Hannah Szenes (sometimes spelled phonetically as "Senesh") was born in Budapest, Hungary. Her father was a playwright and newspaper columnist who died when she was six. Nonetheless, she and her year-older brother, George, were reared in a middle-class, assimilated home by their mother, Catherine. With rising anti-Jewish activity in Hungary, Szenes became a Zionist and yearned to go to the Jewish homeland. She wrote in her journal: "The thought that now occupies my every waking moment is Palestine. Everything in connection with it interests me, everything else is entirely secondary." To Hannah's surprise, George also became a Zionist while studying at a university in France. Just after her 18th birthday, Szenes got her papers to immigrate to Israel, where she went to agricultural college and worked the land on a kibbutz. But Hannah also had an unwavering desire to help her brethren. She found herself in contact with a group that was forming to rescue European Jewry. She and 32 other Jews formally joined the British army and were trained as parachutists in Cairo. Their mission was to parachute into Europe to help Allied pilots who had been shot down, to assist local efforts against the Nazis and, finally, to aid in smuggling Jews to safety in then-Palestine. Szenes was sent to Yugoslavia, where she helped pilots and partisans. After a while, she grew dissatisfied because she surmised that the partisans were not interested in helping Jews escape. When Germany started deporting Jews from her native Hungary, Szenes bravely crossed the border with a French partisan and two Jews who were escaping. They were caught by a Hungarian Nazi patrol. Despite being brutally beaten, Szenes refused to give information regarding her mission. She was sentenced to death for treason and faced a firing squad without a blindfold. In 1950, Szenes's remains were flown to Israel and reburied on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem along with the six other parachutists who died during their heroic mission.