A WWII heroine lives on in museum and archive - ISRAEL21c

It was a mission she knew she might not survive.

Nevertheless, in March 1944, a young Jewish immigrant to Palestine named Hannah Senesh (Anna Szenes) parachuted into occupied Slovenia on behalf of the British army.

The goals were to help Allied pilots who had fallen behind enemy lines flee to safety, and to work with partisan forces to rescue Jewish communities under Nazi occupation.

Senesh was captured by the Hungarian police on June 7, tortured for months, and executed on November 7. She was only 23.

A year later, a soldier in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade, Moshe Braslavski, returned to Kibbutz Sdot Yam, where Senesh had come to live in 1941. He found a suitcase full of letters, diaries, songs, poems and more under Senesh’s bed.