Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And when meet Geese,
Speaker 1: Who's the woman who hid Anne Frank's family for as
Speaker 1: long as she could during World War Two? Died in
Speaker 1: January this year. It got us thinking about the first
Speaker 1: time we ever read and Frank's diaries and what it
Speaker 1: meant to us. I had blogged about picking up every
Speaker 1: Holocaust related young adult book I could find, Number the Stars,
Speaker 1: the Devil's Arithmetic, Devil in Vienna, the Upstairs Room. But
Speaker 1: there's another World War two young Jewish diarist I hadn't
Speaker 1: heard of until our friend Jacob Silverman, a wonderful writer
Speaker 1: you should look up, mentioned her to me. Her name
Speaker 1: is Hannah Sanish, and some call her the Joane of
Speaker 1: Arc of Israel, and when she was younger than we are,
Speaker 1: she parachuted into Nazi occupied Europe to try to rescue
Speaker 1: other Jews. She wrote in a poem a voice called
Speaker 1: I went, and how we missed her in history class.
Speaker 1: I have no idea, but we did. So here's her story.
Speaker 1: We're gonna remedy that So Hannah Sunnish was born into
Speaker 1: a middle class family in Budapest in July of nineteen one,
Speaker 1: and she didn't grow up learning a lot about Judaism.
Speaker 1: Budapest had a very large Jewish community, but it was
Speaker 1: mostly assimilated, and her father wrote plays and newspaper columns,
Speaker 1: so she grew up in this environment where writing was
Speaker 1: considered a really good way to express yourself, and she
Speaker 1: started writing poems at age six when her father died
Speaker 1: about other happy kids and how lucky they were. Really
Speaker 1: a deep thinker right from the start. She started keeping
Speaker 1: a diary when she was thirteen, recording, you know, all
Speaker 1: the little day to day stuff that a thirteen year
Speaker 1: old girl thinks about. But her world was rocked again
Speaker 1: around that time. She got her first taste of anti
Speaker 1: Semitism when she went to a girls school where Jews
Speaker 1: were charged three times the tuition as Christians. She was
Speaker 1: also elected to a post in a literary society, but
Speaker 1: then another election was held because she was Jewish. And
Speaker 1: it's around this time too that Hungarian anti Semitic sentiment
Speaker 1: was growing and restrictive laws were put into place. Jews
Speaker 1: were kicked out of their professions and her brother leaves
Speaker 1: for France because he's not allowed to go to college.
Speaker 1: So this family is starting to rebel in smaller ways already,
Speaker 1: and the Arrow Cross Party emerged in nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 1: a fascist party that quickly became popular. Will come back
Speaker 1: to them later in the episode. But in nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: in this environment that's growing increasingly hostile to Jews are assimilated,
Speaker 1: Hanna found Zionism, which, to simplify greatly, is the desire
Speaker 1: for a Jewish state located in the Jewish homeland of Israel.
Speaker 1: And just uh, for your information, the state of Israel
Speaker 1: wasn't established until so in Hannah's time, today's Israel was
Speaker 1: under British rule as part of Palace Tine, so not
Speaker 1: to confuse you with the terminology later in the podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And she's this person who's really looking for something to
Speaker 1: believe in and to give her life meaning. And in
Speaker 1: her experience, anti Semitism had been everywhere in Europe and
Speaker 1: there was no way to get away from it except
Speaker 1: to go to a place that was just for the
Speaker 1: Jewish people. So she started studying Hebrew for the first
Speaker 1: time and trying to rally her classmates to emigrate to
Speaker 1: Palestine with her. She applied to agricultural school of all things,
Speaker 1: so from academic to farm worker and to recap our
Speaker 1: girl's story so far, she found a cause and a
Speaker 1: new interest in religion. She wanted to leave her home
Speaker 1: and everything she knew, and she was ready to put
Speaker 1: down her books and pick up a shovel. But she's
Speaker 1: got a lot of bureaucratic obstacles to actually get all
Speaker 1: the way to Palestine. And she eventually does get there.
Speaker 1: She sends her mother lots of letters, some of them
Speaker 1: are written with these little illustrations chronicling her daily life.
