Autograph Postcard Signed in Hebrew and Hungarian. Written on both sides to Professor M[ichael] Fekete, Rechaviah, Jerusalem, signed in Hebrew “Hannah.” Senesh writes of her plans to travel to Jerusalem and to attend an agricultural seminar

SENESH (SZENES), HANNA

Kinereth (Israel)

9th August, 1941

Hanna Senesh - National Hero of Israel. Hanna Senesh or, Szenes (1921-1944), originally from an assimilated Jewish background in Budapest, became an ardent Zionist and moved to Eretz Israel in September 1939. She studied at the Nahalal Agricultural School, soon joining Kibbutz Sedot Yam. As the World-War progressed, she enlisted, as did many other Palestinian Jews, in the British Army. Together with a small group of others, she was selected for an elite squad to be trained as a parachutist to be dropped behind enemy lines in German-occupied Yugoslavia, where she was to rendezvous with Tito’s partisans. Her simultaneous goal was to come to the rescue of the Jews of Hungary, slated for extermination. On June 7th, 1944, as she crossed the border into Hungary, she was intercepted and found with a military transmitter to be used to communicate with the British Special Operations Executive. Imprisoned in Budapest, she suffered torture at the hands of her Hungarian and Nazi interrogators, but refused to divulge the details of her mission. She was summarily executed on November 7th, 1944. To the Israeli public, Hanna Senesh became a symbol of selfless devotion to the cause of the Jewish People. In 1950, her remains were reinterred on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Senesh was a gifted poetess in both Hebrew and Hungarian. After her death, her poems became widely admired, most famous of which is her poem is “Blessed is the Match” (Ashrei ha-Gaphrur), composed in Yugoslavia in May 1944. In this postcard Senesh writes to her uncle, Prof. Michael (Miklos) Fekete. In an earlier letter to Fekete, published in her biography, Hanna remarks that he regards her as his “foster daughter.” Having left her immediate family behind in Hungary, the relation with her uncle assumed great significance. See Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary (1973), pp. 161-162; EJ, Vol. XV, col. 661 It is exceptionally rare for any of this heroic young woman's letters to appear at auction.