Crash of the Heavens

How a crack team of parachutists - including several heroic young women - launched one of the most daring rescue missions of World War II.

In the decades before the Second World War, thousands of young Jewish men and women left the antisemitism of Europe for British-controlled Palestine. By 1942, they began receiving reports of unimaginable horrors - of the liquidation of the ghettos, of industrialised killing centres in Poland, and of the plan to exterminate all of Europe's Jews.

The Yishuv - the Jewish community in British Palestine - needed to act. Striking a deal with British Intelligence in 1943, they trained a cadre of volunteer Jewish emigres to parachute behind enemy lines on a dual mission: assisting thousands of downed Allied airmen to escape and rescuing as many Jewish citizens as possible from the death camps.

At the centre of this story is the extraordinary Hannah Senesh, a legendary poet-soldier, and her courageous female colleagues, who, armed with only their intelligence and humanity, underwent training as commandos, radio operators, and parachutists. Then, in early 1944, they courageously jumped behind enemy lines. Captured in her native Hungary, Senesh refused to give up any information even while suffering months of gruesome torture.

Thrilling and inspiring, Crash of the Heavens is one of the great untold stories of the Second World War.

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