Just before Sara Braverman, who often went by the nickname Surika, was due to make her final qualifying jump at the end of her parachute training, she froze. Even when her friends, including her close companion Haviva Reik, offered to jump alongside her on a second attempt, she could not bring herself to leap from the aircraft. That was how she earned the title, “the paratrooper who didn’t jump.”
Yet despite never making that jump, Sara, who was highly regarded by her British commanders, completed the course and was sent to Europe alongside Reik and other volunteers as part of the second mission of the “Yishuv Paratroopers” (Yishuv is a Hebrew term for the Jewish community in pre-state Israel). She was one of only three women selected for the operation. In addition to Sara and Haviva, the first mission included the most famous of the paratroopers: Hannah Senesh. Ironically, Braverman, the one who had been afraid to jump during training, would be the only one of the three women to return home alive.
Braverman was born in May 1919 in Romania to a secular family of modest means. Her father was a committed socialist and thoroughly secular, while her mother came from a religious background. The household itself was secular, but also deeply Zionist. Like most of her siblings, Sara was active in the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, where she quickly distinguished herself through her dedication and leadership. She was selected to immigrate to Palestine as part of a group of outstanding young women drawn from various Zionist youth movements.
In the summer of 1938, at just 19 years old, she stood on a railway platform embracing her parents. It was the last time she would ever see her father. Several months after her arrival in Palestine, he died of heart disease. Left alone in the city of Botoșani, her mother later moved to Bucharest to live with one of Sara’s sisters. When World War II broke out, the two women joined Romania’s Communist underground.
Braverman, however, knew none of this. After the outbreak of the war, Romania joined the Axis powers, and throughout the war years communication between Romanian Jews and the Jewish community in Palestine was almost entirely severed.
In Palestine, Braverman studied agriculture under Ada Maimon, who trained women for agricultural work at the farm she established near Ness Ziona, known as Ayanot. Braverman was fascinated by Maimon, a leading advocate for women’s agricultural training who was also a Sabbath-observant Jew. The encounter left a deep impression on her.
“It was the first time I had ever met someone with such views who also kept Shabbat,” she later recalled.
After completing her training, Sara joined a group of fellow Romanian members of Hashomer Hatzair who formed the nucleus that would go on to establish Kibbutz Shamir. At the same time, she became one of the first women recruited and trained by the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah, the largest Jewish underground organization. On the day they were inducted, Ada Maimon arrived at the camp to wish them success in their new endeavor, and to distribute long trousers so they could maintain standards of modesty.
Braverman’s early Palmach service was not marked by daring battlefield exploits. Instead, much of her work involved smuggling weapons. She found employment as a “worker” in a British factory that manufactured and repaired military equipment, while quietly diverting weapons and ammunition to the Palmach.
When Haviva Reik Stole Grapes
It was during a course for squad commanders that Sara first met the woman who would become her closest friend, Haviva Reik. Only six women participated in the course, and all of them shared the same tent. According to Braverman, the training was grueling.
“Every day we cried in our little tent, saying that we had no strength left. Haviva, she was such a noble and generous soul. I have never met anyone else like her, someone who always wanted to give, to do, to help.
“Then one morning, at roll call, Joseph Tabenkin appeared and announced that something extremely serious had happened during the night: a young woman had been caught alone in the vineyards of Kibbutz Ein HaShofet, apparently intending to steal grapes! We all looked at one another in bewilderment. We were completely exhausted. Who still had the energy to go searching for grapes in the middle of the night?
“At the end of the course they told us that the culprit had been Haviva. It turned out that on the very day we had all declared that we had no strength left and wanted to quit, she decided that the only thing that could lift our spirits was a bunch of grapes. So, she got up in her pajamas and walked all the way to the kibbutz, until she ran into the night watchman.
“When she came back, she decided that since she had returned without the grapes, there was no reason to wake us up and disturb our sleep,” Braverman recalled in an interview.
In addition to smuggling weapons, Braverman and Reik were also active in the Mossad LeAliyah, the Haganah organization that helped Jews reach Palestine despite the immigration restrictions imposed by the British authorities.
Returning to Europe, to Fight
During World War II, the British Army recruited soldiers from across the Empire and from occupied Europe, establishing special units known as the SOE (Special Operations Executive). Their mission was to operate behind enemy lines and undermine the German occupation from within. In 1943, the British authorities and the Jewish Yishuv decided to open recruitment to these special units to volunteers from the Jewish community in Palestine.
The prospect was almost inconceivable.
These were young men and women who had overcome countless obstacles and immigration restrictions to reach Palestine, leaving behind their homes, families, and the motherlands. Now they were being asked to do the unthinkable: leave behind their relative safety in the Land of Israel, secretly return to the very lands from which they had escaped, and confront the Nazi enemy in one of the most brutal wars in human history.
For many, the decision was deeply personal. Parents, siblings, relatives, and friends remained trapped in Europe. Fragmentary reports about the destruction of European Jewry, and the agonizing silence surrounding loved ones whose fate remained unknown, haunted countless Jews in pre-state Israel.
No precise figures exist regarding the number of young people who presented themselves for selection, nor even the exact number ultimately dispatched on what became known as the Yishuv Paratrooper missions. The accepted estimate is that at least 37 volunteers were sent into Europe. Three of them were women: Hannah Senesh, who joined the first deployment, and Haviva Reik and Sara Braverman, who were sent as part of the second. Roughly half of those who embarked on these missions never returned.
Most of the paratroopers did not think of themselves as heroes, nor did they imagine that their task was to bring down the Third Reich. Their goals were far more modest and, in some ways, more urgent: to save as many Jews as possible and to reassure those left behind that they had not been abandoned.
