Home
"Her life is an offering, her words a poem, her story an inspiration." -- Elie Wiesel
Hungarian-born Chana Szenes is famous as a national hero of Israel, a Joan of Arc figure, due to her daring mission as a paratrooper behind German lines that led to her death at age twenty-three during World War II. From 1980 to 2007, Peter Hay lived and worked in Los Angeles, where he wrote Ordinary Heroes: The Life and Death of Chana Szenes (1986), the first of his nine non-fiction books on various subjects.
"Anna" Szenes (anglicized as Hannah Senesh) was born on July 17, 1921, the daughter of a well-regarded Hungarian playwright. In 1939, leaving her widowed mother in Budapest, she went to Palestine "to realize the dream of Zion." With a group of young pioneers Chana helped found Kibbutz Sdot Yam in the Haifa district near the site of ancient Caesarea. While making plans to bring her mother and her brother Gyuri (George) to Palestine, she secretly joined the Palmach, the paramilitary group that was the precursor of the Israeli Defense Forces. In 1943, she enlisted in the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force as an Aircraftwoman 2nd Class. This enabled her to train as a paratrooper in Egypt. She eventually was selected to parachute behind German lines on a spy mission.
On March 14, 1944, she and colleagues Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein were parachuted into Yugoslavia and joined a partisan group. A few days later the Germans occupied Hungary, their erstwhile ally, and Chana was racked with anxiety about her mother and friends trapped in Budapest. Frustrated with waiting for action among the partisans, she decided to act alone, crossing the Hungarian border on June 7, 1944, the same day that Adolf Eichmann began the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Chana was captured by Hungarian border guards and brutally interrogated for five days. Some of her teeth were knocked out. She refused to divulge who might have helped her, or give the codes for the radio transmitter found on her.
Transferred to a Budapest prison, she was confronted with her mother, Katherine, who had no idea that her daughter had left the safety of Palestine. Chana remained defiant, even when the Nazis threatened to murder her mother. Her resistance infuriated her captors and raised the morale of her fellow captives. Then, as the Soviet army was closing in on Budapest, Chana was hastily dragged before a military court and sentenced to death. Her mother, who had been freed, made desperate attempts to save her. Her daughter was executed by a firing squad on November 7, 1944.
From age 13, Chana kept a diary, wrote poetry first in Hungarian and then in Hebrew, and had ambitions to become a writer like her father. Parts of her diary were published as early as 1946, the year that a ship named the S.S. Hannah Szenes brought Jewish survivors of the Holocaust through the British blockade of Palestine. Her diary and letters, first published in England in 1971, have been reprinted numerous times. After the founding of the State of Israel, several schools, streets and community centres were named after Chana Szenes. In 1950, her remains were taken from Budapest and given a state funeral in the National Military Cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, where she rests with six other fallen parachutists. Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and U.N. ambassador Abba Eban concluded, "All the definitions of great courage come together in Chana's life."
Peter Hay was born in Budapest to a Jewish family as Peter Majoros on 9 February 1944, the same year that Chana Szenes died there. Her parents and his grandparents were neighbours and friends. Peter survived his first year as a hidden child, and his father, Istvan Majoros, was a writer who was saved by Raoul Wallenberg, while his mother was in hiding. In May of 1945 his mother met the Hungarian playwright Gyula Hay who eventually married him and Peter became adopted by him. Probably because of the tense political situation following the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, in January 1957 Peter was sent to England, where his maternal grandparents had fled in 1939. Two weeks later Gyula Hay was arrested and later tried for treason. While attending English boarding schools, Peter won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he first read classics and got a B.A. in English language and literature in 1967.
At Oxford he became interested in the theatre, and was instrumental in producing the English premiere of his father's play, The Horse [1961] at the Oxford Playhouse, in November 1965. The comedy, which revolves around Caligula's horse appointed as consul, was translated by the author's son whose mother tongue is Hungarian but who speaks six other languages: English, French, Italian, German, Greek and Latin. While he was at Oxford, Peter Hay was asked by Catherine Szenes to translate Chana's poems from Hungarian for the first English-language edition of her diary, and in 1966 Hay apprenticed with Margaret Ramsay, England's foremost play agent at the time. Consequently, Peter Hay was also on the committee that selected and produced Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead at the Edinburgh Festival.
