100: They escaped Europe — then parachuted back in, with Matti Friedman

The new episode of Ask Club of Anything, this is going to be a very exciting episode.

“We're very, very happy to have Matthew Friedman, fellow journalist, writer at the free press.”

The author of many wonderful books, specifically five books. We've done episodes in the past about his other books as the semi-autobiographical book, which is also a deeper analysis on the first Lebanon war and others. And today we're going to discuss his absolutely riveting new book on a topic that I thought I had understood, but I learned a lot of new things and new insights about the meaning of this whole story.

It's called Out of the Sky.

It's the incredible and mostly not-known story of young members of the Ashu of the Jewish

polity, the Jewish community in the land of Israel before the Declaration of Israel's independence. Who during World War II and what was then mandatory Palestine were trained by the British and power-shooted into Nazi-occupied Europe to organize resistance to safe stranded Allied soldiers to meet and save the Jews. The most famous of these power troopers is the poet Hannah Senish, who was famously

captured, tortured, and eventually executed by the Nazis. We're going to dive into the incredible story of these people, their bravery, their ingenuity, but they were trying to accomplish the myth that was built around them and the more analytical and nevertheless just as profound lessons that we can learn from their story. As Martin notes after pouring over extensive notes and archives in Israel and abroad,

they were sent by the Jewish leadership to save Jews and by the British to rescue Allied troops.

To the best of our knowledge, not a single Jew was saved by them. They were not able to effectively organize resistance to the Nazis. And yet despite the failure and the fact that there were only ever 32 of them, they loomed very large because they teach us certain lessons about that time and about the meaning

“of the Jewish 20th century and of the state of Israel that I think are very significant”

for our day as well. They are founding heroes of the state and we're going to learn who they were, who they really were and crack open that whole story. The book is publishing on March 24. Our episode will also be dropping around then, we're recording an early March.

We might have a couple of weird pauses because there might be rocket sirens, but we are

going to publish the episode at the launch of the book, enjoy the conversation and as soon as you're done with the episode, obviously go out and buy that book. Before we can into it, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by one of our Patreon members, Eric, who dedicated it to the Southern California Hillel chapters at UC Riverside Claremont College's Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Cal Poly Pomona and University of Redlands.

Thank you for helping young Jewish adults thrive in their identity and togetherness and thank you, Eric, for that sponsorship, college kids matter a lot in this space and we're thinking about you guys. I also want to invite you to join our Patreon to join this community. It helps us keep the lights on.

It also means that you're asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about. There's a great discussion for them there where I and listeners and viewers talk about the episodes, talk about the news, talk about what worries us and scares us and share resources that are absolutely fascinating and I have learned from a great deal and you get to join our monthly live streams where I answer your question, all your questions live.

Join us at patreon.com/asklave Anything The link is in the show notes. Mati, how are you? Pretty good. Pretty good. Where it's really.

We just pretend it's all fine, everything's great, don't even know why you're asking. Right, we were in the safe room, yes, about an hour ago and I assume we'll be there at least in a couple more times today, but can't complain. It's weird doing an episode on anything else, at least recording it, but it's kind

of helpful because we're stepping back into a time that helps us remember, I don't know, the astounding privilege of this moment. Yes, it's bad. Yes, it's scary. Yes, Israelis have died and we're a day after the bitchimish rocket fall that wiped out

“a family that killed, I think it was nine at the last count, many more are wounded, but”

nevertheless, we're going to talk about a time before there was an Israel, before the Jews had agency, before the enemy suffered more. The Iranian regime is suffering more than Israelis, and so maybe it's a little therapeutic to dive back into this history. So let's take this dive, before we get into the story of the power trooper specifically,

can you set the scene for us? It's early 1943, the war is raging in Europe.

Jews are living then?

Let's talk first about the issue of how many Jews are living then in Israel, or mandatory

“Palestine, how organized are they, how aware are they of the Holocaust?”

