World War II parachutists knew they weren’t coming back

How does a failed military mission become a national myth? And how do people who seem to have few military accomplishments become great national heroes? 

These are the questions Canadian Israeli author and journalist Matti Friedman sought to answer when writing his most recent book, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe. 

The book tells the true story of Jewish Allied paratroopers led by MI9, a secret department of the British War Office, during World War II. Friedman focuses in particular on four young volunteers from the then British Mandate of Palestine ‒ Hannah Senesh, Haviva Reik, Enzo Sereni, and Haim Hermesh ‒ who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to rescue Jews, gather intelligence, and support resistance movements. 

“The memory of this mission lives on to some extent in the memory of Israel. And if you drive around Israel, whether you know it or not, you’re going to meet the story of this mission from 1944,” Friedman explained in a webinar hosted by the Ghetto Fighters’ House on 17 May. 

For example, if you drive past the area of Rehovot, you pass a kibbutz called Netzer Sereni, named after Enzo Sereni, one of the mission’s commanders. Similarly, there’s a kibbutz called Lahavot Haviva, named after Haviva Reik, one of the heroines of the mission. 

“The mission is encoded in the Israeli landscape. But if you ask people what actually happened, very few people know,” said Friedman. 

This was exactly the impetus for him to write Out of the Sky. Friedman started writing the book in 2022, but 7 October and the subsequent war changed the meaning of the book for him. He said it shows what Zionists were fighting for some 80 years ago, and that perhaps today we have lost that. 

“Originally, I was thinking of this as an attempt to explain to myself why we have this obviously very important legend, which shaped the landscape of Israel. You understand that these were important characters that are very close to the soul of the country. But what did they actually do? And that struck me as an interesting question because I honestly didn’t know,” he said. 

The legend, as told most simply by Friedman, is that these were people who set out at the darkest moment of Jewish history to save Jews and to fight the Nazis. “If you look into this a bit more deeply, you find that they seem not to have saved Jews exactly or to have killed any Nazis, and yet this mission is one of Israel’s founding myths, and these are some of our greatest heroes.” 

Friedman said that many of these volunteers were young Jewish refugees who had already escaped Europe and then chose to return, despite knowing the danger. By 1942, people in Palestine understood the scale of the Holocaust, creating a desperate atmosphere in which Zionism increasingly felt less like a national movement and more like a final refuge for surviving Jews. 

“These people weren’t soldiers; they were storytellers. They were telling a different Jewish story. They were trying to set an example that we would remember, not because they wanted to be famous, not because they were looking for glory, but because they needed to set an example for Jews facing catastrophe,” he said. 

Friedman didn’t set out to focus the story on Hannah Senesh as she is one of the most well-known people from the mission. But he changed direction after realising why she is of symbolic value. 

“Hannah is the symbol not because she’s the most successful commando, not because her military accomplishments are so great. She has basically no military accomplishments. But if the mission is storytelling, Hannah Senesh is the best writer. She’s the most effective symbol for a mission whose function wasn’t actually military. Its function was literary,” he said. 

“Her story, and the mission as a whole, is meant to set an example, to create a story that will inspire people to action, to move the Jews from passivity to action, and tell a new story about the Holocaust.” 

Friedman tells us that Senesh, born in Budapest in 1921, grew up in an educated and literary family, becoming increasingly disturbed by antisemitism in Hungary. As a teenager, she embraced Zionism and immigrated to what was then called Palestine in 1939. There, she studied agriculture and joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam, where she worked while continuing to write poetry and diary entries. During World War II, after learning about the persecution of European Jews, she volunteered for the dangerous British military mission. 

In 1944, she trained as a paratrooper and parachuted into Yugoslavia to help rescue Hungarian Jews and aid anti-Nazi resistance efforts. By June 1944, Senesh had been in Yugoslavia for some time, and she was dying to get into Hungary because, among other reasons, her mother was trapped in Budapest by herself. Another person in Budapest at that moment was Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who was engineering the murder of all the Jews of Hungary. 

“The Jews of rural Hungary had basically been killed by that time. And the Jews of Budapest are still alive, including Hannah’s mother, and she’s desperate to get there. And her comrades in Yugoslavia are telling her not to cross the border because they realise that if she crosses the border, she’s not coming back,” Friedman said. 

One of her comrades, Reuven Dafni, recalled their final moment together as they approached the Hungarian border during World War II. Before parting, Senesh dramatically handed him a folded note, which Friedman described as almost like a scene from a play or film that reflected her literary upbringing as the daughter of a playwright. Dafni initially found the gesture overly theatrical and threw the note away, but later regretted it and went back to recover it. Inside was what would later become Senesh’s second most famous poem, Ashrei HaGafrur (Blessed is the Match), which opens, “Blessed is the match that flared and lit the flames.” 

For Friedman, they make it clear that Senesh is saying that she and the match are going to be burned and that the act of being burned is going to light the flames, which is ultimately symbolic of the mission. 

“The story of the mission is, in my opinion, expressed beautifully by Hannah in that line she gave to Dafni. She understands that she’s not going to save the Jews. And she’s not going to defeat the Wehrmacht, and she probably can’t even save her mother. What she can do is enact an act of heroism so dramatic that it will inspire other people. And other people will hear what she did. And they will know that someone tried to rescue the Jews. 

“And when people face catastrophe in the future, they will have this story of this match that flared. And something about her flame will be preserved, but she’s not coming back. It’s almost a suicide note, or it’s a last will and testament. And it explains something really incredible about how these characters understood what they were doing,” Friedman said.