Peter Hay emigrated to BC in 1967 to teach theatre at Simon Fraser at the invitation of Oxford-educated dramaturge Michael Bawtree. At SFU, he befriended the avant-garde theatre director John Juliani from Montreal, commencing five years of collaboration in experimental theatre. Concurrently, he became the first dramaturge (literary manager) of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company and the founding drama editor of Talonbooks. Juliani directed a production of Gyula Hay's The Horse and started rehearsing his play Have until The Playhouse kiboshed the production as too radical. [It was finally produced in 1995 at UBC's Frederic Wood Theatre.] Hay also worked for the Justice Development Commission in Dave Barrett's government. In Vancouver, Hay published Have, followed by Beverley Simons' Crabdance--which led to his partnership with David Robinson and Talonbooks.
Hay has been involved with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and worked on various plays and documentaries about Chana Szenes, including a film by Roberta Grossman, Blessed is the Match (2008). Peter Hay retired to Summerland, B.C. in 2007, a place he knew from his long association and friendship with the playwright George Ryga, whose plays he published with Talonbooks in the 1970s. After Ryga died in 1987, Hay became active to preserve Ryga's legacy. He co-founded and guided the Ryga Arts Festival in its first five years and he is currently working on a Ryga Archive at the Summerland Museum.
[In his biography of Chana Szenes, Hay uses the diminutive of Anna, which is Aniko, for the Hungarian parts, and then Chana after she went to Palestine. Her brother's name was Gyorgy (umlaut on the o), the Hungarian diminutive is Gyuri, and in Palestine he changed it to Giora. Chana's mother Catherine Szenes was known as Kato in Hungarian, and Ima (Mother) Szenes in Israel.]
Hannah Szenes penned this poem when she was 22 years old, days before her capture on June 9, 1944, leading to her execution by a firing squad on November 7, 1944:
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is that flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honour’s sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
BOOKS:
Translations: The Horse, a play by Julius Hay (in Three European Plays, edited by Martin Esslin; Penguin UK 1970); HAVE, a play by Julius Hay (Talonbooks, Vancouver 1976)
Ordinary Heroes: Chana Szenes and the Dream of Zion (Putnam, New York 1986); Paperback under the title: Ordinary Heroes, The Life and Death of Chana Szenes, Israel's National Heroine (Paragon House, New York 1989)
Theatrical Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, New York 1986) Paperback: (Oxford University Press, New York 1987)
Krishnamurti: The Reluctant Messiah, (co-author with Sidney Field) (Paragon House, New York 1989)
All the Presidents' Ladies: Anecdotes of the Women Behind the Men in the White House (Viking, New York 1988) Paperback: (Penguin, New York 1989)
The Book of Business Anecdotes (Facts on File, New York 1988) Paperback: (Facts on File, New York 1988); U.K. edition: Harrap's Book of Business Anecdotes, (Harrap, London 1988); French: Volume I: Les Deux Cents Anecdotes Le Plus Enrichissantes des Affaires, and Vol II: Deux Cents Histoires Pour Une Meilleure Image de l'Enterprise, (First Inc. Paris 1989); Spanish: El Libro de las Anecdotas de Negocios (Editorial Diana, Mexico D.F. 1993); U.S. reprint: (Wing Books / Random House, New York 1993)
The Book of Legal Anecdotes (Facts on File, New York 1989); U.K. edition: Harrap's Book of Legal Anecdotes, London 1989); Reprint: (Barnes & Noble, New York 1993), (Universal Law Publishing, Delhi 1998)
Broadway Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, New York 1989); Paperback: (Oxford University Press, New York 1989)
Movie Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, New York 1990); Paperback: (Oxford University Press, New York 1991); In Spanish: Sucedio en Hollywood: Anecdotas del Cine (Robinbook, Barcelona 2003)
MGM: When the Lion Roars (Turner Publishing, Atlanta 1991); In French: Metro Goldwyn Mayer: Splendeur du Cinema Americain (Bordas, Paris 1993)
Canned Laughter: the best stories from radio and television's golden years (Oxford University Press, New York 1992)
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit / BELOW: Hannah in Budapest in 1937 or 1938, Hannah in 1939, Hannah's memorial in Budapest, Peter Hay photo by Brenda Maunders
Hungarian-born Chana Szenes is famous as a national hero of Israel, a Joan of Arc figure, due to her daring mission as a paratrooper behind German lines that led to her death at age twenty-three during World War II. From 1980 to 2007, Peter Hay lived and worked in Los Angeles, where he wrote Ordinary Heroes: The Life and Death of Chana Szenes (1986), the first of his nine non-fiction books on various subjects.
