← Ask Haviv Anything
Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:05]
A
A new episode of Ask Khaliv Anything. This is going to be a very exciting episode. We're very, very happy to have back. Mati Friedman, a 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, the semi autobiographical book, which is also a 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 Yishuv, the Jewish polity, the Jewish community in the land of Israel before the declaration of Israel's independence, who during World War II in what was then mandatory Palestine, were trained by the British and parachuted into Nazi occupied Europe to organize resistance to save stranded Allied soldiers to meet and save the Jews. The most famous of these paratroopers is the poet Hannah Senish, who was famously captured, tortured and eventually executed by the Nazis. Mir we're going to dive into the incredible story of these people, their bravery, their ingenuity, what 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 Mati 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 loom 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 24th. Our episode will also be dropping around then. We're recording in 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 get 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 Colleges, 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 forum 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@patreon.com AskHaviv Anything? The link is in the show notes. Mati, how are you?
- [03:49]
B
Pretty good, pretty good.
- [03:51]
A
We're Israeli. We just pretend it's all fine. Everything's great. Don't even know why you're asking.
- [03:56]
B
Right. We were in the safe room, I guess about an hour ago, and I assume we'll be there at least a couple more times today, but can't complain.
- [04:07]
A
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 Beit Shemesh 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 paratroopers, specifically, can you set the scene for us? It's early 1943. The war is raging in Europe. Most of Europe's Jews are trapped in one stage or another of the genocide. And how many Jews are living then? Let's talk first about the Yishuv. 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?
- [05:23]
B
So there's Something about going back to Jewish history that actually gives reason for optimism or gives a certain kind of confidence in the future, which is very strange for 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 this story takes place, and if you then look outside the window and see where we both 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 splitting it lightly, and we're in the middle of a war 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, it doesn't seem that bad. So there's something about Jewish history that actually makes you see things in a, in a sunnier way, which is a very strange thing to say, but I think it is, I think it is true in early 1944, when this story gets going, the Jewish population of Europe has mostly been murdered already. The bulk of the Jews who 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? 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 this story really takes place as that year progresses. The first agents are parachuted in early 1944 into that part of Europe. And the story really ends at the very end of 1944. And that's the story that I, that I tell in out of the Sky. At the same time, there is a Jewish community in what is then British Mandate Palestine at the time of the state's inception. A few years later, the Jewish population here 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. They 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 I read thousands of them in the Haganah archive until I've even 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, you know, 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 is kind of decimation and disaster and they have no idea what, what is coming. So that's the, the stage upon which this story unfolds. In 1944 you talk about how the
- [08:23]
A
Jews are desperate to join the war effort. This is part of the discussion in the book. And by 1944 they, they know there's been the, the reports about what's happening at Auschwitz, about the scale of the genocide. Ben Gurion is now aware the Yishuv had refrained 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 is actually happening at auschwitz. And by 1944 they are already, you know, 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 to end the Nazi regime as 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 Jewish personnel who do volunteer, even just these three dozen people is as this kind of expendable resource. And so tell us briefly the story of Chaim, one of the paratroopers who. 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 and don't mind if they get captured or die. Or am I maybe I'm exaggerating.