What is that story? Right, so there's something about going back to Jewish history that actually gives reason for optimism. It gives a certain kind of confidence in the future, which is very strange for a history that seems to be made up of a series of catastrophes depending on how you tell it, but

if you remember where the Jewish people were 80 years ago in 1944, when the story takes place, and if you then look outside the window and see where we are now, which is in the state of Israel, things don't seem that bad, so we can kind of get lost in current events and convince ourselves that things are bad, and in many ways, they are, of course, we're coming out of a pretty rough day, yesterday here in Israel, not putting it lightly, and

we're in the middle of a war with, with Iran, and of course at the tail end, I hope of a two and a half year trial in the Middle East, but compared to where the Jews were in 1944, doesn't seem that bad, so there's something about Jewish history that actually

“makes you see things in a, in a sunny era, which is a very strange thing to say, but I think”

it is, I think it is true, in early 1944 when the story gets going, the Jewish population of Europe has a mostly been murdered already, the bulk of the Jews will be killed in the Holocaust, have already been killed in the part of Europe where the story takes place, which is central Europe, the countries around Hungary, so what's then, Czechoslovakia, what's then, Yugoslavia, and the worst is yet to come, so Hungary's Jews are still alive

at the beginning of 1944, and most of them will be dead by the end of 1944, and the story really takes place as that year progresses, the first agents are parachuted in early 1944, and to that part of Europe, and the story really ends at the end of 1944, and that's the story that I, that I tell an out of the sky, at the same time, there is a Jewish community in what is then British mandate passed on, at the time of the state's inception a few

years later, the Jewish population will be about 600,000 people, and the possibility of

“there actually being a Jewish state seems very tenuous, and improbable, I think, to”

many people that don't really realize that it will be happening within four years in large

part because of the catastrophe that's happening in Europe, so one of the amazing

things about doing this kind of historical research is going back to the documents of the time, and reading the documents that are being written day by day as the operation unfolds, and there are thousands of them in the Huk'an hour type until they've been in a few other places, they don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, so if you're reading memoirs and works of history, then the outcome is clear, but the people involved in

the mission have no idea what's going to happen, and they look around them and all they see as kind of decimation and disaster, and they have no idea what is coming, so that's the stage upon which this story unfolds in 1944. You talk about how the Jews are desperate to join the war effort, this is part of the discussion in the book, and by 1944 they know there's been the reports about what's happening

at Auschwitz about the scale of the genocide, Ben Gurion is now aware, the Yeshua had refrain from calling on the Allies to bomb the death camps to bomb the Auschwitz facilities, because they were afraid for the lives of 150,000 Jews believed to have been incarcerated there at any one time, and then they understand what it is actually happening at Auschwitz and Ben 1944 they are already desperately calling on the Allies to bomb Auschwitz, of course

the Allies never will, so the Jews are desperate to help the war effort in any way possible,

in the Nazi regime is quickly as possible, the tipping point has already been passed, it's clear the Allies now have an advantage in the war, and the British are very reluctant to accept these Jewish volunteers, and their treatment of the Jews of the Jewish personnel who do volunteer, even just these three dozen people, is this kind of expendable resource, and so tell us, briefly, the story of time, one of the paratroopers, he talks about

how a British soldier literally gave him a broken parachute, and when he confronts the officers, they don't give him an explanation or an apology, it's just, you know, he's allowed to take a non-broken parachute, the Jews are desperate and the British really are not interested in them being involved in don't mind if they get captured or die, or maybe

Not by much, I mean, the the Shove, that is the Jewish community, and British men, it

“Palestine understands by the end of 1942, what is happening in Europe, so again, in retrospect,”

everyone knows what's happening, and everyone knows what the death camps are, and everyone

knows that six million Jews are going to be killed, but they inhabit a more innocent

world, I mean, they don't know about gas chambers and death camps, and it takes years for the human mind to just, you know, accept that such things are possible, and that's true also of the Jews, and in Palestine, at the time, and it's only really at the end of 1942 that it clicks in part because of a group of refugees, and just to get to the land of Israel from Poland, and suddenly people believe these terrible stories that they've heard, and they understand

that it's actually happening, and then there is this leap in consciousness from a doggy-state deep concern and confusion about what's going on to panic, because most of the people in most of the Jews in British men, they're Palestine at the time, are people who love the families

“back in Europe, and they understand that the chances are that they're never going to see these”

people again, and the whole kind of consciousness of the Shove changes, and they start

lobbying, which they actually had been doing since the beginning of the war, but it kind of goes up a few notches that begin lobbying to help the war effort in some way, the Zionists movement wanted initially to send Jewish fighting units to the front, they wanted to fight as Jews as Zionists in Jewish battalions, in Jewish brigades, and the British will have none of it, and the British are not interested in arming large groups of Jews, in part because they understand that

as soon as the war is over, the Jews will likely use what they've learned against the British, and they were not wrong about that, and there's also just a lack of concern for the fate of the Jews at that time, they're told to kind of not make too much noise, because the idea that the Allied War effort is serving, world juries playing into anti-Semitic propaganda is actually in flaming public sentiment in the Arab world, so the Jews are told to kind of sit quietly and let the

