Hannah Szenes (1921-1944)

DOSSIER:
Hannah Senesh (or Chana Senesh), daughter of Bela and Catherine Szenes, was born on 17 Jul 1921 in Hungary.

CODE NAMES:
None Known

After graduating in 1939, Hannah emigrated to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine in order to study in the Girls' Agricultural School at Nahalal. In 1941 she joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam and then joined the Haganah, the paramilitary group that laid the foundation of the Israel Defense Forces. In 1943, she enlisted in the British Army in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force as an Aircraftwoman 2nd Class and began her training in Egypt as a paratrooper for the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

On 14 Mar 1944, she and colleagues Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein were parachuted into Yugoslavia and joined a partisan group. After landing, they learned the Germans had already occupied Hungary, so the men decided to call off the mission as too dangerous. Hannah continued on and headed for the Hungarian border. At the border, she and her companions were arrested by Hungarian gendarmes, who found her British military transmitter, used to communicate with the SOE and other partisans. She was taken to a prison, stripped, tied to a chair, whipped and clubbed for three days. She lost several teeth as a result of the beating. The guards wanted to know the code for her transmitter so they could find out who the parachutists were and trap others. 

Transferred to a Budapest prison, Hannah was repeatedly interrogated and cruelly tortured, but she only revealed her name and refused to provide the transmitter code, even when her mother was also arrested. They threatened to kill her mother if she did not cooperate, but she held firm (and probably saved her mother's life as a result).

While in prison, Hannah used a mirror to flash signals out of the window to prisoners in other cells and communicated using large cut-out letters that she placed in her cell window one at a time and by drawing the Magen David in the dust. She tried to keep their spirits up by singing, and through all the things she went through Hannah still kept her spirit high and stayed true to her mission.

She was tried for treason on 28 Oct 1944. There was an eight-day postponement to give the judges more time to find a verdict, followed by another postponement, this one because of the appointment of a new Judge Advocate. She kept diary entries until her last day, 7 Nov 1944, when she was executed by a German firing squad. The following lines were found in Hanna's death cell after her execution:

One - two - three... eight feet long

Two strides across, the rest is dark...

Life is a fleeting question mark

One - two - three... maybe another week.

Or the next month may still find me here,

But death, I feel is very near.

I could have been 23 next July

I gambled on what mattered most,

The dice were cast. I lost.

Hannah's diary was published in Hebrew in 1946. Her remains were brought to Israel in 1950 and buried in the cemetery on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem. Her tombstone was brought to Israel in November 2007 and placed in Sdot Yam.

During the trial of Rudolf Kastner, Hannah's mother testified that in the time her daughter was imprisoned, Kastner's people had advised her not to obtain a lawyer for her daughter. Further, she recalled a conversation with Kastner after the war, telling him, "I don't say that you could have saved my daughter Hannah, but that you didn't try - it makes it harder for me that nothing was done."