"Anna" Szenes (anglicized as Hannah Senesh) was born on July 17, 1921, the daughter of a well-regarded Hungarian playwright. In 1939, leaving her widowed mother in Budapest, she went to Palestine "to realize the dream of Zion." With a group of young pioneers Chana helped found Kibbutz Sdot Yam in the Haifa district near the site of ancient Caesarea. While making plans to bring her mother and her brother Gyuri (George) to Palestine, she secretly joined the Palmach, the paramilitary group that was the precursor of the Israeli Defense Forces. In 1943, she enlisted in the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force as an Aircraftwoman 2nd Class. This enabled her to train as a paratrooper in Egypt. She eventually was selected to parachute behind German lines on a spy mission.
On March 14, 1944, she and colleagues Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein were parachuted into Yugoslavia and joined a partisan group. A few days later the Germans occupied Hungary, their erstwhile ally, and Chana was racked with anxiety about her mother and friends trapped in Budapest. Frustrated with waiting for action among the partisans, she decided to act alone, crossing the Hungarian border on June 7, 1944, the same day that Adolf Eichmann began the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Chana was captured by Hungarian border guards and brutally interrogated for five days. Some of her teeth were knocked out. She refused to divulge who might have helped her, or give the codes for the radio transmitter found on her.
Transferred to a Budapest prison, she was confronted with her mother, Katherine, who had no idea that her daughter had left the safety of Palestine. Chana remained defiant, even when the Nazis threatened to murder her mother. Her resistance infuriated her captors and raised the morale of her fellow captives. Then, as the Soviet army was closing in on Budapest, Chana was hastily dragged before a military court and sentenced to death. Her mother, who had been freed, made desperate attempts to save her. Her daughter was executed by a firing squad on November 7, 1944.
From age 13, Chana kept a diary, wrote poetry first in Hungarian and then in Hebrew, and had ambitions to become a writer like her father. Parts of her diary were published as early as 1946, the year that a ship named the S.S. Hannah Szenes brought Jewish survivors of the Holocaust through the British blockade of Palestine. Her diary and letters, first published in England in 1971, have been reprinted numerous times. After the founding of the State of Israel, several schools, streets and community centres were named after Chana Szenes. In 1950, her remains were taken from Budapest and given a state funeral in the National Military Cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, where she rests with six other fallen parachutists. Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and U.N. ambassador Abba Eban concluded, "All the definitions of great courage come together in Chana's life."
Peter Hay was born in Budapest to a Jewish family as Peter Majoros on 9 February 1944, the same year that Chana Szenes died there. Her parents and his grandparents were neighbours and friends. Peter survived his first year as a hidden child, and his father, Istvan Majoros, was a writer who was saved by Raoul Wallenberg, while his mother was in hiding. In May of 1945 his mother met the Hungarian playwright Gyula Hay who eventually married him and Peter became adopted by him. Probably because of the tense political situation following the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, in January 1957 Peter was sent to England, where his maternal grandparents had fled in 1939. Two weeks later Gyula Hay was arrested and later tried for treason. While attending English boarding schools, Peter won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he first read classics and got a B.A. in English language and literature in 1967.
At Oxford he became interested in the theatre, and was instrumental in producing the English premiere of his father's play, The Horse [1961] at the Oxford Playhouse, in November 1965. The comedy, which revolves around Caligula's horse appointed as consul, was translated by the author's son whose mother tongue is Hungarian but who speaks six other languages: English, French, Italian, German, Greek and Latin. While he was at Oxford, Peter Hay was asked by Catherine Szenes to translate Chana's poems from Hungarian for the first English-language edition of her diary, and in 1966 Hay apprenticed with Margaret Ramsay, England's foremost play agent at the time. Consequently, Peter Hay was also on the committee that selected and produced Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead at the Edinburgh Festival.
