Out of the Sky
Spiegel & Grau (US), Penguin Random House (Canada), Kinneret (Israel)
In Out of the Sky, Matti Friedman unravels one of the strangest episodes of World War II: In 1944, a team of young women and men who had escaped the Holocaust made the inconceivable choice to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe under the cover of a British military operation. By the end of the mission, not a single Nazi was harmed and not a single Jew was saved, and many of the agents died in the process. Yet some of their names would become legendary, especially that of twenty-three-year-old Hannah Senesh, famed as a poet and the author of the beloved Hebrew song “Eli, Eli.” Their story would become one of the young state of Israel’s founding myths. But 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Using thousands of original documents from once-secret files, manuscripts, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Matti Friedman follows four of the parachutists from the spring of 1944 to the operation’s dramatic end that winter. In Out of the Sky, he tells the gripping and surprising tale of a forgotten moment, demonstrating how storytelling itself can have a power even greater than warfare. And in exploring the line between myth and reality, heroism and futility, he creates an argument that has resonance in our own time.
Praise for OUT OF THE SKY
— Benjamin Balint, author of Kafka’s Last Trial“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.”
— Simon Sebag Montefiore“Thrilling, terrifying, and awe-inspiring.”
"An absolutely captivating story where the reality that Friedman has uncovered is far more fascinating than the myth. This is a book, in every sense, about the distance between heaven and earth, and the courage it takes to cross it.”
—Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
“I’ll read anything Matti Friedman writes, knowing his work will not only engage and enlighten, but transform me. Out of the Sky is the story of a woman who became a legend—and of the eternal interplay between human lives and history, how our stories, taken together, become the record of who we are.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer
"In this hauntingly beautiful book, Matti Friedman sets out to recover the story of Hannah Senesh and her fallen companions from the shadowland of myth and fading memory. Friedman movingly gathers up the sparks of his Jewish heroes’ brief lives, their biblical dreams, European nightmares, and above all the hope, imagination, and youthful daring that could not save Europe’s Jews but continue to inspire the old-new country whose rebirth is Friedman’s true subject.”
— Jonathan Rosen, author of The Best Minds