Teenage Jewish Paratroopers: Hannah Szenes

When I took Jewish History in college, I decided to do my final project on the contributions of Jewish settlers in the Palestinian Mandate to World War II. (Sexy, right?) My research brought me to a group of paratroopers who dropped behind enemy lines in Europe, among them, a young Hungarian woman named Hannah Szenes.

It took a lot of nagging on the part of the proto-Israeli community in Palestine (the Yishuv from here on out) to get this team of Teenage Jewish Paratroopers assembled. On the surface, Jewish settlers would seem like the perfect weapon for the British to use against Hitler – who had more reason to hate Hitler? The problem for the British was that prior to the war (and presumably once the war was over) Jewish settlers in Israel were avowedly anti-British and it would be “acutely embarrassing” if the British trained Jews to fight against Nazis and then those same Jews turned around to fight the British once the war was over. (Isn’t history charming?)

The British had every reason to believe that the Yishuv hated their guts. Because the Yishuv did  - overwhelmingly – hate their guts. If you recall from the post on Gertrude Bell, the mandate of Palestine was created after World War I to be administered by the British, which turned out to be a governmental nightmare because both Zionists and Arab nationalists felt that the land rightfully belonged to them, and neither group wanted the British to be there. In order to sooth the violence between the communities, the British clamped down a series of limitations on Jewish immigration (“White Papers”) – at a time when Jewish refugees were pouring out of Europe only to be turned away from Britain, the U.S., and Palestine. In one particularly inflammatory incident, a boatful of refugees was turned away from Palestine: the boat sank and the refugees died. (Any of this ringing a bell?)

So, even though the Yishuv hated the Nazis more, they still felt that the British were complicit in the murder of millions of European Jews.

In 1940, at the age of nineteen, Hannah Szenes reflected on the Yishuv’s predicament as “a tiny country between two formidable adversaries: one the representative of anti-Semitism, the other the author of the White Paper. Needless to say, we have but one road: to side with the British against Germany.” A year earlier, young Hannah had migrated from Hungary to Palestine alone, leaving behind her mother and brother in Europe. She had lived a fairly privileged, sheltered, and assimilated life in Hungary, but like many young, middle class Jews of her generation, was drawn to the Zionist project. She was a prolific diarist and poet and so she left behind her passionate frustrations that the British would not assemble a Jewish team to send back to Europe.

Why did the British change their minds and start deploying Jewish troops? Desperation – the same thing that had dropped them in the boiling pot of Palestine stew in the first place. In 1941, the British faced dire circumstances. France was under occupation and its colonies in the Middle East and Africa had come under Vichy rule. Rommel was advancing. The Soviet Union and United States wouldn’t join the war until later in the year and a pro-Nazi coup had taken control of Iraq, threatening to cut off access to Britain’s oil supply. The British timidly accepted Jewish help on covert missions in the neighborhood (mainly Vichy Syria) but remained reluctant to send Jews to Europe until assembling their team of paratroopers in 1942.

The British rationale behind the mission, to me, remains enigmatic. Ostensibly, the team was to sabotage Nazi anti-aircraft artillery and aid Yugoslavian partisans for the British – while also assisting Zionist cells and rescuing Jews behind their British commanders’ backs. The risks of the mission were high, and the chances of success, extremely low – but Hannah Szenes volunteered anyway and was duly accepted.

Szenes’ comrades – all of similar background and age – describe the twenty-three-year-old as fearless, feisty, and passionate, often impatient with British delays on the mission. Shortly after the team dropped in Yugoslavia, the Nazis invaded Hungary – Szenes’ homeland. For her, this was the last straw.

Scenes, in uniform, with her brother.

The night of May 12, 1944 Yoel Palgi, another Hungarian-born paratrooper, recalls sitting around the fire with his comrades. Szenes rose abruptly, apparently agitated and asked Palgi to walk with her. As they walked, Szenes unburdened herself, revealing that she could no longer rest easy awaiting British orders in Yugoslavia, knowing that millions of Jews – her mother among them – were in peril across the border. She disclosed her plans to defy her British military orders, and proceed on a Jewish rescue mission. He recalls her saying, “It’s better to die and free our conscience than to return with the knowledge that we didn’t even try.”  Palgi agreed to defy orders as well, and they arranged to meet in Budapest. The next day, May 13, 1944, they crossed separately into occupied Hungary. Nazi authorities captured them both shortly thereafter.

