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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from www.HowStuffWorks.com.

Katie Lambert

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I’m Katie Lambert.

Sarah Dowdey

And I’m Sarah Dowdey.

Katie Lambert

When Miep Gies, who’s the woman who hid Anne Frank’s family for as long as she could during World War II, died in January of this year, it got us thinking about the first time we ever read Anne Frank’s Diary and what it meant to us. I had blogged about picking up every Holocaust-related young adult book I could find: Number the Stars, Devil’s Arithmetic, Devil in Vienna, The Upstairs Room, but there’s another World War II young Jewish diarist I hadn’t heard of until our friend, Jacob Silverman, a wonderful writer you should look up, mentioned her to me.

Her name is Hannah Szenes. Some call her the Joan of Arc of Israel. When she was younger than we are, she parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to try to rescue other Jews. She wrote in a poem, “A voice called. I went.” How we missed her in history class I have no idea, but we did, so here’s her story.

Sarah Dowdey

We’re going to remedy that. Hannah Szenes was born into a middle-class family in Budapest in July of 1921. She didn’t grow up learning a lot about Judaism. Budapest had a very large Jewish community, but it was mostly assimilated. Her father wrote plays and newspaper columns, so she grew up in this environment where writing was considered a really good way to express yourself and she started writing poems at age six – when her father died – about other kids and how happy they were. Really a deep thinker from the start!

Katie Lambert

She started keeping a diary when she was 13, recording all the little day-to-day stuff that a 13-year-old girl thinks about, but her world was rocked again around that time. She got her first taste of anti-Semitism when she went to a girls’ school where Jews were charged three times the tuition as Christians. She was also elected to a post in a literary society, but then another election was held because she was Jewish.

Sarah Dowdey

It’s around this time too that Hungarian anti-Semitic sentiment was growing, and restrictive laws were put into place. Jews were kicked out of their professions. Her brother leaves for France because he’s not allowed to go to college, so this family is starting to rebel in smaller ways already.