The Secret Mission to Save Europe’s Jews, with Matti Friedman

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]My God, my God, I pray that these things never end. The sand in the sea, the rush of the water, the crash of the heavens, the prayer of man.

[00:00:12]This is a poem known as Ellie Ellie by a woman named Hannah Senish, a hero of the Second World War and of early Zionism.

[00:00:21]Today my guest Mattie Freriedman tells her complicated story amongst some others. A tale of British warfare against the Nazis and also of a Zionist effort to rescue Jews trapped behind the lines swirling into the final solution in 1944.

[00:00:40]It's really an incredible tale. Let's get into it.

[00:00:43]>> It is a prescription for war invasion of December 7th, 1941.

[00:00:50]They will live in the experience of continue fighting ground in the field and in the street.

[00:01:16]>> Hi, I'm Mary Mlan. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today Mattie Friedman. He's a journalist. He is um a columnist, my colleague at the Free Press and the author of a book, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe.

[00:01:32]Maddie, thank you so much for joining the show.

[00:01:34]>> Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:36]>> So, let's um let's talk about this fascinating story um that you tell uh in this book. Um, and maybe we could start by you setting the scene for us a little bit about what is going on in mandatory Palestine during the Second World War.

[00:01:53]Um, uh, in the First World War, of course, it's a it's a theater of major combat operations. Um, to what extent does any of that approach this part of the world in World War II? And just just in general, set the stage for us. What is life like in this part of the world in the early 1940s?

[00:02:11]>> Sure. So British mandate Palestine, which is what the territory was called at the time, is is kind of a backwater in this war. The closest that the the hot war ever gets to the borders of Palestine is the German advance through North Africa to LLMain. And there's a there's a kind of a a touchandgo moment when it looks like Raml's forces are going to actually reach British Mandate Palestine. And there's kind of a a a mutual freak out that involves the Jewish population of Palestine and the British who are ruling Palestine at the time because it looks like the Germans are about to show up. But then that advance is reversed at Lmain and and and the country basically remains far from the action. So in those years the territory is governed by the British Empire. The British had received the mandate to govern the territory from the League of Nations and was supposed to create a a Jewish national home in the territory. So the Zionist movement was trying to build what we would now call the state of Israel. Wasn't called that at the time. That was going on in the 1940s. Refugees had made it to Palestine. Their arrival had been blocked by the British in the late 1930s in large part because of anger from the Arab residents of the country who were increasingly concerned about Jewish immigration. So in order to plate the Arab world, which the British needs to keep on side in the war, they cut off Jewish um immigration precisely at the moment when it's most needed. when Jews are trying to get out of Europe, you know, desperately and and the gates are closed. So, the Zionist movement in the country is both furious with the British for blocking the arrival of refugees and there's a screen of Royal Navy destroyers in the Mediterranean and they're hunting refugee ships. So, they're furious about that. Of course, these are the the family members of the Jews in Palestine who are being murdered in in Europe. So, it's very very personal. At the same time, obviously, the Jews are not going to be on the side of the Germans in the war. So although they they're very angry with the British, of course they're on the Allied side in the war. And immediately when the war breaks out, they begin lobbying to form Jewish units and and take part in in this world war as as Jews and as Zionists. So there there are tensions between the Jews and the British in Palestine. There are some areas where there's cooperation. The Jews periodically rebel against the British and sometimes they collaborate with the British. And this mission in 1944 is an example of of collaboration where the side where the sides basically put aside their differences and and say, "Listen, we have a mission. So, let's just forget all the other stuff and see what we can do in central Europe in 1944." Well, before we get to the mission, which is an incredible story or set of related stories, but um just a few more moments on on the scene, um obviously the project of Zionism is well advanced at this point. We're only a few years away from the declaration of a state. Um, can you he generalizations or is is this kind of a an impossible question about the sort of Jews who are collecting in uh what will soon be Israel once the war begins as opposed to waves of immigration before then? Because your story generally involves people who have fled. It generally involves the refugees who maintain close connections and recent connections back to Europe. So who who are as it were the old guard Zionists and and what can you say about the the new wave that's coming in with the war?

[00:05:31]>> Right. So there had been a wave in the 30s of Jewish immigrants from from Germany, not not surprisingly. And before that there had been waves mainly from from Eastern Europe. The the people leading the project in Palestine are mostly East European socialists, borderline communists, people who lived on kibbutim, which is this Zionist invention. It's a kind of a communal farm setup. So people like David Benorian, Golden Meter, they're they're running the show and they're they very much see themselves as the Jewish front in the global workers revolution.

[00:06:05]They're they're very much on the on the left and they're very adamantly secular and and anti-religious and they're the leaders of, you know, the proto state until 1948 and then they become the leaders of the state of Israel after 1948. and they're trying to govern this Jewish population which exists alongside a sizable Arab population. The Jews are kind of a mly crew. There's a an ideological hardcore of people who believe in this project and came in order to create a Jewish state. And there are large numbers of people who just had nowhere else to go and washed up in Tel Aviv which was a new city at the time. Tel Aviv was founded in 1909.

[00:06:45]So when the war breaks out, Tel is just 30 years old. So the place is very new and unformed in their tensions with the local Arab population and their tensions with the British and the British are worried about other threats to them in the region. So it's an unsettled situation in Palestine in the 1940s but not not an all-out war which was you know happening of course in many other parts of the world at that time.

[00:07:09]>> Okay. So, let's talk about British policy here and and what interest the Brits take in using um I I think that's the right verb based on the story that you tell um uh using uh recent refugees from Europe who have come to settle um in Palestine um for operations back on the continent. Um tell us about MI9. I mean tell us about the superructure here um that is conducting this stuff and what they have in mind.

