100: They escaped Europe — then parachuted back in, with Matti Friedman

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2026

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1944, as the gears of the Holocaust turned toward Hungary, 32 young Jewish volunteers did the unthinkable: they parachuted into the genocide. They were a motley bunch, including a celebrated poet and a nearsighted 40-year-old pacifist. They were sent by the British to rescue downed pilots and by the Zionist leadership to save Jews. They stood almost no chance of success, and by every military metric, they failed. They organized no uprisings; they liberated no camps. Yet, as Matti Friedman reveals in his riveting new book Out of the Sky, their mission was never really about military tactics. It was about story-telling. They set out to show that even in the 20th century's deepest, darkest valley of death, a Jew must still strike a match. To prove that the Jewish people were no longer mere victims of history, but authors of it.

Their fame in today's Israel suggests that in that, at least, they were successful.

This episode was sponsored by Patreon member Eric, and dedicated to the Southern California Hillel chapters at UC Riverside, Claremont Colleges, CalPoly San Luis Obispo, CalPoly Pomona, and University of Redlands. Thank you for helping young Jewish adults thrive in their identity and togetherness!

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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A new episode of Ask Haviv Anything.
0:07.4	This is going to be a very exciting episode.
0:09.2	We're very, very happy to have back Mati Friedman, a fellow journalist, a writer at the free press,
0:16.2	the author of many wonderful books, specifically five books.
0:20.0	We've done episodes in the past about his
0:21.8	other books, the semi-autobiographical book, which is also a deeper analysis on the First Lebanon
0:28.1	War and others. And today we're going to discuss his absolutely riveting new book on a topic
0:34.7	that I thought I had understood, but I learned a lot of new things and new insights
0:38.9	about the meaning of this whole story. It's called Out of the Sky. It's the incredible and
0:44.7	mostly not known story of young members of the Ashuv, the Jewish polity, the Jewish community
0:51.7	in the land of Israel before the Declaration of Israel's
0:54.2	independence, who during World War II in what was then mandatory Palestine, were trained
0:59.5	by the British and parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to organize resistance, to
1:05.5	save stranded, allied soldiers to meet and save the Jews.
1:10.2	The most famous of these paratroopers is the poet Khanasenish, who was famously captured,
1:15.3	tortured, and eventually executed by the Nazis.
1:18.0	We're going to dive into the incredible story of these people, their bravery, their ingenuity,
1:23.7	what they were trying to accomplish, the myth that was built around them, and the more analytical and nevertheless just as profound lessons that we can learn from their story.
1:34.6	As Mati notes, after pouring over extensive notes and archives in Israel and abroad, they were sent by the Jewish leadership to save Jews and by the British to rescue allied troops.
1:46.0	To the best of our knowledge, not a single Jew was saved by them. They were not able to
1:49.5	effectively organize resistance to the Nazis. And yet despite the failure and the fact that there
1:54.3	were only ever 32 of them, they loom very large because they teach us certain lessons about that time and about the meaning
	...

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