If she had lived, we would be celebrating her 90th birthday today. But sadly Hannah Senesh (born Aniko Szenes) was murdered in 1944.
Disturbed by the Hungarian education system’s increasing discrimination on religious grounds, Hannah Senesh decided to emigrate from Budapest to the British Mandate of Palestine at the outset of World War II. She enlisted in the British army and later trained to become a paratrooper in the British Special Operations Executive. Her mission was to try to rescue Jewish people in Hungary who were being deported to death camps in Germany. She parachuted into current day Slovenia and tried to enter Hungary, but her mission failed. She was captured, imprisoned, brutally tortured and finally killed by a firing squad. But her captors were unable to break her spirit – she inspired her fellow inmates, as she inspires us still today. “The voice called, and I went – I went because the voice called”, she wrote in one of her now-famous poems.
This morning a number of us gathered at an airfield in Budaors, near Budapest, to remember Hannah. Her nephew was present, as were parachutists from Israel and Hungary. It had been hoped to stage a memorial parachute jump, but stormy weather prevented this. (It may have happened later in the day after I left.) The occasion was very moving, in any event. As I and other speakers observed, there is still an urgent need to support equality and acceptance of difference and to raise awareness of the dangers of anti-Semitism and racism in general. That is why our Embassy continues to participate in activities and work with groups that promote tolerance and – as on this occasion – to honour the memory of those like Hannah, who showed the way and led by example.