REMEMBER THE HEROES OF THE HOLOCAUST

RITA KRAMER: A FLAME THAT STILL BURNS

FROM SEPTEMBER 2009 OUTPOST

In the early days of World War II, when Britain stood alone against Nazi-occupied Fortress Europe, Winston Churchill created a secret organization and gave it the mandate “now set Europe ablaze.”

The organization, Special Operations Executive, would drop agents into the countries of occupied Europe to organize and train resistance groups to be ready to rise up in support of an eventual cross-Channel invasion.

The organization’s existence and activities remained secret all through the war and for years afterward for two reasons. The military establishment did not approve of irregular or “ungentlemanly” warfare, not yet having learned that such tactics would be necessary in order to defeat an enemy that did not play by the rules. The other reason was that SOE was recruiting and training women to be sent into the dark and dangerous Continent.

Female Agents

Women who were fluent in the language of an occupied country could more easily pass as natives than men of military age. Where men would be challenged to show their papers, women could move about freely among the crowds of housewives going about the business of looking for food, soap, and other necessities of domestic life, carrying messages or hidden radio sets on which to communicate with London. The women who volunteered for this mission were told of the dangers, the risks of capture, and what would follow if they were caught.

Among those who accepted those risks was a 23-year-old Jewish woman born in Hungary.

Hannah Senesh (Szenes in Hungarian) was the child of assimilated Budapest Jews; her father was a well-known writer. Her daily experience of anti-Semitism at school and on the streets led her to join a student Zionist group called Maccabea and then in 1939 to emigrate with her brother to Palestine. Hannah studied agriculture at the training school for girls at Nahalal and in 1941 joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam. She continued the writing she had been doing since childhood—a diary, poetry, songs and plays. And she joined the Haganah, determined to fight for Eretz Yisrael.

As it became clear what kind of war they would have to fight and what kind of enemy they faced, the British Army, if not the Foreign Office, relaxed its traditional attitude of suspicion and distaste toward Jews. Many of them were proving useful in unanticipated ways. Those who had escaped from Europe knew the languages of the countries in which they had grown up and many of them were young and strong and eager to enlist in the fight to defeat the Nazi horrors, which by 1943 were clear to those who did not choose to close their eyes.

Captured by an Idea

Enzo Sereni, an Italian Zionist who during the 1930s had worked tirelessly to bring Jews to the Yishuv, both legally and in secret, succeeded in convincing the British to make use of Jewish volunteers as SOE agents. Of 250 who volunteered, fewer than half were selected for training by SOE in Egypt, where they practiced parachuting and were taught other skills they would need in evading capture once dropped into the occupied countries. Hannah Senesh was one of the volunteers who made the cut, and it seemed to her she was destined for the task. She had written in her diary: “Suddenly the idea grabbed me that I must go to Hungary, and be there during these days, to lend a hand to Aliyat Hanoar [an organization to bring out Jewish children]…” And a month later, “A member of the Palmach visited here…and told me that a unit is being organized to do…exactly what I felt ought to be done…”

In March 1944 Hannah was one of three Jewish paratroopers dropped by SOE into Yugoslavia with the plan of eventually crossing the border into Hungary to help the threatened Jews—as well as downed Allied pilots and escaped prisoners of war—to reach safety on one of the evasion lines being run out of occupied Europe. The three joined Tito’s partisans in the Balkan mountains and waited for the right time to continue on.

By now the Germans had taken over in Hungary and disaster awaited the agents. Her two male companions decided to abort the mission, but Hannah was determined to chance it and in early June she made her way to the border, carrying her British wireless transmitter. She was captured on arrival by Hungarian authorities, before she had any chance to carry out her mission. She was imprisoned in the Horthy Miklos Prison in Budapest and tortured—clubbed, whipped, and threatened with the torture of her mother, who had remained in Hungary and been arrested.

Never broken

She never broke. She never revealed her wireless codes or any information about her comrades, her mission, or the organization that had trained and sent them. Remarkably, she kept her spirits up during the months of her brutal imprisonment, finding ways to communicate with other prisoners and singing in the hopes of helping to keep up their spirits.

When it became clear that nothing would be gotten from her, she was accused of treason and tried as a spy. SOE had secured British Army commissions for the agents in the belief, naïve as it turned out, that they would be protected by the uniform and treated as prisoners of war. But Hannah was condemned to death, before the court had even declared a verdict.

As she stood before a German firing squad, she refused to be blindfolded, so she could look her killers in the eyes.

It was November 7, 1944. She had kept writing in her diary until the last, when an entry found in her cell after her death read, “I played a number in a game/I gambled on what mattered most/ the dice have rolled/ I lost.” Hannah Senesh did not live to her twenty-fourth birthday.

Among the things she left behind were poems and songs still sung in Israel today. The best known is Eli, Eli, which concludes “The voice called, and I went/I went because the voice called.”

Last song

These lines are from the last song she wrote from the partisan camp in Yugoslavia:

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.

The flame in Hannah Senesh’s heart answered Churchill’s urging to “set Europe ablaze.”

Hannah Senesh’s diary appeared in Hebrew in 1946. In 1950 her remains were brought to Israel for burial on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem and in 2007 her tombstone was brought to Sdot Yam. Her story has been told in histories, novels and films. She is a particular hero of Israeli children, who know her story and her songs. In 1993 a Hungarian Military Court saw fit to inform her family in Israel that she had been officially exonerated.

*Rita Kramer’s most recent non-fiction boo is “Flames in the Field,” the story of four SDE agents in Occupied France.

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