- [10:08]
B
Not, not by much. I mean the, the shuv that is the Jewish community and British Mandate 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 6 million Jews are going to be killed. But they inhabit a more innocent world. I mean they, they don't know about gas chambers and death camps, and it takes years, but for the human mind to just, you know, accept that such things are possible. And that's true also of the Jews in, in Palestine at the time. And it's only really at the end of 1942 that it clicks in part because a group of refugees manages to get to the land of Israel from Poland. And suddenly people believe these terrible stories that, that they've heard and they understand that it's actually happening. And then there's this leap in consciousness from obviously deep concern and confusion about what's going on to panic, because most of the people in. Most of the Jews in British mandate Palestine at the time are people who left their 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 Shuv 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. They begin lobbying to help the war effort in some way. The Zionist movement wanted initially to send Jewish fighting units to the front. They wanted to fight as Jews, as Zionists, in Jewish battalions and 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. There's also just lack of concern for the fate of the Jews at that time. You know, they're. They're told to kind of not make too much noise because the, you know, the idea that the allied war effort is serving world Jewry is playing into anti Semitic propaganda and is actually inflaming 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 Europe contract because of British resistance, to a group of ultimately 32 parachutists who are going to be sent into Central Europe to, to do what is one of the questions of the book. What exactly is. Is their mission? And it really depends who you ask. You know, getting back to Chaim, who you asked about. Chaim is one of the four main characters in the book. And he's a member of a new kibbutz. He's become a pioneer. He's changed his name. He's kind of like many people did at the time. He's assumed a Hebrew name. So he calls himself Chaim Chermesh. Chesh means scythe. So he's named himself for an agricultural implement. And he is on this kibbutz when a child refugee shows up on the kibbutz 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 kibbutz what. What Nazi 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 it means. Deportation is a euphemism for. For their physical destruction. People are being sent in trains to death camps and they're 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, the 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 lines or POWs who've managed to escape. And they're supposed to help these people get back to Allied lines so they can be kind of 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 Chaim, who, like many Jews in Palestine at that time, he hates the British because they're preventing Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine. So you have the situation where the British have promised the Jews a national home, 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 placate 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 win 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 how he ends up on a British bomber about to parachute into occupied Yugoslavia in 1944.
- [15:53]
A
So what was the point? What was the actual strategy? What there's some fascinating things that you write about. This one is Ben Gurion has an opinion, has a view on what the point is, which is unbelievably powerful and poignant, but they're to help organize downed pilots of the allied forces, etc. They think they're to rescue Jews. They, by the way, always end up going to places where. Where their own families were from. So it. Hannes goes to Hungary and Chaim and Enzo goes to Italy. They're looking as well for their own family. So can you lay that out for us? What are the many different missions and ultimately their 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 Ben Gurion 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. Ben Gurion, as usual, saw the world as it is and understood what everything actually means.
- [17:05]
B
Right. The events of the past couple years for me have only reinforced my admiration for people like Ben Gurion and those early Zionists, certainly Herzl, but 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 kind of 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 openly and 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. To get British agents into occupied Europe so they can help British pilots escape and, you know, speak local languages and they're 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. And 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. They do. But their real mission, as far as they're to save Jews. And there's an amazing meeting, which you're alluding to, that happens in Tel Aviv before most of the parachutists leave British mandate Palestine, 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 Gurion is there, and Golda Meir is there, and Elia Golom, who's one of the commanders, Bahagana is 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, you know, 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, and groups of twos and threes. So one of the Zionist leaders, it's Gollum, the Haganah commander. So he's more of a militarist. 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 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 Wehrmacht. Let's just organize them for survival so they can make it to the end of the war. And Ben Gurion 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. I mean, the war is not over yet, and it won't be for a while. But he's already thinking about the day after the war. And he says, what we. 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 had a very literary element to it. In fact, I think you can see Zionism as essentially a kind of storytelling where people are given a different vocabulary to understand themselves and their. 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 aliyah, which means ascent. And, you know, 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. I mean, what is Zionism? How does it start?
- [20:55]
A
You know, political cognitive 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. 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.
- [21:22]
B
Absolutely. And there's something deep in the Jewish consciousness that I think understands the power of stories, because this is a people kept together over 2,000 years, essentially by the power of stories. I mean, they're in 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 in stories, there's no country, there's no government, that there's not even a shared, you know, spoken language for much of Jewish history. 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 Theodore Herzl 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. 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. The thinking behind the mission. It's a very Zionist mission in that storytelling is actually not secondary to the mission. It might be the prime mission.
- [22:37]
A
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 their narrative, my whole shtick 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 decompromising kind of narrative. That is a. It occurs to me, as we're talking, my own set, my own explanation for what's. What's wrong. The dysfunction over on Palestinian politics. I have a lot of complaints about the dysfunction in Israeli politics. It's okay. And everybody. Mati has published significant essays on this, on that as well. But. But it's that exact storytelling. 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 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 Chaim, who finds a few dozen Jews in the forests of Yugoslavia after escaping 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?
