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.
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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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 2
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,
30 Ada Sereni to Kibbutz Givat Brenner, CZA, Oct. 22, 1945, HA, 14/l/489/28.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 13
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
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 14
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 15
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.”
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 16
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 Yoel Palgi, Into the Inferno, p. 176.
37 Otto Skorzeny, Skorzeny's Secret Missions (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1950).
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 17
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 18
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).
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 19
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 Yoel Palgi, Into the Inferno, p. 63.
47 Yoel Palgi, “How She Fell,” in Hannah Senesh, Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary (New
York: Shocken Books-Herzl Press, 1971), p. 186.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 20
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 21
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 22
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 23
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 24
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 25
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 26
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 27
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 28
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 29
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 Yoel Palgi, Into the Inferno, p. 59.
70 Finci, S Titovom, pp. 27-28.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 30
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.
Ćulibrk and Frantzman/page 31
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.