Folio Literary Series with Matti Friedman, July 20, 2026

[00:00:01]Good evening and thank you for joining New York Jewish Week and U.J.A.

[00:00:06]Federation of New York for our monthly folio literary series. I'm Thea Weaselier, director of public programs at 70 Faces Media, the parent company of New York Jewish Week. It's a pleasure to welcome you tonight to to the conversation. And we're delighted to have author Mati Freriedman with us in conversation with Hillary Kger, executive editor of JTA and New York Jewish Week. They'll be discussing Mati's new book, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe. The harrowing true story of Kana Senanish and a group of idealistic young Jewish volunteers on a fatal mission behind enemy lines and how their story became intertwined with the founding story of Israel. We're also grateful to our partner U.J Federation. U.J.'s work in Israel began long before the state of Israel was declared and remains central to its mission today, serving the needs of all Israelis, strengthening the bond between Israel and the diaspora and supporting a Jewish democratic state of Israel. And since October 7th, the U.J has provided more than $330 million to support the physical, emotional, and economic healing needed to carry Israel forward. And with that, let's now turn to our program and our guest author, Mati Freriedman. Mati is a Canadian Israeli journalist, author, and Jerusalem based columnist for the Free Press. Born in Toronto and based in Jerusalem, he is widely recognized for his writing on Middle Eastern affairs, Israel, and Jewish history. Hillary and Mati, I welcome you to the stage.

[00:01:52]>> Hi everyone. Um, it's a pleasure to be here with you and especially to get to talk to Mati about his new book. Uh, thank you so much for taking some time to talk with us, Matti, and to answer some questions uh, from me and from the audience about Out of the Sky, heroism and rebirth in Nazi Europe. Um, and there should be a link um, in the chat for those who are interested in purchasing a copy of this great book themselves. Um, Mati, um, do you want to start by just telling us a little bit about the book and why you decided to write it at this point in time?

[00:02:27]>> Sure. First of all, Hillary, thanks so much for doing this and thanks to Thea and the folks from 70 Faces. It's great.

[00:02:32]It's great to be with you. I wish we could be doing this in person at a at a you know, at a real event in um in New York or thereabouts. But I'm speaking to you from Jerusalem. This will have to do for now. Um, this this is a story that I think many of us know or at least think we know or know something about. If you had any kind of Jewish education, you probably heard about Kanesh or um uh played several friends who played Kanesh in school productions. Many of us probably sang Eli Eli at some point, whether it was at a Jewish school or at a summer camp. So this is a a myth that's been floating around the Jewish world since since it happened more or less since 1944. But but few of us know anything about it. So even in Israel, the name Khanes is probably one of the most famous names. So if you ask an Israeli if they know that name, almost everyone here would say yes. She's as famous, I would say, as Judah the Makabe or or maybe Theodore Herzel. Everyone knows the name. There are 32 Kosen streets in Israel. There are other kibbutim named after different participants in in this mission because Hana was just one of 32 parachutists who took part in this mission. So this is a a story that's kind of encoded in the Israeli landscape. If you drive around Israel, you'll pass Kibot Netzer Sereni, which is near that's named after Enzo Sereni, who is a great Italian character who was the commander of the mission.

[00:03:59]Kibot Labot Kaviviva named after Kaviva Reich who's kind of Kana's rival as the heroine of of the mission.

[00:04:06][clears throat] Um Alon Abba which is named after another parachutist Aba Belichev. So the story was important enough to be coded into the Israeli landscape but no one knows what the story is. So if you ask people they couldn't really tell you what the connection is between the characters.

[00:04:22]And if you dive into it even deeper, you'll find out something that I found quite striking, which is that we know this as a myth, a Zionist myth about a group of heroic Jews who set off at the darkest moment in Jewish history, perhaps 1944, to save Jews and fight the Nazis. That that's why they're famous.

[00:04:40]That's the That's the legend. But if you look at it closely, you find that they don't seem to have saved a single Jew or killed a single Nazi. So So what's the story and how did they become legends?

[00:04:51]That's what got me interested in in [clears throat] this uh in this strange episode initially.

[00:04:57]>> I'm I'm very interested by your use of the word myth um to describe what happened since these are true events that you're you're narrating throughout the course of the book. Can you talk a little bit about why you're using that word and why you think that's the right word to use?

[00:05:13]What's interesting here is the gap between the the myth that we kind that we know um and the and the real people who embarked on this mission. There there's always a large gap between any legendary story and what actually happened. That goes without saying. Um and in this case the the the gap seemed interesting to me and and worth investigation. So you know we have these legendary characters who are almost two-dimensional poster children. like Hanosenes is kind of a Davy Crockett character in Israel. She's just this image, this very kind of stylized image of a young woman in British military tunic um kind of smiling and and saluting as she goes off, you know, to uh sacrifice herself for for Zionism.

[00:05:56]But who was she really? Who was Hanosen?

[00:05:59]Why did she do what she did? I mean, these were people who escaped the Holocaust, made it to relative safety in the land of Israel, what was then British mandate Palestine, and volunteered to go back. I mean, why did they do that? And why did they do that given the um almost certainty that the mission would fail? And why did they do that knowing as many of them did that they were unlikely to to return? So, the the humans behind the myth are are very very interesting. and the process in in which these very real people, flawed people, um you know, people with a lot of like wrinkles and bumps, not at all two-dimensional caricatures, how do they become myths? How do we get, you know, the myth of Hanesh and this, you know, song that many of us know, Eli? How how does that remain from a very messy human story that takes place in 1944, does not go as planned, yields none of the expected results, and yet, you know, becomes one of the most enduring legends of of Zionism?

