A kindThis Sunday, the Israeli army will launch a spectacular operation in Europe against the politics of memory. One hundred and fifty Israeli soldiers flew to Slovenia in two Air Force Hercules aircraft. On the second day, 100 of them parachuted together with Slovenian, Croatian, Hungarian and British soldiers, following in the footsteps of Jewish war heroes and European guerrillas. They will also visit places where the Jews were extinct. The revered Jewish heroes are 33 men and 2 women from Palestine who were trained by the British army in 1944 to perform a delicate mission in Europe. After the parachute landed in Yugoslavia, 27 of them undertook a secret reconnaissance mission, during which they had to join the partisan struggle against the National Socialists and their allies. Seven members of the organization were arrested and killed in various locations.
Among Israel’s “Ishuf paratroopers” revered as a national hero, the image of Hannah Szenes (1921-1944) is particularly prominent. Her birthday is the 100th anniversary of this Saturday, the calendar date of a five-day military multinational commemorative event that will end with a ceremony in the former grave of the legendary skydiver at the Jewish Kozma Cemetery in Budapest. The name of this action “Light of Heaven” is taken from Hannah Szenes’ poem “The Walk to Caesarea”, one of two poems she wrote after her tragic death , And in the circle of Israeli and Zionist diaspora.
She was born to write
Israeli students learned from the Holocaust memorial ceremony: “My God, my God, there is no end/sand and the sea,/the rush of water,/the light of the sky,/the prayer of mankind”. These verses were understood to express the eternal connection to the land of Israel and were written in November 1942 when Hannah Szenes helped establish the Kibbutz Sdot Yam not far from Caesarea. Hannah was born in Budapest and grew up in a Hungarian-Jewish middle-class family. She was born good at writing. Inspired by her late father, children’s book writer and playwright Béla Szenes, she began to write a diary at the age of 13. When she left Hungary in 1939, where anti-Semitism had become a national doctrine, and headed to Palestine, the young woman’s diary, letters to Catherine’s mother and brothers Chora, and poems became a refuge.
In this way, the immigrant also expressed her doubts about the new way of life associated with great challenges-the often frustrating study at a women’s agricultural school in Moshav Nahalal and the many years of regular physical strength at Kibbutz Sdot Yam Labor work. In 1943, he opposed the exchange of volunteers in the British army. In mid-March 1944, Senes landed as a scout in northern Yugoslavia at the time. Three months later, she sneaked across the border to Hungary with a radio transmitter. There, she was immediately arrested, taken to Budapest and handed over to the secret police.
Despite months of detention and torture, her mother was also held in the same prison, but she did not succumb to the pressure of the interrogators. When she was tried for treason, she defended herself. She rejected an offer to avoid the death penalty by confessing guilt. On November 7, 1944, Hannah Szenes was executed by the firing squad.The heroic myth surrounding the “Ishuf paratroopers” of the Jewish community in Palestine has a scene from the Zionist establishment to the state establishment from the very beginning. icon Been proposed. It was not until the 1990s that the continued decline in the role of staunch Zionists and self-sacrificing war heroines became the subject of critical Israeli reflection. The Israeli historian Judith Tydor Baumel (later Baumel-Schwartz) carefully studied the process of myth creation in 1996, and later she dealt with the entire parachuting group.
