Hannah Szenes

Hannah Szenes (1921 – 1944) was a Hungarian Jewish poet and national heroine of Israel. Emigrating from Budapest to Mandatory Palestine in 1939, Szenes joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam. In 1943, she volunteered for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to parachute into Nazi-occupied Europe to rescue Allied airmen and organize Jewish resistance.

In March 1944, Szenes parachuted into Yugoslavia and spent three months fighting alongside Josip Broz Tito's partisans. Crossing into Hungary in June 1944 on the day the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began, she was captured at the border with a British military transmitter. Brutally interrogated and tortured over several months in Budapest, she steadfastly refused to reveal her transmitter codes or betray comrades. At age twenty-three, she was executed by a Hungarian military firing squad, leaving behind immortal lyric poems including 'Blessed Is the Match'.