[00:07:38]>> Right. So the the British military authorities in Palestine do not trust the Jews because they know and they're absolutely right about this that if you form Jewish units and arm people and train them then everything that you're training them to do against the Germans during the war will be used against the British as soon as the war is over. They understand that the Jews are out for independence and that a clash is coming between the Jews in Palestine and the British Empire. So the mainstream authorities in Palestine are very reluctant to um to agree to these Jewish demands to fight the Nazis. So you have these very um kind of emotional pleasing in 1939 from the Zionist movement. Let us fight. Let us form units. Let us go to Europe. There's a plan to send a thousand commandos, parachute a thousand Jewish commandos into Europe to lead a Jewish uprising in Europe. So there are a lot of very colorful and not very practical plans and the British say no to all of them. And ultimately that plan to to send a massive number of commandos into Europe shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until it becomes this mission that um that I'm describing. The mission is run by a pretty obscure office of British military intelligence called MI9. Of course, we're familiar with MI5 and MI6, which are still around. MI9 is not. MI9 was in charge of escape and evasion. So, their job is to extract British pilots and PS who are behind enemy lines and help them get back to to allied territory. they can be put back on bombers and sent back into the war.

[00:09:00]So that's the job of of MI9. In these parts, it's being run by an officer named Tony Simmons, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Simmons, and he's been in Palestine since the 1930s. And he is quite um sympathetic to the Jewish cause, unlike many of his colleagues.

[00:09:15]And he understands something very interesting about the Jews in Palestine, which is that almost everyone has a double identity because people have come from other places. So people have come from Germany and Poland and Romania and uh and France. So if you need agents to go back into Europe, this is an incredible pool of people. They're completely loyal to the Allied cause. Of course, they're not going to fight for the Germans. Um and yet they have these identities which can help them blend in in occupied Europe. So that's the the origin of the plan on the British side.

[00:09:46]The British need people in in this case in central Europe. We're talking about Hungary, Slovakia, uh, um, Yugoslavia, Romania. They need people who can speak local languages and who can be dropped in and serve as liaison with local partisans and local resistance forces.

[00:10:04]So, they'll be dropped in with radios and they'll communicate with British headquarters and and ultimately 32 people are are dropped as part of this mission. So, that's what the British that's what the British think is going on. the Jews have a different idea.

[00:10:20]>> Well, indeed. So, this is the uh the you lead me right to the natural um next question uh which is the I mean the the energy of your story comes from this tension between what the British are up to and then what the commandos themselves um uh believe is their is their goal on the ground here. Um not necessarily contradictory to the British goal, but certainly um let's just say supplementary uh to it and and perhaps primary for them. So what what is going on in their minds? What are they going to Europe to do?

[00:10:50]>> Right? The priority list is different.

[00:10:52]And in some ways, you know, English is written from left to right and Hebrew is written from right to left. So the Jews were just reading the priority list backwards. So the British idea was go and help us get these pilots out and if you can, you're allowed to, you know, help the local Jews and and make contact with uh with underground forces. the they understand that there are Jews left in these territories, not many. But um they were allowed to do that, but they weren't dropped for that purpose. The the the Zionist movement sends these people, at least this is the explicit mission, to to save Jews. They're they're happy to help the British if that's possible. But their main priority is to do something about the industrialized slaughter of Jews in Europe, which no one is stopping because there's no I mean there's no state that cares about these people to the same extent that the Germans care about annihilating them. So no one's bombing the death camps and no one's bombing the rail lines and millions of people are just being murdered. And the Zionist movement is essentially helpless. They can't do anything about it. They don't have an air force. They don't have an army. They're just a minority of people living under British rule. So the only way to get into Europe is to wear a British uniform, get on a British bomber and and serve the British. So you have this kind of ironic situation where people who basically hate the British. I mean, one of my characters uh uh actually was interned by the British. He was he fled Europe, was caught by a British ship in the Mediterranean and was interned. And so he he was in a British prison and then he wore British uniform and you know took an oath of loyalty to the king and went into Europe as a British soldier even though he'd never been to Britain and none of these people had ever been to Britain as a matter of fact. So there's a very complicated identity game going on here and the question is is really who's using who. The British think they're using Jews for their own purposes. And you know, there's a lot of stories about the special operations executive where they're using local people and they're dropping, you know, French resistance types into France. And because these people aren't British, they're they're more expendable. So, you know, there's an expectation that they're not likely to come back. If they do, it's great.

[00:12:52]But, um, but many of them don't, and many are just swallowed up by the war.

[00:12:55]So, the British think that's, you know, that that's what's happening. They're using these people. The Jews think they're using the British. They actually refer to this mission repeatedly as a plane ticket. So what the British mission to is to them as a plane ticket.

[00:13:07]What they want to do is somehow get into Europe and somehow save Jews in Europe.

[00:13:11]Although how they're supposed to do that is completely unclear.

[00:13:15]You quote the uh the was it the minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moine. The scheme would remove from Palestine a number of active and resourceful Jews in their training need not take place in Palestine. the chances of many of them returning in the future to give trouble seem slight.

[00:13:31]>> Um, good good expression of the utter uh cynicism and ruthlessness of the of the British approach here. Um, well, but I I worry that what has to be juaposed against that though is a kind of woolly lack of um lack of clarity uh in terms of what uh uh these commandos are meant to do for the Jews once they're in Europe. I mean, say more if you can.

[00:13:57]Maybe there isn't much more to say about what tools, what ways of thinking they are given by the Zionist leadership.

