Blessed Is the Match

Resistance fighter, Zionist, and poet Hanna Szenes (Senesh) was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Budapest. In the 1930s, Szenes moved to Palestine, where she joined Kibbutz Sedot Yam. In 1942, she became a parachutist and was trained by the underground Haganah organization to rescue prisoners of war and organize Jewish resistance in Europe. In March 1944, Szenes was dropped into Yugoslavia. She made her way across the Hungarian border, where she was arrested and killed by the Hungarians. In 1950, her body was interred on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem. Her diary from her teenage years was published in 1971.