{"id":49033,"date":"2026-05-29T01:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T08:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=49033"},"modified":"2026-05-28T09:08:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T16:08:07","slug":"hannah-senesh-a-unique-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2026\/05\/29\/hannah-senesh-a-unique-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"Hannah Senesh \u2013 a unique hero"},"content":{"rendered":"

Douglas Century signs copies of his book Crash of the Heavens at the JCC Jewish Book Festival earlier this year. (photo by Tova Kornfeld)<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/i>Douglas Century\u2019s Crash of the Heavens: The Remarkable Story of Hannah Senesh and the Only Military Mission to Rescue Europe\u2019s Jews During World War II<\/i> is a meticulously researched and spell-binding narrative of Senesh\u2019s life, and pre- and postwar Europe and Palestine.<\/p>\n

Senesh, born in 1921, grew up in a middle-class family in Budapest until the Nazis came to power in the 1930s. The rise of antisemitism drove her to join a Zionist youth group and she became obsessed with emigrating to British Palestine. In 1938, she made aliyah to a northern kibbutz, and part of her metamorphosis was to Hebraize her identity, changing her name from Aniko Szenes.<\/p>\n

As word of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis started to leak out, Jews in Palestine (numbering about 600,000) sought ways to rescue their European brethren. British Intelligence MI9, tasked with assisting the escape of thousands of Allied POWs, needed people with local language skills and area knowledge. In 1943, Senesh was recruited, one of three Jewish women in a cohort of 37, to be trained as a paratrooper and radio operator. She made her first jump \u2013 into Yugoslavia \u2013 in March 1944, where she liaised with Partisan groups to carry out sabotage missions. Her hope was to cross into Hungary to save her family and others, but she was captured by Hungarian gendarmes, imprisoned, tortured, tried for treason and executed by firing squad on Nov. 7, 1944.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sharing details from her diary, which Senesh kept from the age of 13, Century takes readers into her pains, her joys. Her poetry is part of her legacy: \u201cA Walk to Caesarea\u201d is almost a second national anthem in Israel, where many streets, parks and schools bear her name. Ironically, Hungarians know little about her.<\/p>\n

The Independent<\/i> interviewed Century by email.<\/p>\n

JI<\/b>: How did you first become interested in Senesh?<\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: I first learned about Hannah when I was about 8 years old at the I.L. Peretz Shul in Calgary. Our principal was a Holocaust survivor \u2013 he\u2019d lived through the Shoah as a boy in Poland. He told us the story of Hannah\u2019s courage, her refusal to give up her secret British radio codes despite months of horrific physical and psychological torture at the hands of the Gestapo.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At that age, I\u2019m sure it was just the broad strokes of the story: she wouldn\u2019t betray her people, she was sentenced to execution by firing squad when she was 23 years old.<\/p>\n

Who could understand the concept of martyrdom at the age of 8? Certainly not me. But I did understand that this was a brave young woman who went to her death and wouldn\u2019t beg for mercy \u201cfrom hangmen and murderers\u201d \u2013 those were her exact words.<\/p>\n

She refused to wear a blindfold as she faced the firing squad, daring the Hungarian soldiers with rifles to look her in the eyes as shot.<\/p>\n

To hear that story age 8 \u2013 well, it was amazing. It was also terrifying. Clearly, it\u2019s haunted me since childhood.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JI<\/b>: This is the first time you are writing about a woman. Was that decision purposeful?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: I never thought about it that way. I\u2019ve tended to write books with male protagonists. Technically, though, the first book I ever published \u2013 when I was in my mid-20s \u2013 was a young adult biography of the Nobel-laureate novelist Toni Morrison.<\/p>\n

I conceptualized this book as a military rescue mission \u2013 most of the action takes place between late 1943 and late 1944, with a \u201cticking-clock\u201d thriller pacing \u2013 and, yes, in the book proposal, I consciously chose to focus on the three women Palmach commandos and parachutists: Hannah Senesh, Haviva Reik and Surika Braverman.<\/p>\n

