Born in the small Finnish village of Rautjärvi in the South Karelia region and thus on the borders of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, Simo Häyhä belonged to a modest farming family; his life seemed destined to inherit his parents' business on the family estate. However, in the winter of 1939, something happened that profoundly changed the fate of her country and her life. Reassured by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Stalin's Soviet Union invaded Finland in order to acquire strategically important territories, especially for additional trade outlets on the Baltic. It was then that Simo Häyhä became a symbol of Sisu - an untranslatable Finnish word, but one that could be rendered as ‘the will to resist when the going gets tough’. The Finnish army, far less well supplied and numerous than the Red Army, gave great proof of sisu in the Winter War, managing to hold out against the massive Soviet war machine - among those who contributed to the resistance was Simo Häyhä. Simo revealed his immense talent as a marksman: armed with his trusty Mosin-Nagant, a Soviet-made rifle, Simo scored more than 500 confirmed kills, although some estimates put the number of Soviets killed by Simo at more than 800. In addition to long range, Simo was also extremely lethal from short range, thanks to his reliable Finnish-made machine gun, the Suomi K31. Due to his extremely high number of kills, Simo became known as the White Death (Valkoinen kuolema in Finnish) also because of his white uniform, which allowed him to camouflage himself in the snow. In March 1940 - just days before the end of the war - he was shot in the face, causing a wound that he carried with him for the rest of his life. The war, which ended on the 12th of the same month with the Treaty of Moscow, ended with the annexation of a large part of Karelia by the USSR, as Finland was no longer able to sustain the war effort. Nevertheless, it was people like Simo who proved the sisu of the Finnish people.