Hannah Szenes

Hannah Szenes (1921-1944) was a Jewish Hungarian resistance fighter who was parachuted behind German lines in World War 2.

The child of a Jewish family in Hungary, Szenes showed a talent for writing from a young age. She was accepted into a Protestant private school, however in spite of a 'gifted student' discount she still had to pay double the regular fees because she was Jewish. Combined with her awareness of the worsening situation for Jews in Hungary, this led her to join Maccabea, a Hungarian Zionist youth movement.

In 1939 Szenes traveled to the British Mandate of Palestine where she studied agriculture and wrote poetry and plays about Kibbutz life. In 1941 she joined the Jewish paramilitary force Haganah and in 1943 volunteered to join the British Special Operations Executive to train as a paratrooper. After training in Egypt she was selected to take part in an operation to infiltrate German-occupied Europe and establish links with beleaguered Jewish communities.

On March 14th 1944 Szenes was parachuted into Yugoslavia along with two men, Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein. Their mission was to enter Hungary and help save Hungarian Jews from being deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The team spent 3 months working with Yugoslavian partisans, during which they discovered that Hungary had been forcibly occupied by German forces in retaliation for attempting to surrender to the Allies. Faced with this new information Palgi and Goldstein decided to call off the mission. Szenes disagreed and pressed on to the Hungarian border alone, however not long after crossing she was arrested by Hungarian police. 

Szenes was imprisoned and suffered a brutal interrogation by police who wanted to know the code for the radio transmitter she used to communicate with the partisans and the British. She was stripped, tied to a chair, and whipped and clubbed for 3 days. She lost several of her teeth. Yet she refused to surrender the code and so she was transferred to a Budapest prison where she continued to be tortured. Frustrated that she wouldn't break, the guards brought in her mother, who she had not seen for 5 years, and threatened her life. Despite this Szenes still refused to give up the code and eventually her mother was released.

Szenes spent the next three months in prison but was not idle. She communicated with other prisoners using a mirror to flash signals and used large cut-out letters to spell out messages in Hebrew. She often sang to keep up the spirits of the other prisoners. However in late October she was tried for treason and on November 7th 1944 she was executed by a German firing squad. 

Following the end of the war, Szenes became widely known when her diary, poetry and plays were published. She was recognised as a national heroine of Israel and in 1950 her remains were reburied in the military cemetery on Mt Herzl in Jersualem.

One of the final entries in her diary contained a poem reading:

In the month of July I shall be twenty-three,

 I played a number in a game,

The dice have rolled. I have lost.

Violette Morris

Violette Morris (1893-1944) was a decorated French athlete, race car driver, military nurse and Nazi intelligence operative.

A wild child from a French noble family, Morris spent her teenage years in a convent where she displayed an incredible aptitude for sports. At the age of 15 she was competing at the highest levels of boxing, swimming, weightlifting, javelin, shot put and discus. She was fond of describing herself with her cheeky motto "Anything a man can do, Violette can do".

Morris married Cyprien Gouraud in 1914 just before the outbreak of the First World War. During the war she served as military nurse driving an ambulance on the front lines during the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme. She also served as a warzone motorcycle courier, wrecking her bike on the crater-filled terrain at least three times, but always completing her mission.

After the war Morris returned to sports, playing for various French Women's Football teams and winning Olympic gold medals for discus, javelin and shot put. Her life driving on the front lines had given her a passion for speed and she competed twice in the Bol d'Or driving a 750cc Benjamin Ruby cyclecar. In 1923 she became the the French national boxing champion. Morris also defied society's expectations of women in her personal life, dressing in men's clothes, smoking heavily and swearing frequently. She was publicly known to be bisexual and was photographed attending the Parisian lesbian nightclub, Le Monocle. In 1929 she had a double mastectomy, stating that her large breasts interfered with her race car driving.

Public opinion eventually turned against Morris. She was banned from entering the 1928 Olympics and was subsequently smeared in the French press. Repeatedly forbidden from entering sporting competitions, Morris became bitter toward French society and in 1935 she agreed to become a spy for Nazi Germany. She was rewarded with a personal invitation from Adolf Hitler to be an honoured guest at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Morris provided Germany with French tank schematics and plans of France's defenses along the the Maginot Line, information which proved integral to the German invasion of France in World War 2.

Following the German occupation of France, Morris became a member of the Carlingue, the French wing of the Gestapo secret police. She operated in counter-intelligence working against British SOE forces that were supporting the French Resistance. She was so effective in infiltrating resistance networks and extracting information through torture that she became known as the 'Gestapo's Hyena'. Her notorious success eventually led to resistance forces plotting to assassinate her. On April 26th 1944 Morris was driving her sports car when she was fatally ambushed by Resistance commandos armed with machine guns. Nobody claimed her body and she was buried in a communal grave.