Revisiting a childhood hero, I am not disappointed

When I was a teenage youth group enthusiast, we were always being asked to name our hero. Hannah Senesh was my go-to.

I didn’t know much about Senesh (also spelt as Szenes), but the idea of a Jewish woman who was brave enough to parachute into Nazi territory captured my imagination.

I also knew she was the author of Eli, Eli – the evocative poem set to music and sung around our campfires towards the end of long nights when everything was getting slow and tired and emotional.

And she had a tragic death at a young age. What more does a romantic teen stuck in the stasis of peaceful New Zealand need for a role model than a moral force, dreamy poet, and action hero rolled into one?

I’ve always meant to find out more about Hannah Senesh, so when I read that this month marks the 80th anniversary of her execution in Nazi-occupied Hungary, I thought I should finally get around to it.

A little better informed, I am confirmed in my opinion that her life is the stuff of which legends are made. Her extraordinary courage and deep loyalty mean this is a name every Jewish child should learn, a woman to plug one of the many gaps in Jewish “herstory”, and offer a model of physical strength and moral fortitude.

Hannah Senesh was born in Budapest in 1921 and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1939, a teenage Zionist who wanted to leave behind antisemitic discrimination and build a Jewish homeland.

But she did not abandon European Jewry. In 1943, she enlisted in the British army and volunteered to join a paratrooper unit tasked with parachuting into occupied Europe. The mission's goals were to help Allied pilots who had fallen behind enemy lines flee to safety, and to work with partisan forces to rescue Jewish communities under Nazi occupation.

In March 1944, Senesh and three fellow paratroopers parachuted into Slovenia. On June 9, she was caught by the Hungarian police and imprisoned in Budapest. She was subject to months of interrogation and torture, including the arrest of her mother, in an attempt to force her to talk.

Senesh never cooperated with her captors. She was charged with spying and treason, and was executed on November 7, 1944, aged 23.

Hannah Senesh is well-known in Israel, where the publication of her diary in 1946 catapulted her to national hero status. She is featured on stamps and posters, and depicted in films, plays and songs. In 1950, her body was reinterred in Israel's national military cemetery on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem.

Her poem A Walk to Caesarea, set to music by David Zehavi and usually known by its opening words Eli, Eli, has become an anthem of Jewish youth groups and is the most commonly played song on Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel.

Senesh’s life is well-documented, thanks to a suitcase found under her bed at Kibbutz Sdot Yam containing letters, diaries, photo albums, and more; and a book of poems which she entrusted to a friend before her last mission.

Despite her short life, there is a great deal to archive. As well as being a paratrooper, a spy and a military hero, she was a pioneer farmer, a poet and a photographer.

After migrating to Palestine, she studied at the Nahalal Agricultural School for Girls in the Jezreel Valley for two years, and became a member of Kibbutz Sdot Yam. Her photographs provide a record of early pioneer life. In a letter she wrote to her mother from Nahalal, she wrote "Everyone wants me to photograph them, as if they’ve appointed me the court photographer".

To mark the 80th anniversary of her execution, the National Library of Israel has released a set of little-known photographs of Senesh, as well as photographs taken by her in Hungary and pre-state Israel.

The photographs are part of the complete Hannah Senesh Archival Collection held by the library, which include manuscripts, notebooks, photos, documents, and personal items, such as Hannah's camera, an Agfa Box-Spezial Camera in a small leather box lined with blue fabric, her name on it in her own handwriting.

They are a powerful addition to Senesh’s words which include this diary entry, written while awaiting execution, "In the month of July, I shall be twenty-three/I played a number in a game/The dice have rolled. I have lost".

Her words live on, most of all in the well-known words of A Walk to Caesarea: