​The poem “In the Fires of War” is the first poem Hannah Szenes wrote in Hebrew. She wrote it on October 11, 1940. The poem appears in the notebook into which Szenes copied her poems shortly before she left Eretz Israel for her parachuting mission and which she gave to her close friend Miriam Yitzhak. Szenes wrote this poem a year after her arrival in Israel, about one year after the outbreak of World War II. Against the backdrop of the war in Europe “among stormy days of the blood,” she tries to “search for a human being.” Hannah Szenes was born in 1921 in Budapest, Hungary to an educated family who were actively involved in Hungarian society. In 1939, she immigrated to Eretz Israel, where she studied at the agricultural school in Nahalal and then joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam. In 1943, she volunteered for the British Army and joined a group of fighters training for a parachuting mission in Nazi-occupied Europe. In March 1944, Hannah and her comrades parachuted into Yugoslavia, close to the Hungarian border. In June, Hannah crossed the border and was immediately apprehended and imprisoned. In a prison in Budapest, she was brutally tortured but refused to give any details about the mission or her friends. On November 7, 1944, Hannah Szenes was executed for treason in her native Hungary.