[00:07:01]So, was there um something in particular that you felt um that you you uncovered in the in in chronicling this that really jarred you in terms of the contrast between the myth and the reality? Or just generally, you know, is there something or a few things that really surprised you in general given what you came in knowing about this and and versus what you came out with at the end?

[00:07:27]Yes, I mean the there were there were many surprises in the story. I mean the the contours of the story were surprising to me because I just didn't know them and I think many of us don't know them. This is um I'll just give the kind of very short version of the mission which is in itself surprising.

[00:07:42]This was a British mission um which is kind of downplayed in the legend that many of us know. This was a mission run by an office of British intelligence called MI9 which is a cousin of MI5 and MI6 which still exists. MI9 no longer exists. it was in charge of escape and evasion in the second world war. So that basically means extracting downed allied pilots behind enemy lines and getting PS who are um you know who have escaped behind enemy lines, getting them back to Allied lines. So there's an office that's running these escape routes around the Mediterranean and the Balkans and it's it's it's their mission. So the Zionists are partnering with the British, but the guy in charge of this mission is a British officer by the name of Tony Simmons, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Simmons. And the whole British side of the mission was quite surprising to me because I always thought of this as, you know, an act of Zionist heroism, but they wore British uniforms. They had British aliases. Um, and they were serving British intelligence, even though none of them were British. And in fact, none of them had ever been in Britain. Um, and at the time, the Zionist movement and the British were actually at at odds in 1944. The Zionists are furious that the British are preventing refugees from reaching Palestine, which is the only possible uh refuge and millions of people are being murdered in Europe and the British are blocking them from uh from escape. So there's no love lost between the Jews here and the British. However, the Jews are obviously not going to be on the Nazi side in the war. They're going to have to fight alongside the British. So the the Jews decide to partner with the British in this mission and um recruit ultimately 32 parachutists from the young Jews who've been arriving in in the land of Israel speaking useful central European languages which are which is what the British are looking for. So Hungarians, Romanians, Serbians, um Slovak, uh that's what that's what's needed. So, I guess that surprised me that it was actually a mission run by two rivals, each of which had a very different interpretation of what was going on. The British thought that these people were being sent to rescue pilots.

[00:09:39]They thought they were using Jews. Um, the Jews thought that they were using the British because the Jews were not that interested in rescuing down pilots, although they were happy to do it if they if they could. But what they really wanted to do was save Jews, and they just had no way of getting into Europe if they didn't join the British army because the Jews obviously had no air force and no army. uh of their own. So they needed to become British soldiers to do it. So they refer to the British mission as a plane ticket. That's all it was. Um they were just trying to get into Europe some somehow. And the British had this understanding that the Jews have kind of a superpower which we don't think about that much. But the British um although they saw the Jews as a real pain in the neck because they were constantly rebelling, they understood that Jews have really a superpower which is that they have double identities >> or maybe triple identities which is something that we take for granted. But many Jews have multiple names and certainly back then spoke multiple languages and could be different things.

[00:10:34]You had Zionist pioneers in the land of Israel who were also you know they could also pass as Hungarians, they could pass as Frenchmen, they could be Polish, they could be German and this is very useful for intelligence. They could be Arabs and and all of these um realizations are are put into effect in the Second World War. Another book of mine is called Spies of No Country, and it's about the birth of the Mossad, which is essentially a British operation that realizes that Jews coming from the Arab world can be sent back into the Arab world as Arabs. So, Jews have this double thing going on, which is actually a I guess it's a deep part of our history. I mean, many of our greatest stories are stories about double identity. For example, the book of Esther is a story about a Jewish girl in Persia who has a Hebrew name. Her name's Hadasa, but she also has a Persian name which is Estster. And using her Persian identity, she gets into the king's court. So, she's in position to sway events um when that becomes necessary.

[00:11:31]But it's almost a spy story. It's a story of double identity. The story of Joseph is a story of double identity.

[00:11:36]Joseph is so Egyptian by the time his brothers show up in Egypt that they don't recognize him. So, [clears throat] he's become unrecognizable. And he has a Hebrew name, Ysef, and he has an Egyptian name, which is Pan. So this is a also a story of double identity. Moses is a story of double identity. So and this is a very deep thing about Jews and the British pick it up and and they use it for their intelligence purposes.

[00:11:58]Meanwhile, the Jews think that they're that they're using the British. So I guess that was one part of the story that that surprised me. There there many other you know human wrinkles here that um you know there were um uh love affairs between the parachutists. uh what Khaviva [clears throat] Reich which who is a fascinating character who's kind of existed in the shadow of Hana since the mission she was an incredible character in many ways a very modern character very the very complicated uh life which is one of the reasons that we know Hana and don't know much about right so that was surprising in a way that kind of brings them to life and one last thing I would say is that um I thought of Hana as a great kind of Israeli heroine um and of course we associate her with Eli, which is maybe the most famous song in modern Hebrew.

