A Holocaust Story: Hannah Szenes

Amid the anti-Semitic and hostile environment of Hungary, the poet Hannah Szenes joined with resistance forces, risking her life to save Jewish communities. Tune in and learn why Hannah Szenes is known as the "Joan of Arc of Israel" in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And when meet Geese,
Who's the woman who hid Anne Frank's family for as

(00:21):
long as she could during World War Two? Died in
January this year. It got us thinking about the first
time we ever read and Frank's diaries and what it
meant to us. I had blogged about picking up every
Holocaust related young adult book I could find, Number the Stars,
the Devil's Arithmetic, Devil in Vienna, the Upstairs Room. But
there's another World War two young Jewish diarist I hadn't

(00:44):
heard of until our friend Jacob Silverman, a wonderful writer
you should look up, mentioned her to me. Her name
is Hannah Sanish, and some call her the Joane of
Arc of Israel, and when she was younger than we are,
she parachuted into Nazi occupied Europe to try to rescue
other Jews. She wrote in a poem a voice called
I went, and how we missed her in history class.

(01:06):
I have no idea, but we did. So here's her story.
We're gonna remedy that So Hannah Sunnish was born into
a middle class family in Budapest in July of nineteen one,
and she didn't grow up learning a lot about Judaism.
Budapest had a very large Jewish community, but it was
mostly assimilated, and her father wrote plays and newspaper columns,

(01:27):
so she grew up in this environment where writing was
considered a really good way to express yourself, and she
started writing poems at age six when her father died
about other happy kids and how lucky they were. Really
a deep thinker right from the start. She started keeping
a diary when she was thirteen, recording, you know, all
the little day to day stuff that a thirteen year

(01:49):
old girl thinks about. But her world was rocked again
around that time. She got her first taste of anti
Semitism when she went to a girls school where Jews
were charged three times the tuition as Christians. She was
also elected to a post in a literary society, but
then another election was held because she was Jewish. And
it's around this time too that Hungarian anti Semitic sentiment

(02:13):
was growing and restrictive laws were put into place. Jews
were kicked out of their professions and her brother leaves
for France because he's not allowed to go to college.
So this family is starting to rebel in smaller ways already,
and the Arrow Cross Party emerged in nineteen thirty nine,
a fascist party that quickly became popular. Will come back

(02:33):
to them later in the episode. But in nineteen thirty eight,
in this environment that's growing increasingly hostile to Jews are assimilated,
Hanna found Zionism, which, to simplify greatly, is the desire
for a Jewish state located in the Jewish homeland of Israel.
And just uh, for your information, the state of Israel
wasn't established until so in Hannah's time, today's Israel was

(02:58):
under British rule as part of Palace Tine, so not
to confuse you with the terminology later in the podcast. Yeah,
And she's this person who's really looking for something to
believe in and to give her life meaning. And in
her experience, anti Semitism had been everywhere in Europe and
there was no way to get away from it except
to go to a place that was just for the

(03:19):
Jewish people. So she started studying Hebrew for the first
time and trying to rally her classmates to emigrate to
Palestine with her. She applied to agricultural school of all things,
so from academic to farm worker and to recap our
girl's story so far, she found a cause and a
new interest in religion. She wanted to leave her home

(03:39):
and everything she knew, and she was ready to put
down her books and pick up a shovel. But she's
got a lot of bureaucratic obstacles to actually get all
the way to Palestine. And she eventually does get there.
She sends her mother lots of letters, some of them
are written with these little illustrations chronicling her daily life.
So still keeping these very detailed entries of everything that's

(04:02):
happening to her. She also writes more poetry, so we
have a pretty good idea of your not so average
persons personal feelings and trouble, and also just the climate
of the time, what was going on. Then Hannah left
the farm for a kibbutz, and while she liked it,
she was lonely. She was extremely idealistic, according to others

(04:23):
who were there, even for idealists, and she was also
worried that she'd never see her mother and brother again,
and that perhaps she'd been selfish in her desire to leave,
starting to have second thoughts about this huge step she
had made in her life, especially as the war heated
up and she didn't hear from her brother anymore, and
from Hungary side, her mother starts getting shorter and shorter letters,

(04:45):
and then they stopped completely. So this split family. All
three of them are in completely separate places, and none
of them are in communication. None of them knows what's
going on with the others. And this is somewhat surprising
for the time, because Hungarian Jews had seemed relative, he
say from the atrocities, going on to give a little
bit of background. Their prime minister from nineteen thirty nine

(05:06):
to nineteen forty one, Paul to Lucky, whose name I
may have completely mangled, had allowed anti Jewish laws to
be enacted, but he'd also jailed many members of the
Arrow Cross party and worked very hard to try to
keep Hungry autonomous during this time, and when the Germans
marched into Hungary on their way to invading Yugoslavia in

(05:27):
April nineteen forty one, he killed himself and his successor,
los Lo Bardosi followed a policy of appeasement, at which
point Hungary joined the Germans in their war and Jews
started being deported. But his successor, miklosh Kali in March
nineteen forty two, went more in the opposite direction. He
walked the line between appeasement and opposition and he refused

(05:49):
to deport the Jews. He stopped that practice during his time.
So well, we have this back and forth going on
in Hungary. Back in Palestine, stories are starting to trickle
in with the Polish people about the horrors happening in
not the occupied Europe and the ghettos and the killings,
and the Jews in Palestine are obviously determined to help.

