The Jewish Paratroopers and The Partisan PDF

Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 1
THE JEWISH PARATROOPERS AND THE PARTISANS IN
YUGOSLAVIA: YUGOSLAV PERCEPTIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS
1944-1945
Jovan Ćulibrk and Seth J. Frantzman*
*This was from a final draft version of this article
Introduction
The 32 paratroopers from the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, who were
selected by the Jewish Agency, trained by the British, and inserted into Eastern Europe during
World War II became iconic figures in Israel. Hannah Szenes (pronounced and sometimes
written “Senesh”) in particular was held up as a hero and exemplary figure for the new country’s
youth. Previous scholarly writing on them has been based on Jewish and British sources,
including the personal recollections of the volunteers themselves. This study seeks to fill in one
of the last remaining gray areas in their story—how the partisans in Yugoslavia, where some of
the paratroopers were sent, perceived their mission. While almost half of the Yishuv parachutists
began their missions in Yugoslavia and some of them never proceeded elsewhere, their reception
by the local resistance has remained nearly unexplored. Furthermore, Yugoslav sources have
until now remained virtually untouched by historians.

Sources
The Yishuv paratroopers have been the subject of many scholarly and popular works.
Foremost among them is Yoav Gelber’s Jewish Palestinian Volunteering in the British Army
During the Second World War, published in 1983.1 Individual members of the contingent wrote
memoirs and have been the subjects of works by others.2 A recent study, Judith Tydor Baumel-
Schwartz’s Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the Making of Israeli Collective
Memory, examines the event’s impact on Israeli memory.3 Baumel-Schwartz’s important
1
Yoav Gelber is one of the foremost experts on the subject. He has also written on Jewish
perceptions of the war. Yoav Gelber, “The Meeting Between the Jewish Soldiers from Palestine
Serving in the British Army and ‘She’erit Hapletah,’” Shoah Research Center, Yad Vashem,
http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206216.pdf; Yoav Gelber,
“The Mission of the Jewish Parachutists from Palestine in Europe in World War II,” Journal of
Israeli History 7:1 (spring 1986), pp. 51-57; Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Perfect Heroes:
The World War II Parachutists and the Making of Israeli Collective Memory (Madison:
University of Wisconsin, 2010).

2
Amos Ettinger, Blind Jump: The Story of Shaike Dan (Cranbury, Rosemont Press, 1992).
Marge Percy and Hannah Senesh, Hanah Senesh: Her Life and Diary (Woodstock: Jewish
Lights, 2005); Yoel Palgi, Into the Inferno (Camden: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Henry
Armin Herzog met Chaim Hermesh in Slovakia and describes him in And Heaven Shed no Tears
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 222.

3
Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the Making
of Israeli Collective Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2010).

corrective and historiographical work illuminates how Israeli society and collective identity were
molded by the parachutists’ stories. Recalling the summer camp she attended, where each cabin
was named after one of the Yishuv paratroopers and every aspect of the camp program was
imbued with their spirit, she writes that she set out to “study how the parachutists underwent a
metamorphosis from ordinary people to ‘perfect heroes.’”4 “To this day,” she maintains, “the
parachutists’ mission is considered the pinnacle of Yishuv activity within the framework of the
British army, on behalf of European Jewry during the Holocaust.”5
But do the Yishuv paratroopers occupy such an exalted position when the story is told
from the Yugoslav perspective? Answering that question requires an examination of all the
material on the British special forces mission in Yugoslavia.
The broader Anglo-American mission in Yugoslavia, of which the Yishuv paratroopers
were a part, also produced a number of memoirs and, more recently, has become a subject of
much scholarly interest. The interest derives from the fact that Yugoslavia, along with France,
was the main battleground of the Special Operations Executive, the volunteer force formed by
the British after the fall of France to carry out sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines. In
the words of M. R. D. Foot, in the spring of 1944, “the Balkans were so honeycombed by SOE
[Special Operations Executive] and OSS [the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the
CIA] missions that the ludicrously named Balkan Air Terminal Service (BATS) had thirty-six
4
Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, “Perfect Heroes,” The Jewish Press, May 26, 2010.
5
Ibid.
different landing strips for them to use.”6 By the end of 1943, Anglo-American missions in
Yugoslavia numbered 65 people working with Draža Mihailović’s Chetnik royalist movement
and 107 with the communist-led partisans.7 Partisan sources dating from the end of September
1944 that mention personnel from the “English missions” list 121 people, among them ten
parachutists of Yishuv. However, only “Sergeant Feigl” (Dan Löhner/Laner) is specifically
labeled as a “Palestinian.”8
Perhaps because of they were a small proportion of the Allied special forces personnel in
Yuguslavia, the Yishuv parachutists get only two paragraphs in Heather Williams’ book on the
SOE in Yugoslavia.9 However, several non-Jewish soldiers from the OSS left accounts of the
Jewish volunteers.10 Franklin Lindsay recalled Bill Deakin’s radio operator: “His real name was
Peretz Rosenberg, and he was a sabra born in Palestine to German parents. His real objective was
to find out whatever he could about the situation of the Jews in Yugoslavia.”11 Thirty-one year
old Deakin and Captain W. F. Stuart had parachuted into Yugoslavia in May of 1943 along with
6
M.R.D. Foot, SOE: An Outline History of the Special Operations Executive 1960-1946
(London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1993), p. 145.

7
Heather Williams, Parachutes, Patriots and Partisans: Special Operations Executive and
Yugoslavia 1941-1945, (London: Hurst & Company, 2003), pp. 107-108.

8
Vojni arhiv Br. Reg. 1/1, F. 8, K. 2221.
9
Williams, Parachutes, Patriots and Partisans, pp. 10, 138-139.
10
Franklin Lindsay, Beacons in the Night: With the OSS and Tito’s Partisans in Wartime
Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