Peter Hay emigrated to BC in 1967 to teach theatre at Simon Fraser at the invitation of Oxford-educated dramaturge Michael Bawtree. At SFU, he befriended the avant-garde theatre director John Juliani from Montreal, commencing five years of collaboration in experimental theatre. Concurrently, he became the first dramaturge (literary manager) of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company and the founding drama editor of Talonbooks. Juliani directed a production of Gyula Hay's The Horse and started rehearsing his play Have until The Playhouse kiboshed the production as too radical. [It was finally produced in 1995 at UBC's Frederic Wood Theatre.] Hay also worked for the Justice Development Commission in Dave Barrett's government. In Vancouver, Hay published Have, followed by Beverley Simons' Crabdance--which led to his partnership with David Robinson and Talonbooks.
Hay has been involved with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and worked on various plays and documentaries about Chana Szenes, including a film by Roberta Grossman, Blessed is the Match (2008). Peter Hay retired to Summerland, B.C. in 2007, a place he knew from his long association and friendship with the playwright George Ryga, whose plays he published with Talonbooks in the 1970s. After Ryga died in 1987, Hay became active to preserve Ryga's legacy. He co-founded and guided the Ryga Arts Festival in its first five years and he is currently working on a Ryga Archive at the Summerland Museum.
[In his biography of Chana Szenes, Hay uses the diminutive of Anna, which is Aniko, for the Hungarian parts, and then Chana after she went to Palestine. Her brother's name was Gyorgy (umlaut on the o), the Hungarian diminutive is Gyuri, and in Palestine he changed it to Giora. Chana's mother Catherine Szenes was known as Kato in Hungarian, and Ima (Mother) Szenes in Israel.]
Hannah Szenes penned this poem when she was 22 years old, days before her capture on June 9, 1944, leading to her execution by a firing squad on November 7, 1944:
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is that flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honour’s sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
BOOKS:
Translations: The Horse, a play by Julius Hay (in Three European Plays, edited by Martin Esslin; Penguin UK 1970); HAVE, a play by Julius Hay (Talonbooks, Vancouver 1976)
Ordinary Heroes: Chana Szenes and the Dream of Zion (Putnam, New York 1986); Paperback under the title: Ordinary Heroes, The Life and Death of Chana Szenes, Israel's National Heroine (Paragon House, New York 1989)
Theatrical Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, New York 1986) Paperback: (Oxford University Press, New York 1987)
Krishnamurti: The Reluctant Messiah, (co-author with Sidney Field) (Paragon House, New York 1989)
All the Presidents' Ladies: Anecdotes of the Women Behind the Men in the White House (Viking, New York 1988) Paperback: (Penguin, New York 1989)
The Book of Business Anecdotes (Facts on File, New York 1988) Paperback: (Facts on File, New York 1988); U.K. edition: Harrap's Book of Business Anecdotes, (Harrap, London 1988); French: Volume I: Les Deux Cents Anecdotes Le Plus Enrichissantes des Affaires, and Vol II: Deux Cents Histoires Pour Une Meilleure Image de l'Enterprise, (First Inc. Paris 1989); Spanish: El Libro de las Anecdotas de Negocios (Editorial Diana, Mexico D.F. 1993); U.S. reprint: (Wing Books / Random House, New York 1993)
The Book of Legal Anecdotes (Facts on File, New York 1989); U.K. edition: Harrap's Book of Legal Anecdotes, London 1989); Reprint: (Barnes & Noble, New York 1993), (Universal Law Publishing, Delhi 1998)
Broadway Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, New York 1989); Paperback: (Oxford University Press, New York 1989)
Movie Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, New York 1990); Paperback: (Oxford University Press, New York 1991); In Spanish: Sucedio en Hollywood: Anecdotas del Cine (Robinbook, Barcelona 2003)
MGM: When the Lion Roars (Turner Publishing, Atlanta 1991); In French: Metro Goldwyn Mayer: Splendeur du Cinema Americain (Bordas, Paris 1993)
Canned Laughter: the best stories from radio and television's golden years (Oxford University Press, New York 1992)
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit / BELOW: Hannah in Budapest in 1937 or 1938, Hannah in 1939, Hannah's memorial in Budapest, Peter Hay photo by Brenda Maunders
