?Thrilling, terrifying, and awe-inspiring.??Simon Sebag Montefiore

The harrowing true story of Hannah Senesh and a group of idealistic, young Jews who parachuted behind enemy lines into Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944.

In 1944, a group of young Jewish refugees agreed to parachute back into Europe as British agents. Many of them died, and some of their names would become legendary, especially that of twenty-three-year-old Hannah Senesh, best known as the author of ?Eli, Eli,? one of the most famous songs ever written in Hebrew. And yet 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Using thousands of original documents from once-secret files, manuscripts, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Out of the Sky follows four of the parachutists from the spring of 1944 to the operation's dramatic end that winter. The British needed multilingual agents behind enemy lines, while their refugee counterparts were desperate to fight back against the murderous Nazi regime. By the end of the mission, not a single Nazi was harmed and not a single Jew was saved?and yet the story of these brave young men and women became one of Israel's founding myths.

In Out of the Sky, Matti Friedman tells the gripping tale of a forgotten moment, showing us how storytelling itself can have a power even greater than warfare. And in exploring the line between myth and reality, heroism and futility, he creates an argument that has deep resonance in our own time.