When I was a teenager in Montreal back in the late 1950s-early 1960s, I was a member of the Zionist youth group Young Judaea. There, we learned the story of Hannah Senesh, the heroic young woman who, during World War II, left Palestine for Nazi-occupied Europe to try to save Jews.
Senesh was a young poet and diarist who was captured and executed in 1944, at age 23, after parachuting into Yugoslavia and then entering Nazi-occupied Hungary to try to smuggle Jews out of the country.
Hannah Szenes (the original spelling) was born in Budapest on July 17, 1921, to a wealthy, distinguished, and assimilated Hungarian Jewish family. Though given a modern Hungarian education, she was exposed to antisemitism during her high school years, and decided to join a Zionist youth movement, learning Hebrew in preparation for aliyah to Palestine.
In October 1938, she recorded 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."
She came to Palestine in 1939 to study at the Agricultural Training Farm in Nahalal, and after two years became a member of Kibbutz Sdot Yam near Caesarea.
In 1943, however, Senesh enlisted in the British Army and began her training as a paratrooper. She and some others were parachuted into occupied Yugoslavia in mid-March 1944 in order to aid the anti-Nazi forces. Two months later she smuggled herself into her native Hungary but was captured.
Imprisoned and tortured, she refused to reveal details of her mission and was sentenced to death. She refused an offer of clemency and was executed by a firing squad in Budapest on Nov. 7, 1944.
In 1950 Hannah Senesh’s remains were brought to Israel where they were buried in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. In the same year a kibbutz was founded and named Yad Hana in her memory.
A poet and playwright, writing both in Hungarian and Hebrew, Senesh’s best known poem is probably "Halikha LeKesariya" ("A Walk to Caesarea"), often known as "Eli, Eli" ("My God, My God"), written in 1942. Her last poem "Ashrei HaGafrur" ("Blessed is the Match") was the title of a documentary about her life produced in 2008. Israeli President Shimon Peres, who knew Hannah as a young pioneer in the 1940s, appears on camera.
A number of books have also been published about her life. An early one, Blessed is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance, by Marie Syrkin, published in 1947, also takes its title from "Ashrei HaGafrur."
Yet for all that, I have always wondered why the story of Hannah Senesh is not as well known as that of Anne Frank. Senesh was much more the "agent" of her own life than was Frank. Is it because somehow the outside world prefers a Jewish victim to a Zionist heroine?
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a critique of Anne Frank, who was herself just a teenager. We have long ago rejected the callous insult to the victims of the Holocaust made by ill-informed people who had asserted that the Jews of Europe went "like sheep to the slaughter."
What, precisely, could a family like the Franks have done? They were, like most Jews, civilians, young and old, without weapons, hidden in a house, and facing the most fanatically trained killers the world has ever seen, masters of most of Europe between 1939 and 1945.
We have learned from this. If Anne Frank symbolizes the doomed stateless Jews of Europe, in the story of Hannah Senesh we see the glimmer of the Jewish state about to be born.
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