Hannah Szenes

Hannah Szenes (or Chana, or Hannah, Senesh) (July 17, 1921 — November 7, 1944) was born in Budapest, Hungary to an assimilated Jewish family, and the daughter of an accomplished playwright and journalist. Executed in her native land at the age of 23, she became a symbol of idealism and self-sacrifice. Her poetry, made famous in part because of her unfortunate death, reveal a woman imbued with hope, even in the face of adverse circumstances. She was a symbol of courage in one of the darkest times of modern history.

Szenes was one of 17 Jews living in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, now Israel, who were trained by the British army to parachute into Yugoslavia during the Second World War in order to help save the Jews of Nazi-occupied Hungary, who were about to be deported to the German death camp at Auschwitz. Arrested at the Hungarian border, she was imprisoned and tortured, but refused to reveal the details of her mission, and was eventually tried and executed by firing squad. She is the only one whose fate after capture is attested to with any clarity.

Now part of the popular heritage of Israel, the diary and letters of Hannah Szenes provide a primary source of information for Jewish life in Budapest during the rise of Nazism in Europe and in the work of early Zionists in Palestine. Her literary work also includes several poems, most notably, “Blessed is the Match,” and two plays, “The Violin” and “Bella gerunt alii, tu felix Austria nube.” She is regarded as a national heroine in Israel, where streets are named after her and her poetry is widely known.

Hannah Szenes might best be described in her own words:

"There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world even though they are not longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for human kind."

Early life

Hannah Szenes was born July 17, 1921, in Budapest, Hungary. The daughter of well-known playwright and journalist Bela Szenes and his wife Katherine, Hannah was raised and educated in Budapest. Assimilated, middle-class Jews, Hannah's parents were not observant. Hannah, therefore, learned little of Judaism during her childhood. She enjoyed a comfortable standard of living in Jewish-Hungarian upper-class society, despite the death of her father in l927 when she was six. She continued to live with her mother and brother.

When Hannah was ten years old, she entered a private Protestant girls' high school. The school had recently begun to admit Catholics and Jews. Catholic youngsters paid double the normal tuition; Jews, triple. Nonetheless, Hannah's mother never considered sending her daughter to the Jewish high school. The girl inherited her father’s literary talent and began to excel in school at an early age, writing plays for school productions, tutoring her peers, and winning a scholarship that defrayed the inflated tuition for Jewish students.

In her first year, Hannah received excellent grades. When her mother complained to the principal about the discrimination practiced against her daughter despite her academic success, he showed some flexibility by lowering Hannah's tuition so that it equaled that paid by the Catholics. One instructor at the school was the chief rabbi of Budapest, Imre Benoschofsky, who was a great scholar and a zealous Zionist. His influence was great on Hannah's burgeoning interest in Judaism and Zionism.

Official anti-Semitism grew in Hungary and anti-Jewish legislation was passed. Elected to a post of the school's literary society, Hannah was informed that she could not take office, being told that a Jew could not hold the presidency. What should she do, fight or hold her peace?

"You have to be someone exceptional to fight anti-Semitism...," she confided to her diary. "Only now am I beginning to see what it really means to be a Jew in a Christian society, but I don't mind at all…we have to struggle. Because it is more difficult for us to reach our goal we must develop outstanding qualities. Had I been born a Christian, every profession would be open to me."

Hannah considered converting to Christianity in order to be able to take office. Rather than convert, however, she decided to sever her connection with the literary society. She was a determined person who stuck to her beliefs.

Hannah joined Maccabea, the most established Zionist student organization in Hungary. Toward the end of October 1938, she wrote in her diary: "I've become a Zionist. This word stands for a tremendous number of things. To me it means, in short, that I now consciously and strongly feel I am a Jew, and am proud of it. My primary aim is to go to Palestine, to work for it."

Graduating at the top of her class in March 1939, she could easily have entered the university. Instead, she applied for a place at the Girls' Agricultural School at Nahalal in Palestine. Her interests soon turned to Zionist appeals for Jewish immigration to Palestine. Though raised in a secular household, Szenes yearned to join Jewish pioneers in Palestine. She resolved at age seventeen to learn Hebrew, and wrote: “it is the true language, and the most beautiful; in it is the spirit of our people”. She resolved to leave for Palestine upon her high school graduation: “What I love is the opportunity to create an outstanding and beautiful Jewish State.” Increasing anti-Semitism, news of her suffering people and the besieged country of Israel inspired her with dedication, with recognition of her nationality. She was deeply imbued with the Zionist ideal.