As Hannah Senesh famously wrote, they hoped to be like the matchstick whose destiny may be to burn away completely, but only after helping to ignite a spark of salvation.
Another factor that encouraged many of the volunteers to enlist was a promise made by the British authorities. According to Braverman, despite the strict restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, the immediate family members of those who joined the missions would automatically receive immigration permits.
Yet even those permits could not always save the people they were meant to help.
One of the volunteers who departed alongside Braverman was Yitzhak Ben Efraim, a fellow member of Kibbutz Shamir. He, too, enlisted in part to secure immigration permits for his parents, who remained in Romania. They received the coveted certificates and managed to board the immigrant ship Mefküre. But tragedy struck before they reached safety. The vessel was torpedoed off the Turkish coast, and the overwhelming majority of its passengers, including Ben Efraim’s parents, drowned.
Both Sara and Haviva had family members trapped in Europe, and both chose to volunteer for the mission. In April 1944, they learned that they had successfully passed the selection process and had been accepted into the second deployment. Reik, who had been born in Slovakia, was assigned to return to her homeland, while Braverman was destined for Romania.
In the summer of 1944, the volunteers entered the paratrooper training program, first at Ramat David and later in Cairo. After months of military drills, intelligence work, and clandestine warfare training, they reached the final test: the qualifying parachute jump.
Many in the group worried that Haviva Reik, who was older than most of the trainees, might struggle to complete it. Instead, the surprise came from elsewhere.
When Sara’s turn arrived, she froze.
Several members of the group, including Haviva, who had already completed her own jump, offered to go up again and jump beside her. Even then, Braverman could not bring herself to leap from the aircraft.
In the end, the British commanders decided to pass her through the course, while arranging for her to reach her destination by other means. The phrase, “the paratrooper who didn’t jump,” would follow her for years.
For Braverman herself, however, there was nothing amusing about it. The experience, especially her inability to jump at the decisive moment, remained etched in her memory as one of the darkest days of her life.
Many of the paratroopers, Hannah Senesh among them, suspected that they might never return.
Years later, Braverman recalled arriving with the group at their base in Bari, Italy, from which they would depart on their respective missions. There, she accompanied her friend Rafi Reiss to a recording studio.
Reiss had immigrated from Slovakia only in 1939. In the few years since, he had married, and shortly before leaving for Europe he had become a father. Fearing that he might not survive, he wanted to leave behind something for his infant daughter.
He asked Sara to accompany him while he recorded his voice, so that if he never came home, his daughter would still be able to hear him.
His fears proved justified.
Reiss was captured in Slovakia together with Haviva Reik and other resistance fighters. All were executed.
To conceal the true nature of their mission from the authorities, the parachutists purchased postcards in Bari, just as if they were ordinary tourists, and arranged for them to be sent to their families during the war. Braverman herself left twenty postcards containing prewritten “updates” on her well-being with the operation’s commander before departing for Yugoslavia. The cards were mailed from Italy to her family, one each week.
Fighting with Tito
Although she never made the jump, Sara nevertheless reached Europe. Together with the other members of the team assigned to Romania, she made her way to Yugoslavia, where they joined Josip Tito’s partisans. For about a month they fought alongside the Yugoslav resistance while waiting for an opportunity to cross the border into Romania.
As Braverman later acknowledged, the cover story devised for her was not especially convincing. She was sent to Yugoslavia under the guise of an upper-class British journalist assigned to report on the fighting there, despite the fact that she did not speak a word of English.
Fortunately, no one ever put her story to the test.
Among the partisans was a Jewish woman whose relatives lived at Kibbutz Sha’ar HaAmakim. The war had cut off all communication between them. Using the group’s radio equipment, Sara managed to send word to the kibbutz that their family member was still alive.
Then, at the end of the summer of 1944, history intervened.
A coup d’état in Romania brought the country over to the Allied side.
Sara’s mission was suddenly rendered unnecessary.
It was canceled.
She could go home.
In early September 1944, Braverman and the other members of the team that had been operating in Yugoslavia returned to the Allied base in Bari, Italy, intending to make their way back to Palestine. There they reunited with several of the other paratroopers, among them Haviva Reik.
Braverman urged her friend to return home with her.
Reik refused.
Born in Slovakia, she remained determined to continue her mission on behalf of the Jews of her homeland.
It was the last time the two friends would ever see one another.
Less than two months later, Haviva Reik was murdered in Slovakia.
After the War
When the war ended, Sara returned to Palestine and to Kibbutz Shamir. Her mother later succeeded in immigrating as well.
Braverman resumed active service in the Palmach and was placed in charge of weapons training in the region stretching northward from Hadera. After the Palmach was disbanded and the Israel Defense Forces established, she and Shoshana Gershonowitz were among the founders of the Women’s Corps.
Over the years, Braverman filled a series of leadership roles in her kibbutz, in the Kibbutz Movement, and in the Mapam political party.
Yet one mission never truly ended.
For decades, she volunteered to speak at gatherings at Givat Haviva and at IDF bases throughout the country, sharing the story of the Yishuv Paratroopers and preserving the memory of those who never returned – especially the story of her closest friend, Haviva Reik.
Sara Braverman passed away at Kibbutz Shamir in February 2013 at the age of 95.
Of the three female paratroopers, the three young women who set out for Europe in an attempt to save the communities and families they had left behind, it was the one who could not bring herself to jump from the aircraft who ultimately returned.
The one whose mission began with a profound sense of personal failure was also the only one who survived.
Thus, she became the one left behind to tell the story of those who did jump, but never came home.
This article was prepared with the assistance of an interview with Sara Braverman from the Toldot Yisrael Archive, preserved at the National Library of Israel, and the book Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the Making of Israeli Collective Memory by Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz.
