{"id":252,"date":"2010-04-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/blessed-is-the-match\/"},"modified":"2022-03-18T12:06:54","modified_gmt":"2022-03-18T19:06:54","slug":"blessed-is-the-match","status":"publish","type":"films","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/documentaries\/blessed-is-the-match\/","title":{"rendered":"Blessed Is the Match"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At age 22, Hannah Senesh parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe in an effort to save the Jews of Hungary. As a poet and diarist, she left behind a body of work that has inspired generations. Narrated by Academy Award nominee Joan Allen, <em>Blessed Is the Match<\/em>\u00a0is the first film to present the life story of this remarkable, talented, and complex woman.<\/p>\n<p>Filmmaker Roberta Grossman first read Hannah\u2019s diary in junior high school, and for the next 20 years continued to be inspired and captivated by her act of fighting back. A modern-day Joan of Arc \u2014 bold, brilliant, and uncommonly courageous \u2014 Hannah was safe in Palestine in 1944 when she joined the only military rescue mission for Jews during the Holocaust. After parachuting behind enemy lines, she was captured, tortured, and ultimately executed by the Nazis. Her mother, Catherine Senesh, witnessed the entire ordeal \u2014 first as a prisoner with Hannah and later as her advocate, braving the bombed-out streets of Budapest in a desperate attempt to save her daughter.<\/p>\n<p>While Hannah Senesh is a figure of great renown in Israel, she remains largely unknown in the rest of the world.\u00a0<em>Blessed Is the Match<\/em> brings this heroine to life through interviews with survivors who knew her \u2014 classmates at a Budapest girls\u2019 school, kibbutz members in Palestine, prisoners from Hannah\u2019s time in a Gestapo jail, and two of her fellow parachutists. With unprecedented access to Senesh family archive, including hundreds of unpublished letters and photos, the film uses Hannah\u2019s diary entries, poetry, and correspondence with her mother to look back on the life of a talented and complex girl who came of age in a world descending into madness.<\/p>\n<p><em>Blessed Is the Match<\/em> is also a mother-daughter love story. Catherine\u2019s raw and revelatory memoirs complement the youthful writings of her daughter, and provide the film with its emotional core. As a worried mother, Catherine watches her child drift away, pursue her own path, and then make the ultimate sacrifice. The film honors Hannah\u2019s legacy, but also captures her motivations in an effort to explain why she chose to act against evil. In her 1942 poem \u201cEli Eli,\u201d Hannah wrote \u201cGod, may there be no end to sea, to sand, water\u2019s splash, lightning\u2019s flash. The prayer of man.\u201d<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>The Filmmaker<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Roberta Grossman<\/strong><br \/>\nAn award-winning filmmaker with a passion for history and social justice, Roberta Grossman has written and produced more than 40 hours of documentary television. She was the series producer and co-writer of <i>500 Nations<\/i>, the eight-hour CBS miniseries on Native Americans hosted by Kevin Costner. Grossman\u2019s feature documentary <i>Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action<\/i>, premiered in February 2005, and has screened and won awards at more than 40 festivals worldwide. Other writing and producing credits include <i>In the Footsteps of Jesus<\/i>, a four-hour special for the History Channel; <i>Hollywood &amp; Power: Women on Top<\/i>, a special for AMC; <i>The Rich in America: 150 Years of Town and Country Magazine<\/i> for A&amp;E; <i>The History of Christianity: The First Thousand Years<\/i>, a four-hour special on A&amp;E; <i>Medal of Honor<\/i>, a six-part television series produced for <i>U.S. News &amp; World Report<\/i>; and <i>Heroines of the Hebrew Bible<\/i> and <i>Judas<\/i> for the A&amp;E series <i>Mysteries of the Bible<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hannah Senesh was a World War II-era poet and diarist who became a paratrooper, resistance fighter and modern-day Joan of Arc. Safe in Palestine in 1944, Hannah joined a mission to rescue Jews in her native Hungary. She parachuted behind enemy lines, was captured, tortured, and ultimately executed by the Nazis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":10914,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1226],"class_list":["post-252","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-social-justice"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Blessed Is the Match | Hannah Senesh Biography | Independent Lens | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Blessed Is the Match is the first documentary feature about Hannah Senesh, the World War II-era poet and diarist who became a paratrooper, resistance fighter and modern-day Joan of Arc.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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