VIDEO: The trailer for Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh
Budapest-born Hannah Senesh was safe in 1943. Living on a kibbutz in sunny Palestine, she was tan and relaxed, and she worked the land with purpose.
Back home in Europe, of course, things were much different. And soon, the same bold Zionist idealism that had drawn her to Haifa four years earlier led the headstrong 22-year-old poet to enlist in the British special ops and parachute into Eastern Europe in an attempt to save her mother and the rest of Hungary's Jews.
Roberta Grossman's film is rich with archival footage (much of it in color), reams of old photos, and diary entries written by Senesh and her mother. It supplements these with revealing interviews with those who knew her, among them Shimon Peres. Senesh's is a tragic story marked by missed timing and star-crossed twists of fate. But it's also a moving reminder that small gestures can have profound meaning.