- [24:19]
B
Right, so there's, you know, the. There's the stated mission and there's what actually happens on the ground. And I guess it's worth saying what you alluded to earlier, that their families are also there. So for a guy like Chaim, you know, he's in Europe with this military mission, and he's got a secret mission given to him by the Haganah, but his family is trapped in Hungary, and there are just train after train of Jews being sent from Hungary to the death camps at that. At that time, Hannes Senesch's mother is trapped in Budapest when she's sent into Europe. So it's personal. Chaim is in the forest 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'd escape, 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 Jews. And it blows their mind. I mean, we're used to the idea of Jewish soldiers, but of course this is a crazy idea in 1944, certainly someone in a forest in Yugoslavia. So they understand that these two soldiers actually speak Hebrew. And Chaim tells them this story about, you know, 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, 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 that are going to come in and pick up these people and fly them to safety. The, the British aircraft that are going in and out of partisan territory are reserved for military personnel. And 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, 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 defeat of 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 Heim's memoir again because all he could do was tell them this story. Maybe it kept them going for another year, year and a half until the war ended. Maybe many of them, or 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 in Hebrew in a forest in occupied Yugoslavia. But there wasn't anything else he could do.
- [27:22]
A
You mentioned that they go mostly in the hope of saving family for many of them. And I want in that light to talk about the story of Hanasenish. 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 a couple of profound differences. Tell us her story and tell us, I mean, also how her story ends.
- [27:54]
B
Right, So I think it's not a spoiler to say that Hana Sanish'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's as well known as Judah the Maccabee or maybe as. Almost as well known as, as Herzl. 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 Chana is a Hebrew name assumed after her arrival in Israel by Anna Senesh, who is a bookworm from Budapest, as you said, the daughter of a novelist and a playwright and 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. Hannah's older than, 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, is quite a complicated one. But Anne Frank becomes elevated as global icon, a universal icon of childhood and innocence, you know, which innocence destroyed by, 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, that's where they want a Jewish character. And Anne is really interesting and very, very smart, but she's not complicated as an adult would be complicated. And she doesn't challenge people in the way that Channa challenges them. Hannah's response to Jewish suffering is not to write a diary and then, you know, be captured and murdered. Hannah fights. Hannah makes it to the Jewish enclave in, 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 that Frank was extremely young. Of course, I'm talking about the way these characters are. Are understood or the literary or mythic characters of these two women that are. That become famous after. After the war. But Anne Frank dies quietly in a 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 everyone knows Anne Frank and not that many people know Hannes Hannesenish makes it Israel. Just as she finishes high school, just as the war begins, she joins an 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 you're supposed to be a worker. And she's going to milk the cows and she's going to, you know, work in the chicken houses and she does all of those things. And she also writes poetry. And 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 Eli, Eli. And then in a story that's similar to the story of Chaim, she understands what's going on in Europe. She understands that her mother is trapped in Budapest. And her mother, I mean, Hannah doesn't know this, but her mother is living not far away from Adolf Eichmann, 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. With the news tight happening. When Hannah 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, 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. Doesn't work quite as planned.
- [32:12]
A
What do we know about her capture and her fate?
- [32:18]
B
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 Haganah and to some extent by the British. Some of those documents survive in the Haganah archive in Tel Aviv. Hana crosses into Hungary in June 1944 with three other people, including an escaped French POW, and is caught at the border. And one of the twists 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 to German intelligence the whole time. So the. This is maybe a bit too complicated to get into now. But the mission has been penetrated by German intelligence. They know exactly what's going on. It's not clear that that's why they intercept Hanna at the border, but it is certain. She's arrested as she crosses the border into Hungary, which is her 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 in Hungary. Hungary's basically disintegrating. Hungary 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 fraying. And Jews are being shot. Thousands of Jews are being shot on the banks of the Danube and thrown into the river. And Hannah's being held in a military prison, and she's being held as a traitor because she's. She's Hungarian. I mean, she thinks she's. You wouldn't say Israeli, right? That's not a 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 Hana Senesh. But as far as the Hungarians are concerned, she's. She's a traitor. I mean, 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. There's a meeting between them in prison, which is a story truly of Shakespearean proportions, which I think, if a novelist made it up, would seem completely improbable. But it's a true story. They. They're reunited in prison, and ultimately Hannesanish is executed in Prison in November 1944.
- [34:33]
A
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, 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. 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.