Allies win the war, and no one prioritizes and I read this in the book, no one prioritizes saving these people to the extent that their enemies prioritize killing them, and that's where things stand in early 1944 when these kind of grandiose plans to send Jewish brigades to fight in

in Europe contract, because of British resistance, two group of ultimately 32 parachutes are

going to be sent into Central Europe, two to do what is one of the questions of the book, what exactly is their mission, and it really depends who you ask, you know, getting back to Khai, who you asked about Khai, is one of the four main characters in the book, and he's a member of a new keyboard, he's become a pioneer, and he's changed his name, he's kind of like many people that at the time, he's assumed a Hebrew name, so he calls himself Khai Khai Mesh, Khai Mesh means "sikh", so he's named himself for an agricultural

implement, and he is on this keyboards when a child refugee shows up on the keyboards, and he turns out

“to have a secret letter that has been sewn into the lining of his coat, and this is a letter that”

Jews have smuggled out of Europe to explain what is happening to them, and they tell the members of this keyboards, what, what not the occupation really is, what deportation really means, right, they're using these euphemisms like deportation, people are being deported, but it's not clear what that means, and around this time, the Jews here understand what, what it means deportation, so euphemism for their physical destruction, people are being sent in trains to death camps,

under being killed, and he understands it and he realizes that he has to go back, he decides that he's going to go back, and of course there's no way to get back, there's no Jewish army, and there's no Jewish air force, we have to read this story, you know, without any of our knowledge of what happens after 1948 to Jews are more or less helpless, and they have no country, so all he can do is volunteer for the British army and the British are putting together this group of

recent arrivals from Central Europe, people who speak useful Central European languages like Hungarian, and can be parachuted into occupied Europe to serve as liaisons between British forces and partisan forces, and to serve an outfit, a section of British intelligence with British special operations, which is called MI9, which isn't in charge of escape innovation, their job is to rescue allied airmen who are shot down behind enemy lions or POWs who've managed to escape, and they're

supposed to help these people get back to allied lines, so they can be fed back into the war, so they serve this specific office of military intelligence, and they become British soldiers, they take an oath of allegiance to the King, which is very ironic for him who, like many Jews in Palestine at that time, hates the British because they're preventing Jewish refugees from reaching

but at the moment when that is most necessary, when you have millions of people desperate to get out of Europe because they're about to be killed, the gates of Palestine are closed in order to play Kate Arab, public opinion, and millions of people are condemned to death, so the Jews are kind of caught between their hatred of the British Empire, and their greater hatred of Nazi Germany, and of course they don't really have a choice, I mean they're clearly on the allied side, and they need to

help the allies when the war so himes signs up for this mission, which is a cooperation between British intelligence and the Haganah, which is the Jewish underground, which will ultimately become the IDF, and that's who he ends up on a British bomber about to parachute into occupied Yugoslavia in 1944. So what was the point? What was the actual strategy? What? There's some fascinating things that you write about this. One is Bungarian has an opinion, has a view on what the point is,

which is unbelievably powerful and poignant, but they're to help organize down pilots of the allied

forces, etc. They are to, they think they're to rescue Jews. They, by the way, always end up going to

places with their own families, where from. So Hanna Senish goes to Hungary and Haim and Hugos, Enzo goes to Italy, they're looking as well for their own families. So can you lay that out for us? What are the many different missions? And ultimately, they're only success if there is a success,

“because these are such bad failures and tell us that story, but the only success is basically”

what Bungarian charged them with, right? Which was tell the Jews that if they survive the war, there's only one place in the world that wants them, which now that we, you know, years later, know what happened to the DPs, the displaced persons after the war, Bungarian as usual saw the world as it is and understood what everything actually means. Right, the events of the past couple years for me have only reinforced my admiration for people like Bungarian and those early

Zionists, certainly hurts all the people who really saw the world as it is and suggested a way out. And I don't think you can really look at current events without realizing how smart and prophetic they were, but the ironies of the mission is that there are multiple missions going on here at the same time. Some of them stated, open things, some of them secret and some of them, I think, just implicit in what people were doing. So you have the British mission which we discussed,

which is to get British agents into occupied Europe so they can help British pilots escape and, you know, speak local languages and their trained as radio operators so they can communicate with

“British forces and that's the British mission. That's what the British think is going on.”

