Into the Inferno: The Memoir of a Jewish Paratrooper behind Nazi Lines

In the spring of 1944, a group of thirty-two young Palestinian Jews parachuted into Nazi-held Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Their goal was to encourage Jewish resistance where possible and to organize rescue schemes thwarting deportations to the death camps. Linking up in Yugoslavia and impelled by the hope that the Jews trapped in Hungary were still capable of fighting back, some of the volunteers set out for Budapest. Tragically, they were betrayed by their local guides, who turned out to be double agents also working for the Hungarian Fascists. The volunteers reached Budapest where the young woman volunteer, Hannah Szenes, was executed and another deported to a death camp. Into the Inferno is the remarkable first-hand account of this mission by the only member of the group who miraculously survived from among those who penetrated into Hungary . He endured imprisonment and torture both by the Gestapo and the Hungarian Fascists, escaped from a deportation train, and joined the Zionist youth rescue underground in Budapest. This book, however, is more than a gripping true-adventure story. It tells of people who willingly sacrificed themselves for a cause. Palgi writes movingly of the bonds of comradeship, of the anguish of losing companions-in-arms, and of the inevitably tragic attempt to turn back the tide of the Holocaust. These young freedom fighters, in the words of Israeli professor Yehuda Sluski, became “a link in the chain of Jewish heroism of all generations.”