Hannah Szenes
A lesson in Courage

Listen to the Story



Hannah Szenes was born in 1921 in Budapest, Hungary, where her father, Bela Szenes, was a well-known journalist and playwright. Assimilated, middle-class Jews, Hannah's parents were not observant. Hannah, therefore, learned little of Judaism during her childhood. Her father died when she was six years old. She continued to live with her mother Katherine Szenes and brother.

Hannah was an excellent student at the local public school, excelling especially in composition and poetry. It was there that she gained some appreciation of Judaism and learned of the existence of anti-Semitism.
When she 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.

Her first year, Hannah received excellent grades. But, her mother complained to the principal about the discrimination practiced against Hannah despite her academic success. The principal showed some flexibility; he lowered 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. He had a good deal of influence on Hannah's burgeoning interest in Judaism and Zionism. At the age of thirteen, Hannah began a diary.

Official anti-Semitism grew in Hungary. Anti-Jewish legislation was passed. Elected president of the high school's literary society, Hannah, now seventeen, was informed that she could not take office. She was 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. It is because we have to struggle, because it is more difficult for us to reach our goal, that we develop outstanding qualities. Had I been born a Christian, every profession would be open to me."

Hannah thought about 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. As a young woman, Hannah was tall, blue-eyed, with brown, curly hair flowing about her elongated face. 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." Hannah's teachers tried to dissuade her from leaving for Palestine.

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.

Hannah reached Nahalal that September. 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. Here almost every life is the fulfillment of a mission."

In 1941, Szenes joined both Kibbutz Sedot Yam and the Haganah (the Jewish underground). By 1942, she was eager to enlist in the Palmach, the commando wing of the Haganah. She also thought of returning to Hungary to help organize youth emigration and to rescue her mother.
She enlisted in the British army in 1943.

In January 1944, Hannah Szenes began training in Egypt as a paratrooper who would operate behind enemy lines. She was the first woman volunteer in the parachutist group. 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." In June of that year Hannah Szenes was parachuted into the former Yugoslavia, where she crossed the Hungarian border with the aid of a partisan group.

The Germans captured her at once and sent her to Budapest. While in prison there, she found an ingenious way of communicating with prisoners whose cell windows faced hers: she cut out large letters and placed them, one after the other, in her window to form words.

A comrade wrote about her: "Her behavior before members of the Gestapo and SS was quite remarkable. She always 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.

A "trial" was held on October 28, and Hannah Szenes was executed by a firing squad ten days later. Eyewitnesses from among her prison mates testified to her bravery. Hannah's last note to her mother, written in her prison cell, just prior to her execution, November 8, 1944 were:
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.
With love forever.
Your daughter, Hannah.

Her final words to her comrades were:
"Continue on the way, don't be deterred. Continue the struggle til the end, until the clay of liberty comes, the day of victory for our people."

Her remains, along with those of six other fellow paratroopers who also died, were brought to Israel in 1950. They are buried together in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem.

Hannah Szenes's diary and poems were published in Hebrew in 1945. They have been translated and published in other languages including Hungarian. The last poem she wrote in prison in Budapest was:

One-two-three... eight feet long, Two strides across, the rest is dark... Life hangs over me like a question mark. One-two-three... maybe another week, Or next month may still find me here, But death, I feel, is very near. I could have been twenty-three next July; I gambled on what mattered most, The dice were cast. I lost.

Nearly every Israeli can recite from memory Szenes's poem "Blessed is the Match," part of which goes:

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

Another of her poems has become a popular prayer among Jews:

Lord, 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 human prayer.

In a fitting footnote, on November 5, 1993 Hannah Szenes's family in Israel received a copy of a Hungarian military court's verdict exonerating Szenes of the treason charges for which she was executed. Israel's Prime Minister 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."








Adapted from "Great Jewish Women"