Certain death, small chance of success: The pre-state parachuters who jumped into Nazi Europe |
Travel around Israel, and you will find streets, squares, and kibbutzim named for Hannah Senesh, Enzo Sereni, and Haviva Reik. While the names are familiar, few Israelis today know who these people were and what they did to deserve such veneration.
Author and journalist Matti Friedman was among those unfamiliar with their stories until he began working on his latest book, “Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe,” which was published on March 24. The book, Friedman’s fifth, recounts the thrilling adventures of these and 29 other Jews from the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish population in Israel) who parachuted behind enemy lines in Europe in 1944 to try to save Jews who had not yet been exterminated by the Nazi killing machine.
“I had a vague sense about who Hannah Senesh [the most famous of the parachutists] was, but I did not know about the others. I think the way in which Hannah has become, in a sense, a Zionist poster child can actually turn people off. They don’t necessarily want to know more, because she seems like a caricature,” Friedman said. (Fittingly, he kept a small plastic Hannah Senesh figurine on the shelf above his desk while writing this book.)
However, once he started looking into these characters, he discovered how intriguing and inspiring they were as real individuals. There was also a key question he was determined to answer: Why are they so important to Israel and Zionism’s founding myth and ongoing narrative, despite not having actually saved any European Jews? Moreover, the Nazis captured 12 of the parachutists and executed seven of them, including Senesh, Reik, and Sereni.
The parachutists were on a double mission, Friedman explains. They had their orders from the Yishuv’s leadership, but they were technically recruits to the British military tasked with working for the MI9 secret service unit, specifically to facilitate the escape of Allied POWs and help downed Allied airmen evade capture by the enemy. After being carefully selected for the mission (32 were chosen from 250 candidates), they were sent to British-controlled Egypt to be trained by the Special Operations Executive. They were taught radio operations and how to connect and fight with partisan groups. From there, they were transferred to Bari, Italy, for flights that would drop them into enemy-controlled territory.
“One of the most interesting characters in the book, I think, is the British officer who runs the mission. His name is [Lt. Col.] Tony Simonds. He had an appreciation of what Jews could bring to the British intelligence effort because of their double identities [because they had escaped the Holocaust to Palestine from various European countries]. They could pretend to be all kinds of different things:........