Even though she believed she could have a successful career in Hungary, she felt it was not worthy of her. Catherine Senesh finally gave her permission. Hannah pleaded her mother to come to Palestine, but Catherine still loved and felt loyal to her homeland.
Hannah really wanted to go home, to go save her mother and other Jews. She tried to get the papers, but was denied. In February of 1943, she learned of a group of people starting an organization who wanted to form a rescue mission and go back into Hungary like Hannah did.
...One day, four guards took her to a room. There, she saw her mother for the first time in 5 years. Catherine Senesh had been arrested that morning. After not even a few minutes together, the guards separated mother and daughter once again.
The next day, a friendly guard brought a chair to Hannah’s cell and told her to step up and look out her window. There was her mother, in the cell across from her window! From their silent conversations writing letters in the air, she found out that her mother was being tortured as well. Hannah never gave in, although she felt the end was near. She wrote this poem about her time in the jail:
One - two - three . . . eight feet long,
Two strides across, the rest is dark . . .
Life hangs over me like a question mark.
One - two - three . . . maybe another week,
Or next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel, is very near.
I could have been twenty-three next July;
I gambled on what mattered most,
The dice were cast. I lost.
~The Summer That Bled book...
She would be appalled at the anti-Semitism now.
According to novelist and Israeli Defense Force veteran Alan Kaufman, IDF soldiers are sometimes referred to as 'matches', in an allusion to Hannah Senesh's beloved poem...j.b. spins blog
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