[00:14:06]It's all well and good and sort of noble and beautiful to say go do something for the Jews. But that sort of sounds like suicide and of course in most of your cases turns out to be without more to it. Was there even an effort to put more to it?

[00:14:20]>> Right. So there's a secret meeting in Tel Aviv before these people are dispatched. And there's a description of it in a memoir written by one of my characters, one of the few who manages to to return. And he describes a meeting with the top leaders of the Zionist movement include in including David Bengorian who would go on to be the prime minister of Israel and the commander of the Hagana, which is the kind of the proto IDF and there are a few other important people there. And they've come to tell the parachutists what their real mission is. So they have this British mission, which is supposedly the real mission, but they know that it's not the real mission.

[00:14:48]What is their real mission? Each of the Zionist leaders tells them something completely different according to the people who are present. So one of them says your job is to arm and train Jews for armed revolt the year before that there had been the Warsaw ghetto uprising which was led by by Zionists in Warsaw and this is what they wanted more uprisings. The Zionist movement which is kind of built on this idea of Jewish action and military bravery and a rejection of pacivity. The Zionist movement cannot live with the story of the Holocaust. They they can't live with the fact that millions of people are being put on trains and gassed. They need to see people fighting back. So, one of the the Zionist leaders says, "This is your job. Train them to fight back." Another one says, "Listen, no.

[00:15:29]There's no point in getting people involved in military uprisings that are certain to be crushed, as of course the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was. Just help them survive until the end of the war and just kind of, you know, make sure that they can make it to the end of the war." Um someone else uh tells them I mean this is day this is Bengorian the kind of the top guy says no actually your your role is not related to the war itself it's related to the day after the war as soon as the war is over we need to see a wave of Jews coming from Europe demanding to reach the land of Israel demanding to reach Palestine the British are keeping the gates closed he says we don't have enough people here to to kind of break open the gates from the inside so we need a human wave moving along the rail lines of Europe along the rivers of Europe and that human wave is going to break open the gates of the land of Israel and help us create our state. So in his mind, the the their job was to kind of make it to the end of the war and then engineer this this human wave, which to a very large degree does materialize. But what all those missions have in common is that they are in no way within the reach of 32 people who are being dropped in twos and threes across a half dozen access occupied countries. So they're given this mission which is obviously not not possible. So not only do the missions contradict, none of them are really feasible, but no one drops out after this meeting. They they all go and it's a strange setup to a very strange story where you know when we learn about this story and one of the characters here, Khan Senes is a national heroine in Israel. Everyone knows her name. She's on postage stamps and schools and there are 32 streets named after her. in Israel. What we all know about these heroes is that they went off to fight the Nazis and save Jews in the world war in second in the Second World War. And um it seems that they didn't save a single Jew or kill a single Nazi.

[00:17:18]So the question is why is this story famous? How did it become a myth? How do people whose military accomplishments were so slim, how did they become legends?

[00:17:27]>> And what were the attitudes? I I presume they were different individual to individual of these uh veteran Zionists many of whose families you know had been in this part of the world for some time now staking out you know a new future for the Jewish people. What were their attitudes towards the Jews who had remained behind um uh in I mean in conditions that that you know increasingly that the the the alarm bells had been going off throughout the 30s. what what what was the thought amongst soon to be Israeli Jews about the Jews of Europe at this point?

[00:18:02]>> Right. So, one thing that I learned when researching this story, which is not something that I ever completely grasped, is that the Jews in Palestine have no idea what's going on in Europe until 1942.

[00:18:12]>> So, we're, you know, we know the story.

[00:18:14]We know where it's going. We have we're unlucky enough to grow up with words like death camps and gas chambers. And we just think those things, we know they existed. But in 1940 1941 no one could believe that such a thing could exist.

[00:18:27]So there are all these wild stories coming out of Europe. There have been a lot of wild stories coming out of Europe in the first world war and many of them turned out to be false. So there was this tendency to say okay listen things are bad in Europe but it's just it's another war and you know Jews will survive the war and there are reports of deportations but it's unclear what deportation means. That just sounds like people are being moved from one place to another. And it's only in 1942 when a group of refugees from Poland reaches the land of Israel reaches Palestine that it's only then that people in Palestine understand that people are being exterminated and there's there's panic in um in Palestine and the newspapers are printed with a black border representing mourning and there are these mass rallies and it's at that moment that this mission is really born when the Zionist movement says we have to do something what what exactly can we do so there's this panic about the fate of the Jews of Europe which are we're talking about people who are in many cases the parents and siblings of the Jews in Palestine. So it's not it's not theoretical. Most of the people had come here in the 20s and 30s and their families were back in Europe and the Zionist dream had been that they would eventually come. So the Zionists see themselves as kind of a beach head or as a you know as pioneers who are clearing the way for the eventual immigration of the Jews of Europe and they suddenly realize that they're they're actually Noah's arc. I mean there nothing else is going to be left. It's just it's just them. Mixed with that is this incomprehension about the fact that that the Jews seem not to be fighting back, which really I mean it's almost a ridiculous thing to say about Europe.

[00:20:00]It's, you know, what were people really supposed to do? But in the Zionist ethos, of course, you're supposed to fight. It's all about, you know, power and and a rejection of pacivity in favor of action. And they they can't understand why the Jews of Europe seem not to be fighting back. And that's why the Zionist movement makes such a big deal of events like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or like this this mission, the mission of the parachute. It's because these are examples of of action which is very much in line with the Zionist ethos and when the state of Israel is founded and they create Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel is called the day of a memorial for the Holocaust and heroism.

