Ordinary Heroes

Fülszöveg

ISBN G-3=1^-131Sa-3 >$S2-SD
ORDINARY HEROES
Peter Hay
Preface by Simon Wiesenthal
With 8 pages of black-and-ivhite photographs
On November 7, 1944, a twenty-three-year-old poet and pacifist named Ghana Szenes (sometimes spelled Hannah Senesh) was executed as a spy. Today, she is a national heroine of Israel. The tragic life and often contradictory personality of Ghana Szenes reflect the very essence of Israel today: tough-minded but compassionate; ideaUstic yet activist! serious but with a mischievous sense of fun.
At the age of seventeen, Ghana had become a Zionist and emigrated alone from her comfortable Budapest home to the swamps of Palestine to build a new country. But as the Holocaust raged throughout Europe, Ghana's conscience and her anxiety about friends and family left behind gave her no rest.
In 1943, she volunteered for one of the most daring secret missions of World War II: she asked to be parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to help organize resistance and... Tovább

Fülszöveg

ISBN G-3=1^-131Sa-3 >$S2-SD
ORDINARY HEROES
Peter Hay
Preface by Simon Wiesenthal
With 8 pages of black-and-ivhite photographs
On November 7, 1944, a twenty-three-year-old poet and pacifist named Ghana Szenes (sometimes spelled Hannah Senesh) was executed as a spy. Today, she is a national heroine of Israel. The tragic life and often contradictory personality of Ghana Szenes reflect the very essence of Israel today: tough-minded but compassionate; ideaUstic yet activist! serious but with a mischievous sense of fun.
At the age of seventeen, Ghana had become a Zionist and emigrated alone from her comfortable Budapest home to the swamps of Palestine to build a new country. But as the Holocaust raged throughout Europe, Ghana's conscience and her anxiety about friends and family left behind gave her no rest.
In 1943, she volunteered for one of the most daring secret missions of World War II: she asked to be parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to help organize resistance and escape routes for civilians and Allied airmen trapped there. At last, she made her way back to Hungary, where she was captured. After five months of brutal torture and interrogation, shortly before the liberation of Hungary, she was court-martialed and shot.
Drawing on extensive interviews with Ghana's family and friends, unpublished diaries, and family letters, Professor Peter Hay compellingly dramatizes the Holocaust and Jewish resistance through the experiences of a single ordinary family: Kató, the mother who stayed home; Gyuri, the son who
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(Continued from front flap)
crossed the Pyrenees on foot and, having escaped the Nazis, returned to fight them; and Ghana, the Zionist daughter who sacrificed her life to give hope to her people.
But Ordinary Heroes is more than a profound and moving testament to one of modern history's few heroines. A threefold portrait of a courageous young woman, a loving family, and a bold new country, Ordinary Heroes is an important and inspiring story of our times.
Peter Hay was born in Budapest in the year of Ghana Szenes's death; their families have remained close friends for three generations. Educated at Oxford, he spent twelve years in Canadian theater and publishing before moving to Los Angeles, where he works as a dramaturge and teaches at UCLA.
Jacket design copyright © 1986
by Walter Harper Jacket photographs courtesy of Katharine and Giora Szenes
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