Zhu Min (; 18 April 1926 – 13 April 2009), originally Zhu Minshu (朱敏书) and also known as He Feifei (贺飞飞), was a Chinese professor of Russian at Beijing Normal University. She was the only daughter of the Chinese revolutionary Zhu De.
Born in Moscow to parents from Sichuan, China, Zhu was raised by her grandmother in Chengdu and never had a close relationship with her mother. While studying in the Soviet Union as a teenager, she was captured by Nazis and held in a concentration camp until 1945. During her imprisonment she kept her identity a secret, telling no one that her father was a high-ranking Chinese military commander.
After the end of World War II, Zhu was able to return to Moscow and continue her studies. She graduated from Lenin Teachers' College in 1953, then moved back to China and taught Russian as a professor at Beijing Normal University. She retired from her position in 1986 and helped found what is now Beijing Military-Civilian Specialist College.
She died in 2009 after a prolonged period of illness and was cremated at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing.
Early life
Zhu Min was born on 18 April 1926 on the outskirts of Moscow in what was then the Soviet Union. Her father Zhu De and her mother He Zhihua (贺治华) had met in Shanghai, then moved to Germany and to Moscow together. Zhu De was attending Moscow's Far East University when Zhu Min was born. Zhu De gave her the milk name Sixun (四旬), but He Zhihua didn't like it and gave her another milk name, Feifei (菲菲).
Later that year, Zhu De was ordered back to China to support the Northern Expedition, and He Zhihua sent Zhu Min, still an infant, to live with He's sister in Chengdu, changing her name to He Feifei (贺飞飞). (Her name was later changed to Zhu Minshu and finally to Zhu Min.) He Zhihua fell in love with another revolutionary named Huo Jiaxin (霍家新) and left Zhu De to marry him, while Zhu Min was raised by her maternal grandmother in Chengdu. Zhu Min later wrote that she could never forgive her birth mother for abandoning her and her father in this way.
Zhu did not see her father again for 14 years, until Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao urged her to travel to Yan'an to meet him. They were reunited in November 1940.
World War II and the concentration camp
In January 1941 Zhu was sent to the Soviet Union to study. Though she was 14 years old, her father registered her as being only 12. She used the alias Chì Yīng (赤英), which her father chose for her. The character 赤 (chì) means "red", as does 朱 (zhū), her real surname, and 英 (yīng) means "hero"; thus her alias meant "Red hero", representing the aspiration Zhu De had for his daughter. She flew to Moscow with the children of other Communist Party leaders, who were accompanied to the airport by Zhu De, Zhu Min's stepmother Kang Keqing, Mao Zedong, and Jiang Qing.
Zhu had suffered from health problems in the past, including asthma, and after her arrival in Moscow her asthma returned, triggered by a case of tracheitis. To help her get better, the school in Moscow sent her to Minsk on 21 June 1941, to attend a Young Pioneer summer camp. The very next day, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and the Battle of Białystok–Minsk began. Zhu Min, along with 20 other children, was taken prisoner. Two years later, in August 1943, she was sent to a Nazi concentration camp in German East Prussia.
Conditions in the camp were terrible: Zhu was forced to eat moldy bread and was frequently beaten. She was also forced to work at a factory in the camp, manufacturing munitions for the German army, but she and the other prisoners tried to covertly sabotage the cartridges they manufactured by spitting into the cartridge boxes to moisten the cartridges and turn them into duds. While in the camp she got scrofula; she later recalled that the doctors there treated her inhumanely, like an animal, cutting off her ulcers without anesthetic. She had scars on her neck for the rest of her life. In one incident in January 1944, a guard at the concentration camp invited Zhu and five other girls to pose for a photo. The girls smiled for the photo, but suddenly the guard accused them of mocking him and whipped them in retaliation.