Hanna's War is the true story of Hanna Senesh, a Hungarian-Jewish WW2 resistance fighter, who would become Israel's "Joan of Arc. As a young person, she fled Nazi-occupied Hungary for Palestine, where she was recruited and trained by the British to serve as a commando.
After completing her training in Britain, she parachutes into Yugoslavia with a commando team to establish escape routes across the Hungarian-Yugoslavian border for downed British pilots. Her attempts to save Hungarian Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, however, leads to her capture, torture and demise at the hands of the Gestapo and the Nazi-controlled Hungarian police.
The movie is based on the "The Diaries Of Hanna Senesh" and the book, A Great Wind Cometh, by Yoel Palgi. The scenes of Hanna being sadistically brutalized by the Gestapo and the Nazi-Hungarians is absolutely heart-wrenching and difficult to watch. Think of a cross between Joan of Arc and William Wallace of "Braveheart," and you have Hanna Senesh.
Maruschka Detmers renders an outstanding portrayal in this movie, although she is a little bit too pretty to come across convincingly as a resistance fighter and martyr.