The Jewish participants in the mission do not think that that is what's going on. In fact, they refer to the British mission at times as a plane ticket. So they need to get into Europe. There's no way to get into occupied Europe in 1944 without joining the British mission,

so they do, but they're real mission as far as their concern is to save Jews. And there's an amazing

meeting which you're alluding to that happens in television before most of the parachutists leave British mandate Palestine for first for Cairo for training and then for occupied Europe. There's a meeting where the parachutists meet the leaders of the Zionist movement in Palestine, so Ben Gorin is there and golden meters there. And the Algolom was one of the commanders behind Ghana's there and there are a few other characters there and the leaders are supposed to

tell these young volunteers what their real mission is. And from accounts of the meeting, you realize that every Zionist leader had a different version of what the mission was and that

“the only thing that really unites all these different versions of the real mission is that none of them”

were actually possible for a group of barely 30 people who are being scattered in occupied Europe. In groups of 2s and 3s, so one of the Zionist leaders that's got them, the Haganak Commandos, who is more of a military as he wants them to organize uprisings. He wants them to get into Europe and he wants them to organize the Jews for resistance. He wants to see more uprisings on the in the spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising,

which had happened a year before in 1943, so that's one version. And someone else says no, we just have to organize the Jews for survival. We're not going to obviously fight the Varamakh. Let's just organize them for survival, so they can make to the end of the war and Ben Gorin says what we have to do is we have to make sure that they know that after the war they need to come here. And after the war we need to see he's already thinking about after the war,

and war is not over yet. And it won't be for a while because already thinking about the day after the war. And he says what we need to see is a river of Jews who are making their way to the land of Israel and not accepting any other alternative. So that's more of a, I guess, a storytelling mission.

It's less a military mission than it is, almost a literary mission. And Zionism has always

where people are given a different vocabulary to understand themselves and their fate. So you are not a refugee, you are a pioneer and you're not homeless, you are actually on your way to your

real home, which is in the land of Israel. And it's your real home, even if you've never been there.

And you're not being forced to go to some refugee camp in the Middle East, you're actually engaged in an action, which is called Aliya, which means a scent. And there's a lot of literary energy here. I don't want to say that it's fictional because it manages to become the truth,

“but Zionism has this really deep understanding of the power of stories. So I mean, what is Zionism?”

How does it start? I think political Zionism has started. I mean, the behavioral therapy for a displaced people. I mean, when you frame your story a certain way, you become empowered with massive agency and capacity, as opposed to when you frame it another way. This is basically all psychology today. I mean, when you go to a therapist, this is what a therapist does for you, help you frame the story in ways that give you agency. And that is the heart and soul

of Zionism with this vocabulary change I think. Absolutely. And there's some thing deep in the Jewish consciousness that I think understands the power of stories because this is a people kept together over 2000 years essentially. But the power of stories, I mean, there are different countries. They speak different languages and what links the Jews of Yemen to the Jews of Poland is that they read the same stories at the same time. And they have this belief that the books that they're reading

have have power, but it's purely about words and books and stories. There's no country. There's no government that there's not even a shared, you know, spoken language from much of Jewish histories.

So the Jews have this understanding that stories are very powerful and it's an understanding that

most other people don't have simply because their national life has been more standard. But there's a reason that the rehearsal responds to the events of his time by sitting down in a hotel room in Paris and writing essentially a new story for the Jews. And it's called the Jewish state. And if you read it through the eyes of someone at his time, it's borderline insane, I guess. But it isn't. And of course, we're both sitting in it right now, which is something to

something to think about. But that's very much the thinking behind the mission. It's a very Zionist mission. And that storytelling is actually not secondary to the mission. It might be the

“prime mission. Just to stay on the philosophical for one second, I think it's interesting because”

when I have discussions with Palestinians or talk about the Palestinian narrative and the way they

frame the narrative, my whole stick is that they tell a certain story of us and it shapes their story of themselves that limits their options. Because we're this thing that has to eventually fall. That is this fragile colonialist thing that has to disappear. And it's hard to wake up from this understanding of the enemy as something fragile about to fall to then say, and nevertheless, I need to compromise. That is a de-compromising kind of narrative. That is a decrystomy, as we're talking,

my own explanation for what's wrong. The dysfunction over on Palestinian politics. I have a lot of complaints about the dysfunction and Israeli politics. It's okay. And everybody, Marty, has published significant essays on this, not as well. But it's that exact story

“telling. I think we're very much a culture of storytelling. I want to get into a place where”

the story really doesn't work. The Jews have a one understanding of the purpose of this mission. The British have a different understanding. That gap in the end guarantees that they don't actually save anybody. And the best example that you tell of this is Hain, finds a few dozen Jews in the forests of Yugoslavia. After escaping an internment with the Italians, they are women, children, and he wants to fly them to safety. And the British refuse. Can you tell us about that?

