Matti Friedman, "Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe" (Spiegel & Grau, 2026)

About this episode

Matti Friedman discusses his book about a daring WWII mission by Holocaust survivors to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe.

Was it one of the war’s most memorable feats of valor or an act of desperation, even madness? In Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe (Spiegel & Grau, 2026), 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. Yet by the end of the mission, not a single Nazi was harmed and not a single Jew was saved, and many of the parachutists died in the process. Even so, some of their names would become legendary, especially that of twenty-three-year-old Hannah Senesh, 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 Using thousands of original documents from once-secret files, manuscripts, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Matti Friedman follows four of the parachutists from the spring of 1944 to the operation’s dramatic end that winter.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…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Matti Friedman

Topics covered

• heroism
• Nazi Europe
• Holocaust
• parachutists
• myth and reality
• valor and futility

Keywords

• Matti Friedman
• Hannah Senesh
• World War II
• Holocaust
• parachute mission
• heroism
• myth
• valor

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Spiegel & Grau

Books & works: Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, Eli, Eli

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