[00:12:45]But if you go to the National Library in Jerusalem, and uh you look at the first draft of that song, which is on display in the National Library, I highly recommend a visit if if any of you are near Jerusalem, you can see the the the first version of Eli. And you can see that in the first line there's a spelling mistake. So Hana Sesh has written that's the first sign of the first line of the poem. Lord made I pray that these things never end. And she's written the word leam with an al if instead of with an which is a classic new immigrant to Israel mistake but it's one of the most famous songs in Hebrew. So it's like finding a spelling mistake in Yates or something. It's really striking. She was a new immigrant. Khanes was in Israel only for a few years and she was Hungarian and she was the daughter of a very well-known Hungarian playwright and she came from a very literary home. And when the Hungarians ultimately catch her, they know her last name. It's kind of like catching the daughter of Amos O or something. So, she's a Hungarian character more than she's an Israeli character. And I think that was also surprising to me, although I guess it shouldn't have been.

[00:13:55]>> Fascinating. Really fascinating. Um, and you you're noting that Han is the name that people know, but there were a lot of other parachutists. And I'm wondering if you can you talked about how this is a British mission and if you want to choose one of the other characters and tell a little bit about their story and just give the outlines for people of what the that um heroic course they took was. Um I think you know each one is distinct but I think they mostly follow the the same general trajectory. So I think it just will help maybe paint a little bit of a picture of what people were doing um before we drill down a little bit more.

[00:14:28]>> Yeah. Sure. I mean I chose there are 32 parachutists. You can't write a book about 32 people. I chose four characters who are the main characters of the book.

[00:14:37]Um, one of them is Kana, of course, because you can't write this story without Hana. Um, one of them is Kaviva Reich, who is again a heroic um, female character, more effective as a parachutist than Kana. In fact, she may have been the most effective of all the parachutists on the ground. She operated in Slovakia in the town where she was born which is a place called Banska Bistritza which I actually visited when I was researching the book. Another character is um Kim Hermes who wrote a book about the mission and who is not famous at all mainly because he survived. So um he might not have understood the mission. um uh he came back alive and wrote a book about it which is an incredible book that kind of allowed me to flesh out many of the details of the mission because he saw the events of course um himself and wrote about them very narrowly escaped um death. Um and the fourth character and maybe I'll talk about him just I'll give a few sentences about him. It might be my favorite and that's Enzo. Enzo Sereni who I mentioned this Italian he's an Italian Jewish aristocrat basically he's from Rome his dad was a physician in the court of the Italian king and he had a PhD and he's this incredibly educated and kind of ariodite uh Italian character. He was initially an Italian nationalist and then um um was kind of disavowed um with the rise of uh or dis disillusioned I guess I would say um as as Mussolini and the fascists uh rose um and he becomes a Zionist and he moves to what is then British Mand Palestine and he founds a kibbut which still exists to this day Gad Brener he founds it along with his wife Ada Sereni who actually plays a role in this uh in this story later on. So, these are two kind of heroic Italians. And what's amazing about him is that he's so unmilitary, which is really true. I think of all these characters, if we, you know, we think of them as military heroes. Um, if they showed up, and I write this in the book, if they showed up at a recruiting office today, no one would, no one would take them. Like, they were completely um unfit for [laughter] the mission. I guess the question is for what mission? And that's really the central question of the book. What was the mission? Um, but certainly for the mission that they seem to be embarking on, they're completely unprepared. I mean, and so he's short and overweight and he has glasses and he's just not a military um character. His his his, you know, superpower is really literature.

[00:16:58]He's he's a writer. He dreams of writing a great multigenerational novel about his family in Italy. Um he he um edits a book before The Mission. Uh the book is an amazing read because it's so crazy to read now. It's about Arab Jewish coexistence under Zionist socialism. So reading it now is like an acid trip or something but it made sense in the 1930s. That was Enzo. He wrote another book about the rise of fascism in Italy which is publishedly. So Enzo is the the commander essentially of the mission.

[00:17:27]He's one of the commanders. He's on the ground running this thing from first from Egypt and then from Italy. He's not supposed to jump. He's not supposed to jump himself into Europe. He is 39 years old. So he's much older than everyone else. He has three kids who he's left behind on the cubot. He's merely meant to be running this from the rear. But and so because of his literary understanding, he knows that you can't send people to their deaths if you're not willing to do it yourself. And because he has a perception of himself as a hero, the hero can't be at headquarters, right? Like Odysius doesn't, you know, run things from from the rear. You have to be there. You have to jump yourself. So he disobys orders.

[00:18:07]the entire Zionist leadership is telling Enzo, you may not jump into occupied Europe. You're too important. You're too old. You have children. Be responsible.

[00:18:15]Don't do this. And he does it anyway.

[00:18:17]And he gets on an airplane flying into northern Italy, which is still occupied in um in the spring of 1944. He's dropped um because of a navigational error by the British pilot, he's dropped essentially on top of a German army camp. So the the Vermach just captures him more or less as he lands and he I mean he disappears. I I trace his fate in in the book. But um yes, that's the story of a of a great and kind of wild and romantic um Zionist hero who unfortunately has been largely forgotten.

[00:18:53]So do you think then that the focus ones and the fact that she's the name everyone knows that that feels um unfair um and that you know if you could talk about I guess a little bit about why she's been she's been the face of the the mission that included 32 people and and whether you think that she sort of deserves that the place that she's been given or or if other people maybe should be sharing that uh podium alongside her.