11
Ibid., p. 49.
Peretz Rose (Rosenberg) in the first joint SOE-SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, the British
foreign intelligence agency) mission to Tito.12 Sebastian Ritchie recorded similar stories.13
Israel’s many archives provide a wealth of primary documentation on the parachutists. Of
particular importance are the Haganah Archive, Israel State Archives, Central Zionist Archives
and Israel Defense Forces Archive. But there are also several museums and local archives, such
as Sdot Yam’s Hannah Senesh House, devoted to the parachutists. There is one surviving
member of the volunteer unit, Sara (Surika) Braverman of Kibbutz Shamir in northern Israel,
whom we interviewed for this article.14 Braverman’s story, although she was not the most active
of the Jewish parachutists, led us to the Yugoslav sources.
Nevertheless, the Yishuv paratroopers’ own writings remain by far the most important
source for chronicling their time in Yugoslavia. These documents are, however, problematic,
because (with four exceptions) the paratroopers did not speak the language of the partisans they
worked with. They were not acquainted with the region’s geography. Neither did they obtain any
knowledge of the local people they met, and whom those people were fighting for or against. At
most, they understood the general picture that there were partisan bands fighting the Nazis.
Beyond this, the volunteers often remained ignorant of many aspects of the situation around
them. They did not understand where they were and were often neither aware of the larger
12
Walter Roberts, Tito, Mihailovic and the Allies 1941-1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1987), p. 117. See also Williams, Parachutes, Patriots and Partisans, p. 139.
13
Sebastian Ritchie, Our Man in Yugoslavia (Abingdon: Frank Cass, 2005), p. 179.
14
Seth Frantzman and Jovan Ćulibrk, interview with Surika Braverman, Kibbutz Shamir, Dec.
12, 2009.
context nor the situation on the ground. This is partially due to the fact that in most cases their
mission involved penetrating another country or being seconded to the British mission. As a
result, they saw no urgent reason to learn the ranks and functions of the partisans with whom
they were temporarily working. They had received no training in the language and culture, so
they were unable to communicate efficiently with the partisans. They often did not even know
basic geographic information, such as their own precise locations. Records left by the
participants thus paint a confused and partial picture. We have, as a result, had to try to
reconstruct the volunteers’ movements and actions and recreate the context of whom they were
assisting and whom they were fighting. This required combing through Yugoslavian records and
published material, as well as interviewing partisans and survivors in that country.
Background to the Mission
Beginning in 1942, at the height of the Second World War, the Yishuv’s leadership, the
Jewish Agency, began to aggressively explore ways to incorporate Jews from Palestine in the
war effort. Its goals were several, among them establishing contact with Jewish communities in
Europe, aiding the war effort, and engaging the Jews from the Yishuv in the war.
One decision was to send Jewish parachutists into German-occupied Eastern and Central
European countries, in the context of a much larger operation that the British were carrying out
to strike at the “soft underbelly” of Hitler’s Europe. The British viewed anti-Nazi partisan
movements as potential allies and Churchill in particular had a romantic conviction that special
operations could undermine the German sense of military superiority. In May 1943 the first
British SOE operatives were parachuted into Yugoslavia to liaison with the communist partisans
led by Tito and the Chetnik royalists. With the surrender of Italy in 1943 and the capture of
Rome in 1944, the Allies were able to base planes at Bari and then later on the island of Vis,
where they could directly supply the Yugoslav partisans. Contact was maintained with the
British forces on the ground through wireless and Sugarphone portable radios that weighed
about 30 pounds.15
The British mission in Yugoslavia was large and diverse. Its main assignment was to
support the activities of the partisans, many thousands of whom were evacuated to hospitals and
then, after treatment, returned to combat. Many well-known public figures served in this SOE
operation, among them Fitzroy Maclean, a former diplomat and member of parliament;
Randolph Churchill, the prime minister’s son; and the novelist Evelyn Waugh. According to one
writer, “throughout the war, the delivery of 16,500 tons of supplies and the evacuation of 19,000
people by special duty aircraft to the Partisans made the difference between defeat and
victory.”16 Overall, 8,000 sorties were flown into the country. When one considers that by the
end of the war over 13,000 men and women had been engaged by the SOE in World War II,
including many thousands in the Yugoslav operation, the Yishuv’s contribution was quite small.
Conceived and overseen for the most part by Reuven Shiloah,17 the Yishuv paratrooper
mission in fact had no single clearly-defined goal. When one of the participants in the mission
“asked Ben Gurion about their central task, he answered ‘that Jews should know that Eretz Israel
is their land and their stronghold’; their mission was to ensure that the survivors ‘will knock en
15
Paul Freeman, “The Cinderella Front: Allied Special Air Operations in Yugoslavia,” Air
Command and Staff College Research Paper, March 1997, p. 27.

