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https://www.yadvashem.org/from-our-collections/hannah-szenes.html

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Hannah Szenes: Zionist, Paratrooper and Poet

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"On the morning of 17 June 1944, a man in civilian garb knocked on the door… He had a warrant for my arrest… They interrogated me... They asked about the children, especially about Hannah. The investigator asked me where Hannah was, and smiling, I answered that she was in an agricultural settlement near Haifa. He shook his head and said: 'She is here, in the next room.' The door opened. I was dumbstruck. Aniko [Hannah] was standing in the doorway, held by four men. Her disheveled hair did not conceal the blue contusions above her eyes. She escaped their grip and jumped on me, sobbing: 'Mother, forgive me!'"

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https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hannah-senesh/

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One of the more poignant songs included in many Holocaust memorial convocations held in Israel, is a short poem, set to music, known popularly as "Eli, Eli." The four-line poem, actually entitled "Walking to Caesarea," was written by one of the more mythological figures in contemporary Jewish and Israeli history, Hannah Senesh (Szenes), whose short life and death have propelled her into the pantheon of Zionist history.

Hannah Senesh was born in Budapest on July 17, 1921, to a wealthy, distinguished, and assimilated Hungarian Jewish family. Her father, Bela Senesh (1874-1929), who died when she was a child, had been a well-known writer and dramatist and her mother, Katharine, an elegant homemaker. Having been given a modern Hungarian education, Senesh was exposed to anti-Semitism during her high school years, propelling her to learn more about her Jewish origins. It was at that time that she discovered the Zionist movement, joining a Zionist youth movement and learning Hebrew in preparation for immigration to Palestine.

In 1939, after finishing her high school studies, Senesh came to Palestine to study at the girls' agricultural school in Nahalal, continuing the diary that she had begun in Hungary. Having completed a two-year course in agriculture, Senesh joined the Sedot Yam kibbutz at Caesarea. Her choice was motivated by the preference of maintaining an anonymous status, rather than being known as "the daughter of Bela Senesh," something that would have been likely had she joined one of the kibbutz groups whose members were primarily of Hungarian origin. Senesh worked in the kitchen and in the kibbutz laundry, and the difficulties that she encountered are echoed in her diary.

In Palestine

In 1943 Jewish Agency officials made overtures towards Senesh to join a clandestine military project whose ultimate purpose was to offer aid to beleaguered European Jewry. The young immigrant, who became a member of the Palmah (the pre-State assault companies of the Haganah), first studied in a course for wireless operators, and in January 1944 participated in a course for paratroopers.

Before leaving Palestine she met with her brother Giora who had just arrived from Europe-the sole surviving member of her immediate family other than her mother-and the two spent the afternoon together on the shores of the Mediterranean, bringing each other up to date with personal and family news.

In mid-March 1944 she and several other Palestinian-Jewish volunteers (most of whom were also of European origin) were dropped into Yugoslavia in order to aid the anti-Nazi forces until they would be able to commence their true mission and enter Hungary. The German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 postponed their plans, and Senesh crossed the border to her former motherland only in June of that year.

Imprisoned in Hungary

Captured within hours of having stepped on to Hungarian soil, she was sent to prison in Budapest where she was tortured by Hungarian authorities in the hope of receiving information regarding Allied wireless codes. Within days of entering Hungary, her two co-parachutists were also captured, unaware of Senesh's whereabouts. Only one of them-Yoel Palgi-was to survive the war.

When the Hungarian authorities realized that Senesh would not be broken, they arrested her mother and the two women came face to face with each other for the first time in almost five years. Katharine Senesh had no idea that her daughter had left Palestine-not to speak of the fact that she was now in Hungary. Initially shocked as they brought in the young woman with bruised eyes and who had lost a front tooth in the torture process, she rapidly regained her composure, and both mother and daughter refused to give the authorities the performance that would lead to the information they had sought.

For three months the two women were near yet far, sharing the same prison walls but unable to catch more than short glimpses of each other. In September 1944, after Katharine Senesh was suddenly released, she spent most of her waking hours seeking legal assistance for her daughter, who-being a Hungarian national-was to be tried as a spy.