[00:19:21]>> Totally. I mean, that was the feeling that I had when I started writing this book. One of my goals at the beginning was to kind of play down Kana a bit. Not not play her down more than she deserves, but to make room for other characters because the only name that is remembered today is Kana Senesh. The mission is basically Kana, but there were 32 parishists. Um, so why should it be all about Kanesenesh? And I really wanted to kind of shrink her character in the book. And as I wrote, her character just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger until I was forced to admit that there is a reason that Han Senes is the heroine of the mission. And and the reason has nothing to do with military achievement. Hanesh had no military achievement. I mean, as I said about the mission um at large, she did not save a single Jew or kill a single Nazi. Um, so why did Kan Seamish become this great military heroine who is as well known as, you know, Moshe Dian in uh um in Israel? Just to give you an illustration of that, one of my kids came home a few years ago with a a pack of playing cards. So like Zionist patriotic playing cards. So there were in sets of four. So there's like four Israeli cities and four kibbutim and there were four great Zionist heroes. So it was Theodore Herzel, Moshe, Gulame, Meer, um, and Kamas. like she's in the top pantheon of Zionism and yet she seems to have achieved absolutely nothing. So what is going on? And it's it's really the question about this mission. What is going on? The mission was a complete failure. It didn't do anything that it was supposed to accomplish. Why did it become a legend?

[00:20:51]Um and I think that the key the key I mean the key can be found in one particular moment in the story. And it's a moment that happens at the beginning of June 1944. And it's the moment where Hana is about to cross from occupied Yugoslavia, which is where she's been dropped, into occupied Hungary, which is where she's from. And her mother at this time is um in Budapest, the Hungarian capital. And living not far away from her mother is Adolf Aman, who is in Hungary, essentially engineering the murder of all the Jews in Hungary. So the Jews of rural Hungary have already been mostly murdered by June. The Jews of Budapest have been left for last. And Kana's mother is in Budapest. So she is insisting on crossing the border into Hungary. And the other parachutists who are with her in Yugoslavia don't want her to go. That they one of the interesting things or surprising things that you find when you read the documents and letters from the time is the is that Hana's comrades didn't really like her, you know, [snorts] which is kind of a funny thing to realize if you grew up with this, you know, perfect kind of Jon of Arc character. Um, but the the other parachutes didn't like her. they were men and [clears throat] um she was she was um very stubborn, very opinionated. She didn't accept their authority. She thought they were as smart as them. They found that very annoying. So, they're telling her not to cross the border because they understand that if she crosses into occupied Hungary, she's probably not coming back.

[00:22:14]And there's a lot of Gestapo along the borders, she's going to get caught and she's not going to come back. And by the way, they're right about that. That is exactly what's going to happen. But Kana is not willing to listen to them and she's insisting on crossing the border.

[00:22:25]So, another parachutist named Ruven Daphne, who survives and gives us this account, is accompanying her to the border, and it's at night. They're in the forest along the Yugoslav Hungary uh border, and they're about to part. So, she's about to leave on this mission, and they're they're never going to see each other again. Um, and Ruven Daphne um and Hannah shake hands in the forest, and Hannah presses into his hand um a folded sheet of paper. So he feels that she's kind of passing him a sheet of paper in in his hand. And this is an incredibly cinematic gesture. I mean, this is like a scene out of literature.

[00:23:02]Um um Hana, as I mentioned, is the daughter of a playwright. So she she grew up at her father's theater premieres. She grew up going to the theater. She grew up reading books. She read an incredible number of books, which we know because she she kept a reading list from age 12. And she wrote down every single book she read. and we still have the list. So, we can just tell that she was just she was a bookworm. And so, this is this seems like a scene out of literature or out of the theater. Not coincidentally, that was Hannah's world. She had a sense of what a heroic quest looks like and what her role is. So, the heroine is about to, you know, stride off to meet her fate. She leaves a last message to, you know, this is classic. So, um um she gives this this folded up um note to Daphne. Dafany is so annoyed by this that he throws it away because he's like he understands himself as being part of an actual military mission. And who is this young woman who's doing this theatrical thing? I mean, this is total Just forget it. He he throws it he throws it away and leaves.

[00:24:03]And um about an hour later, according to his account, he realizes that he probably shouldn't have thrown away Hanosen's last message and he goes back to to find it. And luckily for us, he he finds it in one of the bushes. And I've actually I I saw it a few months ago.

[00:24:17]It's about the size of an index card and it's been folded. And on this um piece of paper when he unfolds it, he sees four lines of poetry. And this is Khanes's second most famous poem. The most famous is Eli Eli. But um uh this is the second most famous poem and I think the poem is kind of the key to what's going on. The first line of the poem is uh maybe maybe some of you know it um Um, happy is the match that burned and lit the flames or happy is the match that flared and lit the flames. So, what is Hana telling us with this poem? I mean, what is what is she saying, right?

[00:25:00]She's um she's about to leave on a mission that she quite clearly understands she's not coming back from.

[00:25:06]She's the match, right? Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames.

[00:25:10]She's the match. She's going off. Um, she's not going to save the Jews of Hungary. Obviously, she's one 22-year-old woman. She's not going to defeat the Vermacht. She's going to flare like a match. And the act of burning herself is going to light the flames. So, the the story of what she's doing is going to light some kind of flame in the future that will give people inspiration. She's going to light the way for other people and show them how how to act. So um I think that is explaining to us in this note which is I mean it's essentially a suicide note or at the very least it's it's a last will and testament. She's telling us what the mission is. The mission was never military. The mission is literary. The mission is to tell a different story about the Holocaust and it's going to be a Zionist story. What is a Zionist story? A Zionist story is a story in which the Jews are actors and not props.