16
Freeman, Cinderella, p. 32.
17
Hagai Eshed, Reuven Shiloah: The Man Behind the Mossad (London: Frank Cass, 1997).
masse on the locked gates of Palestine.’”18 The British however, hoped that the Jews from the
Yishuv, particularly ones who knew Eastern European languages, might help locate downed
British airmen. The Jewish Agency, for its part, was most interested in having the parachutists
make contact with Jewish communities. One letter from the Jewish Agency, sent in January of
1945, well after the mission was underway, underlines this ambiguity. “Wherever there is a
Jewish community, there also exists a Jewish underground organization, which may prove of
value to the Allied war effort … those Jews are in need of help … therefore, contact must be
established with them.”19
That being the case, the Yishuv leadership did not necessarily seek volunteers who were
eminently fit for combat. Surika Braverman, to give on example, was not physically able to
parachute and was flown to a partisan airfield by way of Italy. It was her fluency in Romanian
that led to her selection. The recruitment cards that potential volunteers filled out included
“nationality” as the third item on the list, after name and age; “previous residence in Europe”
was the fourth. Other pertinent items included marital status, languages spoken, the date the
volunteer had left his or her country of origin, and whether family remained in Europe. They
were also asked about their physical appearance, character, and what area they thought they
could infiltrate. Finally, they were asked to record why they saw themselves as “suitable for a
special mission.”20 Volunteers were not necessarily selected to infiltrate their former homelands.
Dan Löhner, for instance, came from Austria, but he was specifically asked by the Jewish
18
Peter Novick, Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), p. 78.
19
Letter to Dan Lohrner from Jewish Agency, Jan. 16, 1945. Haganah Archives (HA), 14/l/489.
20
Undated document, HA, 14/l/489, p. 28.
Agency not to go to his “fatherland … [at least] as far as Jewish interests are concerned.”21 In the
event, he spent his entire time in Yugoslavia trying to cross Austrian border. A letter written to
him by the Jewish Agency in January 1945 shows the degree to which the mission’s aims were
constantly in flux. “We therefore suggest that you contact your superiors and ask to be given the
task of investigating the possibilities of infiltration into your fatherland … the Jews [there] are in
need of your help.”22 The Jewish Agency’s vacillation about what Löhner ought to be doing,
along with the British forces’ failure to use him for either his original mission or a different one,
was typical. The mission’s constantly shifting priorities and its failure to carry out its original
objectives weakened the entire undertaking.
According to histories of the parachute effort, 240 men and women volunteered for the
mission. Of these, 110 were trained, 37 were selected and 32 actually participated.23 The British
provided the operatives with code names, such as “Minnie” for Szenes and “Willis” for Abba
Berdiczew (pronounced “Berdichev”). Most of the volunteers were in their mid-20s, with an
average age of 28. The oldest was 44-year-old Aharon Ben-Yosef of Bulgaria and their youngest
member was Peretz Goldstein, who was only 21. All had been born in Europe and almost half
were Rumanian. Fourteen of them had obtained citizenship in the British Mandate of Palestine
(although for reasons that are not clear, few of the Romanians did).24 Most were members of
pioneering socialist-Zionist movements such as HaShomer HaTza’ir.
21
Jerusalem, Jan. 16, 1945, Central Zionist Archives (CZA), S25/8915-44.
22
Ibid.
23
Baumel-Schwartz, Perfect Heroes, 2010, http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/43868
24
Undated document listing names and births, HA, 14/l/489/28.
Of the 32, almost two thirds were sent by MI9, the section of the British Military
Intelligence charged with rescuing pilots who had gone down behind enemy lines.
Most of the parachutists never carried out the missions they were assigned. Many of them
were captured quickly, while others spent much of their time attempting to reach their
destinations. For instance, the five-man team assigned to infiltrate Slovakia spent weeks at Bari
awaiting for a plane to take them to that country,, missing their target date.
Many of the paratroopers were captured, tortured, and killed. The British could be quite
cold about expressing regrets in such cases. A prime example is a letter about Peretz Goldstein
sent by a British official to Teddy Kollek, who was the Jewish Agency’s liaison with the British.
“I have been instructed by Cairo to cease payments to Private Goldstein,” the official informed
Kollek. “According to our latest information, he was arrested in July, 1944, deported to
Germany and in December 1944 sent to forced labour in an aeroplane factory. The question of
[his] present whereabouts is being pursued.”25
Photographs taken during their training in Palestine and Egypt show them at a rail depot
on the way to Egypt or in a forest, wearing a mélange of uniforms—some in leather flight jackets
and the others in standard-issue desert khaki fatigues with berets.26
Seven volunteers were originally slated to jump into Yugoslavia, which had been
occupied by the Germans, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian forces in April of 1941. Today’s
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a part of Serbia were formed into the fascist Independent
State of Croatia run by the fanatical pro-Nazi Ustaše, a movement that immediately set out to
25
To Teddy Kollek, Jewish Agency from British Army, Sept. 2, 1945, HA, 14/l/489/28.
26
Photo album, “Summer 1944,” CZA, S25/89/14-44.
destroy its perceived enemies, i.e. Serbs, Jews, Roma, and antifascists. Resistance movements
across Yugoslavia emerged almost immediately—primarily the Chetnik royalists and the
communist Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito. Tito’s forces eventually dominated. By 1944 large
parts of the country were liberated or semi-liberated. The Allies invested a large effort to support
these movements, originally in the framework of Winston Churchill’s call to “set Europe
ablaze.” Beginning in 1943, supplies were airlifted systematically from Italy to the antifascist
forces. It was this organized operation, carried out in cooperation with two free armies with
which the British had established close ties, that theoretically ensured an effective deployment of
Jewish parachutists.
Of the seven parachutists slated to operate in Yugoslavia, Reuven Dafni and Eli Zohar
had both been born in Zagreb. Šalom (pronounced “Shalom”) Finci came from the town of
Kreka, near Sarajevo, and Nissim Arazi-Testa from Monastir (Bitola) in Macedonia, joined as
well. At least two of the others, Braverman and Yona Rozenfeld, had been born in Romania.27
Five volunteers were to be sent to Slovakia, which in 1944 was in the throes of a revolt against
the Nazis that would eventually take the lives of around 20,000 Germans and Slovakian rebels.
Three Jewish volunteers were to be sent to Italy, two to Bulgaria, three to Hungary (Szenes,
Goldstein and Yoel Palgi) and nine to Romania. Sergeant Peretz Rosenberg, who was among the
first to be deployed, does not appear on the British list of 31 Yishuv parachutists and their
destinations, probably because he was seconded as a radio operator to Deakin’s British mission
(SOE/ISLD-SIS) headquarters.
27
List of parachutists and destinations and personal details, undated, CZA, S25/8915-44.
The facts on the ground dictated, however, that the largest number of Yishuv
paratroopers—fourteen—would be sent into Yugoslavia, even if their ultimate destination was
other countries, such as Hungary. Yugoslavia also seems to have been the safest destination. Of
those sent directly to other countries, twelve were captured and seven executed—among them
Szenes in Budapest; Haviva Riek,28 Rafi Reiss, and Zvi Ben Yaakov somewhere in Slovakia;
Abba Berdiczew in Mauthausen; Enzo Sereni in Dachau, and Peretz Goldstein, captured in
Hungary and killed at Oranienburg concentration camp. Not a single Yishuv paratrooper was
captured or killed while in Yugoslavia.
Many of those who died became national heroes of the young Israeli nation after the
war.29 Enzo Sereni, almost forty when he died, had been born in Italy. Fleeing the rise of fascism
in 1926, he came to Palestine and helped found Kibbutz Givat Brenner. He was parachuted into
his native Italy in May 1944, but landed near a German position and was immediately captured
and sent to Dachau, where he was killed on November 18, 1944. His wife, Ada, went to search
for him after the war in Europe, sending home to Givat Brenner a cryptic note stating : “Sorry …
happy news completely false, Enzo was killed in Dachau.”30
Hannah Szenes parachuted into Yugoslavia in March 1944. She was captured while
crossing the border into Hungary, where she was put on trial for treason and executed by firing
squad in November of 1944. Zvi Ben-Yaakov. Rafi Reis, Abba Berdiczew, Haviva Reik, and
28
For a short biography of Riek, see Yad Vashem’s Shoah Research Center publication, “Reik,
Haviva,” http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205814.pdf.
29
Baumel-Schwartz, Perfect Heroes, pp. 15-31.
30
Ada Sereni to Kibbutz Givat Brenner, CZA, Oct. 22, 1945, HA, 14/l/489/28.
Haim Hermesh awaited transport to Slovakia from Bari in southern Italy. In September the five
volunteers managed to get to Banská Bystrica in central Slovakia. In late October the town was
overrun by the Germans and the paratroopers fled into the hills with the partisans, where they
were captured almost immediately. Reik, Ben-Yaakov, and Reis were shot. Berdiczew was sent
to Mauthausen camp in Austria, where he was murdered. Hermesh managed to survive the war.
The Yugoslav Sources
There are two main types of Yugoslav sources. The first are official state documents,
preserved mainly in the Military Archive of the Serbian Ministry of Defense, relating to the
British missions and relations between the British and the partisans. The second are recollections
from and memoirs written by partisans who met the Yishuv parachutists. The former offer
insights into what facts were known to the partisans, but they rarely express any sort of opinion.
The latter offer a glimpse into what the partisans knew about the nature of the parachutists’ task
and what they thought about it. The fact that the official sources exist at all is a minor miracle,
given the conditions in which archives were kept during the war. The Tenth (Zagreb) Corps
archive, an important repository with documents on the mission of the parachutists, was burned
at least twice during the war. The disparate recollections and memoirs were published any time
from 1945 to the 1990s.
Thus, while the second group of documents provides insights into partisan attitudes and
the reception of the parachutists of the Yishuv, the first group is vital for understanding the
history of where the parachutists were sent, when they were deployed and whom they met on
their route through occupied Yugoslavia. These documents enabled us to identify partisan and
enemy units and events in which they were involved. This, in turned, helped us comb the second
group of documents for material relating to the relevant partisans’ attitudes towards the
parachutists.
Case I: Stipe and Infiltration into Hungary
In his memoir, Yoel Palgi recalls meeting one Dobszyn, a “handsome youngster, with the
face of an educated person.”31 To find out what impression Palgi made on this young
Yugoslavian, we first had to find out who he was. Through research in the Yugoslav archives we
discovered that the man Palgi was referring to was Petar Drapšin, at that time in transition from
the command of the Sixth (Slavonija) Partisan Corps to the deputy command of all partisan
forces in Croatia. It seems Palgi recalled the name incorrectly. Elsewhere in his book, Palgi tells
a humorous story about one “General Matačic,” commander of the Tenth Corps, who “had to
display Englishmen to his people.” The general was in fact the world-renowned Yugoslavian
conductor Lovro Matačić, who happened to be a member of the partisans; the real name of the
general was Dušan Matetić, whose nom-de-guerre was Vlado.32 Palgi seems to have conflated
the two individuals in his recollection. In fact, the conductor showed him around, while the
general was another person with the same name.
We were also able to determine the name of the person that took Yoel Palgi and Peretz
Goldstein across the Hungarian border from Yugoslavia. The two parachutists referred to him as
“Major Stipa” [sic]. He plays a prominent role in Palgi’s memoirs—the author first suspects him
of having betrayed the two Jews to the Hungarians. But he then shows up in the Hungarian
31
Yoel Palgi, Into the Inferno, p. 47.
32
Ibid., p. 51.
prison where they were held. It transpires that he had been betrayed and captured himself.33 But
Stipe (Palgi’s translator spelled it wrong) was a code name. What was the real name of this
central character in the parachutists’ story?
Yugoslav documents informed us that his real name was Pavle Vukomanović. He was
born on June 26, 1903 in a village Gornje Kusonje in Slavonia. After fighting with the
Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, he escaped across the border into France in 1939,
where he was arrested and imprisoned. After the German invasion of France in 1940 he was sent
to Germany as a slave laborer. He managed to escape and make his way back to Yugoslavia,
where he joined Tito’s Partisans.34 Respected as an innovative commander, Stipe was an expert
at sabotage, and deputy commander of the Partisan special operation forces. His fame as a
special forces commander was second only to that of his superior officer, Ivan Hariš-
Gromovnik.35
The diary of Yoel Palgi helps us to understand the life of Stipe better than official
partisan historiography. For example, the partisans recorded that he was captured in 1945. In
fact, according to Palgi, “Stipa [sic] was arrested at the inn when he handed over [Palgi’s and
33
Ibid., pp. 62-78, 138-213 .
34
Zbornik narodnih heroja Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Omladina, 1958), pp. 872-873; No author,
Narodni heroji Jugoslavije, (Belgrade: Partizanska knjiga-Narodna knjiga-Pobjeda-ISI, 1982),
pp. 353-354.
35
“Gromovnik” was Hariš’s nickname. Literally meaning “Thunder-Maker,” it is folk epithet for
the biblical prophet Elijah (“Ilija” in Serbo-Croatian). Hariš thus also adopted the prophet’s
name, which is why Palgi refers to him as “Colonel Ilija.”

