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.

Yevdokiya Zavaliy

Yevdokiya Zavaliy was a Soviet nurse, soldier and marine commander who fought in World War 2.

Born in 1924, Zavaliy was raised in a small village in the Mykolaiv region of Ukraine, where she worked on a farm. She was brutally exposed to the outbreak of World War 2 when enemy planes bombed her village and in the aftermath she treated injured soldiers by ripping up bed sheets from her home to make improvised bandages. The event left such an impression on her that she persuaded the commander of a cavalry regiment to take her with them to the front line, claiming to be 18 years old when she was in fact 16. 

Zavaliy started serving with the regiment as a nurse, but during this time she learned to shoot rifles, pistols and machine guns. She also became directly involved in conflicts, taking a wound to the abdomen during the retreat at Khortytsia island and saved the life of a wounded officer by dragging him to safety. She was awarded the Order of the Red Star for her bravery, but this was only to be the first decoration she would receive.

One day an officer mistook Zavaliy for a man as she wore soldier's clothes and her head had been shaved to remove lice. The officer ordered her to join a group of soldiers headed to the front line. Zavaliy decided to go along with the mistake and two hours later she took part in a battle near Goryachy Kluch with the 6th Airborne Brigade. She continued to serve in numerous battles under her new male identity and following her capturing of a German officer in combat she was appointed to commander of a reconnaissance squad. When Soviet troops were starving near Mozdok in late 1942, Zavaliy mounted a daring night raid across a river to a German camp, where she stole ammunition and provisions before sailing away on a raft.

The following year Zavaliy was a sergeant serving in the Kuban region when her company was surrounded during a heavy firefight and the company commander was killed. Seeing her fellow soldiers faltering Zavaliy took command, shouting for the men to follow her and leading them in a furious counter-attack which broke the enemy and sent them into retreat. The battle left her seriously injured and during her treatment the doctors discovered that she was a woman. Zavaliy expected to be dismissed and return to nursing, however in light of her many achievements she was allowed to stay in the army and in October 1943 she was promoted to commander of a submachine gunner platoon. 

While the men of her platoon were initially reluctant to follow the orders of a teenage girl, Zavaliy quickly won their respect. The platoon was repeatedly deployed to the forefront of the most intense fighting, where Zavaliy led her men in daring attacks on German lines, taking part in the defense of the Caucasus, the battle for Crimea and ultimately the Soviet expansion across Eastern Europe. She became so feared by German soldiers that they nicknamed her 'Frau Black Death'. Twice she was believed to have been killed in combat but both times she returned unscathed. In her military career she was wounded a total of 4 times and received approximately 40 medals of honour.

Zavaliy was eventually discharged from the army in 1947 and traveled to Kiev where she married and had 2 children. She spent much of her life working as the manager of a grocery store but also toured many cities and army bases where she was celebrated as a military hero. She died in Kiev in 2010.

Janina Forbertówna

Janina Forbertówna was a Polish resistance fighter who took part in the Warsaw Uprising against Nazi occupation in 1944. Using the codename 'Jasia' she worked as a liaison officer in the communist partisan Armia Ludowa, or 'People's Army'. What became of her after the failed uprising is unknown.

Sara Ginaite

Sara Ginaite was a Jewish Lithuanian partisan who fought against Nazi occupation during the Second World War.

Ginaite was born in 1924 in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania. She was educated in a Lithuanian-speaking school, which she was about to graduate from when Nazi Germany invaded the country in 1941. Three of Ginaite's uncles were killed in the Kaunas Pogrom, a massacre of Jewish people that the Nazi's encouraged the Lithuanian population to perform. The pogrom resulted in the deaths of 9200 people, almost half of them children. The surviving members of Ginaite's family were incarcerated in the Kovno Ghetto, along with 40,000 Jewish people.

