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

Finalist for the 75th National Jewish Book Awards

The awe-inspiring and largely untold story of Hannah Senesh, a female paratrooper in World War II whose courage and sacrifice during a daring mission to rescue Europe's Jews left an indelible mark on history.

In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in the British Mandate for Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about ghettos being liquidated, industrialized killing centers in 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 communicatehighly 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 death camps 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 eighteen years old, Hannah emigrated from Hungary to the British Mandate for 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 in her team: the wireless operator tasked with sending and deciphering top-secret British radio codes. Though captured