[00:20:38]They're very careful to stress the heroism because the Zionist ethos demands heroism. Of course, there are many different kinds of heroism. The Jews of Europe were heroic in many ways.

[00:20:47]I mean, just feeding your family for another day was heroic and not losing your humanity was was heroic. And there are many ways of being heroic. But in the very kind of crude um lines of of that time, if you weren't holding a rifle and fighting back, you were you were a coward. And it it took the state of Israel many years to kind of wean itself off this idea that the Jews had gone like lambs to the slaughter. And there was a lot of suspicion of Holocaust survivors when they came to this country. You know, how did you survive? You know, why did you survive when other people didn't? What did you have to do? So the, you know, an event like the Holocaust is very very hard to understand right after it happens. And it uh trickles through the human psyche in many ways, many of them not particularly productive. And it takes a couple decades before Israel kind of learns to treat these people with respect and to see this event in in a kind of rational way. And and none of that was true, of course, in 1943, 1944.

[00:21:47]>> Well, let's zoom in on Hannah Senesh. Um uh because she's famous and because you made reference to her earlier. Who is she? Where does she come from? tell us about her mother. Um, and then let's talk about how she's actually prepared.

[00:22:02]I mean, what kind of training and tools is she given for this mission?

[00:22:05]>> So, Hanosen is the most famous participant in this mission and essentially she's the only name that really survives to the present. There are a few other um parachutists who have kibbutim named after them and and streets, but uh Kana is really the symbol of of the mission. She was 22 when she was dropped into Yugoslavia in the spring of 1944. She had come to Israel immediately when she finished high school in 1939. So she'd really she got out at the very last moment. She grew up in an upper middle class household in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. Her father is a playwright and a novelist and a journalist. And that's that's important to understanding who Hana is because she's very literary and she's a bookworm and she grows up going to the premieres of her dad's plays at the theater. So she has a very theatrical idea, I think, of what a hero is, what a quest is, what bravery looks like, and that's very important to the way that she acts afterwards. She manages to get out of Budapest. She leaves her mother behind. This is a huge kind of uh and painful point for for Hana. She manages to make it to British Mandate Palestine. She goes to an agricultural school for girls where she transforms herself into a pioneer, a Zionist pioneer. So, she wants to be kind of what they would have called a new a new Jew. So, the new Jew doesn't write poetry, which she did. Um, or, you know, uh, read fancy books, they work.

[00:23:32]You milk the cows, you plow the fields.

[00:23:34]That's what it was all about. The Jews had enough intellectuals. They didn't need any more of that. They were going to be, you know, farmers and fighters.

[00:23:39]So she tries to do that and she joins a commune called Stoyam which uh means fields of the sea. It's a beautiful name in Hebrew. It's a kibbut still exists to this day on the Mediterranean coast. And she's miserable and when you read her diaries you can tell that she's doing her best to be a farmer but she hates it. You know she she's meant to be something else and she doesn't like washing pots in the kitchen and folding socks and she misses her mother and she's quite lonely and she's incredibly intelligent and sensitive which I think did not make her life easier. She's writing poetry and kind of hiding it from her uh from her comrades and that all of this is is going on in 1942 1943 when the news starts coming from Europe about the the murder of the Jews of of Europe. Her mother's trapped in Budapest in 1944. Another person in Budapest, not far away from her mother's house actually is Adolf Aishman, who's the SS officer in charge of murdering every Jew in Hungary. So the murder of the Jews in rural Hungary is is completed by that summer. The Jews of Budapest are left for for last. And that's the backdrop to Hana's decision to join this British mission. She is given parachute training in in Galilee in northern Israel at an air base that called Ramat Davidid, which is now an air base uh run by the Israeli Air Force and at the time was run by the RAF. So she does parachute training. At the time, parachuting was a crazy thing to do. It's hard to remember, but you know, the airplane had barely been invented and jumping out of an airplane was something absolutely crazy and there were no reserve parachutes. So jumping was still a big deal from parachute school.

[00:25:09]>> How we talk about drone warfare today just to give people a sense of like you know when people talk about drone swarms you know parachute combat operations had that sense of modernity and the cutting edge and you know sort of crazy what will they think of next kind of qualities to it that for us now it seems sort of humrum.

[00:25:28]>> Right now you can you know pay a few couple a couple hundred bucks and go skydiving. But that idea, they didn't have that idea then. Yeah, it was this futuristic form of warfare and the Nazis had used it really effectively when they captured Cree and this was the new thing, you know, soldiers flying from the air and um it was just an incredible kind of heroism. So there's a glamour associated with parachuting. That's a big part of the mission. There's a reason that these heroes are not remembered as commandos or spies or soldiers.

[00:25:58]We call them parachutists. That was their act of of heroism. So, she's sent to parachute school and then she's moved to Cairo where the the British MI9 has an office disguised as a dance school in Cairo and they train her in how to operate a radio, how to use Morris code, that kind of thing. From Cairo, she's flown to Bari, which is a port in Italy.

[00:26:20]It had just been freed by Allied forces.

[00:26:23]And so it was kind of battered and people were really hungry and the place had been bombed and the allies were were running an airfield in Bari that they were using to both send bombers into Europe and also infiltrate agents. So she's put on a British bomber in the spring of 1944 flown across the Adriatic and then dropped into Yugoslavia with instructions to cross the border between Yugoslavia and Hungary. Vivid descriptions of Bari uh in Eivelyn W's novels of the Second World War. Or I guess it's it's unconditional surrender is the novel. I think it's the third of the trilogy where he talks about um sort of honor >> that Hannah's working with um of which of whom w takes a dim view.