Right, so there's the stated mission and there's what actually happens on the ground. And I guess it's worth saying, which you alluded to earlier, that their families are also there. So for a guy like Hain, he's in Europe with his military mission, and he's got a secret mission given to him by the Haganabha. His family is trapped in Hungary. And there are just train after train of Jews being sent from Hungary to the death camps up at that time. Hanna Senesha's mother is

trapped in Budapest when she sends into Europe. So it's it's personal. Hime is in the forests of Yugoslavia. He's attached to Tito's partisans. Tito's communist partisans. And he's with another parachutist. And they're in the forest and they meet a group of Jews hiding in the forest. They escaped apparently from an Italian internment camp. And they managed to get into Yugoslavia. And they were kind of hiding in the forest. And they understand that these two parachutists are

this is a crazy idea for us. But in 1944, certainly someone in a forest in Yugoslavia. So they

“understand that these two soldiers actually speak Hebrew. And Hime tells them this story about”

where they've come from. They managed to get out of Europe. And they made it to the land of Israel, which is the same country, the same refuge. That, of course, these people know about from the Bible and from the prayer book. And they actually got there. And then they came back. So they managed to escape the Holocaust. And then they parachuted back into the Holocaust to save these people. And to tell them that there is a country where they're wanted. And that one day,

they'll be at home. And they're not. They haven't been abandoned by the world. And here are these two parachutists who've come to save them. But they can't save them. Because there is no Jewish state. And there are no Jewish, you know, transport aircraft. They're going to come in and pick up these people and fly them to safety. The British aircraft that are going in and out of partisan territory are reserved for military personnel. There's no room for many, many dozens of

Jewish refugees. And what the allies are telling the Jews throughout the war is that the solution to the Jews' specific problem in this war is an allied victory. So there will be no

specific action taken to alleviate the suffering of the Jews. The death camps will never be

bombed. For example, which you mentioned. And instead the Jews need to just lend their shoulder to the General War effort and hope that Nazism is defeated and then with the defeated Nazism will come. The alleviation of Jewish suffering. So, of course, the British do not make room on their aircraft for these people. And they're never mentioned in Himes memoir again. Because all he could do is tell them this story. Maybe it kept them going for another year,

year and a half until the war ended. Maybe many of them are some of them at least managed to make it to Israel. But at the moment in question, he could give them some inspiration. He blew

their mind by being a Jewish parachutist that could speak to them. And he grew in a forest in

occupied Yugoslavia, but there wasn't anything else he could do. You mentioned that they go mostly in the hope of saving family for many of them. And I wound in that light to talk about the story of Hanasinish. Very, very famous. She was a poet. She was the daughter of a well-known novelist. You contrast her to Anne Frank in both similarities and some a couple of profound differences. Tell us her story. And I mean, also how her story ends.

“Right. So, I think it's not a spoiler to say that Hanasinish's story doesn't end well. I assume”

that many people have heard her name. She's one of the most famous characters in modern Jewish history. And certainly in Israel, she says well-known as Julia the Macabe or maybe as almost as well-known as her so everyone knows her name in Israel. But outside of Israel and outside of the Jewish world, I think she's almost completely unknown, unlike Anne Frank, who is really a universal icon. She's a global icon. She's really famous in Japan, for example. And these are two women who are very similar

and very different. I mean, strikingly, they have the same name. So Hanasinish, a Hebrew name, assumed after her arrival in Israel by Anna Senish, who is a bookworm from Budapest. As you said, the daughter of a novelist and a playwright and very, very much a child of kind of an upper middle class literary, kind of artistic world and a beautiful writer, a wonderful writer like Anne Frank. And these are two Jewish women caught in this catastrophe in the 1940s who write about it and

deal with it in different ways. Hanas older than Anne. And they have a different take on it. So Anne Frank, at least judging from her diary and the story of her diary is quite a complicated one. But Anne Frank becomes elevated as a global icon, a universal icon of childhood, in a sense, which in a sense destroyed by monsters. And there's something about her character, which makes

“her more palatable to a universal audience who's looking for perfect victimhood. That's what they”

want Jewish character. And Anne is really interesting and very, very smart, but she's not complicated as an adult. It would be complicated and she doesn't challenge people in the way that Hana challenges them. Hana's response to Jewish suffering is not to write a diary and then you know, be captured and murdered. Hana fights Hana makes it to the Jewish on-clave in Palestine and ends up wearing a uniform and jumping into the Holocaust with a gun.