In captivity, when Szenes refused to reveal the code for her British radio, the Gestapo arrested her mother, Catherine Szenes. Hannah’s convictions did not waver. Unexpectedly – albeit tragically – reunited, the mother and daughter caught glimpses of each other and exchanged snatches of conversation during their time detained in the same prison. In November of 1944, the Nazis executed Hannah by firing squad.

She allegedly refused a blindfold.

No matter how you slice it, there is something remarkable about a person (male or female, old or young) sacrificing themselves in this way – but what I find particularly fascinating as a historian is the way that Szenes was canonized in Israeli national memory soon after her death.

On the surface, the relationship between Israel and the Holocaust looks simple. In the history of the modern world, perhaps, even, the whole history of Judaism, no single menace threatened the Jews as much as the Third Reich, which nearly destroyed European Jewry. This catastrophe seemed to prove the Zionist theory right: Europe was no home for the Jews. The guilt of the Western world became the midwife of the State of Israel, established in 1948. As the Jewish state, it is Israel’s responsibility to memorialize the Holocaust, maybe even boasting the heritage of survival.

One of many examples of the Zionist narrative of strength.

The narrative accompanying the Holocaust and the war, however, is not so simple, because the reality was far more complicated. The Yishuv’s involvement in the war was marked by frustration and impotence. Unable to rescue European Jews under official auspices, the Yishuv had to satisfy itself with illegal immigration operations. From this, developed a narrative of blame. The British were to blame for imposing the White Paper, which kept endangered Jews out of Palestine. The Allies in general were to blame for appeasing Germany for so long, and for allowing the genocide to continue by not bombing Auschwitz or the train tracks leading to it. Even survivors, to some extent, were to blame for not standing up against the Germans, thereby giving into stereotypes of the weak, impotent European Jew in direct conflict to the cult of strength idealized by Jewish settlers. Blame went hand in hand with tragedy: millions of Jews suffered and died. In some Israeli narratives the face of tragedy became Hannah Szenes: the vivacious, Zionist girl who willingly sacrificed her life to save her fellow Jews.

Szenes is the perfect hero for Israel. Her voice reaches from beyond the grave, revealing not only her dedication to the Zionist cause, but also her ambiguous feelings towards the British. In her diaries, the Nazis were an implicit enemy, and the British, explicit and she died in defiance of both: standing up to the Nazis while disobeying her British orders.

The participation of Szenes and two other women in the mission also offered a valuable narrative for the fledgling state. The three female participants, all of whom perished, represented Zionist strength and determination. They also served as role models for Israeli women, who faced mandatory active duty before women in much of the rest of the world were permitted to do so.

The fallen parachutists became iconic, offering a shared narrative space for Holocaust survivors and pre-Holocaust settlers. Israelis chose militants as their national World War Two heroes, rather than Holocaust survivors, perhaps because the willingness of citizens to fight and die was immediately essential to the state’s survival in hostile territory. The voluntary sacrifice of the parachutists is compatible with the Israeli narrative of military strength and resistance, resonating with citizens who still live with mandatory military service, some feeling as if they live under constant threat of annihilation.

Sources:

Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor. Perfect Heroes : the World War II Parachutists and the

            Making of Israeli Collective Memory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

            2010.

Palgi, Yoel. Into the Inferno: the Memoir of a Jewish Paratrooper Behind Nazi Lines.

 New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Szenes, Hannah. Her Life and Diary. Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2004.

War Cabinet of Great Britain. Report by the Right Hon. Oliver Lyttelton, M.P., On His

 Period of Office as Minister of State, 1942. London: The National Archives.

War Cabinet of Great Britain. Reports for the Month of June 1941 for the Dominions,

 India, Burma, and the Colonies, Protectorates, and Mandated Territories, 1941.

War Cabinet of Great Britain. Formation of a Jewish Force to Participate in Operations

 in Europe, 1944. London: The National Archives.