[00:27:01]>> Interesting. I actually had no idea that he described Barry and I wish I I wish I'd known that. I'll check that book out. But yeah, there were there were a lot of British there's a lot of British activity around around Bari. Now it's kind of it's a city that few people visit and I did when I was writing this book because I wanted to see what what it was like. can actually the the airport in Bari is the airfield that they used to infiltrate the agent. So if you fly to Bari, you'll land where Hanesh both landed and took off in 1944.

[00:27:28]>> Well, while of course, you know, served with the partisans in Yugoslavia himself and, you know, as you might imagine, a sort of tradath uh right-wing Brit uh took a pretty dim view uh of everything that was going on. Um uh uh and uh you know it's it's interesting that tr sorry this is a digression but I I I I like to recommend books but that trilogy which is a magnificent just work of literature um and doesn't isn't as well remembered as for example brides revisit brides revisited and some other some comedy books he wrote in addition to brides but I I think it is his masterpiece that the trilogy on the war and um it also sort of represents his own evolution on the question of of Zionism of of Jews news where in the first book uh uh and you know I think I'm getting all these details right it's been a few years he's one of his characters is sort of talking about Churchill and and they're not a fan and in the list of his unattractive qualities you know a blowhard this a that a Zionist comma but the third volume unconditional surrender which is written after the war very much grapples with the Holocaust uh and was very shaken by it um as so you know so many Brits who had sort of the middle class um polite anti-semitism um all of a sudden having to confront you know what uh what what what Nazi anti-semitism actually wrought.

[00:28:47]>> That's so interesting. I'm I'm going to run and read those books. The the world that Han is operating in is very much that that Evelyn Wah world. I mean, Anthony Simmons, who's the the officer who I mentioned, who's running MI9 in this area, he leaves an unpublished memoir, which I was lucky enough to find in the Imperial War Museum, and it's an incredible document, and it's very unfiltered, and there's a reason there's a reason it wasn't published, but he's an incredibly compelling character, and he has this really British ability to write, and he's very funny, and he loves language and um and he I mean, he describes himself as an anti-semite. And now, this is a guy who's very sympathetic to the to the Jewish cause.

[00:29:25]I mean, his Jewish subordinates love him. They they love him. They understand that he's on their side. But he describes himself in the memoir as I think he says, "I suffer from the the common British anti-semitism or some something like that, even though nothing in his actions would would communicate that." But that quote from Lord Moine that you um that you brought in earlier and and I'm glad that you did says something about the the climate in which our agents are forced to operate. So, you know, they they show up in Yugoslavia and discover that, you know, even though they're fighting on the side of the Yugoslav partisans and they're fighting as British officers and radiomen, people don't like them because they're Jews. And they figure out very quickly that they it's it's a much better idea to say that there's something else because the partisans, the smarter ones, at least understand that although they're wearing British uniforms, they don't sound British. So, they ask them, "Who are you? Where are you from?" And after a few unfortunate incidents where they realize that these people hate Jews, they start saying that they're Welsh. So they come up with a whole story about how they miss Cardiff.

[00:30:25]And of course, none of them have been to Wales. They've never been to the UK, but they have to somehow explain why they why they're wearing British uniforms, but but same for him. I think at one point he one of the agents tells people he's he's Irish and uh his wife he has a wife back in in uh in in British Mandate Palestine whose name is Schula I think and he tells people that her name is Sally.

[00:30:49]So uh you know they have to kind of change who they are because they realize that they're even though they're operating with the allies this is still a very hostile environment and the British don't necessarily trust them and the partisans don't necessarily like them. one one of the characters meets um Red Army parachutists who are operating with the communist partisans in in Slovakia and he tells them that he's a Jew from a from a socialist commune, right? He's basically a communist and he reads Karl Marx and knows all about it and they don't believe him. The Soviet soldiers don't believe him because they think Jews are speculators and capitalists and they they cannot believe that a Jew could be a socialist. So for for a lot of these people it's an education and you know what the world is like and they have this idea that if they can only create a state and kind of be like everyone else it'll be French people and Polish people and Russians and there's going to be you know some kind of Jewish nationality and everything's going to be normalized. You know there are strong hints in 1944 that that's not likely to happen. So Hannah ultimately, I guess we're now what in the in the summer of 1944, she will attempt to make her way to Budapest. Um, you you already set the scene for us a bit, the extermination of the Hungarian Jews in the countryside. I guess I don't know, you tell me if it's completed by June, but Budapest is is is um is up soon. It's an incredible time uh for a a Jewish I've I've called them commandos, but I will switch to parachutist in different era to to a title that they would have held proudly.

[00:32:22]Um uh it's a hell of a time uh to make your way to your home city in the midst of this absolute maelstrom. I mean, it's a way I mean, for folks who, you know, who've not gotten into the weeds of this stuff, I mean, 1944, it's, you know, um uh Normandy is happening imminently. I guess it it happens just before her last transmission. Um, you know, we're we're less than a year out from victory in Europe. I mean, this is the endgame for Nazism. And yet, as you know, Maddie, um, this is the most savage, violent uh uh we we are in the the absolute maximum velocity of the swirling of the abyss. That is the final solution. It is only rotating faster and faster as 1944 goes on. And and it's just to to kind of play around with my metaphors here, like the top is also starting to like teeter like like the thing is starting to fall apart, which does nothing to diminish the violence. Um what a hell of a time to try to make a run for Budapest, >> right? I mean they it's it's you know when you go back to historical documents and I spend a long time when I was re researching this book in the Hagana archive which is the Hagana was the Jewish underground before the creation of the Israeli army and they have an amazing archive and there's there are thousands of documents and they're related to this mission and I'm spending time with these documents and it's just amazing to read the documents of the time because they don't know what is going to happen. And so if you're reading books about it or memoirs written afterward, they know that they're about a year from the end of the war and but but in the documents they have no idea. I mean, no one has any idea. They're they're kind of navigating in the fog and they're trying to figure out what to do tomorrow, but they have no idea what's going to happen. And when you're when you're doing the research, you kind of have to >> enter their headsp space and also forget what is what is going to happen. So in in June 1944, Hannah wants to cross the border from Yugoslavia into Hungary. Her her crossing had been delayed. She was supposed to go a few months earlier and just as she landed in Yugoslavia, Hungary came under direct German occupation. Until that point, Hungary was an ally of the Third Reich, but they've been kind of independent and uh and and that changes and Hungary is essentially occupied by German divisions and come it becomes a puppet state.

