School of War - The Secret Mission to Save Europe’s Jews, with Matti Friedman

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Matti Friedman is an award-winning journalist and columnist at The Free Press. He joins the show to discuss his latest book, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe. Whom were the Zionist Jews fighting on behalf of the British during World War II? What happened to the legendary Zionist figure Hannah Senesh? And how did a war story without battlefield success help give birth to a nation? 01:45 - The scene in British Mandate Palestine 07:30 - British MI9 unit 07:38 - Jewish military units 08:41 - Rescue missions into Europe 14:21 - Secret meeting in Tel Aviv 17:29 - Palestinian Jews’ view of European Jewry 21:51 - Hannah Senesh 24:46 - Parachuting technology in WWII 26:44 - Sword of Honour trilogy 29:48 - Discrimination against Jewish agents in Europe 32:54 - Chaos at the end of WWII 34:13 - Hannah Senesh’s doomed mission 43:10 - The escape of Hannah’s mother 47:43 - The importance of heroes and myths 49:06 - Understanding Zionism  Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more at The Free Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. 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. This is a poem known as Ellie Ellie by a woman named Hannah Sennish, a hero of the Second World War and of early Zionism. Today, my guest, Maddie Friedman, 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. It's really an incredible tale. Let's get into it. It is for a war. This Lockhean invasion of away. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in him.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. The situation is a brand. People are Nazi-field. On the beaches, we shall fight on the landing ground, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, which will never know that. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War.

I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Maddie Friedman. He's a journalist. He is a columnist, my colleague, at the Free Press, and the author of a book, Out of the Sky, Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe. Maddie, thank you so much. for joining the show. Thank you so much for having me. So let's talk about this fascinating story

that you tell in this book. 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. In the first World War, of course, it's a theater of major combat operations. To what extent does any of that approach this part of the world in World War II and just in general set this stage for us. What is life like in this part of the world in the early 1940s? Sure. So, British

mandate Palestine, which is what the territory was called at the time, is kind of a backwater in this war. The closest that the hot war ever gets to the borders of Palestine is the German advance through North Africa to L.L.A. Main. And there's a kind of a touch and go moment

when it looks like Rommels forces are going to actually reach British mandate Palestine. And there's kind of a mutual freakout 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 advances reversed at L.A. Le Alamein 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 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 placate the Arab world, which the British needs to keep onside in the war, they cut off Jewish immigration precise at the moment when it's most needed

when Jews are trying to get out of Europe desperately 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 family members of the Jews in Palestine who are being murdered 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'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 take part in this world war as Jews and as Zionists.

So there are tensions between the Jews and the British and 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 collaboration, where the sides basically put aside their differences 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 just a few more moments on the scene. Obviously, the project of Zionism is well advanced at this point. We're only a few years away from the Declaration of a State. Can you, he make any generalizations or is this kind of an impossible question about the sort of Jews who are collecting in 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 are, as it were, the old guard Zionists?

And what can you say about the new wave that's coming in with the war? Right. So there are a wave in the 30s of Jewish immigrants from Germany, not surprisingly. And before that, there had been waves mainly from Eastern Europe. The people leading the project in Palestine are mostly East European socialists, borderline communists, people who lived on Kibbutzim, which is this Zionist invention. It's kind of a communal farm set up. So people like David Ben-Gurian, Golda, Eir, they're running the show, and they very much see themselves as the Jewish front and the global workers revolution. They're very much on the left.

And they're very adamantly secular 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 motley crew. There's 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.

So when the war breaks out, Tel Aviv was just 30 years old. So the place is very new and unfortunate. 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 an all-out war,

which was happening, of course, in many other parts of the world at that time. Okay, so let's talk about British policy here and what interests the Brits take in using. I think that's the right verb based on the story that you tell. using recent refugees from Europe who have come to settle in Palestine for operations back on the continent. Tell us about MI9.

