Purely Coentary
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In Abe-struggle for freedom, in our immediate past,
it is urgent that we do not overlook the realities of
resistance. On Passover, we speak of the idealistic, the his-
toric recollections of attainment of liberty that has made
the Festival of Freedom symbolic for all peoples. In the
tragic period of the Holo-
4
caust there have been
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frequent condemnations
A
of a generation that has
'V
been charged with fail-
ing to resist the Nazi
terror. We must not for-
get the heroes who did
resist. Through the Uni.
versity of Michigan we
'VOA
have just given due hon-
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or to the actions of a
noble Christian — Raoul
Hannah Senesh '
Gustaf Wallenberg, the
Swedish hero who single-handedly defied the Nazis and
rescued many tens of thousands of Jews who were to
have gone from Hungary to the Auschwitz ovens. Now
we turn to another heroic performance, that of a very
young girl—Hannah Senesh—whose martyrdom registers
one of the great acts of courage during the last war.
The literature dealing both with the Holocaust and
the redemption of Israel would be incomplete without
the record of Hannah Senesh's bravery, her Zionist
idealism, her devotion to her people.
"Hannah Senesh—Her Life and Diary," just -pub.
fished by Schocken Books, fills the great need of
keeping a proper record of the young men and
women who defied dangers and were willing to
make sacrifices both for Jewish statehood and to
contribute toward the rescuing of Jews from the
terror.
In the life story of Hannah Senesh, which gains
significance in the compilation of letters she had written.
her poems, her diary that has fortunately been retained.
as well as the recollections about her by her mother and
her associates, there has been perpetuated a record—
more moving than any narrative about any of the heroism
that marked both resistance and state-building.
Abba Eban is the right man to have been chosen to
write the introduction to this dramatic story, and he
properly describes the book as "essentially a commentary
on the holocaust," concluding: "All the definitions of giant
courage come together in Hannah's life. But the main
impression is Of a small and lonely figure."
And the translator, Marta Cohn, in the preface, adds
biographical brevities to -Hannah's life story and quotes
Reuven Dafne who was one cf Hannah's fellow-parachutists
who took off on their mission from Brindisi, Italy, on March
13, 1944, then dropped in Yugoslavia, the stopover before
Hannah went to Hungary. there to meet her doom. Marta
Cohn's descriptions conclude with this revealing paragraph:
"Hattie parted from Hannah on June 9, 1944, at a
village near the Hungarian border, just before she
crossed into Nazi-occupied territory. 'When we said
goodbye she pressed a piece of paper into my hand
saying, "If I don't return, give this to our people." I
was amazed by her attitude. It was so unlike her. I
looked at 'the piece of paper and was even more sur-
prised. At a time like that she had written a poem. I
had had no idea she even wrote poetry. I almost threw
it away. It was "Blessed is the Match," the poem every
Israeli, young or old, can now recite from memory'."
Is it any wonder that the translator also should have
emphasized this evaluation of Hannah by Dafne:
"We parachutists were not superman—not super-
women. Supermen exist only on television. We were small,
frail, inexperienced romantic people with all the short-
comings of the average person. None of us was unique—
excepting perhap& Hannah. She was different . . . a
spiritual girl guided almost., rnystician. Perhaps one
can say she had charisma . . . She was fearless, daunt-
less. stubborn. Despite her extraordinary intelligence and
prescience, she was a kind of tomboy—a poet-tomboy-
which sounds rather old, I know. A girl who dreamed of
being a heroine—and who was a heroine."
Several of the essays in this volume are of unusual
significance. Noteworthy are the two by Hannah's mother,
Catherine Senesh, with which the book opens and closes.
The first describes the brilliant girl's childhood: the
second is about the unexpected meeting in Budapest
just before Hannah was murdered by the Nazis.
The second especially needs defining. Hannah became
a Zionist as a youngster. She dreamed of going to
Palestine. She came to Nahalal when she was 18. Her
mother remained in Budapest. The ravages of the war
induced her to enlist in the British forces. She became
a paratrooper, as part of a group from the Palmach who
intended, while entering enemy territory, also to devise
means of escape for Jews.
It became known that the Nazis were readying hun-
dreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews for deportation
and extermination. Hannah, without her mother's knowl-
edge, hoped to get to Budapest and help her mother and
other Jews escape from the fate intended for them.
