My first Women’s History Month feature is a woman that I didn’t hear about until way into my college education. I took a class focused on women as diarists/memoirists using this book as a text. Seriously, it’s a great read and I highly recommend it.
Anyway, one of the diarists highlighted is Hannah Senesh. I don’t know what it was about her life or her diary entries that made her stand out from the many other fascinating women we read but here I am, ten years later, anxious to let the blogosphere know my devotion to her story.
Hannah Senesh was born in 1921 in Hungary. In the face of religious oppression, she and her family were Jewish, her mother managed to ensure an excellent education for Hannah (for three times the rate that Protestants were paying).
A side note here: I loved that Hannah’s mother was clearly a strong feminist in her own right. I didn’t know too much about her until recently but I have written in the margins of my copy Hannah’s diary “Moms!” and “I wonder what her mothers story is?” more on this later, though.
Hannah kept a diary from the age of thirteen until her untimely death at 23. In this diary, she recorded her dreams, political ideas, accounts of the events unfolding around her, and of course, her convictions about her responsibilities as a Jew during World War II. Right at the outbreak of WWII, Hannah left Hungary and her family to emigrate to Palestine. In her diaries we learn that she was dedicated to her personal development of an authentic and independent identity and her belief that love was always waiting to be expressed through service to others.
This theme, service to others, is the thread that continued throughout her life. She wrote, “One needs something to believe in, something for which one can have whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one’s life has meaning, that one is needed in this world”. The most dramatic manifestation of this ideal, and the reason she had become monumental to women’s history as well as Jewish history, was her decision to join up with a special group of Palestinian soldiers trained by the British to help Jews escape from occupied countries. Her unit parachuted into Yugoslavia in March of 1944. By that time, Hungary was already occupied by Nazis and Hannah was captured and imprisoned in Budapest.
In prison she maintained her service despite the unimaginable conditions by teaching the other prisoners Hebrew and made the children dolls out of whatever she could find. She refused to reveal the secrets entrusted to her even when the Nazis threatened to torture her mother who was housed at the same prison. Hannah herself was severely beaten and tortured. She was executed on November 7th, 1944.
Hannah Senesh is a personal hero of mine for many reasons. Her dedication to service is something that I reflect on often. In a less evil time, she may have lived an ordinary life as a teacher or community organizer. This was not the case, and she took her passion for service and stood up to the wrongs she saw. In a letter to her brother two days before she left on her mission she wrote “There are events without which one’s life becomes unimportant, a worthless toy; and there are times when one is commanded to do something, even at the price of one’s life”
Strangely enough (and luckily), when I was doing a little background googling on Hannah Senesh this morning I came across a documentary that has been made about her life called “Blessed is the Match” AND it is playing in Pittsburgh on March 9,10,12 and 18. Visit www.vjfpittsburgh.org to get tickets. According the the director, the film is a tribute the mother and daughter relationship of Catherine and Hannah Senesh through the telling of their story. Field trip, anyone?
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