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, a group of young Jewish refugees agreed to parachute back into Europe as British agents. The British needed multilingual infiltrators behind enemy lines, while the refugees, only recently escaped from occupied Europe, were desperate to fight back against the murderous Nazi regime. Yet by the end of the mission, not a single Nazi was harmed and not a single Jew was saved, and many of the refugees died in the process. Even so, some of their names would become legendary, especially that of twenty-three-year-old Hannah Senesh, best known as the author of the beloved Hebrew song “Eli, Eli.” Their story would become one of the young state of Israel’s founding myths—but 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Using thousands of original documents from once-secret files, manuscripts, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Matti Friedman follows four of the parachutists, including Senesh, from the spring of 1944 to the operation’s dramatic end that winter. In Out of the Sky, he tells the gripping and surprising tale of a forgotten moment, demonstrating 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.