[00:26:00]So, um, you know, the the the the story is going to be of heroic people who jump out of airplanes with weapons and go off to save other Jews. Even if the mission fails, and even if they don't make it back, the the story will live on. And it does. I mean, it sounds kind of um naive, but but we're talking about this story more than 80 years later, so clearly the story lives on. Four years after this mission, um, young Jewish, um, fighters in the land of Israel set off to create a Jewish state in the War of Independence. Um, 6,000 of them died doing it. Um, and we have a state that I'm sitting in right now because of them. And they march off to battle in many cases singing the songs written by Kanasan. They they're they're singing Eli Ali and a happy is the match. They sing those songs in 1948. They have her example um as um um an ideal that they that they need to emulate if we're going to have a revolution in Jewish history that is going to save us from pacivity and lead us to action and to and to statethood. That's what they're doing in this mission. It's it's not a military mission. It's it's it's really a literary mission. It's about writing a story. And they're writing the story with quite literally with their with their blood.

[00:27:23]And so you've used I think the word suicide mission and you certainly talk about you know Enzo sending people to their deaths etc that that basically it was understood what was going to happen.

[00:27:36]Um and so I just first of all do you think that was understood both by the participants and also by the commanders and and to the extent that that was the case especially on the part of the the commanding officers um especially the British who were ostensively not writing a story but were um trying to rescue downed airmen. Um I mean do you think that was an ethical choice to send these people into almost certain death and and you know certainly from the Zionist you know for the Zionist piece of it that you know the idea of murdering people for the sake of a story um you know was a reasonable decision um for those people who who facilitated and watched it happened um given the how how doomed the mission seems to have been clear to be. Yeah, it's a it's a great question.

[00:28:27]I mean, when we read the writing of Kana and Enso and Khaviva, um, we see that they they understand they're probably not coming back. I mean, they all three of them talk about that explicitly. I mean, no one thinks they're parachuting into occupied Nazi Europe and like strolling strolling out.

[00:28:45]It's it's understood that your chances of survival are are slim. For the British, it doesn't matter that much. I mean, it's kind of a cruel thing to say, but um the the stories of special operations, British special operations in Europe throughout the Second World War are full of these very kind of forlorn foreign characters being dropped all over the place and usually never coming back. So, you know, they're dropping agents in France and they're getting caught. Um some of you probably know the story of the assassination of Hydrickch in Prague, which is done by a Czech and a Slovak parachutist and they do manage to kill Hydrickch, but they they don't make it back. So, these are and they're kind of expendable. That that's the truth. These agents are expendable. They're not British. I mean, even British agents might have been expendable, but certainly foreigners were. So, you know, the British thought great if these people can help us out.

[00:29:29]They're, you know, they were dropped with radio transmitters. They speak local languages. If they can help us as liaison with local partisans and get out some of our, you know, air crew, amazing. If they don't come back, whatever, basically. And not not just that, there's a quote, and it's in the book, an incredible quote from Lord Mo, who's the top British official. He's in charge of the Middle East and he's he's [snorts] aware of this mission. And he says, and this is more or less an exact quote, he says, "If we manage to take out some of the most brave and capable Jews in Palestine um and they don't come back, that's great for us." Um because the British are at odds with the Jews.

[00:30:05]So he says, you know, if we send them into Europe and they die, we we benefit.

[00:30:10]The British Empire actually benefits. So that's the attitude of the British. Um as for the Jewish commanders, it's more ambiguous. And I think you're right.

[00:30:16]Judaism sanctifies life. We're not really into suicide. There was always this, you know, the Msada myth in the early years of Israel, which was this myth of not not a myth. I mean, it seems to be a at least to some extent a true story of mass suicide on top of Msada.

[00:30:30]And early Zionism venerates that idea and then um kind of becomes uncomfortable with it because we're not actually supposed to glorify suicide.

[00:30:38]Judaism actually is not into that at all where you kind of, you know, the idea is to survive and and live. Uh but this is a time when death is just surrounding everyone. I mean 6 million people are being murdered. It's the families of all of the participants in the mission and their commanders. Life just means something different in a time like that.

[00:30:55]And many of the participants and the commanders I thought I think felt that they just could not sit in safety while their while their parents or siblings are being butchered in in Europe.

[00:31:06]Certainly Hannah felt that her mother was literally you know a mile away from Aishman's villa in Budapest. So they the idea of living your life when that is happening I think was very hard for them to to bear but that that ami ambiguity is definitely present in this mission. I mean if you understand that the mission is unlikely to achieve anything and people are unlikely to come back what are you doing exactly? Um, and I think what they would say is that they, you know, these people are in the service of of Jewish history and are we have a history of very powerful stories and the Jews needed to be moved at precisely precisely this time from pacivity to action and we we kind of take for granted that we're people of action but it's only because we've grown up in the revolution created by Kanasanto Sereni. where we grow up with the state of Israel and we kind of take for granted that we have an army and that we act and you know people are murdered at Kibbutim um near Gaza on October 7th and people from you know Jerusalem or Tel Aviv go to save them that just makes instinctive sense to us but it didn't in 1944 then Jews had many different ways of dealing with catastrophe you could you know say you could recite psalms you could pray you could um go into the basement and lock the door and wait for things to blow over you could collaborate with the authorities there are many ways to deal with catastrophe and Zionism is trying to say no. When faced with catastrophe, the thing to do is act. You you have to act. And it's a lesson for for today as well. But that's the Zionist message.

[00:32:36]And um you know that Zionist youth movements are trying to inculcate this and it's very much the story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising which is led by Zionists, people who think in the same way. They know the uprising is going to fail. Of course, they do it anyway because um as one of them said, I think it was one of the fighters from the Lodge Ghetto, he said, "We're fighting and dying for three lines in a history book." I mean, it's it takes a leap to inhabit that headsp space, but that's very much where they were.