Goldstein’s] suitcases to the Hungarian ‘partisans’” on June 26, 1944 by the Hungarians, who
were collaborating with the Nazis.36 Stipe managed to escape from captivity in Hungary.
Significantly, in 1944 Stipe was responsible for relations between the Yugoslavian
Partisans and their counterparts in Hungary, as well as the Hungarian Communist party. The
partisan effort to help the volunteers cross into Hungary was, in fact, part of a much larger
operation.
Yet the Yishuv volunteers were not aware of this, as revealed from the fact that they did
not emphasize this fact in their recollections. For instance Palgi asked the Partisans’ Sixth Corps
commander to accept Hungarian Jews into his ranks. Palgi thought this was an original initiative
of his, but in fact the Yugoslav partisans were already recruiting Jewish and non-Jewish
Hungarians. In fact, SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, the German special operations
commander who masterminded the pro-German coup in Hungary in October 1944, wrote that
Tito’s army was active in Hungary, and that the Hungarian regent who opposed the coup, Miklos
Horthy, used his connection with Tito to negotiate with the Allies.37
The memoirs of the Yishuv paratroopers give the impression that they were the only
party seeking to cross into Hungary. The truth is that, during their time in the vicinity of the
Hungarian border, there was frenetic activity on both its sides. The archive of the Croatian
Institute for History (formerly the Institute for the History of the Working Class Movement in
Croatia) holds a collection of documents about the partisans’ links to the Hungarian Communist
36
37
Otto Skorzeny, Skorzeny's Secret Missions (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1950).
Party.38 Twice during March 1944, Partisan headquarters in Croatia urged the Tenth Corps
command to send a battalion-size force into Hungary.39
One document may refer directly to the Yishuv parachutists. It is an order, issued in June
1944, from the Partisan supreme command to the Tenth Corps Command Group to help the
partisan special forces commander Ivan Hariš form saboteur cells and infiltrate them into
Hungary.40 The implication is that the Yishuv parachutists were most likely deployed to Hungary
as part of this larger partisan operation rather than on their own specific mission.
But this operation was of further historical importance. The Military Archive in Belgrade
documents British missions crossing into Hungary from Yugoslavia in 1944. Although Hannah
Senesz, Reuven Dafni, and the rest of their contingent arrived as part of the first British mission
to the Tenth and Sixth Corps, they and those who followed were part of much larger British
action. Yoav Gelber, basing himself on British sources, states that “six S.O.E. teams tried to
cross the Yugoslav-Hungarian border in May-June 1944, but all of them failed.”41 In August of
38
Ljiljana Modrić, Ana Feldman, “Arhivska građa NOB-u na području Sjeverozapadne
Hrvatske,” in Ljubo Boban et al. (eds.), Sjeverozapadna rvatska u NOB-u i socijalističkoj
revoluciji, (Varaždin: no publisher, 1975), p. 1007.