Speaker 1: So still keeping these very detailed entries of everything that's
Speaker 1: happening to her. She also writes more poetry, so we
Speaker 1: have a pretty good idea of your not so average
Speaker 1: persons personal feelings and trouble, and also just the climate
Speaker 1: of the time, what was going on. Then Hannah left
Speaker 1: the farm for a kibbutz, and while she liked it,
Speaker 1: she was lonely. She was extremely idealistic, according to others
Speaker 1: who were there, even for idealists, and she was also
Speaker 1: worried that she'd never see her mother and brother again,
Speaker 1: and that perhaps she'd been selfish in her desire to leave,
Speaker 1: starting to have second thoughts about this huge step she
Speaker 1: had made in her life, especially as the war heated
Speaker 1: up and she didn't hear from her brother anymore, and
Speaker 1: from Hungary side, her mother starts getting shorter and shorter letters,
Speaker 1: and then they stopped completely. So this split family. All
Speaker 1: three of them are in completely separate places, and none
Speaker 1: of them are in communication. None of them knows what's
Speaker 1: going on with the others. And this is somewhat surprising
Speaker 1: for the time, because Hungarian Jews had seemed relative, he
Speaker 1: say from the atrocities, going on to give a little
Speaker 1: bit of background. Their prime minister from nineteen thirty nine
Speaker 1: to nineteen forty one, Paul to Lucky, whose name I
Speaker 1: may have completely mangled, had allowed anti Jewish laws to
Speaker 1: be enacted, but he'd also jailed many members of the
Speaker 1: Arrow Cross party and worked very hard to try to
Speaker 1: keep Hungry autonomous during this time, and when the Germans
Speaker 1: marched into Hungary on their way to invading Yugoslavia in
Speaker 1: April nineteen forty one, he killed himself and his successor,
Speaker 1: los Lo Bardosi followed a policy of appeasement, at which
Speaker 1: point Hungary joined the Germans in their war and Jews
Speaker 1: started being deported. But his successor, miklosh Kali in March
Speaker 1: nineteen forty two, went more in the opposite direction. He
Speaker 1: walked the line between appeasement and opposition and he refused
Speaker 1: to deport the Jews. He stopped that practice during his time.
Speaker 1: So well, we have this back and forth going on
Speaker 1: in Hungary. Back in Palestine, stories are starting to trickle
Speaker 1: in with the Polish people about the horrors happening in
Speaker 1: not the occupied Europe and the ghettos and the killings,
Speaker 1: and the Jews in Palestine are obviously determined to help.
Speaker 1: They've got to do something. Hannah tried to get her
Speaker 1: mother out of Hungary, but the immigration certificate never came,
Speaker 1: so she decided that she had to go back to
Speaker 1: organize a resistance movement in her country and rescue her mother,
Speaker 1: and to put these events in the context of a timeline.
Speaker 1: According to the documentary film Blessed is the Match, which
Speaker 1: you should definitely watch, in January, nine of the Jews
Speaker 1: who would die in the Holocaust were still alive, and
Speaker 1: in fifteen months those statistics were totally reversed, were dead
Speaker 1: and only alive. So this all happened very quickly. So
Speaker 1: in response to the final solution, which is starting to
Speaker 1: go into effect here, wanting to do something to help,
Speaker 1: Hannah joins the Haganah, which is a Jewish military force.
Speaker 1: But then she finds another opportunity. The Brits were looking
Speaker 1: for volunteers to go to the Balkans and contact partisan
Speaker 1: resistance fighters to aid in Allied efforts, and Hannah and
Speaker 1: the other Palestinians wanted to get in the same area,
Speaker 1: but with the aim of rescuing their Jewish brethren in trouble.
Speaker 1: So these two desires coincided a bit, and she and
Speaker 1: the other thirty odd volunteers who were willing to risk
Speaker 1: their lives began training in parachuting so they could get
Speaker 1: behind enemy lines. And Hannah would also be in charge
Speaker 1: of radio communications for her group. And the last photo
Speaker 1: of her ever taken was the day before her mission
Speaker 1: to you the Slavia began and her brother had just
Speaker 1: arrived in Palestine and it was the first time they'd
Speaker 1: seen each other in years, and unfortunately it would also
Speaker 1: be the last, because she and her fellow parachutists landed
Speaker 1: on March fourteenth, ninety four, and by the nineteenth the
Speaker 1: German troops entered Hungary. So terrible timing, Hannah cries, I mean,
Speaker 1: just imagine, she's justus arrived. There's not enough time to
Speaker 1: go to all the Jews and try to build up
Speaker 1: some sort of resistance. And almost immediately the Germans set
Speaker 1: up a new very sympathetic to them government and encouraged
Speaker 1: the Arrow Crossers are fascist from earlier who immediately began
Speaker 1: robbing and killing Jews, and even more laws were set
Speaker 1: in place in addition to those barring Jews from professions
Speaker 1: and owning property. They had to wear the yellow stars.
