Hannah Szenes greets her brother Giora on his arrival in Palestine.
Overview
- Caption
- Hannah Szenes greets her brother Giora on his arrival in Palestine.
- Date
-
February 1944
- Locale
- Tel Aviv, Palestine/Israel
- Variant Locale
- Israel
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Beit Hannah Senesh
- Event History
- The Palestinian Jewish parachutists were a group of British-trained volunteers who were dropped behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Europe during the last two years of World War II. In 1942 the Jewish Agency for Palestine applied to the British for assistance in sending Jewish volunteers to Europe, who as emissaries of the Yishuv (the Palestinian Jewish community), would help to organize local resistance and rescue operations among the Jewish communities. The British were unwilling to send the hundreds of volunteers envisioned by the Jewish Agency, but ultimately agreed to train a few units of Jewish parachutists who were recent immigrants from certain targeted countries that they wanted to infiltrate. The British Special Operation Executive (SOE) intended to deploy the volunteers as wireless operators and instructors on their liaison missions to the partisans, while the British Military Intelligence branch (MI9) planned to use them to locate and rescue Allied POWs and escapees. Both branches consented to the volunteers' dual role as British agents and Jewish emissaries. The candidates were selected from the ranks of the Palmach (the strike force of the Jewish military underground), Zionist youth movement activists and Palestinian Jews already serving in the British army. Of the 240 men and women who volunteered, 110 underwent the training program that commenced in Cairo in March 1943. Because of certain operational difficulties, only 32 of the trained volunteers (including three women) were sent on missions to Europe. Nine of the Jewish parachutists were sent to Romania, three to Hungary, five to Slovakia, ten to Yugoslavia, three to Italy and two to Bulgaria. The first group was dropped into Yugoslavia in May 1943; the last was dropped in southern Austria on the last day of the war. Of the 32 volunteers, twelve were captured. Seven of the twelve were subsequently executed, including Haviva Reik in Slovakia and Hannah Szenes in Hungary. The Jewish parachutists succeeded in making contact with the various national resistance movements in the Balkans, including Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia. Several were active participants in the Slovak National Uprising. Others succeeded in aiding Allied POWs in Romania and organizing immigration to Palestine in the immediate post-liberation period.
[Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust: 3:1103-4]
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005519.
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005519.
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
Beit Hannah Senesh
Copyright: UnknownProvenance: Miriam NeemanMuseum of Jewish Heritage/Center For Holocaust Studies
Copyright: Exclusively with sourceProvenance: Katherine SzenesSource Record ID: A 759.2 - Published Source
- The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust... - Berenbaum, Michael - Little, Brown and Company - p. 172
Keywords & Subjects
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Hannah Szenes (1921-1944), poet, diarist and Palestinian Jewish parachutist. Hannah was the daughter of Bela and Katrina Szenes. She was born in Budapest, where her father was a noted Hungarian feuilleton writer and playwright. Though she was raised in an assimilated home, Hannah was drawn to Zionism in the late 1930s. Against the wishes of her widowed mother (Bela Szenes died in 1927), she began to study Hebrew and prepare for immigration to Palestine. She arrived in September 1939 and enrolled at the agricultural training school for girls in Nahalal. Hannah began writing poetry at this time. When she completed the agricultural program two years later, Hannah joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam near Caesarea. At the end of 1942, concerned over the fate of her mother in particular, and European Jewry, in general, Hannah enlisted in the British army and joined a group of Palestinian Jewish parachutists who were being trained in Egypt to operate behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Europe. After completing her training, Hannah was dropped into Yugoslavia in March 1944 with four male parachutists. Days after their landing they learned that German troops had occupied Hungary. Hannah spent three months with Yugoslavian partisans before undertaking the dangerous trek into Hungary. She finally crossed the border on June 9, but was captured shortly afterwards with a radio transmitter in her possession. Hannah was jailed for a time in Szombathely before being transferred to Budapest. During her five months of imprisonment she was subjected to torture, but did not reveal any important information. In late October after the fascist takeover of Hungary, Hannah was brought to trial before a secret Hungarian court and convicted of treason. She was executed by firing squad in the courtyard of the prison on November 7, 1944. In 1950 her remains were brought to Israel and interred on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem. As a writer Hannah Szenes is best known for her Hebrew poem "Ashrei Hagafrur" (Blessed is the Match), written in May 1944 after a chance encounter with a Jewish female partisan in Yugoslavia. Hannah gave the poem to her fellow parachutist, Reuven Dafni, shortly before her capture. Hannah was survived by her mother, who settled in Israel after the war.
[Sources: Encyclopedia Judaica, 15:661; Encyclopedia of Zionism, 2:1090; Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4:1447-8]
- Record last modified:
- 2019-01-30 00:00:00
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa6016
