One – Two – Three...
Hannah Szenes, martyr, war hero
A poem by Hanna Szenes, translated by Joe Váradi. Please take a minute to read about this remarkable young lady. She wrote this poem just shy of her 23rd birthday, in captivity, at the end of WWII. Later that year, she was executed by firing squad.
One — Two — Three…
One – two – three...
eight feet wide.
Two strides end to end, dismal dark.
Life but a fading question mark.
One – two – three...
maybe a week more,
By month end, will I be dead,
Death hangs low, overhead.
I would be twenty-three
this July.
I gambled, damned be the cost,
The die was cast. – I lost.
Hannah Szenes was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1921. Her literary talents were discovered early on, but her life was made increasingly difficult by anti-Semitic laws in the 1930s, and in 1939 she emigrated to Palestine, then a British colony.
She trained to be a paratrooper with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) of the British Army, and in 1944 was part of a troop parachuted into Yugoslavia, in a last-ditch effort to organize Jewish resistance and prevent the mass deportation of Jews from Hungary to German death camps.
She was captured and tortured, yet she refused to give up her transmitter codes or the names of her fellow resistance fighters. Finally in November she was tried and executed. Despite her short life, she left behind an impressive body of poems and other writings. Today she is regarded as a national heroine in Israel.
You can read more about her below, thanks to roman mikhail.
