Hannah Senesh’s Victory

by George Robinson

Sometimes failure is as compelling, as inspiring as victory.

Consider the case of Hannah Senesh, a 22-year-old Hungarian Jew who left Hungary in 1939 to fulfill her dream of Zionism in Palestine. As World War II dragged on in her native Europe and stories of Nazi atrocities against the Jews filtered out of occupied Europe to the Yishuv, she was among a small band of activists who volunteered to serve in the British Army, returning to Hungary to help organize a Jewish resistance to the Third Reich.

But her mission was a disaster from the moment she and her comrades jumped from their plane into the darkness of night. Not long after they landed, Senesh was captured, held in a Gestapo prison,

tortured and, finally, executed. But despite her defeat, Senesh’s name became a byword for Jewish action against the Nazis and, now, her story gets a detailed retelling in Roberta Grossman’s documentary, “Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh,” which receives its American premiere on June 2.

“Before I started work on the film, I didn’t even know her name,” confesses actress Joan Allen. “But it is an incredibly moving and powerful story, and now she is very meaningful to me.”

Allen, the Oscar-nominated, Tony-winning actress who has been seen on-screen in such films as “The Crucible,” “Nixon” and “The Contender,” contributed her voice to the film, reading the words of Hannah’s mother, Catherine, the woman that Hannah dreamed of saving from the Nazis.

Allen has done narration for documentaries before, most notably “The Rape of Europa,” and has recorded “eight or 10 audio books,” she notes. But her work on “Blessed Is the Match” was a little more like preparing for a character role.
“Just by watching the documentary [in a rough cut before the soundtrack was recorded], I got a bit of a sense Catherine’s nature,” Allen says. “I wanted to make her vital, to express how much she loved her daughter through what I was saying. So my work was about finding those human qualities through her writing.”

“There’s a little bit of technical stuff involved because you have to time what you are saying to a specific length of footage,” she explains. “Sometimes they literally want it to be 14 seconds long. [The director will ask,] ‘Can you speed that one up?’ or ‘Can you slow it down to fill the 14 seconds.’ But ultimately, I just try to say the words in a believable way. You try to be real.”

She is pleased with the final result and grateful to have been a part of the project.
“That this young woman had the fortitude and strength and compassion — it’s a great lesson of humanity,” Allen says. “When you get exposed to people who have done such extraordinary things, that pushes you, so that in some aspect of your life you will do something that is brave.”

And that is a final and decisive victory.

“Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh,” will be shown at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (36 Battery Place) on Monday, June 2 at 7 p.m.; Joan Allen and Roberta Grossman will be present at the screening and a discussion afterwards. For more information, call (646) 437-4200 or go to www.mjhnyc.org.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization