From the award-winning, critically-acclaimed author of Pumpkinflowers and Spies of No Country, comes the harrowing true story of a group of idealistic young Jewish Palestinians who, with the help of the British forces, parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944.
From the award-winning, critically-acclaimed author of Pumpkinflowers and Spies of No Country, comes the harrowing true story of a group of idealistic young Jewish Palestinians who, with the help of the British forces, parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944.
The story of the Jewish parachutists who escaped Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine only to return on a British-sponsored mission near the end of World War Two is one that Matti Friedman had heard of but had never understood. Their names were legendary in the early years of the State of Israel, especially Hannah Szenes, best known for her poem "Eli, Eli," who at the age of 23 was tortured and executed in Budapest, the city of her birth. And yet what exactly was the mission, and what had it actually accomplished? What had these parachutists done to become heroes?
Out of the Sky follows four of the parachutists from the spring of 1944 to the operation's dramatic end that winter. The mission was run by British officers and Zionist leaders in Palestine who, faced with the Nazi threat, suspended their mutual distaste but not their mutual suspicion. The British needed multilingual agents behind enemy lines, while the Jewish leaders wanted to somehow fight back against their Nazi murderers. Of the thirty parachutists who jumped, seven were killed, while others performed acts of extraordinary bravery and ingenuity merely to escape back to Palestine. Not a single Nazi was harmed; not a single Jew was saved. Nothing of practical value was gained. And yet the myth of these brave young men and women willing to sacrifice themselves for a larger cause has eclipsed their actual deeds.
In Out of the Sky, Matti Friedman tells the gripping tale of this forgotten moment of history and shows us how story itself can have a power even greater than warfare. And in exploring the line between myth and reality, heroism and futility, and how history remembers what it chooses to remember, he creates an argument that has deep resonance and meaning in our own time.