[00:34:30]That's probably the best way to describe it. Um and then but Hannah insists on going anyway. and her comrades, the other parachutists are trying to talk her out of it because they understand that if she crosses the border into Hungary, she's probably not going to come back. And of course, they're right.

[00:34:43]She isn't going to come back. And one thing you learn when you read, you know, the writing of the people who are involved is what's surprising, I think, to someone who grows up with the myth of heroic Hana Senes is that her comrades don't like her very much. Their comrades are men and and Hana's very stubborn and she has her own ideas. She doesn't listen to them. She doesn't think that they're smarter than her and they don't want her to go and she insists on going and eventually they you know they give in and she's clearly going to go. So she crosses the border with three other with three other people. One is an escaped French P who's working for for British intelligence and there are two Hungarian Jews who've managed to make it out of Hungary and are trying to go back in to to extract more Jews. She's heading off toward toward the border and um a comrade who who survives is with her and he describes this scene where they they shake hands and she presses into his palm a poem that she that she wrote kind of a classic honest mood. It sounds like a scene from a play where the heroine is about to uh stride off to meet her fate and she leaves behind the last message.

[00:35:39]So it's it's a bit Jon of arc I think in a in a conscious way. I mean, Hana is very much conscious of the hero's quest and the way this is supposed to look.

[00:35:48]And she knows that she has to go to Hungary because that's what the heroine is supposed to do. And her mother's trapped in Budapest. She's not going to leave her there, even though it's not clear exactly how she's going to find her. So, she she crosses the border and is immediately arrested on the other side of the border. And one thing that I didn't know when I started researching this book is that the entire mission is transparent to to the Abbear to German intelligence from from the outset. I'd never known that. That's not part of the official story of this mission, but it's quite clear that the the couriers who are running messages for um for the Zionist office that's running this operation, the couriers all work for the Germans. So, the Germans know more or less what's what's going on. We don't know if that's the reason she was arrested when she crossed the border, but it does make sense. Well, Hannah wouldn't be the first or or last hero um to uh to not be super popular with her peers and to have a a somewhat heroic conception of themselves.

[00:36:41]>> In fact, that goes with the territory.

[00:36:42]That's almost, you know, that's one of the demands of being being a hero. If you're really nice and easygoing and a team player, you're probably not going to be Achilles.

[00:36:50]>> Yeah.

[00:36:52]You know, it's a hard story, but you have to tell the story of of Hannah in captivity and and in particular the role of her mother. Um, which is just it's just absolutely um well, I almost don't want to characterize it. It's it's it's a terrible thing and a remarkable thing.

[00:37:08]So, what what happens to to Hannah uh in in prison or in jail? So, she's caught on the border and then she's um she's tortured on route and makes it to a prison in Budapest, which is a notorious military prison. So, she's back in the city where she was born. She's not far from from, you know, the home where she where she grew up, but she's in a she's in a prison. And this is June 1944. Her mother's at home in their nice house on on Rose Hill in Budapest and and someone knocks on her door and she opens it.

[00:37:39]It's it's morning. It's about 8:00 a.m.

[00:37:40]according to her recollection of this and and it's a police officer in plain clothes and he says, "You have to come with me to the headquarters of military intelligence." And she says, "What's going on?" He doesn't really know or he won't tell her. She gets dressed and she she goes with him and she's seated in a room facing a military interrogator whose name we know. His name was Lieutenant Roa. And he asks her, "Where's your daughter?" And she says, "She's in Palestine." Which is the truth as far as she knows. She has no idea that Hana has joined the British army and has set out on this mission. She thinks she's safe in this agricultural commune on the beach near Caesaria, which is where Hana was a few months before. So he asks her again, "Where's your daughter?" And she says she's she's she's far away from here. In fact, it's the only thing that's really keeping her going through this war is the knowledge that at least her daughter is is far from the war and and is safe. He asks her several times and makes her sign a declaration saying that Hana is not uh you know that Hana is in is in Palestine. And then the door opens behind her according to her account. and two men bring in this woman who she doesn't recognize and the woman has matted hair and she's missing one of her front teeth and she's bruised and a second later she realizes that it's Hannah and she hasn't seen her for 5 years and that's how they meet and it's it's like a scene from Shakespeare. I mean, it could be King Lear, and if my book was a novel, I think it would be accused of uh of a lack of lack of realism, but that's really how it happened, according to Katherine, who's on his mother, who lives who leaves us a very detailed account of it. So, they're they're reunited in prison and and ultimately they're imprisoned together, not in the same cell. So Katherine can see Hana in a different part of the prison but can't talk to her and can't touch her and can't avert the fate that I think that they both realize is yeah is coming.

