Senesh (Szenes), Hannah

(1921–44)

   Haganah parachutist in Nazi-occupied Europe. Hannah Senesh was born into an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family but became a Zionist under the influence of the strong anti-Semitism existing in Hungary in the late 1930s, which found official expression in anti-Jewish legislation. She emigrated to Palestine in 1939 and eventually joined a kibbutz. In 1942, when news of Hitler’s extermination policy reached the world, she joined a group of Haganah members whom the British military authorities had agreed to train with the aim of dropping them into occupied Europe. Their mission was to rescue allied pilots, organize resistance, and set up a rescue operation for the Jews. Thirty-two Palestinian Jews were sent on the mission. Hannah Senesh parachuted into Yugoslavia in March 1944, a few days before the Germans occupied Hungary and began to deport Jews on a massive scale. She crossed into Hungary in June, only to be captured by the Hungarian police. She refused to give away information even under torture and was executed by a firing-squad on 7 November 1944. Six more of the parachutists also lost their lives on the mission. Hannah Senesh’s ambition was to be a writer, and she left a diary written between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two, and a number of poems in Hungarian and in Hebrew. She was reburied in Israel in 1950.