Hannah Szenes: SOE Paratrooper, Poet of Eli Eli and Her Unbroken Silence

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Hannah Szenes was born in Budapest in the summer of 1921 into an assimilated Jewish family; her father, Béla Szenes, was a journalist and playwright who died when she was young. At a Protestant girls' school that charged Jewish students the highest fees, she was allowed to pay the reduced Catholic rate because of her talent. As antisemitism grew she joined the Zionist youth movement Maccabea and taught herself Hebrew, and in 1939 she emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, studying at the agricultural school in Nahalal and joining Kibbutz Sdot Yam in 1941. She joined the Haganah, enlisted in the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force in 1943, and was one of 33 chosen from 250 candidates for Special Operations Executive missions, training as a paratrooper in Egypt.

On 14 March 1944 she parachuted into Yugoslavia, but Germany had occupied Hungary and the mission was effectively aborted. She pressed on with Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein and was arrested by Hungarian gendarmes carrying a British radio transmitter. In a Budapest prison she was whipped and clubbed for three days and lost several teeth, and her captors brought in her mother, Catherine, and threatened to kill her, but she never gave up the code. Tried for treason by an Arrow Cross court on 28 October 1944, she was executed by firing squad on 7 November 1944, refusing a blindfold and clemency.

• Her captors wanted the cipher to run a Funkspiel, sending false messages to SOE in her name.
• She coached cellmate Matilda Goldstein to fake a fall, reach the prison infirmary and escape through a window.
• At the Kastner trial, her mother testified that Kastner's network advised against hiring a lawyer for Hannah.
• She was reburied at Mount Herzl in 1950, and a Hungarian military court exonerated her in 1993.
• Her poem "A Walk to Caesarea," known as "Eli, Eli," was set to music by David Zehavi.