HANNAH SENESH |
| At twenty-one, Hannah Senesh was the same age as many of the birthright students when the Hungarian government in 1944 captured, imprisoned, and tortured her. From an early age Hannah proved herself to be a highly talented writer especially of poetry. She became the chairman of the school Literary Club until a great wave of anti-Semitism swept Hungary and she was replaced by a non-Jew. This incident profoundly affected and in many ways transformed her from an assimilated Jew into an ardent Zionist. With some difficulty, she made arrangements to migrate to Palestine in 1939, determined to enter agricultural school. She refused to enter university argueing the youth would have to toil the land. Graduating from school, she settled in Kibbutz S'dot Yam near Caesarea. Hannah soon left to join a special unit of the British army whose mission it was to rescue British and Jewish refugees. Her unit's first assignment was to Yugoslavia, where special attention was to be paid to partisans. The assignment soon ran into difficulties. Two partisans were taking her and a colleague across the Yugoslav-Hungarian border, when they were stopped and questioned; one of the partisans committed suicide, leading to increased suspicion. A radio was found on Hannah. Hannah was tortured so that she would reveal the radio code from her. Hannah refused, knowing that the lives of many thousands depended on that information Hannah Senesh was executed on November 7, 1944, aged twenty-three. She was reburied in 1950 in Mount Herzl in the area for martyrs. |