And that's a very different response. I mean, I'm not, this is not a criticism. Anne Frank was extremely young. Of course, I'm talking about the way these characters are

after the war, but Anne Frank dies quietly in an Nazi camp. And she doesn't live beyond

the war to disturb the peace of Christians and Muslims by demanding space for herself in the world. And that makes her easier to digest and it's the reason that, you know, everyone knows and Frank and not that many people know Hana Sennish. Hana Sennish makes it Israel just as she finishes high school just as the war begins. She joins in agricultural commune. She tries to reinvent herself as a pioneer. She tries to kind of shed her literary interests because what you're supposed

to be in the Zionist movement in those years is your supposed to be a worker and she didn't know the cows and she's gonna, you know, work in the chicken houses and she does all of those things and she also writes poetry. She doesn't really tell people about the poetry because being intellectual is not that fashionable and people tend not to know that she's writing some

“pretty striking poetry, including one poem that will ultimately become, I think, the most famous”

song in modern Hebrew, which is called Ellie Ellie. And then in a story that similar to the story of time, she understands what's going on in Europe. She understands that her mother is trapped in Budapest and her mother, I mean, Hana doesn't know this, but her mother is the thing not far away from Adolf Ayhan, who has of the SS who's been moved to Budapest to murder the Jews of Hungary. And he's going about this very methodically and her mother's trapped in Budapest with the news

tightening when Hana decides to volunteer for this mission. She understands that the commanders of the Jewish underground and British commanders are looking for Jewish volunteers who are willing to parachute back into Europe. And she signs up for this mission and in early 1944, she's dropped into occupied Yugoslavia with the order to proceed from Yugoslavia into Hungary. And that is what she does. It doesn't work quite as planned.

What do we know about her capture and her fate? We know quite a lot. I mean, we know a lot about this mission because of the amount of documentation that was kept at the time, both by the Huguna. And to some extent, by the British, some of those documents survive in the Huguna, in Tel Aviv, Hana crosses in Hungary in June 1944 with three other people, including the escaped French P.W. and is caught at the border. And one of the

lists in the story, which I was not aware of when I started researching the story, is that this entire operation, which is supposed to be secret, of course, is completely transparent German intelligence the whole time. So the emphasis may be too complicated to get into now, but the mission has been

“penetrated by German intelligence. I know exactly what's going on. It's not clear that that's why”

they intercept Hana at the border, but it is certainly possible. She's arrested as she crosses the border into Hungary, which is for native land. And she's arrested and imprisoned and tortured and kept in prison until this is June. So she's kept in prison until until November there are many ups and downs

politically. And a hungry hungry is basically disintegrating hungry had been a Nazi ally and then

becomes essentially a Nazi puppet state. And by the end of 1944, the Red Army is about to arrive and things in Hungary are really, really freeing and Jews are being shot. Thousands of Jews are being shot on the banks of the Danube and thrown it to the river. And Hana is being held in a military prison and she's being held as a trader because she's she's Hungarian. I mean, she thinks she's you can say Israeli, right? That's not the word that people use at that time, but she thinks she's

transformed herself into something else. She's no longer Anna, Senna, she's Anna, Senna, but as far as the Hungarians are concerned, she's a trader and she's serving British intelligence. She was caught with a radio transmitter and they put her in prison and her mother is actually imprisoned with her, which is this meeting between them in prison, which is a story truly of Shakespearean

“proportions, which I think have been novelist made it up with seem completely improbable,”

but it's a true story. They're reunited in prison. And ultimately, Hana Senna is

executed and prison in November, 1944. One of the ways that I think the book articulates the trap that the Jews feel themselves in is the experience of these paratroopers or a couple of them of who encounter the Yugoslav partisans and discover that they don't like the Jews either. And in fact, they have to pretend to be what Welsh to explain their strange English for being British, trying to help the partisans. Tell us about that. There was no quarter.