Speaker 1: There were deportations, arrests, murders, people were put in ghettos,
Speaker 1: their restrictions on leaving the house, and it's important to
Speaker 1: know that things were fast tracked really in Hungary. The
Speaker 1: Germans showed signs of weakness and Allied hope for their
Speaker 1: defeat was growing. So the Germans, the Arrow Crossers and
Speaker 1: their other collaborators had to do their damage quickly. You
Speaker 1: have the Allies breathing down their back, right, So more
Speaker 1: than four thousand Hungarian Jews were sent to concentration camps
Speaker 1: in just two months. But none of this that had happened. Yet,
Speaker 1: when Hannah decided to actually cross the border into Hungary,
Speaker 1: and anyone who was paying attention knew that it would happen,
Speaker 1: though it was it was clear that it was coming,
Speaker 1: and so it was a very brave thing for her
Speaker 1: to do. A lot of her parachute as companions that
Speaker 1: it was too dangerous, and she knew that when she
Speaker 1: left there was a great risk of being killed. But
Speaker 1: she goes anyways, and she's only twenty two years old,
Speaker 1: and she gave what's probably her most famous poem, Blessed
Speaker 1: is the match, to one of the men before she left,
Speaker 1: and it goes, Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Speaker 1: Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness
Speaker 1: of the heart. Blessed is the heart with strength to
Speaker 1: stop its beating for honor's sake. Blessed is the match
Speaker 1: consumed in kindling flame. And according to the documentary, she
Speaker 1: handed this piece of paper to her fellow parachutists and
Speaker 1: he just sort of threw it in the bushes and
Speaker 1: went on his way. But he realized that he had
Speaker 1: to go back. He just had a feeling and went
Speaker 1: back and searched through all of these bushes to he
Speaker 1: found that little piece of paper and found her poem. So, unsurprisingly,
Speaker 1: Hannah is caught. She knew she probably would be when
Speaker 1: she signed on for this mission, and the Gestapo wanted
Speaker 1: her transmitter codes, but she wouldn't give them up, and
Speaker 1: she didn't want to give up the other people in
Speaker 1: her mission, and so she's brutally beaten and tortured. All
Speaker 1: of her teeth are knocked out, and even when she's
Speaker 1: being interrogated every day, she would not break and give
Speaker 1: up the codes. They took her to Budapest, and once
Speaker 1: they found out who she was, brought her mother in,
Speaker 1: thinking they could use her against Hannah, and her mother
Speaker 1: of course didn't know anything. She had thought Hannah was
Speaker 1: still in Palestine. Surprise. That must have been for a
Speaker 1: terrible but she wouldn't, of course press her for information either,
Speaker 1: so they both ended up in jail. And well, it
Speaker 1: must have been incredibly difficult to see each other and
Speaker 1: those kinds of circumstances, it must also have been a
Speaker 1: comfort because they could see each other through their windows
Speaker 1: sometimes or in the prison yard. Hanna made really good
Speaker 1: use of those windows too, She used them to signal
Speaker 1: information about the outside world to the other inmates. Of course,
Speaker 1: she's being kept in very close quarters, but she's exposed
Speaker 1: to a lot of really important, really secret information, and
Speaker 1: she's able to pass that on to other people, right
Speaker 1: because she's still being interrogated every day, so she has
Speaker 1: the opportunity for at least someone to whisper something to
Speaker 1: her or perhaps overhear other things that the guards are saying.
Speaker 1: So she tries to give her fellow inmates hope. And
Speaker 1: she drew a star of David on her dirty window
Speaker 1: at some point because she didn't have to wear the
Speaker 1: yellow stars like the others did, but she wanted to
Speaker 1: let them know that she was still part of them.
Speaker 1: And she also tried to entertain her cell mates, teaching
Speaker 1: them Hebrew, telling them about Palestine, writing little pieces and
Speaker 1: having them put them on, and even lied to a
Speaker 1: woman in the prison yard saying that her teeth had
Speaker 1: always been knocked out. They weren't knocked out by someone
Speaker 1: who was interrogating her, so perhaps she wouldn't be as scared. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: things in Hungary are getting worse than the region of Hungary.
Speaker 1: Who was working on a separate piece was overthrown and
Speaker 1: the arrow crossers took over and they roped Jews together
Speaker 1: and put them in the Danube, shooting every other one
Speaker 1: and letting the others sink up. So still continuing on
Speaker 1: this rapid fire extermination, and eventually Hannah's mother Catherine was released,
Speaker 1: but Hannah would stay in prison to be tried for treason.