As I was writing \u2026 it became clear that the central storyline needed to be Hannah\u2019s. To a lesser extent, I write about the other parachutists\u2019 missions in Slovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>JI<\/b>: What research did you do for the book?<\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: There are so many primary source documents available. All of Hannah\u2019s poetry, diaries, letters and photographs are in the National Library of Israel archive. There are also many memoirs \u2013 most of them out of print \u2013 by the various parachutists. There are invaluable oral histories in the U.S. Holocaust Museum and at Yad Vashem. For four years, I felt like I was basically living in archives and military libraries, but I knew that I\u2019d never do this story justice solely on previously published research.<\/p>\n

I flew to Tel Aviv in the summer of 2023 to do what we used to call \u201cshoe-leather reporting.\u201d I spent weeks in Israel, retracing the footsteps of Hannah Senesh and the other parachutists. That summer of 2023, I met David Senesh \u2013 Hannah\u2019s nephew \u2013 a renowned psychotherapist specializing in treating trauma. David was himself a POW and tortured by the Egyptians in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve become close friends with David and his wife\u2026. They really gave me some valuable personal insights into the family dynamic \u2013 and I learned things that have never been in other books.<\/p>\n

JI<\/b>: Was there a particular demographic you were trying to capture?<\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: I set out to write this book for one reader \u2013 my daughter, Lena. She\u2019s studying English and wants to be an author. My daughter was 22 when I finished the book; Hannah was 22 when she embarked on her paratrooper mission in March of 1944. My daughter said, \u201cThank God you\u2019re not writing about another complex, sociopathic antihero! Hannah is a courageous and talented woman who the reader can actually admire.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JI<\/b>: How did you arrive at the book\u2019s title?<\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: When I was pitching the idea to my literary agent, I was already writing about Hannah, but it was about to be the centenary of her birth in July 2021 and 150 IDF paratroopers were recreating her jump in a mission called Operation Crash of the Heavens. The title comes from Hannah\u2019s most famous poem, \u201cA Walk to Caesarea,\u201d better known by its musical adaptation, \u201cEli, Eli.\u201d It\u2019s a very short poem, and Hannah\u2019s next-to-last line in Hebrew is \u201cbarak hashamayim<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>The literal translation is \u201cthe lightning in the sky,\u201d but, to me, the most artful translation is, \u201cthe crash of the heavens.\u201d<\/p>\n

JI<\/b>: What has the reception to the book been like?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: It\u2019s been wonderful, warm and very appreciative. Even people who know about Hannah Senesh \u2013 especially people from Israel \u2013 tell me that I introduced stories and things they never knew before.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spoken at a few schools: the Hannah Senesh Community Day School in Brooklyn, King David High School in Vancouver, Yeshiva University in New York. When I\u2019m talking to teenagers, I try to contextualize the story by stressing how assimilated the Jews of Hungary were, especially in Budapest. They felt fully Hungarian. But then the series of so-called \u201cJewish Bills\u201d came into effect, limiting the number of Jews in the professions, setting quotas for university \u2013 Hannah had wanted to study education and become a schoolteacher but that became impossible. Ultimately, Jews couldn\u2019t own property, couldn\u2019t have a telephone. They were stripped of all civil rights \u2013 by the Kingdom of Hungary, of course, not by Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n

I ask high school kids and university students: Do you guys feel Canadian? You\u2019re proud of Canada? Cheer for Canada in the Olympics? What if, overnight, the government said: \u201cYou\u2019re not Canadian. Turn in your passport. You can\u2019t go to university. You need to move out of your house \u2013 you can only live on certain streets in houses marked with a yellow star. You can\u2019t be out in public past noon.\u201d Why? Because Parliament passed a new law that says you\u2019re no longer a Canadian \u2013 you\u2019re a Jew. That means you\u2019re an alien living among Canadians without the rights or privileges of a citizen. How would you feel? What would you do?<\/p>\n

JI<\/b>: You started this book before Oct. 7, 2023. Did that tragic event and its aftermath affect the way you wrote the narrative?<\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: Absolutely. I was deep into the writing process before Oct. 7, 2023. I knew that words like Zionism, Israel and Palestine were hot buttons when I started writing the book, but after Oct. 7, they became third rails.<\/p>\n