In November 1944 Hannah Senesh came up before a tribunal and eloquently pleaded her own cause, warning the judges that as the end of the war was nearing, that their own fate would soon hang in the balance. Convicted as a spy, Senesh was sentenced to death, although the court had decided not to carry out the sentence with alacrity.

Put to Death

However, her poignant speech during the trial was taken as a personal affront by the officer in charge, Colonel Simon, who came into her cell on the morning of November 7th and presented her with two options: to beg for a pardon, or to face death by a firing squad.

Refusing to beg clemency from her captors, whom she did not consider legally permitted to try her case, Senesh penned short notes to her mother and her comrades and went to her death at age twenty-three in a snow-covered Budapest courtyard, refusing a blindfold in order to face her murderers in the moments before her death. Her body was buried by unknown persons in the Jewish graveyard at Budapest.

Katharine Senesh, who escaped from the infamous Budapest "Death March," hid in that city until its liberation by the Soviet forces in January 1945. Having immigrated to Palestine where she joined her surviving child, Giora, she became an instrumental part of the Hannah Senesh legend, based on her daughter's courageous life and death, brought to public knowledge by fifteen editions of her daughters diary, poetry, and plays, that have since been published in Hebrew.

In 1950 Hannah Senesh's remains were brought to Israel where they were buried in the "Parachutists' section" in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. In the same year a kibbutz was founded and called in her memory.

Reprinted from Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia with permission of the author and the Jewish Women's Archive.

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One of the more poignant songs included in many Holocaust memorial convocations held in Israel, is a short poem, set to music, known popularly as "Eli, Eli." The four-line poem, actually entitled "Walking to Caesarea," was written by one of the more mythological figures in contemporary Jewish and Israeli history, Hannah Senesh (Szenes), whose short life and death have propelled her into the pantheon of Zionist history.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2dKMDz9b64

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NEVER AGAIN - A song to remember the Holocaust

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https://www.britannica.com/event/Holocaust

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Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah ("Catastrophe"), Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban ("Destruction"), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question." Yiddish-speaking Jews and survivors in the years immediately following their liberation called the murder of the Jews the Ḥurban, the word used to describe the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 bce and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 ce. Shoʾah ("Catastrophe") is the term preferred by Israelis and the French, most especially after Claude Lanzmann's masterful 1985 motion picture documentary of that title. It is also preferred by people who speak Hebrew and by those who want to be more particular about the Jewish experience or who are uncomfortable with the religious connotations of the word Holocaust. Less universal and more particular, Shoʾah emphasizes the annihilation of the Jews, not the totality of Nazi victims. More particular terms also were used by Raul Hilberg, who called his pioneering work The Destruction of the European Jews, and Lucy S. Dawidowicz, who entitled her book on the Holocaust The War Against the Jews. In part she showed how Germany fought two wars simultaneously: World War II and the racial war against the Jews. The Allies fought only the World War. The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. This word was chosen because in the ultimate manifestation of the Nazi killing program-the extermination camps -the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria and open fires.

Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they had made no secret of their anti-Semitism. As early as 1919 Adolf Hitler had written, "Rational anti-Semitism, however, must lead to systematic legal opposition....Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether." In Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"; 1925-27), Hitler further developed the idea of the Jews as an evil race struggling for world domination. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in religious anti-Semitism and enhanced by political anti-Semitism. To this the Nazis added a further dimension: racial anti-Semitism. Nazi racial ideology characterized the Jews as Untermenschen (German: "subhumans"). The Nazis portrayed the Jews as a race and not as a religious group. Religious anti-Semitism could be resolved by conversion, political anti-Semitism by expulsion. Ultimately, the logic of Nazi racial anti-Semitism led to annihilation.