There was no safe place. They found no ally, even when they were there allegedly to help Britain's partisan allies. That's right. There's this moment in the force of Yugoslavia,

Tito's partisans and they realize that the partisans don't like them either. And the parachutists

are themselves socialists. I mean, these are readers of marks. These are members of socialist

“communes called Kibut Same. And they expect to be, I think, greeted at least,”

politely by, you know, fellow socialists and the ranks of the partisans, certainly because they're on the same side. They're fighting the Nazis. And it turns out that that is not the case at all. And in fact, they are disliked intensely by by many of the partisans. And they learn that they cannot reveal to their hosts that they're Jews. That they'll be treated well as long as they're considered to be British and they are wearing British uniforms. But some of the partisans must have

noticed that these people do not sound like, you know, residents of Manchester or of London,

they have strange accents. They start making a different story. And these are, you know, kind of comic at one point they tell the partisans that they're Welsh. And they start making up stories about Cardiff. How they miss Cardiff. And Hime whose wife's name is Dina tells people that his wife's name is Diana. And his daughter's name is Shuleen. He tells people that her name is Sally. And he's a Welshman. And that is, at a different time, his mother parachutes to tell people that they're Irish,

because they assume that the, the, the Croat peasants and the ranks of Tito's partisans are not going to be able to know what, you know, what an Irish accent or what a Welsh accent sounds like.

And later on, Hime has an experience with Russian troops or fighting in support of

partisans and Slovakia. This is a different part of the story. But they also, he tells them that he's a Jew and they respond, you know, ferociously. They will not accept that he's a socialist, because they say the Jews are speculators. And, you know, capitalist blood suckers. So he couldn't possibly be a socialist and they just realized that there's no, as he said, there's no, there's no quarter and even the people fighting the Nazis. You know, hate the Jews only marginally less than the Nazis

“do. And it's a, it's a realization. I think for them, maybe one that we're still living with right now,”

which is that Zionism can Zionism is a revolution, of course, in Jewish history. But it's not going to solve all of the problems encountered by Jews in the, in the diaspora, as we're seeing, of course, over the past two and a half years. And I think they get a real whiff of it, turning the war. Yes, it's not going to solve the problem. But also, there is nothing else that would solve the problem. And there's communism is not the solution

that a lot of Jews had hoped for. And none of the rest of it, as long as the Jew can, can be the avatar for whatever anxiety and whatever prevents the redemption of the world, the Jew will have to serve as that avatar. So no Zionism won't solve the problem, but it is still going to solve the problem of being dependent on those people. It's, it's just it's tragic, all these angles do it. All these experiences, all these lessons that seem to emerge from their story are deeply Zionistic,

but in the tragic sense, in the ways that Zionism should not have been right. And in the ways that, should not have been necessary. I think Zionism should have just been a luxury belief of Jewish identity.

“That's right. I think that that's what makes the story, the right story for this moment,”

which I didn't intend because I started writing this book a year before the war. But you know, your line, they just said, which is that it's right in the tragic sense, or it's Zionist in the tragic sense. I mean, that's very much where we are in 2026. There's a tragic sense to everything. And if there was a kind of triumphful tone to much of our discourse, before October 7, 2020, three of them people kind of thought that we'd figure things out. You know, that Zionism was a solution

for the Jews here, and that the Baltimore C was a solution for the Jews. And in the diaspora, and I think now we're much more aware of the tragic aspects of all of this. And I think that makes this story much easier to understand. Now then it would have been before October 7. So it's strange to say about a story about Jewish pressure, that's where in British uniforms 80 or 0, but I think it's very much a story for this moment.

I usually enjoy winning debates. This is not a debate that's fun to win in the grand historical sense. I want to finish with a question that emerged for me from the book. And it's so subtle and nuanced, and yet so fundamental, I don't entirely know how to tackle it. So let's start with Enzo. Enzo is 40, near-sighted. He is ordered to return by the leadership of the issue of, including Ben Gurion, I think. He doesn't listen. He is, it's even stranger than that.

and he believed in coexistence. And, you know, he would not have had walk around with a gun,

“he would walk around with a stick, coexistence with the Arab population, and this man decides to do”

something he is not physically equipped to do, never mind, intellectually, you know, he's a real

intellectual. I mean, to be a pacifist in that age is, you know, it's not a Columbia University pacifist, so to speak. It's a manifesto sacrifice for his pacifism. And yet, he decides to go to this mission. When you take all of those different pieces, they knew this was suicide. There's so many indications. There's so many ways that they understand they're not coming back, or if three of them make it back out of the 32 that's a miracle. How, why would they commit this suicide?