Most moving is Catherine Senesh's "Meeting in Buda-
pest" that gives the mother's description of her experiences
in the same jail with her daughter, how they exchanged
brief words and signals from their prison windows.
It is the story of the shock that came to the mother,
who was a chief object in Hannah's mission—to help her
escape from the Hungarian hell created by Nazism.
The sudden arrival of her daughter, who she believed
to be in Palestine, and the evidence that the brave young
girl had been tortured are described in Catherine's
description of how she was brought to her by Nazi
guards: "Her once soft, wavy hair hung in a filthy tangle,
her ravaged face reflected untold suffering, her large,
expressive eyes were blackened, and there were ugly
welts on her cheeks and neck. That was my first glimpse
of her. She tore herself away from the men, and rushing
to me threw her arms around my neck sobbing: 'Mother,
forgive met !"
Then came the prison life—mother also incarcerated
to exact from her, or through her to force her daughter to
confess, the radio code and the secret of her mission. And
in the orison she gained from fellow prisoners and also
from the prison guards admiration for her courage
and respect for her brilliance.
Hannah made dolls from every available object in her
prison cell. She recalled her parents' 25th anniversary date,
and she made gifts for her mother.
Even the criminal Captain Simon, who sent Hannah
to her death, the Gestapo beast who escaped justice after
the war by escaping from Hungary, had testified that
"Hannah Senesh remained rebellious until her last day,"
that "she wrote to her comrades: 'Continue the struggle
till the end. until the day of liberty comes, the day of
victory for our people'." But the beast had taken with him
or destroyed the last messages Hannah was permitted to
,
Artist's Tribute to Underground Jewish
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VER HAVE SO MANY HUMANS
PROVED THAT THEY COULD DIE
GLORIOUSLY AS IN THE RECENT
GREAT WAR AGAINST FASCISM.
THE NUMBER OF HEROES DEFIED
COUNT. AND YELOCCASIONALLY
A NERO RISES WHOSE FEATS ARE
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THAT THE STORY
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Israel—she had often spoken about _the reality of an
eventual Jewish statehood.. It was 'while in Yugoslavia,
under command of a woman partisan, that she showed
the effects of the terrorizing days. Dafne reports: "The
years of terror had left the mark on her face, and despite
her youth her hair was streaked with grey." A couple
of days later she handed him the final poem before her
last that she had written, and Marie Syrkin's translation of
it, "Blessed Is the Match," reads:
Blessed is the match consumed
in kindling flame. "
Blessed is the flame that burns
in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the &art with strength to stop
its beating for honor's sake.
Blessed is the match consumed
in kindling flame.
These lines were written in Hebrew in Sardice, Yugo-
slavia, May 2, 1944. Rescued for posterity also as part
of the Hannah Senesh record are these lines, "One Two
—Three," she had written before her death, in Budapest,
completing the Hannah Senesh book in a translation from
the Hungarian by Peter Hay:
"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 mo s t,
The dice were cast. I lost.
She was 23' when she was executed in 1944. Only a
day before she was to leave Palestine on her tragic
mission, her brother, George, for whom she frequently ex-
pressed great affection in her dairy, letters, conversations,
came to Palestine. She asked for an extra day's leave
and the entire group's departure on its mission as para-
troopers behind the Nazi lines was delayed for an entire
day for her to spend with her brother who is now, with
his mother, in Israel.
There is so much that is quotable from her diary—and
from her letters! She was a brilliant student in Hungary
and was elected to a class office, only to be barred be-
cause she was Jewish. She felt the anti-Semitic sting, she
became a Zionist, she studied Hebrew.
An item in her diary, dated Oct. 27, 1938—she was
17 then—reads:
(Continued on Page 56)
2—Friday, March 31, 1972 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Heroine Hannah Senesh
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write to her mother and to friends.
With the account given of her bravery hy Dafne.
the Hannah Senesh story emerges as one of the bravest in
human records. The Dafne story is a classic of its own.
Himself a hero in rescue tasks and in Israel's struggle for
independence, he describes his association ,with „Hann ah,
tracing the various steps in her brief career as a fighter for
freedom. It was before she had crossectinto Hungary—
having been betrayed by some in the Yugoslav partisans
whom she did not trust. She jested with him about Yugo-
slavian experiences, dreamed of a future, free Plretz
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Hannah Senesh Story Perpetuates Record of Young
Girl's Heroism in Struggle Against Nazism .. Her
Mother's Deeply Moving Account of Stoic Bravery
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