She’s probably the most fascinating feminist you’ve never heard of. And for the seven years I had the honor to know her, she shared her recollections of World War II and narrated an almost forgotten history of twentieth-century women’s activism. I learned of her sudden death in a staccato email from Bulgaria: the Amazon has left us. Her life spanned fascism, Communism, and klepto-capitalism, but she never surrendered hope.

“The Amazon” was her code name. As a child of fourteen, Elena Lagadinova fought Bulgaria’s Nazi-Allied monarchy as its youngest girl partisan. Decades later, her passion helped define the international women’s movement during the Cold War. Once celebrated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, her story was lost in the vortex of political change following the collapse of Communism in 1989.

Born in 1930, Lagadinova was the daughter of a poor carriage driver. In early 1944, she fled her burning home to join her father and three older brothers in a guerilla brigade of antifascists. “I wore my stolen pistol on a chain around my neck,” she once told me, “So if we were attacked while we slept, I wouldn’t forget it.”