- [35:16]
B
That's right. There's this moment in the forest of Yugoslavia where the parachutists, these Jewish parachutists, were in British uniform. They're helping Tito's partisans. And they realize that the partisans don't like them either. And they. The. The. The parachutists are themselves socialists. I mean, these are readers of Marx. These are members of socialist communes called kibbutzim. And they expect to be, I think, greeted at least politely by, you know, fellow socialists in the ranks of the partisans, certainly, because they're on the same side. They're fighting the Nazis. And it. It turns out that that is not the case at all. And in fact, they are disliked intensely by. By many of the partisans 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. Of Manchester or of. Or of London. They have strange accents. They start making up different stories, 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 Chaim, whose wife's name is Dina, tells people that his wife's name is Diana and his daughter's name is Shuli. And he tells people that her name is Sally and he's a Welshman. And that is at a different times, Mother. Parachutists tell people that they're Irish because they assume that the. The Croat peasants in 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, Chaim has an experience with Russian troops who are fighting in support of partisans in 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. And they will not accept that he's a socialist because they say that Jews are speculators and, you know, capitalist blood suckers, so he couldn't possibly be a socialist. And they just realize that there's no. As you 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 during the war.
- [37:51]
A
Yes, it's not going to solve the problem, but also there is nothing else that would solve the problem. 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 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 just. It's tragic. All these angles to 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, you know, should not have been necessary, I think Zionism should have just been a luxury belief of Jewish identity.
- [38:51]
B
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 that you 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 triumphal tone to much of our discourse before October 7, 2023, when people kind of thought that we'd figure things out, you know, that Zionism was a solution for the Jews here and that liberal democracy 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 than it would have been before October 7th. So it's strange to say about a story about Jew parachutists wearing British uniforms 80 years ago, but I think it's very much a story for this moment.
- [39:48]
A
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, nearsighted. He is ordered to return by the leadership of the Yishuv, including Ben Gurion. I think he doesn't listen. He is. It's even stranger than that. In the actual Yeshua, he was in the actual village where he was living. He was a pacifist and he believed in coexistence. And, you know, he would not 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, is respect. It's not a Columbia University pacifist, so to speak. It's a man who has to 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. 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, bespectacled pacifist Enzo, parachute into occupied Europe, into fascist Europe?
- [42:04]
B
I think that that's, that's the question that this book asks. What. What did these people think they were doing? And were they, were they deluded? You know, did they expect some other outcome? Did they think that they were going to beat the Wehrmacht? Did they think they were going to save the Jews? And of course, the answer to all of 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 and a very accomplished person. He already founded a kibbutz. He'd edited a 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 least, at least to Enzo. And he wrote another book that was published posthumously. So he's a very serious. He's a very serious character, but he's almost 40. Hannesen finishes 22 when she jumps out of the airplane. But she's also. We have her writing. She kept a diary and she wrote letters and she was a beautiful writer. 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, and she explains what she thinks her fate is going to be. And this is a poem called Ashreha Ghafur, or Happy is the match, which she leaves with comrades before she crosses the border into occupied Hungary. And which, you know, expresses this, this famous sentiment. It's quite a, quite a well known poem which is Happy is the match that is burned and lights the flame, or burned as it lights the flame. So it's kind of suicidal in plural.
- [43:47]
A
And lights many flames.
- [43:49]
B
Yeah, that's right. Multiple flames. And that the match is burned. And that's Hannah. And she writes it as she crosses the border. So it's clear that she's not unaware of her fate. So why did they do it? And I think that the answer 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. 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'd probably be turned away. Their talents were other talents and they were very much drawn from the realm 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, Les Miserables, or whether it's, you know, other works of great literature which often recount tales of heroism, 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 and the Odyssey is another example, and 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 the covers over your head. And it's not to collaborate, and it's not to lie to yourself about 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 few chances of success, or so it. Or so it seemed. And yet it manages to save the Jewish people in the 20th century. And both of us are immediate beneficiaries 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, neither Enzo nor Hannah 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,
- [46:53]
A
in 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 spark that light, just to turn on that light for other Jews who were in there. Because that's how you respond to darkness. Mati, your book, out of the sky, comes out March 24th. Thank you so much for joining me.
- [47:25]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Khabib.