Hannah Szenes

Born to an assimilated Hungarian literary family, Szenes turns to Zionism as a teenager, emigrates in 1939 to study at the Nahalal agricultural school, and then joins Kibbutz Sdot Yam. She volunteers for a British-organized unit of Jewish parachutists from the Yishuv, sent into occupied Europe to aid Allied airmen and contact Jewish communities, and drops into Yugoslavia in March 1944. Crossing into Hungary, she is captured, imprisoned, and tortured, refusing to reveal her radio codes even when her mother is brought before her, and is executed by firing squad in Budapest on 7 November 1944, at twenty-three. Her poems, especially Eli Eli ("A Walk to Caesarea"), enter the Hebrew canon, and she becomes the central figure of that small mission of some three dozen parachutists, seven of whom were killed: it rescued few, but it remains the Yishuv's best-remembered attempt to reach the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.