Hannah Senesh (1921- 1944) In Memoriam Yom Ha Shoah

Hannah Senesh (1921- 1944) In Memoriam Yom Ha Shoah

By Jerry Gordon, New English Review

Tonight (Apr 7) marks the onset of Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Memorial) in Israel and the Jewish World. The date in the Hebrew calendar,27th Nisan,  commemorates the anniversary  of valiant Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against Nazi occupation forces by young Jewish resistance fighters in April 1943. Yom Ha Shoah falls one week after the Passover holiday and a week before Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Remembrance Day for its fallen soldiers.

One of the Shoah victims was a young valiant Hungarian Jewish woman, a Zionist  Haganah underground resistance fighter in pre-State Israel, Hannah Senesh. Senesh grew up in a privileged assimilated bourgeois Jewish family in Budapest. She was the daughter of  a popular playwright, Bela Senesh, his wife Katherine and younger sibling to her older brother Giora. Father Bela Senesh died in 1927 at age 33 of a heart attack. Hannah was only six years old at his passing. His absence triggered Hannah’s early interest in poetry.

Hannah made aliya to Palestine (now Israel) from Hungary at age 18 propelled by rising Hungarian antisemitism she experienced at a Protestant-run private high school open to Catholics and Jews in Budapest.  She left after graduation and upon Aliyah to the Palestine Mandate went to the agricultural school at Nahalal and joined kibbutz Sdot-Yam.  In 1943, she  enlisted in the British Army and volunteered to train with a small group of Palestinian Jews on a mission to Nazi – occupied Hungary for the British Secret Operations Executive. She had hoped to save her mother and fellow Hungarian Jews about  to be  shipped on death trains to Auschwitz. It was the only military mission sent to rescue Jews during the Shoah.

Palestinian Jews had  learned early in World War II about Hitler’s Final Solution that eventually murdered Six Million European men, women and children by war’s end.  They had besieged British authorities to  volunteer in such dangerous missions to rescue fellow Jews.  She and her team parachuted were into occupied Yugoslavia in 1944.   After staying with Yugoslav partisans, she and her team were discovered after crossing into Hungary. She was  incarcerated, tortured in a Gestapo prison and shot by a German firing squad in November 1944. Even with her mother present during her interrogation, she refused to reveal the radio codes of the team and their mission. She was not quite 23 years old at the time.

Her mother Katherine survived the Holocaust joining her son Giora. Hannah’s remains were re-interred in Israel on Mount Herzl in 1950.  More than 430,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau in less than 90 days over the period from May to July 1944. A period when the allies had the best opportunity to destroy via aerial bombing the gas chambers, crematoria and railway marshaling yards at the Nazi SS death complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau. See here.

Senesh is known both for heroism, moral courage and her poetry that survive her. See: Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, the First Complete Edition.

Watch this Hulu Video of the 2009 film on the life of Hannah Senesh, The  Blessed is the Match. 

The title of the film, The Blessed of the Match is taken from Senesh’s poem of the same title:

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