39
Vladimir Kapun, Međimurci na Kalniku, “Partisan Operations, 1944-1945,” in Dughan Boban
et al. (eds.), Sjeverozapadna rvatska u NOB, p. 558.

40
Vojni arhiv, Br. 170/2326. 11/VI. 44., in Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o
Narodnooslobodilačkom ratu jugoslovenskih naroda, Volume V, Vol. 28, (Belgrade:
Vojnoistorijski institut, 1963), p. 553.

41
Gelber, “Mission,” p. 68.
that year, the Sixth Corps Command informed the Supreme Command that “the Allies asked that
the Sixth Corps transfer their people urgently to Romania through Fruška Gora. Also, they want
to continue to be transferred to Hungary. We request instructions.”42 While the “people”
mentioned here probably include the Yishuv parachutists, they may well have been part of a
larger group. On April 9, 1944, the British asked Tito to help smuggle the anti-Nazi former
Hungarian prime minister, Count István Bethlen into Yugoslavia.43 Of the 121 people listed on
the rosters of the Sixth and Tenth Corps as members of the “English mission,” 22 are marked as
having intentions to proceed further to Hungary.44
While getting Allied personnel into Hungary was something Tito’s forces did time and
again, the fact that a Partisan commander personally took Palgi and Goldstein across the border
indicates that the Yugolavian underground viewed their mission as of special importance. A
reason appears in a letter sent by the important British mission member, Major Peter O. Parker,
to Tito on April 17, 1944. Parker wrote that “His Britannic Majesty’s Government have been
42
Vojni arhiv, 9. VIII. 1944, Br. 3238 (42 gr.), Zbornik narodnih heroja Jugoslavije, Volume V,
Vol. 31 (Belgrade: Vojnoistorijski institut, 1964), p. 495.

43
Vojni arhiv, Br. Reg. 2/1, F. 4, K. 2221.
44
The Military Archive has a wealth of documents about Allied personnel going to the Partisan
Sixth and Tenth Corps: Major Harker with Capt. Hadow and Sgt. Peaker (undated), Capt. Ennals
and Capt. Mc.Kay on June 24, 1944, Segeants Hardy and Morris on June 23, 1944, Capt. Nowell
and Pvt. Veselinovic on April 28, 1944. The arrival of Sarah Braverman and Sgt. Reisz, led by
Major Macadam, was announced to the partisan HQ on July 20, 1944 (Vojni arhiv, Br. Reg. 8/1,
F. 6. K. 2221).
asked by responsible and representative Jewish bodies if you will assist any Jews who may
escape from HUNGARY. It is presumed that many Jews are in great peril as a result of the
recent German occupation, and any action you may be able to take would be much appreciated.
His Majesty’s Government presume that any refugees of military age could, if you so wish, be
enlisted in your forces; the remainder could be evacuated to ITALY” (capitalizations in the
original)45
We were unable to locate Tito’s reply. According to Palgi’s memoirs—the most detailed
account written by a Yishuv paratroopers—an agreement “for the establishment of the Jewish
Brigade” was communicated to the Tenth Corps headquarters and he “presumed that the
agreement had come from the High Command.”46
Case II: The Situation in 1944 and the Question of Partisan Support
One of the most common themes in the memoirs of the parachutists is that the partisans
did not provide sufficient assistance to the Jewish volunteers and their mission. Palgi wrote that
“She [Hannah Szenes] was the first to suspect the partisans of unwillingness to help and of
misleading us.… Only weeks later it became clear how right she had been, and that we were, in
truth, being completely misled by the partisans.”47 To discover whether this claim is based on
fact, we studied partisan operations in the area where the main group of Yishuv volunteers was
situated.
45
Parker to Tito, April 17, 1944, Vojni Arhiv, Br. 170/2326. 11/VI.44.
46
47
Yoel Palgi, “How She Fell,” in Hannah Senesh, Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary (New
York: Shocken Books-Herzl Press, 1971), p. 186.

The region in question is located in what is now northwestern Croatia, the theater of
operations for the Tenth (Zagreb) Partisan Corps, and Slavonia, where the Sixth (Slavonija)
Corps operated. During the time the Yishuv volunteers spent there, the Germans were preparing
their withdrawal from southeastern Europe. The Zagreb-Belgrade railroad that connected the
German units to their withdrawal routes back to Austria was of vital importance. To protect the
corridor, the Second Panzer Army under Generaloberst (Lt. General) Dr. Lothar Rendulic, which
had been transferred to Yugoslavia in 1943 to aid in anti-partisan operations, was called upon to
secure the railroad. It included the 69th Reserve Corps, which was deployed in the exact region
where the Jewish volunteers were located. The Panzer army and 69th Corps also included a
Cossack cavalry division for special purposes under the command of Andrey Vlasov.48 These
forces were also assigned to protect the Gojilo oil depot, near the town of Kutina, which became
especially valuable after Romania’s oil fields were captured by the Red Army.49
The terrain in this area is relatively flat, although there are some undulating hills and a
few mountains, among them Papuk and Psunj, as well as the ridges around the town of Kalnik.
Some parts are forested. In their memoirs, the parachutists often refer to the “Čerkezi,” which
literally means “Circassians” but was also the Serbo-Croatian word for “Cossacks.” The name in
fact designated actual Circassians, a Muslim tribal mountain people, originally from an area near
48
Antun Miletić, “Severozapadna Hrvatska 1941-1944. u svetlosti nemačke arhivske građe,” in
Ljubo Boban et al. (eds.), Sjeverozapadna Hrvatska unarodnooslobodilačkoj borbi i
socijalističkoj revoluciji, pp. 1012-1024.

49
Nikola Živković, “Nemačka eksploatacaija materijalnog bogatstva sverozapadne Hrvatske u
period 1941-1945,” in Boban et al., (eds.). Sjeverozapadna Hrvatska, pp. 1025-1036.

