Blessed is the Match

A poem by Hannah Szenes (Sennesh). Hannah Szenes was born in Budapest on July 17, 1921, to a wealthy Hungarian Jewish family Hannah was exposed to antisemitism during her high school years, propelling her to learn more about her Jewish origins. It was at that time that she joined a Zionist youth movement and learned Hebrew in preparation for immigration to Palestine. In 1939, after finishing her high school studies, Szenes came to Palestine. She joined an elite Jewish fighting group called the Palmach which defended Jews from Arab attacks. She took a course in parachuting and jumped out of a plane into Yugoslavia with several other Jewish volunteers in order to aid the anti-Nazi forces and enter Hungary from there. The Nazis invaded Hungary and captured her within hours of her stepping onto Hungarian soil. They tried to force her to give away the wireless codes of the allies but she refused to give them the information they wanted. In November 1944 Hannah Szenes came up before a tribunal and warned the judges that as the end of the war was nearing, that their own fate would soon hang in the balance. Convicted as a spy, Szenes was sentenced to death. On the morning of November 7th she was presented with two options: to beg for a pardon, or to face death by a firing squad. Refusing to beg clemency from her captors, whom she did not consider legally permitted to try her case, Szenes penned short notes to her mother and her comrades and went to her death at age twenty-three in a snow-covered Budapest courtyard, refusing a blindfold in order to face her murderers in the moments before her death.