Hannah Senesh

(Or Chana Senesh) (Hebrew: חנה סנש‎) (Hungarian: Szenes Anikó)

(July 17, 1921 – November 7, 1944)

was a Hungarian Jew, one of 37 Jews living in 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 Hungary, who were about to be deported to the German
death camp at Auschwitz.

Szenes was arrested at the Hungarian border, imprisoned and tortured, but she refused to reveal details of her mission and was eventually tried and executed by firing squad. She is regarded as a national heroine in Israel,
where several streets and a kibbutz are named after her,
and her poetry is widely known.

Szenes was born on July 17, 1921, to an assimilated Jewish family in Hungary.
Her father, Béla, a journalist and playwright, died when she was six years old.
She continued to live with her mother, Katrina, and her brother, György (Giora).

She enrolled in a Protestant private school for girls which also accepted Catholic and Jewish pupils, however, she had to pay three times the regular tuition because she was Jewish. This, along with the realization that the situation of the Jews in Hungary was becoming precarious, prompted Szenes to embrace Judaism. She announced to her friends that she had become a Jew, and joined Maccabea, a Hungarian Zionist students organization.

Szenes graduated in 1939 and decided to emigrate to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine in order to study in the Girls' Agricultural School at Nahalal. In 1941, she joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam and then joined the Haganah, the paramilitary group that laid the foundation of the Israel Defense Forces. In 1943, she enlisted in the British army and began her training in Egypt as a paratrooper for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Arrest and torture

In March 1944, she and two male colleagues, Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein,
were parachuted into Yugoslavia and joined a partisan group. After landing,
they learned the Germans had already occupied Hungary, so the men decided to call off the mission as too dangerous.[1] Szenes continued and headed for the Hungarian border. At the border, she was arrested by Hungarian gendarmes, who found the British military transmitter she was carrying, used to communicate with
the SOE and 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 so
they could find out who the other parachutists were.
She did not tell them, however, even when they brought her mother into
the cell and threatened to torture her too.
While in jail, 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 in the dust. She tried to keep their spirits up by singing.

Trial and execution


She was tried for treason on October 28, 1944. There was an eight-day postponement to give the judges more time to find a verdict, followed by another postponement, this one because of 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," and another: "I loved the warm sunlight."
Szenes's gravestone

Her diary was published in Hebrew in 1946. Her remains were brought to Israel in 1950 and buried in the cemetery on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem.
Her tombstone was brought to Israel in November 2007 and placed in Sdot Yam.

After the Cold War, a Hungarian military court officially exonerated her.
Her kin in Israel were informed on November 5, 1993.
********
Szenes was a poet and playwright, writing both in Hungarian and Hebrew. The following are four of her better known poems or songs. The best known of these is Halikha LeKesariya ("A Walk to Caesarea"), commonly known as Eli, Eli,


Walk to Caesaria (Eli, Eli)


My God, My God
May these never end...
The sand and the sea
The rustle of the waters
The lightning of the heavens,
The prayer of man.


Hannah Senesh

אלי, אלי

אלוהים, אלוהים
אלה מעולם לא סוף מאי ...
את החול והים
את רשרוש של המים
את בזק של השמים,
התפילה של האיש

חנה סנש




The Hannah Senesh, grave.