Photo Credit: Robert G. Zuckerman
Roberta Grossman
Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh
2008 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
Bio: An award-winning filmmaker with a passion for history and social justice, Roberta Grossman has written and produced more than forty hours of documentary television. Her feature documentary, Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, was shortlisted by the Academy for Best Documentary Feature in 2009, won the audience award at eleven film festivals and was broadcast on PBS. Grossman was the series producer and co-writer of 500 Nations, an eight-hour CBS mini-series on Native Americans hosted by Kevin Costner. Grossman’s feature documentary, Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action, premiered in February 2005, and has screened and won awards at more than forty festivals worldwide. Other writing and producing credits include In the Footsteps of Jesus for the History Channel; Hollywood and Power: Women on Top for AMC; The Rich in America: 150 Years of Town and Country Magazine for A&E; The History of Christianity: The First Thousand Years for A&E; Medal of Honor, a six-part television series produced for U.S. News and World Report, and “Heroines of the Hebrew Bible and Judas” for the A&E series Mysteries of the Bible. Her most recent project is the documentary, Hava Nagila: The Movie. (Credit: Blessed Is the Match Official Website)
Description: Narrated by Joan Allen, 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.
Safe in Palestine in 1944, Hannah joined a mission to rescue Jews in her native Hungary. Shockingly, it was the only military rescue mission for Jews during the Holocaust. Hannah parachuted behind enemy lines, was captured, tortured, and ultimately executed by the Nazis. Incredibly, her mother Catherine witnessed the entire ordeal—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.
With unprecedented access to the Senesh family archive, and through interviews, eyewitness accounts, and the prolific writings of Hannah and Catherine Senesh, Blessed Is the Match recreates Hannah’s mission and imprisonment. The film explores Hannah’s childhood against the backdrop of significant historical events, resulting in a rich portrait with several interlocking strands. (Credit: Blessed Is the Match Official Website)
Interview Date: January 28, 2009
Women and Hollywood: What drew you to make this movie?
Roberta Grossman: I first read Hannah Senesh’s diary when I was in junior high school and was really taken with her poetry and her passion, her writing and her high-minded idealism. I became a filmmaker right out of college and from that time I tried to make a film about Hannah Senesh. I was always writing proposals and grants and it never came together. It was for the best, because, by the time I was able to make the film, about three-and-a-half years ago, I was a mother and closer in age to Catherine Senesh—Hannah’s mother—and I realized that the best way to tell this story was as a mother-daughter story. Heroic stories can be quite dull but the story of a mother watching her headstrong daughter do something that could take her life, and also of coming to rescue her—that was a potentially profound way to tell the story that would transcend ideas of heroism and would even transcend the Holocaust. Happily, Catherine Senesh published her diary, which I missed the first time around. She wrote a beautiful memoir about Hannah’s childhood, the mission, and their time and that became the basis of the film. Catherine’s memoir becomes the narration of the film, voiced by Joan Allen.
W&H: How did you get Joan Allen involved?
RG: I was just really lucky. It’s six degrees of separation. I knew somebody who knew her lawyer, so we sent Joan the film, and she said yes. And she completely elevated the film. We worked with a scratch track for more than a year, and when Joan’s voice was dropped into the film, it changed the film profoundly because she brought so much warmth and intelligence.
W&H: Why did it take so long for a film about this woman to be made?
RG: That’s a really good question. I think that the family was very protective of Hannah’s legacy and every time they had overtures from filmmakers and production companies, they didn’t feel comfortable about turning over Hannah’s story to that kind of exposure. It was the passage of time and the development of a relationship with me as someone they thought they could trust to tell the story.
W&H: Did any of it have to do with the fact that most of the Holocaust stories are pretty much male—aside from Anne Frank?
RG: There were a lot of women heroines in the resistance and there were two other women parachutists. I’m not a social historian so I can’t answer why it took so long for a movie to be made about Hannah. All I know is that I am incredibly lucky that I ended up getting to be the person who made the film. I do think that generally (in the industry), women’s stories are not the first to be told.
W&H: I was struck by the scene of her coffin coming back to Israel and the reception she received.
RG: That was a period of time (her body was returned in 1950), five years after the Holocaust and two years after the state of Israel was founded, when the country was new and young and desperately in need of inspirational stories. Hannah was held up as a symbol of resistance. She wasn’t looked at as a young girl from Hungary who emigrated to Israel. She was held up as an Israeli heroine with that idea of Jews protecting themselves and fighting if necessary.
She was powerful beyond her actions. (Young women who go to the army are still taught about Hannah Senesh as a symbol of bravery.) Besides her actions, she left behind her diaries and her poems, so you could get an insight into the heart of the person. She was this warrior poet and that’s a very powerful combination. In addition, her mother was there and Catherine became known in Israel as Mother Senesh, and she became a powerful figure in her own right. All these things together made it a perfect storm for Hannah becoming a national icon.
W&H: Your film made it to the short list for the Academy Award.
RG: I’m very grateful for that. I think the film is coming into its own now and people are beginning to hear about it. I hope people will see the film. I’m grateful that the process exists in such a way that a little movie that doesn’t have buzz or a studio behind it can still be considered.
W&H: Most documentaries have outreach campaigns for getting the word out. What are your goals beyond the theatrical release?
RG: We started the outreach for the film almost at the same time we started making it. My feeling is that if you are going to make a film, you need to get it seen, and there are many avenues for getting a movie seen, and one of the most powerful is grass-roots outreach. We have a full-time director of outreach. Facing History and Ourselves, the leading Holocaust education organization, has been a partner for more than a year. We have created a thirty-two-page study guide and they are doing teacher training all across the country. We also created a forty-five-minute version of the film for junior high schools and high schools.
W&H: Explain the importance of the title—Blessed Is the Match.
RG: It is the title of the poem that Hannah wrote before she crossed the border into Hungary from Yugoslavia. She gave it to one of her fellow parachutists and asked him to bring it back to the Kibbutz if she didn’t return. The poem is about self-sacrifice. A match is a very humble thing yet it can start a fire, and Hannah had the idea that one person could make a difference. I think it’s remarkable that she had that sense of herself.