[00:39:30]>> Um and and at one point doesn't her mother uh Katherine believe that Hana has been killed and she attempts suicide. I mean there's just an awful sort of series of events here, >> right? Katherine is so just shocked and depressed by by by these events that she attempts suicide in the cell and it fails and they're they're imprisoned in the same prison for several months.

[00:39:52]Eventually, Catherine is released at a moment when it seems that the Red Army is about to liberate Budapest. So, the Hungarian regime is is shaky and they decide that they'd better be nice to their political prisoners because they're about to be liberated by by the Allies. And so they they release Catherine and eventually she's she's uh arrested again. She's um she's kind of put on one of the death marches, manages to escape. So she has her own she has her own story. Um and Hana is, you know, repeatedly interrogated and um and ultimately executed in November in the yard of this prison. She was 23. And there's this note uh that I have from your book. Dear mother, I don't know what to say. Only this. A million thanks and forgive if you can. You know well why words aren't necessary. With endless love your daughter, >> right? I mean that note is amazing for many reasons. First of all, if you come to Jerusalem, you can see that note.

[00:40:52]It's in the National Library. It's on display at the at the National Library of Israel along with a few of Hana's poems. And she obviously scribbles this note with a pencil on a piece of paper and she sticks it in the in a pocket and then her clothes are later given to her mother and they find this note in in the pocket. And and this story is much of the story is about names. People keep changing their names. It's a story about fluid identity. So when she grows up in Budapest, her name is Anna Senesh. And then she moves to the land of Israel and becomes a pioneer and gives herself a Hebrew name. So now she's Kana Senanishes and then she's inserted by the British back into Europe and they call her agent Minnie. So she has many many names and in this note she has no name at all. She's kind of she's transcended politics. She's not part of any national story. It's just your daughter. It's kind of the most basic relationship and the you know the the only relationship that that matters in the end is is that one >> and the complexities of this relationship too and just for the for Catherine you know um it's all well and good that your child wants to be a hero uh and serve the Zionist cause and fight the Nazis etc etc. Meanwhile you were taking solace this whole time just knowing that your child was safe. How pissed would we all be? How furious uh to realize that your kid has gone and done something like this when you thought that the one silver lining in this whole human tragedy which is probably going to kill you. Odds are I mean it's incredible that Catherine survives. Um is it at least Anna made it? this must have been crushing for for Catherine. And she she deals with it admirably and she tries to help her daughter. And when they release her from prison at that moment when it seems that the Red Army is about to arrive, she tries to get a lawyer to help Hana. And the lawyer tells her, "Listen, she's on trial for treason. She's a Hungarian national who was caught with a British radio transmitter. So there's not much that they can do. But but he says, "Don't don't worry. You know, she'll just be imprisoned until the end of the war. the end of the war is clearly coming and she'll be released at the end of the war. No one expects her to be, you know, executed so so quickly. And then Catherine makes this really unlikely escape. She's not in prison in Budapest, but there's a um a coup uh carried out by the Aroc cross, which is essentially the Nazi party in in Hungary. But they are now in control and groups of Jews are just being seized by armed militia men in the streets marched to the Danube which is the big river that runs through Budapest between Buddha and Pest and they're being shot from the banks of the Danube into the river and this is happening to thousands of people and somehow she manages to avoid that fate. She's um she's put on one of the death marches. She manages to just slip aside, hide in a convent, and um eventually she makes it to to Israel, which I mean didn't exist when she arrived there, but it it comes into existence in 1948. And then she has to live alongside this myth that's built around Khanesh. So Hanosen is one of the great heroins of Zionism. And soldiers go off to battle in 1948 singing Hanosen songs. So she has to be part of that while feeling, I imagine, exactly the way you described, which is this absolutely crushing sense of futility that she could have been safe. I mean, she was out. She'd escaped the Holocaust. She came back. It's one of the most amazing things about this mission is that all 32 participants were people who escaped the Holocaust and made it to relative safety and then made the incredible decision to parachute back in. I'm sorry we're not going to have more time because this is just one story of several that you zoom in on uh in your book. Um Enzo Sereni, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

[00:44:42]I mean I I just just cuz I have an interest in Dao. Um and I've stood in that crematorium numerous times. Um where of course he's he's killed. Um was was just a another gripping I mean all these tales are just sort of incredible but also sort of disastrous.

[00:45:00]You know, this is this is not a story of um sadly of uh of of operational excellence. Um not that everything is the fault of the parachutist, far from it. Um but the odds are steep. The resources are limited. The expectations, the expectations of the British alone to, you know, be part of these escape networks already pretty ambitious, already pretty dangerous. you layer on the Zionist expectation of uh this mission to on some level save the Jews of Europe and it's just it's just a little crazy. The whole thing is just a little crazy, >> right? And my conclusion ultimately is that this can't be understood as a military mission. It's very hard to understand as as a mission of of a kind that would be at the center of a regular World War II book. you know, um, you know, the assassination of Hydra in Prague, great book about that called HH, one of my favorite books, and that's a pretty classic story where the SOE sends in two assassins and they reach Prague and they kill Hydra. So, that's a pretty classic World War II story, you know, right? The dam busters, you know, there's there's stories of of operational success, which we like to read. Even D-Day is a story of sacrifice, but it's a story of success that actually worked. And I think the people behind this mission wanted this mission to be on that same bookshelf.