I tried not to let it affect the way I was writing the book. Of course, seeing all the anti-Israel protests exploding on campuses and in city streets the past couple of years, hearing all the outright distortion of history, it affects a writer\u2019s psyche. As we were designing maps for the book, for example, I insisted that they said, \u201cBritish Mandate for Palestine\u201d as well as \u201cEretz Israel.\u201d\u2026 While writing the first draft, I had non-Jewish friends asking me, \u201cDoug, what is Zionism?\u201d and I realized that, in the post-Oct. 7 world, it was a critical question. I felt I should let Hannah define what Zionism meant to her. On Oct. 27, 1938, she writes in her diary: \u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019ve already mentioned that I\u2019ve become a Zionist. This word stands for a tremendous number of things. To me, it means, in short, that I now consciously and strongly feel I am a Jew, and am proud of it.\u201d Full stop.<\/p>\n

JI<\/b>: If you would have been able to interview Senesh, what would you have asked?<\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: I have so many questions. I don\u2019t want to give any plot spoilers, but there\u2019s one story which hasn\u2019t been told before in previous books. In the summer of 1944, Hannah helped a young Slovakian-Jewish woman named Matilda Glattstein to escape from the Gestapo prison in Budapest. Hannah learned that Matilda was pregnant and devised a complicated escape plan, which means she knew exactly how to break out of the prison and yet she herself didn\u2019t. She saved another woman\u2019s life \u2013 but not her own. I\u2019d ask Hannah this question: \u201cIf you could rescue Matilda Glattstein, a pregnant woman with no military training, why didn\u2019t you rescue yourself?\u201d I\u2019ve got my own theories, but I would love to ask Hannah.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JI<\/b>: Why should people read your book?<\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: On the most basic level, I hope they want to read a compelling, exciting and emotional story of heroism during the darkest days of World War II. In hindsight, I didn\u2019t write the book just for my daughter, or just for young Jewish women, or for anyone who aspires to do what Hannah did \u2013 become a poet or author and leave her mark on the world. Within the story, I\u2019m asking some more universal questions: What do we mean by courage? Where does moral conviction come from?<\/p>\n

We\u2019re living in a crazy era, and it\u2019s worth remembering that there are some causes for which it might be necessary to make the ultimate sacrifice\u2026.<\/p>\n

JI<\/b>: Tell me about your collaboration with Kosha Dillz?<\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: Kosha Dillz is someone I\u2019ve known for years and years. His real name is Rami Even-Esh. [He\u2019s] an Israeli-American rapper, filmmaker, social media personality and influencer. I sent him an ARC [advance reading copy] of Crash of the Heavens<\/i> last October and we just started bouncing around ideas.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We agreed that, with this terrifying rise in antisemitism, it\u2019s the perfect time to make the name Hannah Senesh \u2013 poet, paratrooper, Palmach commando \u2013 known to all the millions of people in their teens, 20s and 30s who are too busy \u201cdoom scrolling\u201d to read the book. I figured, what better way to reach them than to have a gifted modern-day poet like Kosha Dillz breathe fresh energy and inspiration into her story? He wrote some amazing lyrics based on my book and we shot a video on the streets of New York for his song called \u201cHannah Senesh.\u201d… You can find it on all the streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JI<\/b>: Are there any plans to use your book as the basis for a film or play?<\/p>\n

DC<\/b>: Yes, people have been talking about an adaptation, but the world of TV and film adaptations is so mercurial. Right now, we\u2019re working on an adaptation of my previous book, The Last Boss of Brighton<\/i>, about the life and times of a Soviet-born Jewish mobster \u2013 the aforementioned \u201ccomplex, sociopathic antihero.\u201d\u2026 At the same time, one of my earlier books \u2013 also about the Mafia in New York City \u2013 is being developed for a series\u2026. But we\u2019ll see what happens. Stay tuned.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tova Kornfeld <\/b>is a Vancouver freelance writer and lawyer.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Douglas Century signs copies of his book Crash of the Heavens at the JCC Jewish Book Festival earlier this year. (photo by Tova Kornfeld) Douglas Century\u2019s Crash of the Heavens: The Remarkable Story of Hannah Senesh and the Only Military Mission to Rescue Europe\u2019s Jews During World War II is a meticulously researched and spell-binding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49034,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[24885,24884,21043,4242,53,3189],"class_list":["post-49033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-douglas-century","tag-hannah-senesh","tag-heroism","tag-history","tag-holocaust","tag-second-world-war"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}