Crash of the Heavens: The Remarkable Story of Hannah Senesh and the Only Military Mission to Rescue Europe’s Jews During World War II

Author: Douglas Century

In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in Palestine, then controlled by the British. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about ghettos being liquidated, industrialized killing centers in German-occupied Poland, and a chilling campaign to exterminate Europe’s entire Jewish population. When it became clear that the Allies were unwilling to spare any forces from the war effort to save civilians, the Jewish community in Palestine came up with a daring plan.

Working with British military intelligence, an elite unit of young Jewish paratroopers volunteered to return to eastern Europe. Once behind enemy lines, they would use their expertise in the local languages and terrain to rescue thousands of downed Allied pilots and escaped POWs who were trapped with no way to communicate—highly trained airmen desperately needed by the British and American air forces to fly more bombing missions.

At the same time, these volunteer commandos would help Jewish civilians escape deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps and killing centers or take up arms in resistance against the Nazis. Hannah Senesh was one of only three female paratroopers who risked everything to infiltrate occupied Europe.

In 1939, at just 18 years old, Hannah emigrated from Hungary to the Palestine, where she dreamed of being a poet and a schoolteacher. Instead, she became a poet and a paratrooper. Five years after fleeing Europe, Hannah parachuted back into occupied territory as a freedom fighter with the most crucial role on her team: the wireless operator tasked with sending and deciphering top-secret British radio codes. Though captured almost immediately after crossing the border into Hungary, she refused to give up her radio codes or any information about her mission, despite enduring months of horrific torture. Her final act of defiance—choosing to die before a firing squad rather than beg for clemency—cemented her legendary status as the “Jewish Joan of Arc.”

Hardback

432 pages