I mean, tell us about the superstructure here that is conducting this stuff and what they have in mind. Right. So 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 at that. A clash is coming between the Jews in Palestine and the British Empire. So the mainstream authorities in Palestine are very reluctant to agree to these Jewish demands to fight the Nazis. So you have these very

kind of emotional pleas beginning 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 send a massive number of commandos into Europe shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until it becomes this mission 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. Eminem was in charge of escape and evasion. So they're

job is to extract British pilots and POWs who are behind enemy lines and help them get back to allied territories. They can be put back on bombers and sent back into the war. So that's the job of MI-9. 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 sympathetic to the Jewish cause, unlike many of his colleagues. 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 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. And yet they have these identities, which can help them blend in in occupied Europe. So that's the origin of the plan on the British side. The British need people in, in this case, in central Europe. So we're talking about Hungary, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania. They need people who can speak local languages and who can be dropped in and serve as liaisons with local partisans and local resistance forces. So they'll be dropped in with radios and they'll communicate with British headquarters and ultimately 32 people are dropped as part of this mission. So that's what the British think is going on.

The Jews have a different idea. Well, indeed. So this is the, you leave me right to the natural next question, which is, I mean, the energy of your story comes from this tension between what the British are up to and then what the commandos themselves believe is their goal on the ground here. Not necessarily contradictory to the British goal.

but certainly, let's just say, supplementary to it and perhaps primary for them. So what is going on in their minds? What are they going to Europe to do? The priority list is different. 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 make contact with underground forces.

they understand that there are Jews left in these territories, not many, but they were allowed to do that, but they weren't dropped for that purpose. The Zionist movement sends these people, at least this is the explicit mission, to save Jews. 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. the Germans care about annihilating them. So no one's bombing the death camps. So 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 rules. So the only way to get into Europe is to wear a British uniform, get on a British bomber 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, Chaim, actually was interned by the British. He fled Europe, was caught by a British ship in the Mediterranean and was interned. And so he was in a British prison and then he wore British uniform and 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 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 more expendable. So, you know, there's an expectation that they're not likely to come back if they do. It's great. But many of them don't and many are just swallowed up by the war. So the British think that's, you know, that's what's happening. They're using these people. The Jews think they're using the British and they actually refer to this mission repeatedly as a plane ticket. So what the British mission is to them as a plane ticket, what they want to do,

do somehow get into Europe and somehow save Jews in Europe, although how they're supposed to do that is completely unclear. If you read the headlines about Israel, you're only getting a tiny slice of a long, complicated story without depth, context, or sometimes even the basic facts. I'm Norm Weissman, the host of unpacking Israeli history, the podcast that dives into the fascinating and sometimes controversial events and figures that have shaped Israel's past and present. each week on unpacking Israeli history. I explore the layers of Israeli history,

debates around the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, the cultural forces at play, drawing from a variety of sources and perspectives. So if you're looking for a nuance, thought-provoking take on Israel, one that avoids the oversimplifications and political spin, I think you'll really appreciate the show. Find unpacking Israel's history,

wherever you listen to your podcast or on YouTube. You quote the minister of state for the Middle East Lord Moyne. The scheme would remove from Palestine a number of active and resourceful Jews and their training need not take place in Palestine. The chances of many of them returning in the future to give trouble seems slight. Yes. Good expression of the utter cynicism and ruthlessness of the British approach here. Well, but I worry that what has to be juxtaposed against that, though, is a kind of woolly-eyed. lack of clarity in terms of what these commandos are meant to do for the Jews once they're in Europe.

I mean, say more if you can. Maybe there isn't much more to say about what tools, what ways of thinking they are given by the Zionist leadership. 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, it turns out to be, without more to it. Was there even an effort to put more to it? 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 return. And he describes a meeting with the top leaders of the Zionist movement, including David Ben-Gurion, who would go on to be the prime minister of Israel, and the commander of the Haganah, which is kind of the proto-DF, 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. 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, there'd been the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was led by Zionists in Warsaw, and this is what they wanted. More uprisings, the Zinist movement,

which is kind of built on this idea of Jewish action and military bravery and a rejection of passivity. The Zionist movement cannot live with the story of the Holocaust. They can't live with the fact that millions of people are being put on trains and gasped. They need to see people fighting back.

