Leap of Faith

In the middle of 1944, Slovak rebels staged an uprising against the Fascist puppet government and established a precarious stronghold for anti-Nazi forces. It was too late for this to help Slovakia’s Jews, two-thirds of whom had already been deported to death camps. But it represented a promising opportunity for the Americans, the British, and the Russians, who hoped that the enclave could survive until the advancing Russian army reached it.

On September 18, as Matti Friedman relates in his gripping account, an American B-17 Flying Fortress arrived in the rebel capital of Banská Bystrica carrying supplies, men from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and a hitchhiker named Haviva Reick, a young Slovakian-born Jewish woman from Palestine. Clothed in a British uniform and answering to an English pseudonym, she was a Yishuv emissary ostensibly serving only His Majesty’s government; her surreptitious mission was to help survivors in what was soon to be reconquered Slovakia and to aid the hitherto relatively unscathed but now deeply endangered Jews of neighboring Hungary. In town, she met up with three young compatriots who were part of the same covert operation and had parachuted into the country to make their way to Banská Bystrica by an infinitely more arduous route. Quartered at a luxury hotel, the group was confronted by Egon Roth, “a bespectacled young intellectual” Zionist youth leader. Unlike some of the other Jews in town, he wasn’t happy to see them.

Before the war, Haviva had been Egon’s counselor in Hashomer Hatzair. But that didn’t prevent him from chastising her and the others. “Who called you? Who needs you?” he thundered at them, according to Haim Hermesh, the only member of the group who survived to tell the tale. He reports Egon shouting:

You brag about how you stand tall, as if you came here as representatives of some master race from the Land of Israel. You must know: We’re not ashamed to hide and grovel, escape and sneak across borders in order to save one more Jew from this giant tomb. For years we’ve been grateful for every day that passes and have been planning tricks to move each of us one step closer to the Land of Israel, and suddenly a few “heroes” get up, get on a plane, and jump into the open grave.

What Roth said was not, in the end, an unjust description of what the parachutists actually did and what has made them, to the perplexity of Friedman, avatars of Zionism for generations. “The strange gap,” he writes in his introduction to his book about them, “between the mythic stature of the heroes and their scant accomplishments—this is the mystery that drew me to their story and kept me submerged in their world for years.”

Friedman spent part of that time in the archives and has apparently read everything in print about the “heroes.” What he has written, however, is not another history of their exploits, of which there are already many, including Douglas Century’s excellent Crash of the Heavens (published just months ago), but a personal “journey into their story.” It’s a book by a man who immigrated to the Land of Israel as a teenager about some unforgettable people who did the same thing half a century earlier and how they helped make his adopted country what it is.

Friedman does his best to step into their shoes and even to make the jump with them. Although he is a combat veteran of the IDF, who has written movingly about his own military experience (and much else), it was only when a paratrooper friend told him that it was “wrong to write a book about parachutists without jumping” that he made his first—and, presumably, only—leap from an airplane (in the Negev). He visited Banská Bystrica, Bari, Budapest, and many of the other locales in which his eighty-year-old story unfolded and tried to imagine what these places looked like to his protagonists and how they felt when they were there. Above all, he tries to understand what made them do what they did.

On one level, there’s no mystery about that. “We must parachute into Europe,” Haviva wrote, “like a mother breaking into a burning house to rescue her children.” At the time Haviva wrote this, she hadn’t heard from her own mother for two years, from the time she had received one of the infamous, deceptive postcards reporting that her mother had been “transferred to General Government, formerly Poland” from her home in Banská Bystrica. Later, when she was on the spot, Haviva saw her empty house. “Perhaps we could have stopped it,” she wrote. Friedman, for his part, wonders “what she imagines she could have done.”

All of the parachutists, including the one destined to become most famous, Hannah Senesh, were similarly “terrified for their families in Europe, tormented by their own relative safety and by their inability to help.” But there was more to it than that, and Hannah was the one who best put her feelings into words. The daughter of an important Hungarian writer, and a budding writer herself, she was a teenage convert to Zionism who escaped from Budapest just before the war, changed her name from Anna to Hannah, and quickly became a kibbutznik. But that didn’t satisfy her for long:

I know that I won’t be a simple worker. I can’t be and don’t want to be,” she fumes in her journal, which she now writes in Hebrew. She has low moments when she wonders if she erred in coming here at all, and if she can ever be forgiven for abandoning her mother.

