For generations of American Jews, an innocent, unformed Dutch teenager personified the victims of the Holocaust. What might have been the repercussions had the story of a courageous young woman named Hannah Senesh been widely circulated instead of Anne Frank’s saga?
That’s one of the fascinating questions implicitly raised by Roberta Grossman’s beautifully made Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh. The feature-length film is on a trajectory to become the most-honored Jewish documentary of the year, with the audience award at the Washington and Atlanta Jewish film festivals and a spot on the Academy Award shortlist for Documentary Feature (though no nomination). The film screens in the Seattle Jewish Film Festival on Tues., April 28.
Born in Budapest in 1921, Senesh was a promising poet and playwright. Enamored of Zionism and constrained by anti-Semitism, she emigrated to Palestine when World War II broke out, leaving behind her mother Catherine. Senesh thrived in her adopted land, and it seems probable she would have emerged as a leading cultural figure in the new Jewish State.
But when the news broke that the Nazis had commenced deportations in Hungary, Senesh volunteered to return to rescue Jews. She trained as a paratrooper and parachuted into Eastern Europe in March 1944. Senesh has been considered a national icon in Israel since that ill-fated mission, although her exploits are less well known here.
“I think the reason she was so embraced was because she was not an Anne Frank — a victim character,” Grossman asserts. “That kind of a character was completely unacceptable in Israel. Many of the Holocaust survivors had a hard time in Israel because there was somewhat of a blaming-the-victim mentality. So I think Hannah Senesh was purposefully raised up because she was an active heroine.”
If there’s anything one learns from reading history, it’s that very little is black and white. Whether the subject is Menachem Begin or Moshe Dayan or Hannah Senesh, the facts are inevitably more complicated that the legend.
“Some people in Israel really are kind of annoyed that she was manipulated by the powers that be to become a heroine rather than just seen as a person, as a young girl,” Grossman says. “What I wanted my movie to do was to look at her as a person, and to look at her relationship with her mother, and why she made the choices that she did.”
The veteran Los Angeles filmmaker, whose credits include Heroines of the Hebrew Bible for A&E’s “Mysteries of the Bible” series, drew extensively on Hannah’s journals and poems as well as other materials that have been preserved over the ensuing decades. In the absence of archival footage, however, Grossman took the daunting step of recreating pivotal events — notably Hannah’s interrogation and imprisonment in the same building where her mother was held. These segments are beautifully done, bearing no resemblance to the cheesiness of most nonfiction cable-television programming.
Grossman was the rare American girl who read Senesh’s diary in junior high school. She was inspired to join Hashomer Hatzair, the Socialist Zionist youth movement, and to live in Israel for a time. It also sparked an obsession to make a film about Senesh, a pursuit that began in earnest the moment Grossman became a filmmaker out of college. You might think she’d be frustrated that it took all these years, but Grossman says it was necessary for her to realize that it was a story of two women, not one.
“I’m so thrilled that [the film] didn’t happen until this point in my life, because what happened in the interim was I became a mother, and I’m much closer in age to Catherine Senesh than to Hannah,” Grossman explained during an interview last summer in San Francisco’s grand Castro Theater, while Blessed Is the Match was screening in the S.F. Jewish Film Festival.
She identified for the first time with Catherine’s memoir, which details the mother and daughter’s incarceration and reflects on Hannah’s life and character.
“Hopefully it takes it beyond just a story of heroism, beyond a Jewish story, to a universal story of a love between a mother and a daughter,” Grossman says.
Hannah’s dedication and bravery will always resonate with people of a certain age, of course. Adults whose idealism has been tempered by time may have a different view of her unbridled idealism.
“Young people are very, very irritating in their great passions,” Grossman says with a smile. “That’s what’s so wonderful about young people, but also stupid in a way. Did Hannah give her life for a noble cause or did she give her life foolishly for nothing? I think she ended up saving her mother.”
Grossman is stumped for a second when asked to name the Bible heroine whom Hannah most closely resembles.
“Maybe Deborah,” she muses. “But I really don’t see Hannah as a military figure. They were armed, but they weren’t going in to do battle with the German army. Maybe Ruth, in a way, because of her loyalty and placing the love between her and her mother as a priority. She might fit that.”
As the first feature-length documentary about Senesh, Blessed Is the Match will make a powerful imprint on current and future generations of young Jews — especially girls. It begs the question of if we would have had a different experience of being Jewish had we heard Senesh’s story as children.
“I think maybe we would have been less sad,” Grossman says. “I grew up reading Anne Frank and every other piece of Holocaust literature that I could get my hands on, and I think it’s left an indelible mark on my spirit in not necessarily the most positive way.”
It’s difficult to find a lot in Anne Frank’s too-short life we could call uplifting. But Hannah Senesh had the challenges, the opportunity, the talent and the character to distinguish herself — and inspire us.
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to make the movie,” Grossman says, “not because I want young girls to parachute behind enemy lines, but she’s a model of standing up for what you believe is right, and for believing that moral choices are important and do make a difference. One of my goals, in a grandiose sort of fantasy, was to make Hannah Senesh as well known outside of Israel as Anne Frank. Not to denigrate Anne Frank, who I love, but I think there’s a lot of room for other models and other stories.”
Blessed Is the Match screens as a part of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival on Tues., April 28 at 6:30 p.m. at the SIFF Cinema at McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St., Seattle.