Hannah Szenes

Hannah Szenes was a Hungarian-born poet who emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1939 to study at an agricultural school, joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam in 1941 and enlisted in the Haganah. In 1943 she volunteered for the British forces and was trained by the Special Operations Executive; on 14 March 1944 she was among thirty-seven Jewish volunteers from Palestine parachuted into Yugoslavia, from where she crossed into Hungary on a mission to help Jews facing deportation. She was arrested at the border by Hungarian gendarmes who found her transmitter, was tortured for months and refused to give up her code even when her mother was arrested and threatened, and after a treason trial under the Arrow Cross regime she was executed by firing squad in Budapest on 7 November 1944, aged twenty-three. Her remains were brought to Israel in 1950 and buried on Mount Herzl, and her poems, among them 'A Walk to Caesarea' ('Eli, Eli'), are still sung today.