Hitler's worldview revolved around two concepts: territorial expansion (that is, greater Lebensraum-"living space"-for the German people) and racial supremacy. After World War I the Allies denied Germany colonies in Africa, so Hitler sought to expand German territory and secure food and resources-scarce during World War I-in Europe itself. Hitler viewed the Jews as racial polluters, a cancer on German society in what has been termed by Holocaust survivor and historian Saul Friedländer "redemptive anti-Semitism," focused on redeeming Germany from its ills and ridding it of a cancer on the body politic. Historian Timothy Snyder characterized the struggle as even more elemental, as "zoological," and "ecological," a struggle of the species. Hitler opposed Jews for the values they brought into the world. Social justice and compassionate assistance to the weak stood in the way of what he perceived as the natural order, in which the powerful exercise unrestrained power. In Hitler's view, such restraint on the exercise of power would inevitably lead to the weakening, even the defeat, of the master race.

When Hitler came to power legally on January 30, 1933, as the head of a coalition government, his first objective was to consolidate power and to eliminate political opposition. The assault against the Jews began on April 1 with a boycott of Jewish businesses. A week later the Nazis dismissed Jews from the civil service, and by the end of the month the participation of Jews in German schools was restricted by a quota. On May 10 thousands of Nazi students, together with many professors, stormed university libraries and bookstores in 30 cities throughout Germany to remove tens of thousands of books written by non- Aryans and those opposed to Nazi ideology. The books were tossed into bonfires in an effort to cleanse German culture of "un-Germanic" writings. A century earlier Heinrich Heine -a German poet of Jewish origin-had said, "Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people." In Nazi Germany the time between the burning of Jewish books and the burning of Jews was eight years.

As discrimination against Jews increased, German law required a legal definition of a Jew and an Aryan. Promulgated at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nürnberg on September 15, 1935, the Nürnberg Laws-the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Law of the Reich Citizen-became the centrepiece of anti-Jewish legislation and a precedent for defining and categorizing Jews in all German-controlled lands. Marriage and sexual relations between Jews and citizens of "German or kindred blood" were prohibited. Only "racial" Germans were entitled to civil and political rights. Jews were reduced to subjects of the state. The Nürnberg Laws formally divided Germans and Jews, yet neither the word German nor the word Jew was defined. That task was left to the bureaucracy. Two basic categories were established in November: Jews, those with at least three Jewish grandparents; and Mischlinge ("mongrels," or "mixed breeds"), people with one or two Jewish grandparents. Thus, the definition of a Jew was primarily based not on the identity an individual affirmed or the religion he or she practiced but on his or her ancestry. Categorization was the first stage of destruction.

Responding with alarm to Hitler's rise, the Jewish community sought to defend their rights as Germans. For those Jews who felt themselves fully German and who had patriotically fought in World War I, the Nazification of German society was especially painful. Zionist activity intensified. "Wear it with pride," journalist Robert Weltsch wrote in 1933 of the Jewish identity the Nazis had so stigmatized. Religious philosopher Martin Buber led an effort at Jewish adult education, preparing the community for the long journey ahead. Rabbi Leo Baeck circulated a prayer for Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in 1935 that instructed Jews on how to behave: "We bow down before God; we stand erect before man." Yet while few, if any, could foresee its eventual outcome, the Jewish condition was increasingly perilous and was expected to worsen.

By the late 1930s there was a desperate search for countries of refuge. Those who could obtain visas and qualify under stringent quotas emigrated to the United States. Many went to Palestine, where the small Jewish community was willing to receive refugees. Still others sought refuge in neighbouring European countries. Most countries, however, were unwilling to receive large numbers of refugees.

Responding to domestic pressures to act on behalf of Jewish refugees, U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt convened, but did not attend, the Évian Conference on resettlement, in Évian-les-Bains, France, in July 1938. In his invitation to government leaders, Roosevelt specified that they would not have to change laws or spend government funds; only philanthropic funds would be used for resettlement. Britain was assured that Palestine would not be on the agenda. The result was that little was attempted and less accomplished.

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Holocaust | Definition, Concentration Camps, History, & Facts

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Holocaust, the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Today the Holocaust is viewed as the emblematic manifestation of absolute evil. Learn more about the Holocaust in this article.