“The Hannah of legend,” Friedman tells us, “is idealistic and prepared for sacrifice,” but far from debunking this legend, he substantiates it. He quotes, for example, her conversation with another parachutist (who survived the war) while preparing in Yugoslavia to cross the border into Hungary:

One night, Joel [Palgi] and Hannah leave the bonfire and walk in the forest. She confesses to inner turmoil. She knows the risk, but she’s going to cross. It’s better to die with a clear conscience than to return without trying, she says, and if she fails, at least the Jews in Nazi hands will hear of her attempt and draw comfort and courage. These may be pronouncements placed in her mouth later on, but to me they sound like Hannah.

If these words sound authentic to Friedman, it’s in large part because they seem to presage the poem Hannah handed to another of the parachutists just before undertaking her doomed mission:

Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames.

Happy is the flame that burned secret in the deepest hearts.

Happy is the heart that knew when in honor to stop.

Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames.

Friedman singles out the act of lighting as the essential feature of the poem: “What separates the Diaspora from the Land of Israel, and Anna from Hannah, is action.” The second verb in the first and the last line, he writes, “lies at the center of the mission. In fact, I believe it’s the key to the mystery that has always hovered around the events—what the mission was and why figures who seemed to achieve so little became legends.”

Hannah was captured, tortured, and excecuted, but her poem, and her story, lived on. She and the other parachutists weren’t commandos as much as they were storytellers:

They’ve been sent to write, with their lives, a Zionist story about the war—a story that will lead others not to despair but to action. In this story, Jews will be not victims but heroes. This won’t change the war, but it will change how people remember the war, and therefore change the future. When faced with tragedy, those who know the parachutists’ story won’t pull the covers over their heads, or bemoan the cruelty of fate, or wait for someone else to do something. They will look out into the night, grip the sides of the door, and jump.

In this respect, the parachutists’ mission was successful, Friedman believes. The poem Hannah handed to her comrade quickly made its way home, was copied by David Ben-Gurion into his journal, and was set to martial music. “In the movie The Illegals, filmed just three years later, in 1947, Jewish refugees trying to escape Europe can already be heard singing this song.” One of the ships on which they sailed, in defiance of the British blockade of Palestine, was named the Hannah Senesh.

For Friedman, this story is not only a national story but, as he reports, a personal one. Like so many of the parachutists, he, too, left the diaspora as a teenager and headed for a kibbutz. Like them, he started out as an optimist. They believed that all wars would soon come to an end and that the future Jewish state would mark the dawn of a new era, and he, too, believed, when he moved from Canada to Israel in the early 1990s, that peace was around the corner and that the country would become a normal place to live. He thought this throughout his own military service in Lebanon and during the strife-torn years that followed. But the pervasiveness of antisemitism has now disabused him of any such ideas:

The hopefulness about the world that was built into the Zionist idea, we now know, was fanciful. Israel may be a bulwark against the problem for those of us who live here, a way to keep it at bay if we’re vigilant. That is a revolution. But it’s not a solution.

Indeed, Friedman sees things in a far grimmer light than the heroes about whom he has written, who lived in a far grimmer period:

In 1944 the parachutists believe that you jump, hit the ground, and begin the historic change that’s needed, the one that’s coming. They’re optimists. They don’t imagine what we know—that you grip the sides of the door and jump, but when you land, fold your parachute, and lift your head, you’re not on the ground. You’re on another plane. And then you jump from that plane, hit the ground and roll, dust yourself off, and you see that it’s just another plane.

The fear that this is the inexorable reality and is not likely to change in the forseeable future has driven hordes of Israelis, especially during the past couple of years, to relocate themselves to places like Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, and even Thailand. And if Friedman felt this way all the time, it might be hard to understand why he himself would stay put.

His book ends, however, not with these sobering reflections but with him recalling his suspension in midair, floating above the Negev. He could see Masada, which didn’t stir him. The mass suicide of the ancient Jewish rebels there, he writes, is a sterile myth, whose victims left us “no poems or prayers” to hold on to. But he also saw Mount Nebo, where Moses, at the end of his life, caught sight of the Promised Land that he would never enter. Moses “showed the people who he was and who they could be, and showed them where to go.”

Of those earlier parachutists, Friedman writes:

The strange and lingering power of the parachutists lies not in any military victory, but in the older stories pulsing beneath the surface of theirs. The hero escapes danger but returns. She’s given new words and actions. She’ll be remembered. She stands on the mountain and is allowed a glimpse of what happens next. But she won’t cross. Her part is over.

Some eighty years later, the necessary parts are played by those who remember Hannah Senesh and her comrades, Israeli citizens like Friedman and his children. But his tone is more melancholy than triumphant. Hannah’s most famous poem prays (in Friedman’s translation) that “these things never end / The sand and the sea / The murmur of water / The lightning in the sky / A human prayer,” but one leaves this powerful book with the sense that its author is looking resolutely at an Israeli future in which war, too, may never end.