[00:46:18]And one of the reasons that the story has kind of fallen aside and not really been discussed for a long time is that it doesn't really belong on that bookshelf. It it belongs on a different shelf, which is I guess it the mission is is less military than literary. It's a mission that's designed to write a different story about the Second World War because the Jews need to be given a story of heroism and hope. They can't just end the war with this image of train after train of people going to the gas chambers. They need a story, even if it's a small story. And even if it didn't work, they need a story about heroes who got on airplanes and took weapons and jumped into the night sky in order to save their brothers and sisters. And the the heroes, and this is maybe one of the most incredible things that I discovered when I was doing my research, the heroes knew that. I mean, they knew this was not going to work.

[00:47:07]They weren't stupid. They didn't think that they were going to save the Jews or defeat the Vermacht.

[00:47:12]um and they knew that they probably weren't going to come back and they were right about that. In many cases, what they thought they were doing was setting an example. They were telling a story that would inspire others to action. And in that from that angle, it works. And and proof of that is that you here we are 80 years later and we're still talking about them. Yeah. literary in the sense of myth, national myth. And myth not in the in the flimsy superficial where people sometimes just use it as, you know, a synonym for why, >> right? I mean, absolutely. It's myth in its most noble sense. A myth is not nothing. A myth a myth is really important because a myth inspires you to action and it sets a standard to which you aspire. Heroes are really important and we're in an anti-heroic age. We're at a moment where we're very suspicious of heroes and people's instinct is not to emulate heroes, but rather to tear to tear them down and to explain to themselves why this hero isn't that great. You know, this guy might seem great, but you know, he's an alcoholic.

[00:48:10]He, you know, is violent. He's a criminal. We're always looking for some reason that um that that our heroes can be torn off the pedestal and we can somehow alleviate that discomfort that's caused when you see someone who's incredibly impressive. So you can either, you know, there are a few options how you deal with the way heroes make us feel. They make us feel small.

[00:48:29]So you can say, okay, I feel small when I look at Neil Armstrong, John McCain, a war hero. So my solution to that will be to be as close to them as possible. I'm going to try to be maybe not a hero like them, but I'm going to be, you know, noble in my personal life, and I'll try to aspire to their example. Another way of dealing with it is by is by tearing them down. You know, by saying, you know, about John McCain, I prefer people who weren't caught. You know, that's a pretty classic 21st century way of dealing with heroes, but heroes and myths are incredibly important. And I think we're really feeling the lack of those things that the Zionist movement always understood the power of stories because the Zionist movement is essentially a story that was written by a playwright and a journalist named Theodore Herzel in um he's from Vienna and he experiences this wave of very frightening hatred directed at him and other Jews in the 1890s and he sits down in a hotel room in Paris and he writes this pamphlet which is called the Jewish state and it's it's an alternative future. essentially, but it's very close to fiction and people think he's crazy, including his friends. And if you read that pamphlet, it is pretty crazy except that I'm sitting in the state right now.

[00:49:40]So, Zionism understands that myths and stories are not negligible. They're incredibly important. So, when you send people to write a myth, you're not sacrificing them for nothing.

[00:49:50]>> Isn't it crazy, Maddie? Or or and I realize that this question could set us up for an entire another episode. So, so this will be the short version. Maybe we should do a whole episode on this at some point, but >> whenever you want.

[00:50:01]>> Just this striking irony of Jewish history and the history of Zionism. Um, and I realize this this sounds like Aaron has an interesting thought decades late. You of course you know marinate in this but but I just want to reflect based on what we've been discussing that this story of Zionism which originates as this um cause of those the left this or in many important ways it cause the left and um uh you know is formed by anti-imperialism literal literal anti-imperialism uh uh opposition to the British Empire that the the descriptions you were giving of kind of the culture of the Zionists and the rejection of the you know literature and the arts in return for engineering and work. I mean this um you know if you read about um uh anti-imperial postimperial India I mean the ethic is very similar um I mean this is a story of postimperial anti-British empire politics very sympathetic to coherent with um uh you know the this the tale of the global left >> absolutely >> in 2026 and Zionism is a a a dirty word uh for the left and um the emblem of imperialism. What a what an incredible insane twist in the plot.

[00:51:16]>> Really amazing. I mean, if we could go back and speak to these people, you know, from our future 80 years later and tell them that this has happened, I think they would be shocked because for them, Zionism was part of the part of the proletarian revolution. They saw themselves as as part of the left. The the military forces that they venerated were Tito's partisans. you they love the Red Army, you know, they didn't like the uh British Empire and they were suspicious of American capitalism, which is really, you know, it's very hard to understand from 2026, but that was really very much the vibe. It was unclear in the early years whether Israel was going to be part of the Soviet block or part of the the American alliance system. Bengorian was always very clear that he wanted Israel to be part of the American system, but there were people who were part of his social circle, part of the Kubot movement, who saw themselves as part of the the world of socialism. And it plays out in an interesting way in in the 1950s. But Bengorian venerates Gandhi. He's pro Gandhi is probably the figure who he most admires and he sees the story of the Jews in Palestine as parallel to the story of of India throwing off the imperial yoke and becoming a a a democratic country. And this happens at the same time. I mean, these countries are founded or become independent precisely at the same time. And there's a story of partition and there's tension with the Islamic world. So, he sees himself as part of a story that would be familiar to Gandhi. And uh it's hard to it's hard to understand that from 2026 when we're in a very in a very different place. I mean, Israel remains a very left-wing country compared to the United States in terms of the way it's set up.

[00:52:53]So, you know, we're much more like a European social democracy than we are like the United States. And that's the inheritance of the of the radical socialists who set this place up. Maddie Freriedman, you are a columnist for the Free Press. The book is called Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe. It's been a totally fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming on School of War.

[00:53:15]>> Thanks again for having me.

[00:53:29]Heat. Heat.