Chechnya, whom the Ottomans settled in Yugoslavia after they had been expelled by the
Russians in the 1830s.50 In the decades that followed they became notorious among the Serbs for
their zealous allegiance to their Turkish overlords. They were infamous for cruelty toward the
local people. As a result, when Cossack troops from the Ukraine appeared alongside the German
army, the Serbs and the rest of the locals referred to them “Čerkezi” as well.
During the first half of 1944 the Cossack and German armored force, aided by Croatian
collaborators, launched several major operations against the Communist partisans in Croatia,
among them Operations Canne, Ungewitter, and Rouen. By this time the forces of the Croatian
national army were in process of merging themselves with the Ustaše party’s armed forces.
(Prior to this these the two armies were separate entities, much like Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht
and SS.) The Croats did not take independent action at this time, their forces being subordinated
to the Germans. In the aftermath of Mussolini’s fall in Italy in 1943, Germany imposed strict
control over its Axis allies.
The German military juggernaut forced the partisans in Croatia and some of those in
Slavonija to be constantly on the move, fleeing from their overwhelmingly superior enemies.
The Tenth Corps, hardly an elite force, was especially hard pressed.51 Furthermore, the Tenth
Corps command suspected that a German or Ustaše agent, whom they codenamed “Rolf,” had
infiltrated its intelligence department at the beginning of 1944. Information this mole conveyed
50
Dawn Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 119.

51
Franko Mirošević, “Obilježja NOB-a u Moslavini,” in Boban et al. (eds.), Sjeverozapadna
Hrvatska, p. 491.
to the Germans enabled the latter to destroy two entire partisan units. The first of these losses
came when the Germans attacked the town of Ludbreg. The Germans surrounded an entire
partisan battalion belonging to the Seventeenth Slavonija Brigade and slaughtered the rebels
almost to the last man.52 In the second case, at the end of March 1944, the Second Moslavina
Brigade was caught and massacred by Cossacks on the banks of the Sava river at Oborovina.53
Reuven Dafni recalled in his memoirs that the group of partisans he was with arrived in
Oborovina just a few days after this slaughter.54 In May, the Partisan force’s Zagreb Detachment
was decimated.55
The Germans guarded the Hungarian border closely. The Partisans thus had to take every
precaution when they escorted soldiers of the British mission into Hungary. The fact that Stipe,
an experienced special forces commander, was captured shows just how dangerous this was.
Barcz, a town on the Drava river, was the central point for crossing the Hungarian border—yet in
1944 was also the location of a German anti-partisan training centre. It is hardly surprising, then,
that the Jewish parachutists faced a difficult and often fatal mission. The fact that so many were
52
Mate Jerković, “Sadejstvo VI slavonskog i X zagrebačkg korpusa u NOR-u,” in Boban et al.
(eds.), Sjeverozapadna Hrvatska, p. 229.

53
Danilo Livada-Dane, “Razvoj i djelatnost obavještajne službe Druge operativne zone NOV i
POH u periodu 1942-1944,” in Boban et al. (eds.), Sjeverozapadna Hrvatska, pp. 763-794.
54
Reuven Dafni, “Im Lohamai HaHofesh,” in Yeruvavel Gilad and Galia Yardeni (eds.), Magen
BeSeter (Jerusalem: no publisher named, 1949), p. 379.

55
Pero Popović, “Zagrebački partizanski odred,” in Boban et al. (eds.), Zagreb: Sjeverozapadna
Hrvatska, no publisher, p. 446.

captured was clearly due to the nature of the situation itself, not to any paucity of assistance from
the Partisans.
The Tenth Corps also faced another difficulty in its sector. The part of Croatia that the
Jewish mission transferred to with the Partisans was also a stronghold of the People’s Peasant
Party (PPP), a conservative Catholic faction with an antisemitic history. The PPP took a neutral
stance in the conflict, siding neither with the pro-German Ustaše government nor Tito’s
Partisans. In their memoirs, the parachutists relate that, when they were transferred from
Slovenia (which was occupied by Germans and Hungarians) to the Tenth Corps sector, they were
told by the British to remove the “Palestine” insignia from their uniforms. Many of the Tenth
Corps’ soldiers had joined the partisans only recently, after the Italian capitulation, and many of
them were former members of the Croatian army. The Partisans thus could not rely much on the
local population and their own rank and file often were not to be trusted as well, not just in
relation to the Jewish mission but in general.
The parachutists had a narrowly-defined mission and were eager to carry it out
successfully. Only vaguely aware of the larger military context and focused only on their
particular responsibilities, it is hardly surprising that the situation they encountered on the ground
fell short of their expectations. In one classified report provided to the British sometime after the
capture of Szenes, an informant notes that “days passed; the Partisans continued to promise me a
guide, but he never materialized, I began to grow impatient.” When the informant, referred to as
“Ivan” in the dispatch, was finally provided with a guide, it turned out to be the same one who
had taken him and Szenes on June 7, before her capture. From his point of view, this
demonstrated that the Partisans did not do all they could to aid the mission and may have harmed
it.
Case III: Partisan Knowledge of the Yishuv Mission
What did the Partisans know about the British mission and its members from the Yishuv?
Were they aware of where the latter came from and what they sought to accomplish? The British
gave the parachutists cover stories to disguise their real identities, but the men and women from
the Yishuv seem not to have been very good at acting the parts they were assigned. Not being
professionally trained special operations soldiers, this is not a surprise. In this they were much
like other nonprofessionals who were recruited for secret missions during the war, such as the
scientists working on the atom bomb project in the US.56 Braverman, for instance, says she that
she hid her identity from the partisans and claimed to be an English journalist. However, she
used her real name. Her cover story, she says, was ridiculous: “whoever heard of an educated
English lady who doesn’t wear makeup and knows how to milk Partisan cows?”57 Why the
British mission or the Jewish volunteers thought that such a cover story could pass is not clear.
On the other hand it is obvious that the volunteers were very open with senior partisan
officers. Testimony to this effect comes from the diary of Dr. Makso Šnuderl. Šnuderl was a pre-
war Yugoslav liberal politician turned member of the partisan Osvobodilna Fronta, the
Liberation Front of the Slovenian People. He referred to a group of British personnel, one of
whom was Hannah Szenes, who bivouacked at Partisan headquarters in Semič, in the district of
Bela Krajina, a partisan stronghold in Slovenia. He clearly received a very rich picture of Jewish
life in Palestine under the Mandate. The parachutists made no attempt to hide their identities and
56
Lansing Lamont, Day of Trinity (New York: Scribner, 1965).
57
Interview with Surika Braverman, March 2010.
recounted to him their struggle for independence. In his diary he refers to the group as an
“English (Jewish) mission.” “They invited us for dinner,” he wrote, “and gave us wine and
provided a pleasant evening for us.… Hannah spoke a lot about the relations in Palestine
between Jews and the British and Arabs, collective labor and Hebrew language and life in
general. The girl is extremely intelligent.”58
One important testimony comes from the political commissar of the 39th Krajina
Division’s reconnaissance battalion. This unit operated in the very heart of partisan-controlled
territory, in northwestern Bosnia. We interviewed Colonel (Ret.) Zdravko Janjić in Belgrade in
February 2010.59 Prior to his posting to the 39th, he served with the First Proletarian Division, an
elite unit that sometimes acted as Tito’s personal guard and constituted the Supreme Command’s
reserve force. When asked if he was aware of the Jewish presence with the British mission he
said: “Of course we knew that they were Jews from Palestine.” The Partisans, he maintained, had
received an oral order that they should take special care to protect the Palestinian Jews in the
British missions from falling into harm’s way. He said that he believes that this order came from
Moše Pijade, a Serbian-Jewish member of the partisan supreme command, although he has no
evidence to support this claim.
This claim dovetails with that of Vladimir Dedijer, who referred the arrival of the first
Yishuv parachutists in Yugoslavia. He had been a liaison to the British mission at the time and
recalled Jews from the Yishuv being among the members of the first British Mission that arrived
58
Dr. Makso Šnuderl, “Srečanje z judovsko delegacijo na našem osvobojenom ozemlju,” Borec
12 (1975), pp. 655-657.

