This chapter examines the writings of Hannah Szenes (1921–1944), a Jewish woman born to a well-educated family in Budapest. Szenes wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a writer, and her early work shows a willful disengagement from politics that slowly fades over the course of the 1930s, especially after she moved to a kibbutz in British Mandate Palestine. From there, her work becomes infused with fear of the Nazis, a growing awareness of the Holocaust, and a desperate desire to save her mother, still in Nazi-occupied Budapest. In poetry, in letters, and in diary entries, Szenes recounts her decision to join a paratrooper unit and make their way across Yugoslavia and into Hungary. At the Hungarian border, she was captured and taken to a Gestapo prison, where she continued to write until her execution there; a poem and a letter were found in the pockets of the dress in which she was executed. Szenes is thus a paradigmatic zero generation writer: she came, over time, to the realization that there are some causes worth dying for, and this slow evolution of her consciousness can be traced across her youthful work in Hungary, her writing in Palestine, and her prison writing. Szenes’ life and writing, then, defy claims of passive Jewish victimhood: though she died, she was an active agent in her own life, made and recorded decisions that she knew would lead to her own death; her writing, however, though full of grief and sorrow, contains a zero generation consciousness: the knowledge that though she would not live, her words might, and the Jewish people might as well.