Speaker 1: So in August nineteen forty four, the pro Nazi government
Speaker 1: in Hungary started showing cracks. In July, there had been
Speaker 1: another attempt on Hitler's life as part of Operation Valkyrie,
Speaker 1: and it had become clear that Germany was close to
Speaker 1: losing the war, and as a further ray of hope
Speaker 1: for Hannah, the Soviets had entered Hungary in September, and
Speaker 1: she was still in jail, but it seemed like she
Speaker 1: might get out. She still has a trial to go through, though,
Speaker 1: and her trial is a closed military tribunal in October
Speaker 1: nineteen and she wouldn't plead for her life, but interestingly
Speaker 1: they do not sentence her, and the judges flee the country,
Speaker 1: so it's seeming like perfect timing. Finally, for once, it
Speaker 1: seems like she might actually get out. She's still keeping
Speaker 1: her diary, which is part of the reason that she's
Speaker 1: so famous. We have this very clear record of everything
Speaker 1: she's been doing, day by day. And she wrote that
Speaker 1: she wasn't sure if she believed in a god, but
Speaker 1: she believed that the world was created for good despite everything.
Speaker 1: And that also reminded me of the famous and frank
Speaker 1: quote about still believing that people are good at heart.
Speaker 1: And she wrote another poem she's well known for during
Speaker 1: this time, saying that she would have been twenty three,
Speaker 1: but I gambled on what mattered. Most the dice were cast,
Speaker 1: I lost. And despite the fact that her judges had fled,
Speaker 1: there was one man who had it in for her,
Speaker 1: and he made sure she was executed on November seven,
Speaker 1: ninety four, and it said that she refused a blindfold you.
Speaker 1: A week after she was killed, her mom was sent
Speaker 1: on a death march to Austria. This is another amazing story.
Speaker 1: She manages to escape and finally reach his Palestine, and
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty Hannah's body was returned to Israel and
Speaker 1: she's buried there along with seven of the other parachutists
Speaker 1: who had volunteered with the British Army. And as for Hungary,
Speaker 1: the Soviets drove the last of the Germans and the
Speaker 1: arrow Crossers out in February nineteen and in nineteen forty
Speaker 1: one there had been seven hundred and twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: Jews in Hungary. By the end of the war, only
Speaker 1: two hundred sixty thousand were left. Tens of thousands more
Speaker 1: left after the war, but today Budapest has the largest
Speaker 1: Jewish population in Eastern Europe, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason why Hannah Senish is perhaps more
Speaker 1: famous than the other parachutists in her group or even
Speaker 1: that mission, is because of all those records she kept,
Speaker 1: because of the journal she kept until the day she died,
Speaker 1: and her poems and her other writings, and despite the
Speaker 1: fact that we hadn't known who she was, she is
Speaker 1: a huge figure in Jewish history and in times when
Speaker 1: anti Semitic sentiment is far from gone. You know, last
Speaker 1: year there was that shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington,
Speaker 1: d c. And also last year the Budapest memorial to
Speaker 1: the thousands of Jews killed in the Danube was vandalized.
Speaker 1: The steel shoes symbolizing the victims were filled with pigs feet.
Speaker 1: In the face of those sentiments, it's encouraging to remember
Speaker 1: the bravery of people like Hannasenish and like knee Peace.
Speaker 1: So on that somber note, we're going to go to
Speaker 1: happier things like listener mail. So since Hannah was a
Speaker 1: Hungarian poet, we thought it would be appropriate to mention
Speaker 1: a very interesting real mail that we got from Troy
Speaker 1: in Atlanta. He sent us a tri corn hat made
Speaker 1: of paper and suggested that we cover the topic of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century modernist poet Marianne Moore. And we tried
Speaker 1: to wear this hat, but our heads are too big
Speaker 1: for it, we think because of all of our brains
Speaker 1: full of brain. And it also reminded us of this
Speaker 1: guy who lived somewhere in the dorms at u g
Speaker 1: A who wore a tricorn hat every day, and the Troy,
Speaker 1: if it's you, let us know. I had completely forgotten
Speaker 1: about him until now, but it's pretty memorable. He also
Speaker 1: sent us some patterns for tricorn hat, so we might
Speaker 1: try to make our own later. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: send us some email, you can get us at History
Speaker 1: Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We've also got
Speaker 1: a Twitter feed at missed in History and a Facebook
Speaker 1: fan page at history Class Stuff, and we have an
Speaker 1: article that might interest you if you're into World War
Speaker 1: two stuff, are their Nazi war criminals still at large?
Speaker 1: Which you can find on our homepage at www dot
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: and be sure to check out the stuff you missed
Speaker 1: in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com home page