Yoel Palgi

They met up with, and attached themselves to, the partisan army's 6th Corps in the Papuk Mountains. The German occupation of Hungary forced changes in their plan, rendering the task of infiltration and carrying out their work even more hazardous. In the meantime the two groups were united on 6 May. They spent some time with the partisans, engaging in guerilla warfare, sabotage activities and the securing of escape lines for Allied airmen, while worrying that they were unable to implement the real purpose of their mission, helping Jews escape the harrying plight they were being subjected to in Hungary. Hannah Szenes was particularly disturbed by news leaking out from Hungary, and, together with Reuven Dafni, snuck over the border in late May, having prearranged with Palgi to meet up either before the Dohány Street Synagogue or, failing that, the city's main cathedral. Eventually Palgi and Goldstein managed to cross over into Hungary via the Drava River with the assistance of smugglers, on 19 June, some ten days after Szenes' capture and unaware of her fate.

In 1954, an event on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the parachutists' wartime activities was organized at Ma'agan. Tragically, 20 people associated with the organization of the operation, including 4 parachutists who had survived these ordeals, died when their plane crashed en route to the kibbutz.

Palgi was called as a witness in 1954-1955 when Kasztner was arraigned on charges of collaborating with the Nazis. He was cross-examined by Shmuel Tamir, and his hero's image was tarnished as he struggled, stuttering, to explain the apparent contradictions between his post-war book on the events, and his recollections in the testimony he deposed. When asked which version was correct -'What is the truth?', he replied, 'I wrote a novel, not a history,' and thereby effectively undermined the credibility and reliability of his account of what actually had taken place. Later, he charged that he had censured himself for fear of the British in 1946. The book underwent revisions for a second edition issued 2 decades later, a year before his death. In this reworking, he corrected those parts he said he had censored for the version written while the British were still the authorities in Mandatory Palestine. The variations have left historians uncertain of what precisely happened regarding a number of key events in his narrative.

Palgi was a co-founder of El Al and its deputy director from 1949 until 1960. As director of operations of the national airline, he was also on board the Bristol Britannia turboprop plane which made the first El Al non-stop flight between the United States and Israel in December 1957. Subsequently, he was Israel's director of civil aviation until 1964, when he was appointed ambassador to Tanzania. On the termination of his posting in 1966, Palgi joined the board of the Histadrut Sick Fund, where he was active until 1978.

In February 1948, on the eve of the Arab-Israeli War, Palgi, accompanied by Boris Senior, was dispatched by the Haganah on a mission to South Africa to buy aircraft for the fledgling Yishuv fleet Sherut Ha'avir, forerunner of what was to become, within months, the Israeli Air Force. The mission also involved hiring maintenance crews to service them. A deal to import 50 P-40 Kittyhawks had to be scrapped because obstacles to getting them back into Palestine were insurmountable but Palgi did succeed in acquiring two DH-89 Rapides, one Anson, three Fairchild Arguses, two Beechcraft Bonanzas and five Dakotas, and managed to ferry the fleet back into Palestine just before both the independent state of Israel was declared and war broke out.

Palgi returned home in 1945. Together with the other survivor, Haim Hermesh, he was burdened by a gnawing sense of pain and guilt for having the luck to survive while his comrades had fallen. The following year, he published a memoir of the events, entitled Ruach Gedolah ba'ah (The Great Wind Came). In this memoir, which, in recording the circumstances in which so many died he considered part of his war duty, he expresses his shock by an impression he received on returning to his community, writing, "Everywhere I turned, the question was fired at me: Why did the Jews not rebel? Why did they go like lambs to the slaughter? Suddenly I realized that we were ashamed of those who were tortured, shot burned. There is a kind of general agreement that the Holocaust dead were worthless people. unconsciously, we have accepted the Nazi view that the Jews were subhuman."

The volunteers were split into two groups, with one, consisting of Hannah Szenes, Abba Berdiczew, Reuven Dafni and a Ma'agan member, Jona Rozen [cs], parachuting into the north of Yugoslavia on 14 March. Palgi's group were flown to Bari where they met up with Enzo Sereni. They were scheduled to make their drop on the first night of Passover, 7 April 1944, which meant preparing for a seder even as they were flying over enemy territory, but adverse weather conditions delayed their departure, and they eventually parachuted into Croatia a week later, on 13 April, dropping into an area generally under the control of Tito's communist partisans.

Palgi had joined the Palmach, the strike force of Haganah and underground army of the Jewish community in Palestine, in 1942. In the following year, he volunteered, together with Peretz Goldstein [he], to partake in another Yishuv operation into German-occupied Europe. Both Palgi and Goldstein were members of the Ma'agan community, a group of Hungarians formed around the area of the Sea of Galilee, and Goldstein, like Palgi, had also been born in Cluj. The group were required to enlist in the British army and underwent training in Ramat David and Cairo, and, after completing their course, were issued with weapons, silk maps and cyanide pills. Two further measures were taken: they were promoted to officer rank in order to endow them with a certain status if captured, and, secondly, they underwrote insurance policies which, if they were killed, would ensure that their kibbutzim would be compensated for their sacrifice. There was also a personal dimension for many of those who volunteered. Palgi's family was still behind enemy lines in Cluj. Such anxieties were soon to be exacerbated by news that in March Germany had invaded Hungary.

Yoel Palgi (Hebrew: יואל פלגי; born Emil Nussbacher 1918 – 1978) was a Palmach parachutist who was dropped by Britain into Yugoslavia during the Second World War to assist in the rescue of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust and RAF pilots captured by the Germans.

Palgi was born in Cluj, Austria-Hungary (now in Romania) in 1918. In 1939, he made aliyah and joined Kibbutz Afikim in Mandatory Palestine.