Crash of the Heavens

About this book

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, is expertly revealed "in cinematic detail" (The Wall Street Journal). 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 a 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. At the same time, they would help Jewish civilians escape deportation to death camps or take up arms in resistance against the Nazis. In 1939, at just eighteen years old, Hannah Senesh had 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 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." Hannah's legacy lives on today in the widely published diary she'd kept since age thirteen and in her poetry which has inspired generations. Each year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a short poem Hannah composed on the shores of the Mediterranean in 1942 is sung at ceremonies around the world. Titled "Eli, Eli," or "My God, My God," it has become a modern hymn, taught in schools, sung in synagogues, and printed in thousands of prayerbooks. More than just a gripping historical account of Hannah's life and afterlife, Crash of the Heavens "is a magnificent masterwork" (Colonel Jack Jacobs, U.S. Army (retired), Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, author of If Not Now, When? ) that offers a powerful reminder of the human spirit's ability to shine, even in the darkest of times.