Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh

Description

Hero • Martyr • Poet
The inspiring story of a remarkable life cut short.

“I don’t think Hannah wanted to die for the sake of having her memory exalted in history or to prove herself equal to a romantic image she conceived for herself. Her purpose wasn’t to die. She died for her life’s purpose.”
—U.S. Senator John McCain, in Why Courage Matters

Hannah Senesh, poet and Israel’s national heroine, has come to be seen as a symbol of Jewish heroism. Safe in Palestine during World War II, she volunteered for a mission to help rescue fellow Jews in her native Hungary. She was captured by the Nazis, endured imprisonment and torture, and was finally executed at the age of twenty-three.

Like Anne Frank, she kept a diary from the time she was thirteen. This new edition brings together not only the widely read and cherished diary, but many of Hannah’s poems and letters, memoirs written by Hannah’s mother, accounts by parachutists who accompanied Hannah on her fateful mission, and insightful material not previously published in English.

Described by a fellow parachutist as a “spiritual girl guided almost by mysticism,” Hannah’s life has something of value to teach everyone. Now the subject of a feature-length documentary, Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, Hannah’s words and actions will inspire people from each generation to follow their own inner voices, just as she followed hers.

Foreword vii Marge Piercy Preface xi Eitan Senesh Translator's Preface xiii Marta Cohn Memories of Hannah's Childhood xvii Catherine Senesh The Diary 1 The Letters 167 The Mission The Last Border 223 Reuven Dafne How She Fell 231 Yoel Palgi Meeting in Budapest 253 Catherine Senesh Selected Poems 295 Afterword 309 Roberta Grossman Reader’s Guide 313 Historical Note 317 Notes 321

Sujets

• Holocaust
• Philosophie et théologie
• Hungría
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• The Holocaust
• World War II
• Judaism
• Hungary
• Palestine
• Religion
• Holocauste
• Seconde Guerre mondiale
• Hongrie

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 03 février 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580235754
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

O THER J EWISH L IGHTS B OOKS OF I NTEREST
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Edited by Judea and Ruth Pearl
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By Len Lyons, PhD
Foreword by Alan Dershowitz
Photographs by Ilan Ossendryver
A Dream of Zion: American Jews Reflect on Why Israel Matters to Them
Edited by Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin
Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, the First Complete Edition
2010 Quality Paperback Edition, Third Printing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information regarding permission to reprint material from this book, please mail or fax your request in writing to Jewish Lights Publishing, Permissions Department, at the address / fax number listed below, or e-mail your request to [e-mail] .
2004 by Eitan Senesh, David Senesh, and Ginosra Senesh Foreword 2004 by Middlemarsh, Inc. Afterword 2007 by Roberta Grossman
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Senesh, Hannah, 1921-1944. Hannah Senesh: her life and diary / by Hannah Senesh; foreword by Marge Piercy; preface by Eitan Senesh.-1st complete ed. p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58023-212-8 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-58023-212-4 (hardcover)
1. Senesh, Hannah, 1921-1944. 2. Jews-Palestine-Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Hungary. 4. World War,1939-1945-Jewish resistance-Hungary.5. Senesh, Hannah, 1921-1944-Diaries. I. Title.
CT1919.P38S3668 2004
940.53'18'092-dc22
2004014535
ISBN-13: 978-1-58023-342-2 (quality pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-58023-342-2 (quality pbk.)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Parts of this book were published as Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary by Schocken Books, New York,1972.
Cover design: Tim Holtz
Manufactured in the United States of America
Published by Jewish Lights Publishing
A Division of LongHill Partners, Inc.
Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, P.O. Box 237
Woodstock, VT 05091
Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone]
www.jewishlights.com
C ONTENTS
Foreword
Marge Piercy
Preface
Eitan Senesh
Translator s Preface
Marta Cohn
Memories of Hannah s Childhood
Catherine Senesh
The Diary
The Letters
The Mission
The Last Border
Reuven Dafne
How She Fell
Yoel Palgi
Meeting in Budapest
Catherine Senesh
Selected Poems
Afterword
Roberta Grossman
Reader s Guide
Historical Note
Notes

