“Thrilling, terrifying, and awe-inspiring.”—Simon Sebag Montefiore

“Gripping . . . Out of the Sky is at once an eloquent inquiry into heroism, a wrenching chronicle of bravery and betrayal, and a poignant evocation of a generation hurled from innocence into the maw of history.”— Ben Balint, author of Kafka’s Last Trial

The harrowing true story of Hannah Szenes and a group of idealistic young Jews who parachuted from Palestine into Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944.

Matti Friedman had heard the story before but had never quite understood it: A group of young Jews who had barely escaped the rise of Nazism found refuge in Palestine and then agreed to parachute back into occupied Europe as British agents. Their names were legendary in the early years of the State of Israel, especially that of 23-year-old Hannah Szenes, best known as the author of “Eli, Eli,” one of the most famous songs ever written in Hebrew. And yet what exactly was the mission, and what had the parachutists actually accomplished? What made them heroes?

Using thousands of original documents from once-secret files, manuscripts, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Out of the Sky follows four of the parachutists from the spring of 1944 to the operation’s dramatic end that winter. The mission was run by British special-operations officers and Zionist leaders who, faced with the Nazi threat, suspended their mutual distaste but not their suspicion. The British needed multilingual agents behind enemy lines, while their Jewish counterparts were desperate to fight back somehow against their Nazi murderers. Of the thirty-two parachutists who jumped, seven were killed, while others performed acts of extraordinary bravery and ingenuity merely to escape. Not a single Nazi was harmed, not a single Jew was saved—and yet the story of these brave young men and women became one of Israel’s founding myths.

In Out of the Sky, Matti Friedman unravels this perplexing dissonance, telling the gripping tale of a forgotten moment, showing us how storytelling itself can have a power even greater than warfare. And in exploring the line between myth and reality, heroism and futility, and how history remembers what it chooses to remember, he creates an argument that has deep resonance in our own time.

PRODUCT DETAILS

ISBN: 978-1954118997
Price: $28.00
On-sale date: 3/24/2026