How did they perceive it? They don't treat it as suicide. They're all hoping to bring their family home. They know it's almost impossible. The Jews are barely making it out. Nobody's really being sent in. The British are, you know, begrudgingly letting this tiny group just basically

to let the issue vent, right? Because they won't send in battalions. Why would an Enzo? Never mind,

you know, when an 18-year-old does something stupid like join an army and go to war, 18-year-olds are dumb. I was dumb when I was 18. Why would Enzo, 40-year-old, you know, bespectacleed pacifist Enzo, parachute into occupied Europe, into fascist Europe?

“I think that that's the question of this book. Asks. What do these people think they were doing?”

And where they, where they diluted, you know, did they expect some other outcome? Did they think that they were going to beat the vermach? Did they think that we're going to save the Jews? And of course, the answer to all those questions is no. These are extremely intelligent people. And they understand exactly what is going on. And that's true of Enzo, who's, as you said, almost 40 years old, in a very accomplished person. He already founded a keyboard. He's edited

of volume, which you can find from 1936 on Jewish Arab coexistence under the rubric of Zionist socialism. It's a book that, you know, if you read it now, it seems pretty naive. But it made sense at the time at this, at this, Enzo, and he wrote another book that was published, Boston, this, these, these are very serious. He's a very serious character. But he's almost 40 Hanna Senesha's 22 when she jumps out of the airplane. But she's also, we have a writing,

she got to diary and she wrote letters and she was a beautiful writer and, and she also completely understands what's going on. And she understands her likely fate and in fact she writes a poem, which explains what she thinks is going on. She explains what she thinks her fate is going to be. And this is a poem called A Shreha Gaphool, or Happy Is The Match, which she leaves with a comrades just before she crosses the border into occupied Hungary, and which, you know, expresses

this famous sentimentist. It's quite a well-known poem, which is A Shreha Gaphool, any self-made seat level. Happy Is The Match, that is burned and lights the flame, or burned as it lights the flame. So it's kind of, in plural and like many flames. Yeah, that's right. There are multiple flames, and that the, the match is burned, and that's Hanna. And she writes it, as she crosses the border. So it's, it's clear that she's not unaware of her fate. So why did they do it? And I

think that the, that the answer is, is literature. I mean, the answer is that these were people

who had very powerful stories in their head, and it's not a coincidence that the participants in this mission. In this mission, it's not a coincidence that the participants in this mission were deeply literary people. I mean, they were not commandos. They were not, you know, really secret agents. They're not very good at it. And if they, I write this, if they showed up at a recruiting office today, they probably be turned away. Their talents were, were other talents. And they were very

much drawn from the realm of, of literature. So if you grew up with literature, whether that literature is the Odyssey or whether it's the Tanakh or whether it is, you know, Le Misafabla or whether it's you know, and other works of great literature, which often recount tales of her was I mean, you know that there's a deep connection between literature and heroes that the great literature is about heroism and, you know, the Iliad is one example. I mean, Odyssey is another example.

The book of Samuel is another example. And the book of Genesis is a different kind of

“example, but these were people raised in those stories. So they understood, I think implicitly”

or innately that the response to a dark time to a hopeless time is not to jump into bed and pull

but what's going on, the response is to embark on an act of heroism that even if it doesn't

“succeed will inspire others that will light the flames that will demonstrate to other people”

the correct way to respond to tragedy and disaster and in doing so they're really embodying the

spirit of Zionism, which is kind of a call. I guess a call to the heroic impulse, it's a call to face

“reality, a very dark reality in Europe, not by, you know, self delusion and not by collaboration,”

but by embarking on a project which had a few chances of success or so it, I'm so it's seen

then yet it manages to save the Jewish people in the 20th century and both of us are immediate

benefit-series of it. So they understand this. I'm not sure exactly how they would explain it. I wish I could have interviewed them for this book. I wish I could ask them about how they see it now. Of course, either ends of Norhana make it to the end of 1944, but their heroism is deeply connected to the stories that they had in their head and the way they understood Zionism and what it demanded from Jewish people in the 1940s.

And the deepest darkest moment, the pinnacle of the Holocaust, the valley of death, 32 Jews went into the valley of death and struck a match. Just to just to spark that light,

“just to just to turn on that light for other Jews who were in there because that's how you”

respond to darkness. Matthew, your book out of the sky comes out March 24. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me, Philippe.