[00:33:06]>> So, two words I think seem really emblematic of this book. Um, and I wonder how you define them and relate to them as, you know, descriptors for your subjects, if you would. um you in fact use them as such. One is heroism and one is resistance, >> right? I mean I guess those are the two key um key words here. The I mean there's a there there's a funny funny is totally the wrong word here but um two of the characters two of the minor characters write last letters before their execution in a Slovak jail um at the very end of 1944. One of them is Tvi Benyakov and one of them is Rafi Rice.

[00:33:49]And they've been captured along with Khaviva Reich by Nazi forces after a battle in in a forest in in Slovakia.

[00:33:56]And they're in a prison and they're about to be executed. And they both write letters that they managed to smuggle out. And both letters make it to um to to the land of Israel. And we and we have the letters and in both of the letters which are written in different cells. So they're not writing these letters together. Both of them write, "Do not make me a hero. do not make me a hero after my death. What I did was not heroism. I just did what I had to do.

[00:34:19]Um, and it's really striking also because they both wrote it and also because of course that's what a hero would say. What else would a hero say?

[00:34:25]Of course you say don't you know I'm not really a hero. Um, so they're very conscious of the the kind of the heroic storytelling that is going to go on and in fact is already going on that the the letters indicate that they know this is going to happen because in some ways they're they've been sent in service of the creation of stories of Jewish heroism which are which are rare in 1944. Again, we have to kind of like go back 80 years and remember there aren't a lot of Jewish military heroes. I mean there's Trump which is a very kind of ambiguous story from early Zionism but there's no tradition of Jewish military heroism. The Zionist movement is trying to resuscitate figures like Barba um in order to give the Jews military heroes but we don't really have any. So um the the characters in a very self-conscious way set out to become heroes. That's what they're supposed to do. And that is what Kana is doing in the forest. She's acting like a heroine. and she knows how to be a heroine because she has read probably too many books. So she just she has the idea and Enzo knows he has to be a hero and he knows that means he has to jump. He can't send other people to jump and he has to jump even if it doesn't make any sense for him to jump and indeed it ends tragically. So heroism is very much the word that's kind of floating over the the mission. And it's interesting to think of that from our own times in 2026. We're in a very anti-heroic age. I mean the the in 1944 I think the the human response to heroism would be to say wow I want to be like that you know I want to be like Hannah I want to be like George Washington I want to be like um you know Auggie Murphy um Moshe Dian you know whatever John McCain I want to be like these heroes I want to emulate them but at some point that changes and we become suspicious of heroes so then our response to heroism becomes let's tear these people down like the there's a distance between us and a hero and it makes us uncomfortable because these people are better than us. So we can we have to reconcile that in some way either by reaching their height or by tearing them down to our own size. And and I think the the the response today is is to do the latter. And the best example of that I think was um Trump's President Trump's response to to McCain.

[00:36:40]If you remember McCain was a prisoner of the North Koreans for I think six years underwent terrible torture. Walks out of prison in the most noble way possible.

[00:36:50]And and President Trump said of him, "I prefer people who weren't caught." So it's this is an unherooic person bringing a hero down, but it's very much what we all do, you know, now when we see a hero, we say, "Oh, that guy's an alcoholic. He was terrible to his family. You know, he's not really a hero. He was doing it for, you know, for selfish reasons." Um, so in order to kind of appreciate these heroes, we have to reinhabit that um that ability to look up to heroes. I'm not sure what we're going to do without heroes. I mean, I think one of our one of the ills of present day society is that we don't have heroes anymore. So, um, you know, in an absence of heroes, everything just becomes ridiculous and and corrupt. You need something to look up to. And and in 1944, that was still understood. In Israel, to some extent, it's still understood. I mean, because heroism is required of us and of our children on a daily basis. Um but in much of the west the idea of a of a hero is very much under under fire and um you know people emulate different role models, celebrities maybe athletes. Um I'm not sure that our societies are going to survive in in those conditions which also makes it interesting to think about heroism and in this story. [snorts] It's interesting to hear you say that because I do think one of the um things you come away from this book with is like you said a sort of humanizing of these people and that means that they're flawed, right? I mean that's what humans are is flawed people. You find out that as you said people didn't like Hana, they really didn't like Haviva. Um and so in a way it feels like there is a little bit of deconstruction um going on in terms of of the idea of hero in this book. So sort of how are you reconciling that with what you were what you were just saying about the need for heroes and how it does seem that you perceive these people as heroes uh despite not having succeeded in the military component at least of the mission they were in.

[00:38:45]>> Right. I do think that they're heroes and and the book actually makes a case for their heroism in a different way. Um because I think that if we understand that these are real people and if we can get as close to them as possible, which we can because they left a lot of writing, that makes them more heroic.