(06:10):
They've got to do something. Hannah tried to get her
mother out of Hungary, but the immigration certificate never came,
so she decided that she had to go back to
organize a resistance movement in her country and rescue her mother,
and to put these events in the context of a timeline.
According to the documentary film Blessed is the Match, which
you should definitely watch, in January, nine of the Jews

(06:34):
who would die in the Holocaust were still alive, and
in fifteen months those statistics were totally reversed, were dead
and only alive. So this all happened very quickly. So
in response to the final solution, which is starting to
go into effect here, wanting to do something to help,
Hannah joins the Haganah, which is a Jewish military force.

(06:57):
But then she finds another opportunity. The Brits were looking
for volunteers to go to the Balkans and contact partisan
resistance fighters to aid in Allied efforts, and Hannah and
the other Palestinians wanted to get in the same area,
but with the aim of rescuing their Jewish brethren in trouble.
So these two desires coincided a bit, and she and

(07:19):
the other thirty odd volunteers who were willing to risk
their lives began training in parachuting so they could get
behind enemy lines. And Hannah would also be in charge
of radio communications for her group. And the last photo
of her ever taken was the day before her mission
to you the Slavia began and her brother had just
arrived in Palestine and it was the first time they'd

(07:41):
seen each other in years, and unfortunately it would also
be the last, because she and her fellow parachutists landed
on March fourteenth, ninety four, and by the nineteenth the
German troops entered Hungary. So terrible timing, Hannah cries, I mean,
just imagine, she's justus arrived. There's not enough time to

(08:03):
go to all the Jews and try to build up
some sort of resistance. And almost immediately the Germans set
up a new very sympathetic to them government and encouraged
the Arrow Crossers are fascist from earlier who immediately began
robbing and killing Jews, and even more laws were set
in place in addition to those barring Jews from professions

(08:24):
and owning property. They had to wear the yellow stars.
There were deportations, arrests, murders, people were put in ghettos,
their restrictions on leaving the house, and it's important to
know that things were fast tracked really in Hungary. The
Germans showed signs of weakness and Allied hope for their
defeat was growing. So the Germans, the Arrow Crossers and

(08:46):
their other collaborators had to do their damage quickly. You
have the Allies breathing down their back, right, So more
than four thousand Hungarian Jews were sent to concentration camps
in just two months. But none of this that had happened. Yet,
when Hannah decided to actually cross the border into Hungary,
and anyone who was paying attention knew that it would happen,

(09:07):
though it was it was clear that it was coming,
and so it was a very brave thing for her
to do. A lot of her parachute as companions that
it was too dangerous, and she knew that when she
left there was a great risk of being killed. But
she goes anyways, and she's only twenty two years old,
and she gave what's probably her most famous poem, Blessed
is the match, to one of the men before she left,

(09:30):
and it goes, Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness
of the heart. Blessed is the heart with strength to
stop its beating for honor's sake. Blessed is the match
consumed in kindling flame. And according to the documentary, she
handed this piece of paper to her fellow parachutists and
he just sort of threw it in the bushes and

(09:52):
went on his way. But he realized that he had
to go back. He just had a feeling and went
back and searched through all of these bushes to he
found that little piece of paper and found her poem. So, unsurprisingly,
Hannah is caught. She knew she probably would be when
she signed on for this mission, and the Gestapo wanted
her transmitter codes, but she wouldn't give them up, and

(10:13):
she didn't want to give up the other people in
her mission, and so she's brutally beaten and tortured. All
of her teeth are knocked out, and even when she's
being interrogated every day, she would not break and give
up the codes. They took her to Budapest, and once
they found out who she was, brought her mother in,
thinking they could use her against Hannah, and her mother
of course didn't know anything. She had thought Hannah was

(10:34):
still in Palestine. Surprise. That must have been for a
terrible but she wouldn't, of course press her for information either,
so they both ended up in jail. And well, it
must have been incredibly difficult to see each other and
those kinds of circumstances, it must also have been a
comfort because they could see each other through their windows
sometimes or in the prison yard. Hanna made really good