Life in Israel

Today is my birthday, and I am eighteen. One idea occupies me continually – Eretz Israel. There is but one place on earth in which we are not refugees, not emigrants, but where we are returning home - Eretz Israel. (written by Hannah July 17, 1939)

Less than a year after these lines were written, Hannah had already arrived at the Nahalal agricultural school in Eretz Israel. A young girl, full of faith, who had left everything behind and immigrated alone to fulfill her dream – to live and build Eretz Israel. Her mother, Katherine, to whom she was deeply attached, remained on her own in Budapest. Her brother, Giora, had gone to study in France the previous year.

Hannah departed for Palestine shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe, before the formalization of legislation restricting economic and cultural opportunities for Hungarian Jews. Reaching Nahalal that September, where she was to spend two years, in her first letter to her mother, she wrote: "I am home .... This is where my life's ambition – I might even say my vocation – binds me, because I would like to feel that by being here I am fulfilling a mission, not just vegetating… this fulfillment of a mission."

In 1941, she joined Kibbutz Sedot Yam where she encountered the rigors of farming and authored her most passionate poetry. She also wrote a semi-autobiographical play about the sacrifices made by a young artist after joining a collective. Her diary chronicles wartime Palestine, detailing the influx of refugees under the British Mandate, the report from Europe and hardships experienced by the kibbutz members. Concern for the fate of fellow Jews after Jewish immigration to Palestine was curtailed, and awareness of the mounting persecution in Europe, Palestinian Jews proposed the active engagement of a Jewish force to be allied with the British.

By 1942, Hannah Szenes was eager to enlist in the Palmach, the commando wing of the Haganah, the paramilitary group that laid the foundation of the Israel Defense Forces. She dreamed of returning to Hungary to help organize youth emigration. She was also determined to liberate her mother from the hardships long discussed in their correspondence. She enlisted with the resistance, joining the Women’s auxiliary Air Force along with several other young Jewish women. Their male counterparts joined the Pioneer Corps.

In 1943, she enlisted in the British army, when they allowed a limited number of Palestinian Jewish volunteers to cross behind enemy lines in occupied Europe, and began her training in Egypt as a paratrooper for the British Special Operations Executive.

She wrote: “I must go to Hungary, be there at this time … and bring my mother out.” The day before she left Israel for her mission, Hannah visited her beloved brother who had just arrived from the Diaspora.

The Mission

In 1943, Hannah Szenes volunteered to parachute into Nazi-occupied Europe to aid Jews under Nazi oppression and underwent training in Egypt. Altogether, there were 250 men and women who volunteered to parachute. One-hundred-and-ten of them underwent training; only thirty-two were actually dropped, and five infiltrated into target countries. Of those thirty-seven people, twelve were captured and seven were executed by Germany.

To her comrades she asserted: "We are the only ones who can possibly help, we don't have the right to think of our own safety; we don't have the right to hesitate .... It's better to die and free our conscience than to return with the knowledge that we didn't even try."

On March 11, 1944, Hannah flew to Italy; two days later she parachuted to the land of the Partisans, to the former Yugoslavia, together with fellow parachutists from Palestine. There, Hannah spent three months with Tito's partisans, hoping that with their help she would be able to cross into Hungary.

In the beginning of June 1944, Hannah was one of the five people who went into the target country. They successfully crossed the Hungarian border with the aid of a partisan group, only to be denounced the following day by an informer and taken to a Gestapo prison in Budapest.

Arrest, torture, trial, execution

After crossing the border, Szenes was arrested by Hungarian gendarmes, who found the British military transmitter she was carrying, which was to be used to communicate with the SOE and with other partisans. She was taken to a prison in Budapest, tied to a chair, stripped, then whipped and clubbed for several hours. The guards wanted to know the code for her transmitter in order to discover who the other parachutists were. She did not tell them, even when they brought her mother into the cell and threatened to torture her as well. (Hecht, NY Messner, 1961)

While in prison, Szenes used a mirror to flash signals out of the window to the Jewish prisoners in other cells, and communicated with them using large cut-out letters in Hebrew that she placed in her window one at a time, and by drawing the Magen David (Star of David) in the dust. She sang in an effort to keep their spirits up.

A comrade wrote about her: "Her behavior before members of the Gestapo and SS was quite remarkable. She constantly stood up to them, warning them plainly of the bitter fate they would suffer after their defeat. Curiously, these wild animals, in whom every spark of humanity had been extinguished, felt awed in the presence of this refined, fearless young girl."

