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On this date in 1944, Hannah Szenes was shot by the Nazis in her native city of Budapest — a city she had left five years before, and to which she had returned as a British special operative.

Hannah Szenes (alternatively, “Chana Senesh”) grew up in interwar Hungary.

Reaching adulthood in a period of rising anti-semitism in the late 1930’s, she became a Zionist and emigrated to British-controlled Palestine.

But with the onset of war, she signed up with the British Special Operations Executive and was parachuted behind German lines in March 1944.

Her brief: to save both Jews and downed Allied pilots. It is often described as the only military expedition to relieve European Jewry during World War II.

And it was as dangerous as it sounds.

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Hannah was nabbed crossing into Hungary on a mission that her colleagues (rightly, it seems) deemed too perilous to attempt, and withstood months of torture without divulging her codes.

By the time she went in the dock for treason, Nazi control of Hungary was collapsing and judicial administration itself was breaking down to the timpani of falling shells. Her sentencing November 4 was postponed; on November 7, an officer peremptorily informed her that she had been condemned to death. It’s believed that she was actually never formally sentenced, merely mopped up ahead of the unstoppable Red Army, which on this very day first entered Budapest’s suburbs.

A writer as well as a fighter, Szenes’ poetry survived as her monument to life — like the present-day Israeli standard “Blessed is the Match”, also the title of the documentary excerpted above; and, her “Halikha LeKesariya” (”A Walk to Caesarea”), also known as “Eli, Eli” (”My God, My God”). Here it is sung by Regina Spektor.

These lines were reportedly her last-known verses from prison:

One - two - three … eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark …
Life is a fleeting question mark
One - two - three … maybe another week.
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.

Also On This Date

• 1944: Richard Sorge and Hotsumi Ozaki

On this date in 1945, eponymous Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling was shot at Oslo’s Akershus Fortress for high treason.

By the time of his death, the Nazi collaborator (English Wikipedia page | Norwegian) had already given his surname to English and other languages as a synonym for traitor.

Just deserts for his efforts as chief of the fascist party Nasjonal Samling to aid the Nazi conquest of his home country. Quisling interrupted a radio broadcast on April 9, 1940 to proclaim himself Prime Minister* and order cooperation with invading Germans.

Although Quisling’s lack of popular support compromised his value even as a puppet, he remained as Minister President of Norway through the war — a crucial tool in Germany’s counter-encirclement jousting with Britain, nicely explained at the outset of Frank Capra’s American propaganda flick Why We Fight:

He enjoyed public regard commensurate with his station.

A 1944 cartoon in Sweden (which remained tenuously neutral and unoccupied during the war) indicates that Quisling had already made his name a byword for treachery. The caption reads:
“I am Quisling.”
“And the name?”

Norway had abolished capital punishment in 1905, but its government-in-exile reinstated it expressly for dealing with high-level collaborators.

Though Quisling himself may have deserved this and worse, the justice and legality of so doing has been controversial every since.

The site of Quisling’s execution. Some other shots from his trial are in this 60-year Norwegian-language retrospective.

* Thought to be the first on-air putsch in history.