59
Jovan Ćulibrk, interview with Col. (Ret.) Zdravko Janjić, Belgrade, Feb. 9, 2010.
under William Deakin in 1943. Dedijer wrote down names of the members of the mission. The
sixth person on his list is “Rose, telegraph operator, Jew from Palestine.” Rose is described
elsewhere by him as “Palestinian;”60 Šalom Finci was described in Tenth Corps HQ as a
“Palestinian on his way to Slavonia.”61 The Partisan Supreme Command carefully monitored the
arrival of the missions. It received precise lists of Allied personnel present in partisan areas, and
“Palestinians” were a distinctive group among them, though their presence was inconsistently
reported. Even Tito himself asked Brigadier Fitzroy MacLean on March 27, 1944 about the
whereabouts of Hannah Szenes’s mission, “about a British party of five, recently arrived in
SLOVENIA on their way to HUNGARY on a mission connected with the rescue of British
prisoners of war there.”62 It seems that there were some misunderstandings concerning approval
for their infiltration.
In contrast to these accounts is the case of Eli Zohar. Zohar, born Mirko Leventhal in
Zagreb, was one of the parachutists’ only members to come from Yugoslavia and speak the
language of the partisans. Ivan Šibl was a political commissar of the Tenth Corps. (Reuven Dafni
accused Šibl of being the main reason for the prolonged stay of the volunteers among the
partisans, which hindered their mission.63 Dafni thought that Šibl was a half-Jew.) Zohar offers a
humorous anecdote, another one involving an amateurish cover story. He relates that he was
60
Vladamir Dedijer, Dneinik, (Belgrade: Prosveta-Svjetlost, 1970), pp. 253, 12-13.
61
Šalom Finci, S Titovom vojskom u Jugoslaviji (Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština Jugoslavije,
1974), p. 17.
62
Vojni arhiv, Br. 17, F. 2, K. 2221.
63
Dafni, “Im Lohamai HaHofesh,” p. 381.
introduced to Šibl as “Eli Joel, Sergeant” only to find himself greeted in Serbo-Croatian by Šibl
who told him “you are not Eli Joel, you are Mirko Leventhal, my friend from high school.” But,
on the same occasion, Šibl met Hanna Senesz and, in his diary, described her as British.64
Later on a group of ten Jewish refugees from Hungary came to the partisans, fleeing from
the Germans. Among them were three young women whom Eli Zohar apparently knew from
before the war. He asked to see them and was allowed, in the presence of the officers of OZNA.
(OZNA was the Department for the Protection of the People, in fact a Partisan security service. It
was established on May 13, 1944, meaning that this encounter occurred after that date.) Zohar
questioned the refugees in the presence of the partisans. He seems to have met one of the girls a
few more times following that encounter. According to Dr. Ruža Blau Francetić, all three of the
girls were later arrested by the partisans and executed as British spies.65 This story includes one
issue that may shed light on its veracity. The relationship between the British and partisans
worsened in the fall of 194. and the British missions were under suspicion that only grew with
time.66 This might have been the context under which this event took place. There is, however,
64
Ivan Šibl, Ratni dnevnik (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1966).
65
Ruža Blau Francetić, “Humani lekar spasio me lažnom dijagozom,” in Aleksandar Gaon (ed.),
Mi smo preživeli Jevrejski istorijski muzej, (Belgrade: no publisher, 2009), pp. 89-100.
66
On this matter, one especially useful document is one from the Belgrade Military Archives,
13th Primorsko-Goranska Division from Istria, no. 51, dated June 3, 1945, marked as “top
secret.” By the end of the war, British were being treated as a threat, and the document forbids its
brigade and battalion commanders to have any contacts with the Allies, under pain of severe
punishment for even a slightest transgression.

another related issue. Since the counter-intelligence work of these partisan units was under the
control of the intelligence officer of Tenth Corps who is believed to have been a German/Ustaše
spy, it may be that he used this as an excuse simply to get rid of Jews and to deepen the
misunderstanding between the British and partisans. This facts of this horrendous betrayal
require further study.
Case IV: The Work of the Parachutists of the Yishuv
The Jewish volunteers arrived with the purpose of saving Yugoslav and other Eastern
European Jews. But they largely failed. The diary of Šalom Finci, who was born in Kreka, a
coal-mining town in central Bosnia, records meetings with Jewish refugees in Yugoslavia. But
the political commissar of the partisan airfield that the British mission used to extract the British
personnel does not bear out Finci’s recollections. For four or five months in 1944 the post of
airport political commissar was held by a survivor of the Jasenovac concentration camp, Tzadik
Danon, who would later serve as a rabbi in Yugoslavia. He worked with the English mission
stationed at the airport, but fails to mention any Jews with the English mission. None of the
Jewish parachutists remembers him either. He recalls that “I spent four or five months at the
airport and there was an English mission there and I spoke French. The commander of the
mission spoke French also. He was a nice and cultured man, but I don’t remember his name.”67
Danon’s story indicates that the Jews were at least good at hiding their identity from him. He and
Šalom Finci both recall the plane that brought in Finci, because it was attacked by German
67
Sadik Braco Danon, “Od ropstva do Blajburga,” in Jaša Almuli (ed.), Jevreji i Srbi u
Jasenovcu, (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2009), pp. 87-144.