So one of the Zionist leaders says, this is your job. Train them to fight back. Another one says, listen, no, 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. And someone else tells them, I mean, this is, this has Ben-Gurion, the kind of the top guy, says, no, actually 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 just 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, their job was kind of made it to the end of the war and then engineer 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 possible. So not only

do the missions contradict, none of them are really feasible. But no one drops out after this meeting. 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, Hanasenish 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 Second World War. And it seems that they didn't save a single Jew or kill a single Nazi. 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? And what were the attitudes, I presume they were different individual to individual, of these 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 in conditions that, you know, increasingly the alarm bells had been going off throughout the 30s. What was the thought amongst soon-to-be Israeli Jews about the Jews of Europe at this point?

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. So we know the story. We know where it's going. We're unlucky enough to grow up with words like death camps and gas chambers.

I mean, just think those things, we know they existed. But in 1940, 1941, no one could believe that such a thing could exist. So there are all these wild stories coming out of Europe. But there have been a lot of wild stories coming out of Europe in the First World War and many of the world. them turned out to be false. So there was this tendency to say, okay, listen, things are bad in Europe, but it's just 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. It's only then that people in Palestine understand that people are being exterminated. And there's panic 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 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 beachhead or as pioneers who are clearing the way for the eventual immigration of the Jews of Europe. And they suddenly realized that 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 the Jews seem not to be fighting back, which really, I mean, it's almost a ridiculous thing to say about Europe. 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 the rejection of passivity in favor of action. And they

can't understand why the Jews of Europe seem not to be fighting back. And that's what the Zionist movement makes such a big deal of events like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or like this mission, the mission of the parachute. It's because these are examples 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. 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. I'm just feeding your family for another day was heroic and not losing your humanity was heroic and there are many ways of being heroic. but in the very kind of crude lines of that time, if you weren't holding a rifle and fighting back, you were a coward, and 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. How did you survive? 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 trickles through the human psyche in many ways, many of them not particularly productive. And it takes a couple decades before Israel learns to treat these people with respect and to see this event in a kind of rational way. And none of that was true, of course, in 1943, 1994. Well, let's zoom in on Hannah Sennesh 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.

And then let's talk about how she's actually prepared. I mean, what kind of training and tools is she given for this mission? So Hannah Sennish 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 parachutists who have Kiboutin named after them and streets. But Hana is really the symbol of the mission. And 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 had really 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 journalist. And 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 afterward. She managed to get out of Budapest. She leaves her mother behind, this huge and painful point 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 new Jew. So the new Jew doesn't write poetry, which she did. Or, you know, read fancy books.

They work. You milk the cows, you plow the fields. 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. So she tries to do that and she joins a commune called Stotiam, which means fields of the sea. It's a Hebrew.

It 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'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, from her comrades, and that all of this is going on in 1942, 1943, when the news starts coming from Europe about the murder of the Jews 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 Eichmann, who's the SS officer in charge of murdering every Jew in Hungary. So the murder of the Jews in rural Hungary is completed by that summer.

The Jews of Budapest are left for last, and that's the backdrop to Hannah's decision to join this British mission. She is given parachute training in Galilee in northern Israel at an air base that called Ramat David, which is not. now an air base 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 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 parachutes. It's cool. 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 humdrum. Right, now you can, you know, pay a few,

a couple hundred bucks and go skydiving. But that idea, they didn't have that idea. And, yeah, it was this futuristic form of warfare and the Nazis had used it really effectively when they captured Crete. And this was the new thing, you know, soldiers flying from the air. And it was just an incredible kind of heroism.

So there's a glamour associated with Paris shooting. That's a big part of the mission. There's a reason that these heroes are not remembered as commandos or spies or soldiers. We call them parachutists. That was their act of heroism. So she's sent to parachute school. And then she's moved to Cairo where 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 Morse code, that kind of thing. From Cairo, she's flown to Bari, which is a port in In Italy, it had just been freed by allied forces. And so it was kind of battered and people were really hungry.

