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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
