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Hannah Szenes Story
Contributed by Joshua Handler

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

1. Hannah Senesh was a Hungarian Jew, one of 37 Jews who lived in the British Mandate for Palestine (now Israel), who were trained by the British army to parachute into Yugoslavia during the Second World War in order to help save the Jews of Hungary, who were about to be deported to the German death camp at Auschwitz.

2. Senesh was arrested at the Hungarian border, imprisoned and tortured, but she refused to reveal details of her mission and was eventually tried, and executed by firing squad. She is regarded as a national heroine in Israel, where several streets, a headquarters the zionist youth movement Israel Hatzeira and a kibbutz are named after her, and her poetry is widely known.

3. Senesh enrolled in a Protestant private school for girls which also accepted Catholic and Jewish pupils; however, she had to pay twice the regular tuition because she was Jewish. This, along with the realization that the situation of the Jews in Hungary was becoming precarious, prompted Szenes to embrace Judaism. She announced to her friends that she had become a Zionist and joined Maccabea, a Hungarian Zionist students organization.

4. Senesh graduated in 1939 and decided to emigrate to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine in order to study in the Girls’ Agricultural School at Nahalal.

5. 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 Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force as an Aircraftwoman 2nd Class and began her training in Egypt as a paratrooper for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

6. In March 1944, she and two male 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. Szenes continued and headed for the Hungarian border.

7. At the border, she was arrested by Hungarian gendarmes, who found the British military transmitter she was carrying, used to communicate with the SOE and other partisans. She was taken to a prison in Budapest, tied to a chair, stripped, then whipped and clubbed for three days. The guards wanted to know the code for her transmitter so they could find out who the other parachutists were. She did not tell them, however, even when they brought her mother into the cell and threatened to torture her too.

8. Whilst in jail, Szenes used a mirror to flash signals out of the window to the Jewish prisoners in other cells, and communicated with them using large cut-out letters in Hebrew that she placed in her 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 Szenes went through she still kept her spirit high and stayed true to her mission.

9. Senesh was tried for treason on October 28, 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 was executed by a firing squad before the judges had returned a verdict. She kept diary entries until her last day, November 7, 1944 when she was killed by a German firing squad. One of them read: "In the month of July, I shall be twenty-three/I played a number in a game/The dice have rolled. I have lost," and another: "I loved the warm sunlight."
haggadah Section: Maggid - Beginning

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