And the place had been bombed. And the Allies 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 in Evelyn Waugh's novels of the Second World War. I guess it's an unconditional surrender is the novel. I think it's the third of the trilogy where he talks about sort of honor that Hannah's working with, of whom Waugh takes a dim view. Interesting.

I actually had no idea that he described Barry, and I wish I had, I wish I'd known that I'll check that book out. But yeah, there were a lot of British, there's a lot of British activity around, around And Bari, now it's a city that few people visit. And I did when I was writing this book because I wanted to see what it was like. And actually, the airport in Bari is the airfield that they used to infiltrate the agent. So if you fly to Bari, you'll land where Hanasanish both landed and took off in 1944. Well, of course, you know, served with the partisans in Yugoslavia himself.

And, you know, as you might imagine, as sort of trad-cath, right-wing, Brit, took a pretty dim view of everything that was going on. And, you know, it's interesting that trilogy starts as a digression, but I like to recommend books. But that trilogy, which is a magnificent work of literature, and doesn't, it isn't as well remember it as, for example, Brideshead revisited in some other, some comedy books he wrote in addition to Brideshead. But I think it is his masterpiece, the trilogy on the war. And it also sort of represents his own evolution on the question of Zionism, of Jews, where in the first, book. 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 they're not a fan. And in the list of his unattractive qualities, you know, a blowhard of this, that, comma, a Zionist, comma.

But the third volume, Unconditional Surrender, which is written after the war very much grapples with the Holocaust and was very shaken by it. As so, you know, so many Brits who had sort of the middle class, polite anti-Semitism, all of a sudden having to confront, you know, what Nazi anti-Semitism actually rot. That's so interesting.

I'm going to run and read those books. The world that Han is operating in is very much that, that Evelyn-Wa world. I mean, Anthony Simmons, who's the officer who I mentioned, who's running in my nine 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 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 he describes himself as an anti-Semite. And this guy was very sympathetic to the Jewish cause.

I mean, his Jewish subordinates love him. 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 common British antisemitism or something like that, even though nothing in his actions would communicate that. But that quote from Lord Moyne that you brought in earlier,

and I'm glad that you did, says something about the climate in which our agents are forced to operate. So, you know, 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 radio men, people don't like them because they're Jews. And they figure out very quickly that they, 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. 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're wearing British uniforms, but same foreign.

I think at one point, Haim, one of the agents, tells people, He's Irish. And his wife, he has a wife back in British Bandit, Palestine, whose name is Shula, I think. And he tells people that her name is Sally. So, 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 of the characters meets Red Army parachutists who are operating with the

communist partisans in Slovakia. And he tells them that he's a Jew from a socialist commune. He's basically a communist. And he reads Karl Marx. He 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 cannot believe that a Jew could be a socialist. So for a lot of these people, it's an education and 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, So there'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. Yeah, there are strong hints in 1944 that that's not likely to happen. So Hannah, ultimately, I guess for now what, in the summer of 1944, she will attempt to make her way to Budapest. You already set the scene for us a bit, the extermination of the Hungarian Jews in the countryside. side. I guess I don't know. You tell me if it's completed by June, but Budapest is up soon. It's an incredible time for a Jewish. I've called them commandos, but I will switch to parachutist indeferent era to a title that they would have held proudly. It's a hell of a time 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 have not got into the weeds of this stuff. I mean, 1944, it's, you know, Normandy is happening imminently. I guess it happens just before her last transmission. You know, we're less than a year out from victory in Europe. I mean, this is the end game for Nazism. And yet, as you know, Maddie, this is the most savage, violent. We are in 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 it's just to kind of play around with my metaphors here.

