Travel around Israel, and you will find streets, squares, and kibbutzim named for Hannah Senesh, Enzo Sereni, and Haviva Reik. While the names are familiar, few Israelis today know who these people were and what they did to deserve such veneration.

Author and journalist Matti Friedman was among those unfamiliar with their stories until he began working on his latest book, “Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe,” which was published on March 24. The book, Friedman’s fifth, recounts the thrilling adventures of these and 29 other Jews from the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish population in Israel) who parachuted behind enemy lines in Europe in 1944 to try to save Jews who had not yet been exterminated by the Nazi killing machine.

“I had a vague sense about who Hannah Senesh [the most famous of the parachutists] was, but I did not know about the others. I think the way in which Hannah has become, in a sense, a Zionist poster child can actually turn people off. They don’t necessarily want to know more, because she seems like a caricature,” Friedman said. (Fittingly, he kept a small plastic Hannah Senesh figurine on the shelf above his desk while writing this book.)

However, once he started looking into these characters, he discovered how intriguing and inspiring they were as real individuals. There was also a key question he was determined to answer: Why are they so important to Israel and Zionism’s founding myth and ongoing narrative, despite not having actually saved any European Jews? Moreover, the Nazis captured 12 of the parachutists and executed seven of them, including Senesh, Reik, and Sereni.

The parachutists were on a double mission, Friedman explains. They had their orders from the Yishuv’s leadership, but they were technically recruits to the British military tasked with working for the MI9 secret service unit, specifically to facilitate the escape of Allied POWs and help downed Allied airmen evade capture by the enemy. After being carefully selected for the mission (32 were chosen from 250 candidates), they were sent to British-controlled Egypt to be trained by the Special Operations Executive. They were taught radio operations and how to connect and fight with partisan groups. From there, they were transferred to Bari, Italy, for flights that would drop them into enemy-controlled territory.

“One of the most interesting characters in the book, I think, is the British officer who runs the mission. His name is [Lt. Col.] Tony Simonds. He had an appreciation of what Jews could bring to the British intelligence effort because of their double identities [because they had escaped the Holocaust to Palestine from various European countries]. They could pretend to be all kinds of different things: Hungarians, Slovaks, or Croats. That was very useful,” Friedman said.

Simonds was fine with these parachutists making contact with local Jewish populations, as long as they had first completed their assigned MI9 tasks. But as far as the parachutists and the political leadership of the Yishuv were concerned, the primary mission was saving Jews.

The problem was that no one was really clear how this was to be achieved, and the parachutists were not given the specific instructions and tools they needed to get the job done.

“For the Zionist leadership and the parachutists, the British mission was a plane ticket, a way to get into Europe… Even the question of what helping the Jews would mean is not clear,” Friedman said.

“There’s this scene [in the book and based on historical records] where the parachutists meet the Zionist leadership after they are recruited. Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, and others are there. The parachutists are being told what their real mission is, and it turns out that no one really knows… Each Zionist leader has a very different idea. What became clear to me is that the only thing that these various missions have in common is that they’re all completely impossible,” he said.

Friedman decided to focus the book’s narrative on four parachutists: Senesh, Sereni, Reik and Haim Hermesh. Hermesh is the least known of the four, likely because he survived. His out-of-print (Hebrew only) memoir about the mission, “Operation Amsterdam,” was an invaluable resource for Friedman.

Like all the other surviving parachutists, Hermesh was no longer alive for Friedman to interview. Instead, the author breathed life into the story by traveling to some of the locations where the parachutists had been in Europe, and by delving into archives.

“Luckily, the documentation is incredible. The Haganah [the primary pre-state Zionist underground militia] archive in Tel Aviv has thousands and thousands of real-time documents from the mission, which really allow one to piece it together and tell it in a gripping way without inventing anything. There are also memoirs and biographies, most of which are not really read anymore. This story was kind of a big deal in the 1950s and 1960s, and then it became kind of forgotten,” Friedman said.

“Out of the Sky” follows its four main characters as they each try to accomplish their missions. To detail here exactly what happened to each of them and the decisions they and their handlers made would spoil for readers the “thriller” aspect of the book.

However, to share that Senesh disappeared after crossing the Yugoslavia-Hungary border and ended up tortured and executed in a notorious Budapest prison would not divulge anything that is not publicly known. The same goes for Reik’s killing in a massacre of resistance fighters by Germans in Slovakia, and Sereni’s demise in the Dachau concentration camp.

“By the end [of writing the book], I came to love the four main characters and felt deeply connected to each of them in a different way. Hannah [the daughter of a famous Hungarian playwright and journalist] was an idealist, a bookworm, and theater kid. She came to Israel at the same age I did, which was 17-18.

“I really like Enzo. He was a fiery character. He also had a very powerful literary imagination. He saw himself as a heroic character and kind of set out to play a heroic role.

“Haim was a keen observer of these events [as we can see from his memoir]. You can see he was a very modest guy. He did incredibly heroic things, but didn’t make too much of them. In his description of events, he subverted the myth even as he was creating it,” Friedman said.

“But the character I probably love the most is Haviva, because she was so human. Her life was incredibly messy, and she was unhappy much of the time, and she tried to make herself happy by using whatever [or whomever] she could. She was unheroic in her personal life, but she seems to have been the most effective of all the parachutists,” he said.

So if Reik was the most successful in the mission, why did Senesh become the most famous of the group?

“Haviva Reik’s personal life kind of ruled her out as the heroine of the mission. That had to be Hannah Senesh, who was much more of a Joan of Arc character. Haviva was just too messy,” Friedman said.

All 32 of the parachutists knew that the chances of their dying were high, and that they would likely become Zionist heroes, but Friedman believes that Senesh and Sereni in particular grasped this concept.

“I think it’s related to their class. They were both from upper-class Jewish families. They both had a very literary European education, and they read a lot of books, so they very much had the idea that they were enacting heroic roles… I think that they understood what they were doing essentially as the creation of a myth of heroism. They knew what a hero does in a great novel or play, and they very consciously set out to be that,” Friedman said.

“Out of the Sky” encourages us to ponder the relevance of the parachutists’ heroism for today. How can Friedman’s excavation of this Zionist founding myth bring the names on those street signs to life for younger generations? The author believes that although Israelis live in a different Israel than the one of 80 years ago, they should understand that it is a state that Hannah Senesh and her colleagues created.

“Of course, there have been big changes, but after October 7 I felt that for the first time I could understand the [book’s] characters, because they inhabited a world where there were no good options, and they had to navigate incredible hostility… I’m not comparing our darkness to theirs, but there is that feeling of lacking good options… These people didn’t get into bed and pull the cover over their heads. They realized that what was necessary was heroic action,” Friedman said.

“I think it’s valuable to kind of go back to the beginning and look at one of the founding myths of this place. It’s not as irrelevant as we would hope, and it’s not as distant as it might have seemed on October 6, 2023,” he said.

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