Review - "Crash of the HEavens," Douglas Century

 This is a powerful story, especially at this time when anti-Semitism is on the rise, coming from extremes on both the left and the right. Besides her diary, a documentary was made of her life in 2008, “Blessed is the Match.”

 

Hannah was, obviously, a remarkable young woman whose life was cut short.

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Crash of the Heavens, Douglas Century, 2025

January 3, 2026

 

“There is a terrible pathos in any torture or death, but the effect is somehow sharpened

when the victim has the innocence of youth and the fragile grace of femininity.”

                                                                                                                                Abba Eban (1915-2002)

                                                                                                                                Introduction

                                                                                                                                Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, 1972

 

Living in the United States today, no matter one’s racial/religious makeup or financial circumstances, it is impossible to fully comprehend what life was like for European Jews when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of German on January 30, 1933. Most stayed, unable or unwilling to anticipate the horrors that were to come – enslavement, imprisonment, torture and extermination.

 

A few left. Estimates are that, of the roughly nine million Jews living in Europe in 1933, approximately 400,000 left with the rise of Nazism. Hannah Senesh was one. At age 18, she left Budapest in 1939 – leaving her mother and father – and emigrated to British Mandatory Palestine to join her brother György. Coming from a cultured upper-middleclass background, Hannah wanted to become a poet and educator.

 

By 1942 the fate of Europe’s Jews became widely known. Yet the Allies did not think it feasible to infiltrate German-occupied countries to save them. The Palmach, an elite paramilitary force composed of Jewish émigrés in Palestine, was established in 1941. In 1942 they began working with British Military Intelligence with the goal of paratrooping into Eastern Europe to save those they could. Hannah, who had been working on a kibbutz, applied and was accepted into the Palmach. Trained as a radio operator, but not yet 23, she parachuted into Yugoslavia in March 1944 to help resistance fighters, then crossed into Hungary with the goal of saving Jews. Before she left she penned an eight-line poem, “Blessed is the Match,” which became the title of a 2008 documentary on her life. Its final four lines:

 

Blessed is the heart with strength to stop

Its beating for honor’s sake.

Blessed is the match consumed

In kindling flame.

 

Shortly after crossing into Hungary she was captured. Refusing to provide the names of her collaborators, she was imprisoned and tortured. On November 7, 1944 she was executed by firing squad in the city of her birth, the city she had left five years earlier. Today she is revered in Israel as a martyr, known best for a short poem she wrote in 1943 while helping to build Kibbutz Sdot Yam, “A Walk to Caesarea,” “...The rush of the water/ The crash of the heavens/ The prayer of man.”

 

Douglas Century, a Canadian-born veteran investigative journalist, has done a masterful job of telling Hannah’s story. Rising anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Europe lend urgency and pertinence to this book.