(10:58):
use of those windows too, She used them to signal
information about the outside world to the other inmates. Of course,
she's being kept in very close quarters, but she's exposed
to a lot of really important, really secret information, and
she's able to pass that on to other people, right
because she's still being interrogated every day, so she has
the opportunity for at least someone to whisper something to

(11:20):
her or perhaps overhear other things that the guards are saying.
So she tries to give her fellow inmates hope. And
she drew a star of David on her dirty window
at some point because she didn't have to wear the
yellow stars like the others did, but she wanted to
let them know that she was still part of them.
And she also tried to entertain her cell mates, teaching
them Hebrew, telling them about Palestine, writing little pieces and

(11:44):
having them put them on, and even lied to a
woman in the prison yard saying that her teeth had
always been knocked out. They weren't knocked out by someone
who was interrogating her, so perhaps she wouldn't be as scared. Meanwhile,
things in Hungary are getting worse than the region of Hungary.
Who was working on a separate piece was overthrown and

(12:04):
the arrow crossers took over and they roped Jews together
and put them in the Danube, shooting every other one
and letting the others sink up. So still continuing on
this rapid fire extermination, and eventually Hannah's mother Catherine was released,
but Hannah would stay in prison to be tried for treason.

(12:26):
So in August nineteen forty four, the pro Nazi government
in Hungary started showing cracks. In July, there had been
another attempt on Hitler's life as part of Operation Valkyrie,
and it had become clear that Germany was close to
losing the war, and as a further ray of hope
for Hannah, the Soviets had entered Hungary in September, and
she was still in jail, but it seemed like she

(12:49):
might get out. She still has a trial to go through, though,
and her trial is a closed military tribunal in October
nineteen and she wouldn't plead for her life, but interestingly
they do not sentence her, and the judges flee the country,
so it's seeming like perfect timing. Finally, for once, it
seems like she might actually get out. She's still keeping

(13:11):
her diary, which is part of the reason that she's
so famous. We have this very clear record of everything
she's been doing, day by day. And she wrote that
she wasn't sure if she believed in a god, but
she believed that the world was created for good despite everything.
And that also reminded me of the famous and frank
quote about still believing that people are good at heart.
And she wrote another poem she's well known for during

(13:32):
this time, saying that she would have been twenty three,
but I gambled on what mattered. Most the dice were cast,
I lost. And despite the fact that her judges had fled,
there was one man who had it in for her,
and he made sure she was executed on November seven,
ninety four, and it said that she refused a blindfold you.

(13:53):
A week after she was killed, her mom was sent
on a death march to Austria. This is another amazing story.
She manages to escape and finally reach his Palestine, and
in nineteen fifty Hannah's body was returned to Israel and
she's buried there along with seven of the other parachutists
who had volunteered with the British Army. And as for Hungary,

(14:15):
the Soviets drove the last of the Germans and the
arrow Crossers out in February nineteen and in nineteen forty
one there had been seven hundred and twenty five thousand
Jews in Hungary. By the end of the war, only
two hundred sixty thousand were left. Tens of thousands more
left after the war, but today Budapest has the largest

(14:35):
Jewish population in Eastern Europe, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.
Part of the reason why Hannah Senish is perhaps more
famous than the other parachutists in her group or even
that mission, is because of all those records she kept,
because of the journal she kept until the day she died,
and her poems and her other writings, and despite the

(14:56):
fact that we hadn't known who she was, she is
a huge figure in Jewish history and in times when
anti Semitic sentiment is far from gone. You know, last
year there was that shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington,
d c. And also last year the Budapest memorial to
the thousands of Jews killed in the Danube was vandalized.

(15:16):
The steel shoes symbolizing the victims were filled with pigs feet.
In the face of those sentiments, it's encouraging to remember
the bravery of people like Hannasenish and like knee Peace.
So on that somber note, we're going to go to
happier things like listener mail. So since Hannah was a

(15:37):
Hungarian poet, we thought it would be appropriate to mention
a very interesting real mail that we got from Troy
in Atlanta. He sent us a tri corn hat made
of paper and suggested that we cover the topic of
the twentieth century modernist poet Marianne Moore. And we tried
to wear this hat, but our heads are too big

(15:57):
for it, we think because of all of our brains
full of brain. And it also reminded us of this
guy who lived somewhere in the dorms at u g
A who wore a tricorn hat every day, and the Troy,
if it's you, let us know. I had completely forgotten
about him until now, but it's pretty memorable. He also
sent us some patterns for tricorn hat, so we might
try to make our own later. If you'd like to

(16:20):
send us some email, you can get us at History
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We've also got
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article that might interest you if you're into World War
two stuff, are their Nazi war criminals still at large?
Which you can find on our homepage at www dot

(16:42):
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