[00:39:01]Like if you understand that Kanesh is a bookworm who's kind of stubborn and and you know, prickly, that makes her more heroic because she she suddenly seems like a real person and not like a character. And if we understand that Khaviva is this really complicated character and she's, you know, she's kind of involved in like multiple impossible relationships with men at the same time of the mission and and she's kind of looking for something and she can't find it and um and parallel to this, she's doing the most heroic thing possible by parachuting back into her now occupied home country of Slovakia. I mean, it it makes them greater. It makes them much greater. So the impulse that says in order to have a hero we have to airbrush them that I don't think that holds water certainly not in 2026. Hanosen was not Jonavar and in fact Jonov Arc wasn't Jonavar. I mean like these are all humans and that's that's what makes them so amazing and that's what's inspiring to us because we're also humans and we can also do heroic things. These are not a different it's not a different breed of it's not a different species. These are people like us who made incredible decisions that we still remember. So it's their humanity that makes them heroic. So in in the book I try to deconstruct the caricatures and then kind of rebuild them as actual people who do something really heroic which is not military heroism. So the mission is not a successful commando mission which is the way people have tried to present it because we really wanted a story of Holocaust heroism. Like we wanted a story that was you know like a great secret mission into Europe. One of the reasons that the story has kind of been abandoned in recent decades is that it doesn't make sense. It like it doesn't hold water as a real story of heroism because that was never the mission. It's it's not really about military heroism.

[00:40:48]It's about storytelling, which is one of the great Jewish talents. I mean, it in 1944 was basically the only weapon in our arsenal. All we had was stories. We had nothing else. And the Zionist movement used to be very good at employing stories as weapons. We've not we're not good at it right now, but but we were good at it. So, it's it's an opportunity to think about how what what real heroism looks like. And I do think that we we need it. I mean, we need it now. And it's not necessarily going to be military heroism. It's not going to be people jumping out of airplanes. And um or it could be. I mean, literally, people in Israel have to do that all the time, but um but we need a lot more heroism. I need heroism in our community. There's a lot of you, we're in a dark time that has come uh to many of us unexpectedly and and people are trying all of the usual repertoire of ways to deal with it, collaborating, ignoring it, hoping it's going to blow over, you know, reciting prayers or or whatever. Um um we're going to need to be a bit heroic here and people are going to actually have to stand up and take action that might not work. I mean, that's not 20 that's not a very 2026 thing to say. We might have to take action that will fail in the short term but will be remembered by our children or grandchildren as having been the right thing to do if not if not heroic and that is very much the headsp space of Hanosen and her comrades. It's very much not our headsp space but I think that we can regain it.

[00:42:10]>> I think that all segus really well into a question that we have from the audience um and which I'll read in just a second. Um but just a reminder if people do want to ask questions please uh drop them in the Q&A. You can also find the link to the book. If this is sparking your interest in reading it, if you haven't yet, um, please do get a copy. Um, Nenah asks or she first she says that you're telling a very powerful, inspiring story. Uh, I agree.

[00:42:36]Um, I cannot help but wonder in what ways its resonance has shifted, especially post October 7th, or even if it's even lost its resonance to many Israelis.

[00:42:47]>> Um, first of all, you don't have to read the book, you just have to buy it. um what you know what you do after you buy it. That's I I'll never ask. Um [laughter] um I actually think I mean I started writing this book a year before October 7th. First of all, thank you for that question. And the the the book really starts a year before October 7th with these questions about mythology and and then I do a lot of the research before October 7th and then October 7th happens. And after October 7th to me the story becomes much easier to understand which is a weird thing to say and I realize that's not like that's not my only takeaway from October 7th but suddenly we find ourselves in a world that is much more similar to the world of the characters than the world of October 6th. And I'm not saying that we're in the 1930s and I'm not saying that this is the Holocaust and I don't like that kind of kind of simplistic um um you know parallel thinking. However, I think that many of us thought before October 7th that we more or less had the the world figured out and that the Jewish um problem in the diaspora had been solved by liberal democracy and that the Jewish problem in the Middle East had been solved by Zionism. And when I moved from Toronto, which is where I grew up, to Israel in 1995, I thought I was moving between two solutions, you know, like life in Canada would be great thanks to, you know, western democracies and life in Israel would be great because of Zionism. And then on October 7th, we realized that none of that is true. So, um, liberal democracy is actually not going to protect Jews. Um, and in fact, the the order that we grew up in, the postw World War II order, is fraying and disintegrating. At the same time on October 7th um in the sovereign state of Israel we had images that looked like images from Kishv or from some pogram in the 1600s right the Kspacks are in the village raping women and kidnapping children and murdering people in their kitchen. Um, so we're not, you know, we're not free of Jewish history in the way that we that we thought. And suddenly I'm in a world that is much more similar to the world of Hanosen because these characters Hana and Enzo and Khaviva and Kim, they they move in a world that offers them no good options.

[00:44:54]There, you know, there is no state. They hope there will be. That doesn't seem likely. Um, they live in a British, you know, mandate territory where they have no power. They go back to Europe which is occupied by people who are murdering their families and friends and even their own allies in Europe hate Jews. So this is a kind of a constant theme in in the book where they're you know they're with for example Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia and they're fighting with the allies but the parachutists realize very early on that they cannot reveal that they're Jews because the partisans although they're communists fighting alongside the British they they don't like Jews. So the the parachutists actually start lying about where they're from. Um because the partisans notice that they don't sound British, they have to come up with some other story and they start saying that they're Welsh. Um because no one knows what Welsh sounds like or what a Welsh accent sounds like.

[00:45:42]So they come up with this whole story about how they miss Cardiff um in Wales, which is a place that none of them have ever been. Um, so they're in this world which is quite which is quite dark and you know there's this glimmer of a crack in history which is the possibility of a Jewish state and they decide they're just they're going to jam their fingers in the crack and they're going to try to widen it and get as many people through as possible but they their world is is scary and ambiguous and not sunny. And I I think that October 7th made their world much much easier for for me to understand as strange um as strange as that may sound.