Like the top is also starting to like teeter. Like the thing is starting to fall apart, which does nothing to diminish the violence. What a hell of a time to try to make a run for Budapest. Right. I mean, it's, you know, when you go back to historical documents and I spend a long time when I was researching this book in the Haganah Archive, which is the Haganah was the Jewish underground before the creation of 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 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 but in the documents they have

no idea. I mean no one has any idea 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 doing the research you kind of have to enter their headspace and also forget what is what is going to happen. So in June 1944, Hana wants to cross the border from Yugoslavia into Hungary. 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'd been kind of independent. And that changes. And Hungary is essentially occupied by German divisions and it becomes a puppet state. That's probably the best way to describe it. And then, but Hannah insists on going anyway. And her comrades, the other parachute is start 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. She isn't going to come back. And one thing you learn when you read the writing of the people who are involved is, which is surprising, I think, to someone who grows up with the myth of heroic Hannah Seneh is that

her comrades don't like her very much. Their comrades are men. And, And Hannah'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 give in and she's clearly going to go. So she crosses the border with three other people.

One is an escaped French POW who's working 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 extract more Jews. So she's heading off toward the border. And a comrade who survives is with her. And he describes this scene where they, shake hands and she presses into his palm, a poem that she wrote, kind of a classic, Hanasanaish mood. It sounds like a scene from a play where the heroine is about to stride off

to meet her fate and she leaves behind the last message. So it's a bit Joan of Arc, I think, in a conscious way, I mean, Hannah was very much conscious of the hero's quest and the way this is supposed to look and she knows that she has to go to Hungary because that's what the heroin 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 the Abber to German intelligence 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 couriers who are running messages 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 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 last hero to not be super popular with her peers and to have a somewhat heroic conception of themselves. In fact, that goes with the territory. That's almost, you know, that's one of the demands of being here. If you're really nice and easygoing and the team player, you're probably not going to be Achilles. Yeah.

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and in particular the role of her mother, which is just absolutely, well, I almost don't want to characterize it. It's a terrible thing and a remarkable thing. So what happens to Hannah in prison or in jail? So she's caught on the border, and then she's tortured en 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 the home where she grew up, but she's in a prison. And this is June 1944. Her mother's at home in their nice house on Rose Hill in Budapest, and someone knocks on her door, and she opens it. It's morning.

It's about 8 a.m., according to her recollection of this, 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 goes with him, and she's seated in a room facing a military interrogator whose name we know. His name was Lieutenant Roja. 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 Hannah 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 Caesarea, which is where Hannah was a few months before. So he asks her again, where's your daughter? And she says, 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 far from the war and is safe. And he asks her several times and makes her sign a declaration saying that Hana is not, you know, that Hana 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 Hana. And she hasn't seen her. for five years, and that's how they meet. And 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 lack of realism. But that's really how it happened, according to Catherine, who's Hannah's mother, who leaves us a very detailed account of it.

So they're reunited in prison, and ultimately they're imprisoned together, not in the same cell. So Catherine can see Hannah in a different part of the prison, but can't talk to her. can't touch her and can't avert the fate that I think that they both realizes, you know, is coming. And at one point, doesn't her mother, Catherine, believe that Hannah's been killed and she attempts suicide? I mean, there's just an awful sort of series of events here. Right.

Catherine is so just shocked and depressed by these events that she attempts suicide in the cell, and it fails. And they're imprisoned in the same prison for several months. eventually Catherine is released at a moment when it seems that the Red Army is about to liberate Budapest. So the Hungarian regime is shaky, and they decide that they'd better be nice to their political prisoners because they're about to be liberated by the allies. And so they release Catherine. And eventually she's arrested again. She's kind of put on one of the death marches, manages to escape.

So she has her own story. and Hana is repeatedly interrogated and and ultimately executed in November in the yard of this prison. She was 23. And there's this note

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. It's in the National Library. It's on display at the National Library of Israel, along with a few of Hannah's poems. And she obviously scribbles this note with a pencil and a piece of paper, and she sticks it in a pocket, and then her clothes are later given to her mother, and they find this note in the pocket. And much of the stories about names, people keep changing their names. The story about fluid identity. So when she grows up in Budapest, her name is Anna Sennash. And then she moves to the land of Israel and becomes a pioneer and gives herself a Hebrew name. So now she's Hana, Sanesh.

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 transcended politics. She's not part of any national story. It's just your daughter. It's kind of the most basic relationship. the only relationship that matters in the end is that one.