About Jewish Lights
Copyright
F OREWORD : T HE E NIGMA OF H ANNAH S ENESH
For many years, after the lighting of the candles at my seder, as we begin the haggadah, we have recited Hannah Senesh s poem Blessed Is the Match. I first ran across the story of Hannah Senesh in 1984, when I was researching and writing Gone to Soldiers , my novel about World War II. I did not use her in the novel, but her life and death deeply impressed me and I have never forgotten her.
I asked, as many have, why did a young girl from a relatively privileged background who was safely out of the war become a heroine? We have had in English only a few brief and poignant poems. What possessed her to fling herself back into danger? Why did she leave Palestine, enlist in the British army, train for clandestine activity behind enemy lines?
When we look at what she did, a young woman with the foresight to leave Hungary in 1939 and move to what was then Palestine, alone at eighteen, we are astonished. No one in her family or their circle were Zionists. They were not religious and she had never learned Hebrew until she chose to study it, with the aim of emigrating. They were assimilated Jews-her father had been a successful writer of comedies that were quite popular and was also a columnist for a paper. Her early diaries reveal a girl with the usual interests: She worried about doing well in school, wanted to be a writer, flirted with boys, adored her grandma, was teased by her brother. Only prescience adds meaning to the diaries of her early high school years.
Then in the midst of the early repression of Jews, her sense of that injustice awakened. She began to explore her identity as a Jew. Swiftly, that search became the core of her identity. She decided to prepare herself to go to Eretz Israel, and with little support of anyone close to her and to the dismay of her family, she persevered and was accepted to an agricultural school in Palestine.
This section of her diaries might be particularly useful to those too young to have any memory of the context in which the State of Israel was founded. Hannah, of course, died before Israel existed, but her reasons for becoming a Zionist should interest many to whom the word is almost a curse these days. Her diaries once she came to Palestine give us insight into what it was like under British rule.
She threw herself into whatever labor was assigned her-planting and harvesting in the fields, carpentry, poultry husbandry (her chosen field of interest), laundering, baking-no matter how boring she sometimes found the work. Her diaries from the moment she began to explore her Jewish identity gain in interest. She was honest about her occasional feelings that doing physical labor and menial work might not prove the best use of her talents. Yet her excitement and commitment continued to build. She was confident in her choice.
Her leadership emerged early in the kibbutz where she lived after agricultural school. Then, when a chance arose for her to return to Hungary to try to save Jews from the Holocaust, she again moved swiftly, this time to enlist under British control. That ability to imagine something and the moment it became possible to force it into reality was one of her outstanding traits. She was aware the British were only interested in rescuing their downed pilots, but nothing interfered with her sense of her true mission.
Somehow, she managed to escape the constricting effect of gender roles that hamper the full development of so many women. She never fell in love and her flirtations were minor. False modesty never compelled her to pretend she could not do what she could succeed at. She assumed leadership and it seemed to feel natural to those around her as well as to her. She was not particularly concerned with her appearance and her self-critical faculties were focused on her character and her actions, not on her face or her hair or her body. Every Yom Kippur, she took stock and found herself falling short of her ideals and intentions. She exuded charisma and vitality. Although introspective and judgmental toward herself, she was a cheerful person, energetic and able to enjoy whatever she could, even in prison, even in the shadow of the death we know from her last poem she expected.
Her bravery seemed natural and unforced, and yet almost blinding to those around her-whether she was learning to parachute, fighting with the partisans in what was then Yugoslavia, or refusing to talk under torture. The accounts from that last period of her life, from a fellow soldier, from her mother in the same prison, are particularly moving. The Nazis seemed puzzled by her, this young woman who was so proud to be a Jew, but they solved their discomfort by shooting her.
For us, she is also a puzzle, this short life that became so supercharged in her last years. Extraordinary courage is never quite explicable. But her later diaries, letters from Palestine, and the memories of those who knew her help us approach her far more closely than even her few beautiful unembellished poems. There is a directness and powerful simplicity in them that accords with our sense of Hannah Senesh as a woman who saw what she thought was right and should be done time after time, and as soon as she could, went and did it, no matter how difficult or dangerous it might prove to be. Reading those poems has to make a reader wish she had lived to develop her talent fully and to write far more to leave to us. If this collection helps us remember an exemplary and heroic woman, then it will have accomplished much.
Marge Piercy
P REFACE
Sixty years have passed since the death of my aunt, Hannah Senesh, who has become a symbol of Jewish heroism in the modern era. Many know the story of her mission and her murder, but few are familiar with the story of her life. I was born five years after her death-I got to know my aunt by reading her diaries and letters, and from stories that my grandmother Catherine and my father, Hannah s brother George, told me.
After my grandmother s death in 1992 at the age of ninety-six and my father s death in 1995, I began to receive letters from people who saw me as one of the last links to my aunt s legacy. When I visited the Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Washington, DC, in 1998, I spoke to Jewish educators from all over the world. Their continuing interest in Hannah catalyzed my decision to do as much as I could to keep her memory alive. Upon my return to Israel I worked with friends of my aunt s from Kibbutz Sdot Yam to launch a nonprofit foundation whose mission is to commemorate my aunt s life and values. Hannah Senesh exemplifies the Jewish-indeed, the universal-virtue of taking personal responsibility for general suffering. She never hesitated to sacrifice her own needs and comforts to serve others.
As someone who was born, educated, and raised in the sovereign state of Israel, I believe that Hannah s story, the values she embodied, and her way of life should be brought to the attention of young people throughout the world. I extend my thanks to Jewish Lights and its publisher, Stuart M. Matlins, for this newly expanded edition of my aunt s diaries, letters, and poems; and to my editor, Arthur Goldwag. I see this book as a blessed match and a flame, which fires the imagination, brings people closer to one another, and embodies the universal prayer