This observation notwithstanding, both the Gestapo and Hungarian officers brutally tortured Szenes. They demanded her radio code; she refused. They threatened to torture her mother in front of her eyes, then kill her. She still would not buckle. Her mother, whom they had also imprisoned, was, in the end, released rather than tortured.

Hannah Szenes was tried for treason on October 28, 1944. There was an eight-day postponment to give the judges more time to find a verdict, followed by another postponment, this one due to the appointment of a new Judge Advocate.

She was executed by a firing squad before the judges had returned a verdict. She kept diary entries until her last day, November 7, 1944. One of them read: "In the month of July, I shall be twenty-three / I played a number in a game / The dice have rolled. I have lost,".

Eyewitnesses from among her prison mates testified to her bravery. Throughout her ordeal she remained steadfast in her courage, and when she was executed by a firing squad, she refused the blindfold, staring squarely at her executors and her fate.

Hannah's last note to her mother, written in her prison cell just prior to her execution said: "Dearest Mother, I don't know what to say - only this: a million thanks, and forgive me, if you can. You know well why words aren't necessary."

Her final words to her comrades were: "Continue the struggle till the end, until the day of liberty comes, the day of victory for our people."

Szenes's gravestone

Legacy

The remains of Hannah Szenes, along with those of six other fellow paratroopers who also died, were brought to Israel in 1950. They are buried together in the Israeli National Military Cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

Hannah Senesh’s diary and poems were published in Hebrew in 1945. They have been translated and published in other languages including Hungarian. Nearly every Israeli can recite from memory Senesh's poem "Blessed is the Match":

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame. Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.

On November 5, 1993 Hannah Szenes' family in Israel received a copy of a Hungarian military court's verdict exonerating her of the treason charges for which she was executed. Israel's then Prime Minister, the late Yitzhak Rabin, attending the Tel Aviv ceremony where the document was turned over to the family, noted that for Hannah Szenes, "there is little use for the new verdict. Nor does it offer much comfort to her family. But historic justice is also a value and the new verdict...represents a measure of reason triumphing over evil."

Her diary, in which she recorded faithfully since a young girl, was published in Hebrew in 1946. Hannah Szenes remains an inspiration to young writers; her work ensures her place as a national heroine.

Several monuments to Hannah Szenes have been erected throughout Israel. Numerous streets, a forest, settlements and a species of flower were given her name. A museum, established by the Hannah Senesh Legacy Foundation, was built at her former home in Kibbutz Sdot Yam.

Poetry and plays

Szenes was a poet and playwright writing both in Hungarian and Hebrew. The following are a selection of her better known poems or songs. The best known of these is Halikha LeKesariya ("A Walk to Caesarea"), commonly known as Eli, Eli ("My God, My God"). Many singers have sung it; it was used to close some versions of the film Schindler's List:

My God, My God, I pray that these things never end,

The sand and the sea,

The rush of the waters,

The crash of the Heavens,

The prayer of Man.

The voice called, and I went.

I went, because the voice called.

The following lines are the last song she wrote after she was parachuted into a partisan camp in Yugoslavia:

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.

Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake.

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

The following lines were found in Hanna's death cell after her execution:

One - two - three... eight feet long

Two strides across, the rest is dark...

Life is a fleeting question mark

One - two - three... maybe another week.

Or the next month may still find me here,

But death, I feel is very near.

I could have been 23 next July

I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.

Further reading

• Hecht, Ben; Perfidy, New York, Messner 1961 OCLC: 613093
• Braham, Randolph L., The Holocaust in Hungary: a selected and annotated bibliography: 1984-2000, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001, ISBN 0880334819 OCLC: 49394388
• Hay, Peter, Ordinary heroes: Chana Szenes and the dream of Zion, New York, Putnam, 1986, ISBN 0399131523 OCLC: 13395114
• Schur, Maxine; Ruff, Donna; Hannah Szenes: a song of light, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1986, ISBN 0827602510 OCLC: 11840452
• Szenes Chana, élete, küldetése és halála, (Hungarian Language) Tel Aviv, Hákibuc hámeuchád Kíadása, 1954, OCLC: 32607220

External Links

• Hannah Senesh Hannah Senesh Legacy Foundation, Retrieved January 10, 2007
• Hannah Senesh, our namesake, Hannah Senesh Community Day School, Retrieved January 10, 2007
• History of the Jews in Hungary, Wikipedia, Retrieved January 10, 2007
• Hannah Szenes The Jewish Virtual Library; project of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Retrieved January 10, 2007

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