And the complexities of this relationship, too, and just for Catherine, you know, it's all well and good that your child wants to be a hero and serve the Zionist cause and fight the Nazis, et cetera, et cetera. Meanwhile, you were taking solace this whole time, just knowing that your child was safe. How pissed would we all be? How furious 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. Is it at least animated? This must have been crushing for Catherine. And 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 Hanna. 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 he says, 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 executed so quickly. And then Catherine makes this really unlikely escape. She's not in prison in Budapest, but there's a, um, a. who carried out by the Arrow Cross, which is essentially the Nazi party in Hungary. So they are now in

control. And groups of Jews are just being seized by armed militiamen in the streets, march 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 put on one of the death marches. She manages to just slip aside, hide in a convent. And, um, Eventually, she makes it to Israel, which didn't exist when she arrived there, but it comes into existence in 1948. And then she has to live alongside this myth that's built around Hanasenish. So Hanesonish is one of the great heroines of Zionism.

And soldiers go off to battle in 1948 singing Hanesonish 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 futile. 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 was just one story of several that you zoom in on in your book. Enzo Sereni, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

I mean, I just because I have an interest in Dachau. And I've stood in that crematorium numerous times where, of course, he's killed. Was this just another gripping? I mean, all these tales are just sort of incredible, but also sort of disastrous. You know, this is not a story of, sadly, of operational excellence. Not that everything is the fault of the parachute is. It's far from it. But the odds are steep.

The resources are limited. 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 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 a mission. of a kind that would be at the center of a regular World War II book, you know, the assassination of Hydra in Prague, great book about that called H-H-H-H-H, one of my favorite books. And that's a pretty classic story where the SOE sends into assassins, and they reach Prague and they kill Hydra. So that's a pretty classic World War II story. You know, write the dam busters.

You know, there's these stories 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. 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 belongs on a different shelf, which is, I guess, the mission 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 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. They weren't stupid. They didn't think that they were going to save the Jews or defeat the Vermont. 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 from that angle, it works. And proof of that is that here we are eight years later. And we're still talking about them. Yeah, literary in the sense of myth, national myth. And myth, not in the flimsy, superficial. People sometimes just use it as a synonym for why.

Right. I mean, absolutely. It's myth, in its most noble sense, a myth is not nothing. 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 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.

he, you know, is violent, he's a criminal. We're always looking for some reason 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. 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 noble in my personal life, and I'll try to aspire to their example. Another way of dealing with it 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. The sinus movement always understood the power of stories because the sinus movement is essentially a story that was written

by a playwright and a journalist named Theodore Herzl in, he's from Vienna, and he experienced this wave of very frightening hatred directed at him and another 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 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. 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. Isn't it crazy, Maddie? And I realize that this question could set us up for an entire another episode. So this will be the short version. Maybe we should do a whole episode on this at some point. Whenever you want. Just this striking irony of Jewish history and the history of Zionism. And I realize this sounds like Aaron has an interest.

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 is this cause of the left, this, or many important ways of cause of the left, and, you know, is formed by anti-imperialism, literal, literal anti-imperialism, opposition to the British Empire. 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, if you read about anti-imperial, post-imperial India, I mean, the ethic is very similar. I mean, this is a story of post-imperial anti-British empire politics,

very sympathetic to coherent with, you know, the tale of the global left. Absolutely. In 2006, and Zionism is a dirty word. for the left and the emblem of imperialism. What an incredible insane twist in the plot. 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 part of the left. The military forces that they venerated were Tito's partisans. And they loved the Red Army. you know, they didn't like the 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 bloc or part of the American alliance system. Ben-Gurion 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

Kibbutz movement who saw themselves as part of the world of social. And it plays out in an interesting way in the 1950s. But Benghourian venerates Gandhi. Gandhi's probably the figure who he most admires. And he sees the story of the Jews in Palestine as parallel to the story of India, throwing off the imperial yoke and becoming 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 his story. that would be familiar to Gandhi. And it's hard to, it's hard to understand that from 2026 when we're in a very, at 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. 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 radical socialists who set this place up.

Maddie Friedman, 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. Thanks again for having me. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if?

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