While living in the ghetto Ginaite joined the Anti-Fascist Fighting Organization (AFO) to take part in the resistance against the Nazis. She began a relationship with their charismatic youth leader, Misha Rubinson, and the two married in 1943. The pair broke out of the Kovno Ghetto that winter, escaping to the Rudninkai Forest where they established a partisan military unit named 'Death to the Occupiers'.

Ginaite returned to the Kovno Ghetto twice to help others to escape, once disguised as a nurse claiming she was there to escort four sick workers. In 1944 Ginaite and Rubinson took part in the liberation of the Vilna and Kovno ghettos, although by this time 90% of the Jewish populations inside had been killed. Ginaite's own family were all dead, save for her sister and a young niece.

After the war, Ginaite fought against rampant anti-semitism to become a professor of Political Economics at Vilnius University, where she published award-winning books on the Holocaust in Lithuania. Following her husband's death in 1983, she moved to Canada to live with her two daughters and continue her academic career.

Elena Haas

Elena Haas (1912-1945) was a Czech resistance fighter during World War 2.

A young woman beginning a career in civil engineering, Haas was 25 years old when Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. She joined the Czech Resistance movement to fight against Nazi occupation, where her engineering skills made her an excellent saboteur, identifying where to plant explosive charges for maximum damage to structures.

In September 1944 she led a strategic raid, aided by a French agent and British special operatives. During this mission she successfully destroyed a key bridge and stocks of Nazi ammunition and supplies. 35 enemy soldiers were killed in the process.

Haas died in early 1945 leading a force of Czech partisans against a Nazi airfield near Prague. During the mission she was shot down, still firing her own weapon as she fell to the ground.

Ilse Hirsch

Ilse Hirsch was a Nazi resistance fighter who played a key role in the assassination of Franz Oppenhoff in the later days of World War Two.

Born in 1922, Hirsch joined the League of German Girls, part of the Hitler Youth movement, when she was 16 years old and became one of the organisation’s leaders. In 1945 she became involved with the Nazi resistance force, dubbed ’The Werewolves’, whose mission was to work behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced into Germany.

Hirsch was selected to take part in Operation Carnival, a mission to assassinate Dr. Franz Oppenhoff, who had recently been appointed mayor of Aachen by the Americans who had taken control of the city. Hirsch knew the ground well and acted as a guide for the team. Along with 5 other Werewolves she was parachuted in near Aachen and guided them to Oppenhoff’s countryside home outside the city. Oppenhoff was shot by SS Lieutenant Leitgeb on the steps of his home, after which Hirsch attempted to lead the Werewolves to safety. However she caught her foot on a trip-wire and triggered a landmine, gravely injuring her and killing Leitgeb.

Hirch’s injuries kept her in hospital for a long time but she eventually returned home. In 1949 the surviving members of the team, barring one, were arrested and became the subject of Aachen ‘Werewolf Trial’. All were found guilty and sentenced to 1-4 years in prison, but Hirsch was released. Following the war Hirsch continued to live in the Aachen area, marrying and having two sons.

The Aufseherinnen

The Aufseherinnen were female guards in Nazi concentration camps during The Holocaust, of which there were about 3,700.

Aufseherinnen recruits were primarily trained and worked at Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp, but as World War II escalated they were often transferred to other camps to help with manpower shortages. SS men were instructed to treat female guards as equals and comrades in their work and the Aufseherinnen received similar training to male guards

Herta Ehlert, an SS woman, described her “physically and emotionally demanding” training as including how to punish prisoners and how to look out for sabotage and work slowdowns. However toward the end of the war little, if any, training was given to fresh recruits, many of which were forcibly transferred from factory work.

The enthusiasm with which Aufseherinnen embraced their work varied greatly. Ilse Koch, the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp was infamous for her cruelty and her war crimes trial after the war received worldwide media attention. Conversely, a camp guard named Klara Kunig is recorded as being dismissed for being too polite and kind toward the inmates.

As the Allies liberated the camps, SS women were generally still in active service and many were captured. The US imprisoned between 500 and 1000 SS women, although the majority were later released and only the higher ranking Aufseherinnen went to trial.