[00:46:22]So you write in the introduction um then rather than this simply being a true story, quote, "This is a true account of my journey into their story." And at several points you note your own efforts to find more information and your own sense of each person and your interaction with the material and the people and your perceptions of them. Why was it important to write this as a dialogue between you and the information you uncovered rather than a straight narrative of the event?

[00:46:50]>> Yeah, that's a great question. That's a good that's a journalist like craft question. Um, you know, I >> I'm a journalist. Full disclosure.

[00:46:56]>> Yeah, I know. [laughter] I know. You can tell. And it's one thing it's something we struggle with as journalists. I was my my journalistic boot camp was really at the AP which is a news agency. And of course at the AP there's no first person like you're never in the story. Um and I for many years I thought that being that using the first person was kind of narcissistic. Like what are you doing in the story? Just write the story. By the way I still think that's sometimes true.

[00:47:20]But often the um the absence of the storyteller in the story is is a fiction that's actually a bigger lie than than anything else because of course you're in the story. Like of course you're of course Mati Freriedman is telling the story who else is telling the story. So pretending that I'm not there or that I'm just you know a mirror like a passive mirror that's that's not honest either. So um in this book in a to a greater extent than in my four previous books I'm here as a guide to the reader.

[00:47:49]I'm walk the story is very complicated and it happens in different places involves different people. It's not really a unified narrative. um which I hope the reader doesn't really notice because I'm creating unified narrative by being in it. Like the glue that sticks the pieces of the story together is my character and the way that I'm kind of moving through my own investigation of of the story. And I'm also trying to bring the reader into the moment when this story is being written, which is in the middle of a terrible war in Israel. And I don't make much of it, but I do explicitly reference it at one point in the book in a way that I hope kind of makes this story alive. Now, this isn't a nostalgic book. book. It's a story being written right now at a particular moment in Jewish history. Um, and I needed to be there to make to make that point as as well. So, I hope I I didn't overdo it, but um, it's very much a story that is being told by me. And I I decided to make that explicit in the in the introduction in the sentence that you quoted because usually what I would do and what most journalists would do is to say, "This is a true story." That's a classic sentence to write in a non-fiction book. This is a true story.

[00:48:49]And I wrote that in a in in the first drafts of the book. This is a true story. And then because these characters are so literary, because they wrote themselves and they wrote books and they read books, I kind of felt them breathing down my neck and looking over my shoulder and I'm like, did they think this is a true story? Like they're they're reading my book. Is this true?

[00:49:10]Does this strike them as a true version of what happened to them? And of course, they they probably wouldn't, even though I've tried to be as accurate as possible. So instead, I went for a subjective claim, which is this is a totally true story. I'm not making anything up there. No, there's no invented dialogue here or invented characters. There are long source notes at the end of the book for anyone who's interested, but this is my own jump uh for lack of a better word into the story of the parachutists.

[00:49:40]>> So, we need to finish in just a minute.

[00:49:42]So, this will be the last question. Um unfortunately this has been so interesting and and brings out so much richness in the book and really um puts it in it to brings it to light and a new perspective. So thank you for sharing all these thoughts with us. Um I had mentioned the words heroism and resistance um as two words that felt really important and sort of emblematic of the book. Um and I'd love to end with your reflections on a third term which is rebirth. Um, that word is part of the subtitle of your book, Out of the Sky, Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe.

[00:50:18]Who's being reborn in this story? And is there something from this historic episode that can help nurture a more contemporary rebirth as well?

[00:50:28]>> Right. I mean rebirth I don't make much of it in in the book but this is not I mean it's a it's a tragedy in in many ways um like in the literary sense of that word but it's in the it's in the service of a rebirth that is miraculous that you know that happens after the greatest tragedy in the history of the Jewish people we have this renaissance which I'm a part of again I'm speaking to you from Jerusalem we take it for granted we've grown up with it we don't appreciate it enough. But you know, I have four kids who speak Hebrew as their mother tongue and think that's totally normal.

[00:51:03]>> Like 100 years ago, no one spoke that 120 years ago. No, no one spoke that language. It wasn't a spoken language.

[00:51:10]So, we're living in this miraculous rebirth that happens after this mass death. Um, and these characters are part of it and and they understand it.

[00:51:17]They're they're at a kind of a hinge moment in history and they set out to kind of push with their own lives essentially the the the the move of the Jewish people from this mass grave in Europe to rebirth in the land of Israel.

[00:51:34]That's what they're doing. It works.

[00:51:37]That that part of the mission works and I'm a beneficiary of it. Many of [clears throat] us are. And that's the rebirth I'm talking about, which is I think that one that we need to think about and and appreciate particularly now when this rebirth is is under assault um across the world and and in grave danger. So if we want to preserve the rebirth, we're really going to have to think about it and be a bit heroic about uh our choices in the next couple years.

[00:52:05]>> Well, thank you so much uh for that answer and all the answers. so um illuminating and such an a fascinating not just story but stories and and the way that you've helped um me and I'm sure other readers understand the depth and richness um of something that's been an important piece of the Jewish and Zionist story but hasn't gotten um the full treatment and interrogation it's deserved until now. Um so thank you and thank you everyone um who's joined us in the audience um for being a part of this. Thank you so much to our partners, UJA, Federation of New York, and thank you especially to my colleagues at 70 Faces Media, especially Thea and Barl who've organized everything and made this happen. Um it's it's been a pleasure and um I'm looking forward to the next one. I hope you'll join us then.