“God, may these never end – the sand and the sea, the rush of the waters, the flash in the heavens, the prayer of man.” These are the words of a short poem, “Walking to Caesarea”, written in 1942 by Hannah Szenes, whose short life we commemorate on her Yahrzeit, the 21st of Cheshvan. Hannah Szenes (July 17, 1921 - November 7, 1944) was born in Budapest to a wealthy, distinguished, and assimilated Hungarian Jewish family. She went to a private Protestant secondary school where she was one of a small number of Jewish students. While she excelled there, she also encountered institutionalized anti-Semitism. Her response was to become an ardent Zionist and learn Hebrew in preparation for immigration to Palestine. In 1939, upon completing secondary school, Hannah came to Palestine and completed two years of studies at the Agricultural School for Young Women in Nahalal. She then joined the newly organized kibbutz, Sedot Yam, in Caesarea. While In Palestine, Hannah continued writing in the diary she had started in Hungary at the age of thirteen, and also wrote some poetry and plays. In the summer of 1943, wanting to help in the effort to defeat the Nazis and to do something for the Jews of Europe, Hannah accepted an invitation to join a unit being trained to parachute into occupied Europe. There, she and the other Palestinian-Jewish volunteers would carry out a double mission. For the British, they would help set up escape routes for downed Allied air-crews; for the Haganah — the Palestinian Jewish underground army — they would organize Jews and, if possible, help them to escape. Just before leaving Palestine she met with her brother Giora who had just arrived from Europe, and the two spent one afternoon together on the shores of the Mediterranean. Hannah and a number of her colleagues parachuted into Yugoslavia in March 1944. She crossed into Hungary in early June, but was immediately captured by the Hungarian authorities and aggressively interrogated. Despite the torture, Hannah would not give her captors the information they sought. Her mother was arrested in an attempt to extract information from Hannah, but Hannah remained resolute. As a Hungarian national, she was tried for treason, found guilty and executed by firing squad at the age of 23, refusing a blindfold in order to face her murderers in the moments before her death. Her remains were moved to Israel in 1950, and she is now buried in the section of Israel’s national military cemetery dedicated to the seven parachutists who fell. In the same year a kibbutz was founded and called Yad Hannah in her memory. Hannah’s mother, Katherine, and brother survived the war and immigrated to Palestine. Katherine became an instrumental part of the Hannah Szenes legend. She brought to the public the story of Hannahs courageous life and death, with fifteen editions of her daughter’s diary, poetry, and plays, that have been published in Hebrew. geni/people/Hanna-Szenes/6000000010764325547 (Posted by Edna Kalka Grossman )
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 23:30:01 +0000
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