planes. Danon was simply unaware the Finci was on it.68 From this single airport hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of partisans were evacuated to British hospitals in Vis or in Italy. It would
seem likely that two Jews from Sarajevo stationed there would have made each other’s
acquaintance. In fact, they most likely would have known each other from before the war. Yet, it
seems, they never met.
Another strange fact is that Jasenovac, the largest extermination camp in Yugoslavia, was
located only 100 km (62.5 miles) from the area in which the Yishuv parachutists were deployed.
By conservative estimates, 17,000 Jews were murdered there. Yet Surika Braverman claimed in
her interview with us that she never heard about it. Yoel Palgi, as always a source of more
extensive information than his companions, did know about it and called it “a prison and
slaughterhouse” for Yugoslav Jews.69 In his memoir, Šalom Finci offers an account of a brief but
shocking encounter with another Sarajevo Jew, a childhood friend, who had escaped from
Jasenovac.70 But neither Palgi nor Finci’s accounts are very detailed and neither writer displays
much interest in the Jews who were dying there.
The evidence shows that the parachutists of Yishuv, in spite of Franklin Lindsay’s
testimony about Rosenberg, were not all that interested in the Yugoslav Jewish community.
While they mention encountering Yugoslav Jews during their time in the country, they made no
effort to organize the community’s remnants or to arrange for their immigration to Palestine.
Were they wholly consumed with their almost impossible mission to penetrate Hungary,
68
Finci, S Titovom, pp. 16-17.
69
70
Finci, S Titovom, pp. 27-28.
Slovakia, and Romania? Were the remnants of Yugoslav Jewish community so small and
scattered that rescuing them would have been impossible? The parachutists do not tell us.
Conclusions
Our perusal of Yugoslav archival material, interviews, and field study have shed light on
the actions of the volunteer Yishuv parachutists sent by the British into Yugoslavia during World
War II. The mission, we show, was confused and often inconsistent in its stated goals and the
action taken to achieve them. It was chaotic and plagued by misunderstanding between the Jews,
who found themselves sometimes in a foreign world among people who did not speak their
language, and the Yugoslavian partisans, for whom foreign interests and missions, including
Jewish ones, were not a high priority. Nevertheless, they cared much more than the members of
the Yishuv realized. While the parachutists complained of a lack of sufficient assistance from the
partisans, in fact the Yugoslavian combatants did a great deal for them.
We have attempted in our study to iron out some of the contradictory details regarding
whether the European-born Palestinian Jews did or did not hide their identities and whether the
Yugoslav partisans understood who they were. It appears from the sources that, although
instructed to hide their identities, the cover stories they were given would easily have given them
away. Thus the attempt to hide their identities failed. However at the same time the Yugoslav
partisans seem to have known little about them or expressed much interest in their real identities.
It is important to understand that situation in which emissaries found themselves in Yugoslavia
was unexpected and complex. They found themselves deployed along the main German retreat
route from the Balkans. Failing to grasp complexity of the situation, they persisted in pursing
grand but nearly impossible goals, instead of smaller and achievable ones.
What this study helps to show is the degree to which the Yishuv’s ambitious plans and
the British training program foundered on the fact that little could be accomplished under the
circumstances. While they became heroes of the Yishuv, their military contribution was
negligible and made little impression on the anti-German partisan fighters in Yugoslavia.

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Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 1

THE JEWISH PARATROOPERS AND THE PARTISANS IN

YUGOSLAVIA: YUGOSLAV PERCEPTIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS

Jovan Ćulibrk and Seth J. Frantzman*

*This was from a final draft version of this article

until now remained virtually untouched by historians.

Memory, examines the event’s impact on Israeli memory.3 Baumel-Schwartz’s important

http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206216.pdf; Yoav Gelber,

University of Wisconsin, 2010).

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 222.

of Israeli Collective Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2010).

British army, on behalf of European Jewry during the Holocaust.”5

material on the British special forces mission in Yugoslavia.

The broader Anglo-American mission in Yugoslavia, of which the Yishuv paratroopers

parachutists of Yishuv. However, only “Sergeant Feigl” (Dan Löhner/Laner) is specifically

(London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1993), p. 145.

Yugoslavia 1941-1945, (London: Hurst & Company, 2003), pp. 107-108.

Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

Israel’s many archives provide a wealth of primary documentation on the parachutists. Of

of the Jewish parachutists, led us to the Yugoslav sources.

published material, as well as interviewing partisans and survivors in that country.

Background to the Mission

Command and Staff College Research Paper, March 1997, p. 27.

established with them.”19

objectives weakened the entire undertaking.

pioneering socialist-Zionist movements such as HaShomer HaTza’ir.

[his] present whereabouts is being pursued.”25

and the others in standard-issue desert khaki fatigues with berets.26

paratroopers—fourteen—would be sent into Yugoslavia, even if their ultimate destination was

captured or killed while in Yugoslavia.

happy news completely false, Enzo was killed in Dachau.”30

The Yugoslav Sources

from 1945 to the 1990s.

Case I: Stipe and Infiltration into Hungary

general was another person with the same name.

central character in the parachutists’ story?

Narodni heroji Jugoslavije, (Belgrade: Partizanska knjiga-Narodna knjiga-Pobjeda-ISI, 1982),

name, which is why Palgi refers to him as “Colonel Ilija.”

Hungarians. In fact, SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, the German special operations

command to send a battalion-size force into Hungary.39

Hrvatske,” in Ljubo Boban et al. (eds.), Sjeverozapadna rvatska u NOB-u i socijalističkoj

revoluciji, (Varaždin: no publisher, 1975), p. 1007.

et al. (eds.), Sjeverozapadna rvatska u NOB, p. 558.

Narodnooslobodilačkom ratu jugoslovenskih naroda, Volume V, Vol. 28, (Belgrade:

Vojnoistorijski institut, 1963), p. 553.

to continue to be transferred to Hungary. We request instructions.”42 While the “people”

having intentions to proceed further to Hungary.44

Vol. 31 (Belgrade: Vojnoistorijski institut, 1964), p. 495.

agreement had come from the High Command.”46

York: Shocken Books-Herzl Press, 1971), p. 186.

Ljubo Boban et al. (eds.), Sjeverozapadna Hrvatska unarodnooslobodilačkoj borbi i

socijalističkoj revoluciji, pp. 1012-1024.

period 1941-1945,” in Boban et al., (eds.). Sjeverozapadna Hrvatska, pp. 1025-1036.

control over its Axis allies.

Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 119.

(eds.), Sjeverozapadna Hrvatska, p. 229.

BeSeter (Jerusalem: no publisher named, 1949), p. 379.

Hrvatska, no publisher, p. 446.

relation to the Jewish mission but in general.

Case III: Partisan Knowledge of the Yishuv Mission

general. The girl is extremely intelligent.”58

territory, in northwestern Bosnia. We interviewed Colonel (Ret.) Zdravko Janjić in Belgrade in

evidence to support this claim.