Dina Porat Vengeance and Retribution are Mine — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Dina Porat - Vengeance and Retribution are Mine

Holocaust survivors who were planning to exterminate the whole of Germany / Karni Eldad, Makor Rishon

The fire in Europe is dying down.  Threads of smoke cut through the horizontal landscape, hinting at a heaven above, a heaven filled with Jewish souls exploding there as if in a whirling storm. Their brothers who were still amongst the living, gradually emerged from their hiding places.  Wary, their eyes flickering from side to side.  They don’t believe it has happened, they don’t believe it is over, they don’t believe that they will manage to stay alive with the ghosts.
They are gathered  up from the ghettoes, concentration camps, forests, monasteries, cellars and attics. They can hardly move, but the cancer of revenge comes from within and motivates them to take action.

A few dozen survivors gather around Abba Kovner – the leader of the partisans and fighters from the Vilna Ghetto - a charismatic and impressive man, a poet and writer.  They devise a plan together and take the necessary steps to implement it.  They will live like shadows in the coming year then return to cursed Germany, integrate with the population, make contacts, and wait for the big moment when they will avenge every drop of spilled Jewish blood in front of the whole world.

Prof. Dina Porat plunged into this merciless world in her book Vengeance and Retribution are Mine, which was published by the Haifa University about two months ago.

Porat, the chief historian of Yad Vashem, is professor emeritus of the Department of Jewish History and head of the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry.  She researched the history of the Nakam Group – a group of about 50 Jewish men and women who had sought to retaliate for the murder of six million Jews by killing six million Germans.  How can such a mass killing be instigated?  According to Plan A devised by Kovner and his people, some of the members of the group were supposed to integrate into various positions in the infrastructure systems of three or four major cities in Germany, and chemically poison the drinking water. If this plan failed, they would go on to a modified Plan B, the mass extermination of SS personnel.  Plan C settled for the targeted hindrance of Nazi officers.

The feeling of revenge which pulsated within the survivors was what kept them going then.  Some of them were planning to commit suicide after completing the job, while others believed that taking revenge would enable them to start to build a new life.  “They were motivated by a desire to fulfill the decree of those murdered”, says Porat.  “This wasn’t just an inner feeling, the decree for revenge was very clear:  people had written it on pieces of paper which were thrown from trains, decreed with their last breath, shouted out in every possible way.  In the last letters sent by youth group leaders before their death, they had written that they would not rest in peace until their blood had been avenged.  When Kovner established ‘Escape Routes’ for the Jews (relatively safe routes which would lead them to the DP camps) he and his men would pass through towns which had been emptied of Jews, and would sometimes see a decree written on the wall ‘Jews – take revenge’!

Porat’s book about this affair is structured as a chronological story in which passages from authentic documents, fighters’ testimonies etc., are inserted. She started writing about the avengers at the request of former members of the group.  “In 2000, I published a biography of Abba Kovner ‘Beyond the Reaches of Our Soul’ (for which she received the National Jewish Book Award). I devoted only one or one and a half pages to the Nakam affair since, while they were active, Kovner had been arrested by the British.  When the avengers read the story themselves, they saw that there was very little written about them and they crucified me. ‘What does that mean?’  They said to me ‘We spent a whole year of our young lives there, and all you can write is one page?’  I immediately promised to write a separate book about them”. 

Porat managed to interview 34 of the 50 Nakam group members; today, only four of them are still living.  “I encountered the biography of a generation. When World War II broke out, they were members of a Zionist youth group, and spoke Hebrew and Yiddish. They had all grown up in a very Jewish environment and, of course, their parents made sure to send them to Jewish schools. Another characteristic was that during the Holocaust they had been partisans, members of ghetto undergrounds or even spent time in Auschwitz. They were very creative and thought outside the box.  Thirdly, they had a sense of mission and duty towards the future of the people, its good name, its history.  They couldn’t do otherwise.  They say that, after the war: we do not have the right to immigrate to Israel and establish a kibbutz, have families and raise children. They were duty-bound to take revenge, as the matter has been placed on their shoulders and they bear responsibility. They are really great, people of quality with values, the crème de la crème of European Jewry. The Haganah’s European commander called them ‘nice guys’.  I tried to find an explanation for the gap between all this and the fact that they wanted to kill six million people, including women and children who had no connection to crimes against the Jewish people”.

According to Porat, when she started researching the subject, no serious study had been written in the Western world about the activities of Nakam after World War II. “It’s true that people were aware of the story in general, but no one had really looked into it. I couldn’t understand why there had been no dialogue about it. After all, it is obvious to anyone reading testimonies that there had been a hankering for it.  As Antek Zuckerman said (one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising), ‘I have never met a Jew who didn’t seek revenge’.

“I had hoped that the book on this subject would be well-received, but I did not imagine that there would be such great interest in it. It went on to win the Bahat Prize. 15 large events have already been dedicated to it. And I ask: In the end, they didn’t take revenge, so what is it all about?  What happened?

“My explanation is: We have, after all, made peace with Germany. They have saved us with reparations without which Israel would have collapsed. We accepted these reparations with anger and the gnashing of teeth but then refused to buy German-made goods. However, this too has passed. Today, we are completely reconciled. Thousands of young Israelis live in Berlin, and Germany is our most loyal partner in the EU. Today in Israel, the Polish are hated more than the Germans. Then the story about this group appears, and they say:  there should be no reconciliation. The Germans should have been punished, and they weren’t. Now we have the second and third generations who want to see where they stand regarding this statement. There is another explanation: Society in Israel has changed. It is more resolute, and is not prepared to be mistreated or hurt. Therefore, people like the avengers are accepted with much more respect”.

In the preface of the book, Porat maps the groups seeking revenge which were active then. “There were partisans who had decamped the forest and Jews who had returned from their hiding places. They identified and executed some hundreds of those who had murdered their families and communities”, she says.  “There was a group in Vienna which had executed a few dozen Nazis and collaborators, after they had been identified and there was a small group of people from within the British Army’s Jewish Brigade which had taken revenge. They would go out at night in army jeeps, knock on the door of someone who had been responsible for murders, notify him that he had been judged by the Jewish people and then execute him”.

“The encounter between the Brigade soldiers and the group of avengers in July, 1945 was significant. As for the soldiers – those Jews they were expecting to meet, the fighting Jews.  They received the survivors with a great deal of enthusiasm and admiration. As for the avengers, according to Vitka Kempner (Abba Kovner’s partner): ‘The encounter with the Brigade was the start of Eretz Israel for us’.”

“And yet, when the members of the group hinted at their plan to kill millions of Germans, they were confronted with reluctance, thereby understanding that there would be no support. Most of the Brigade soldiers were for revenge. There were also many survivors who had spread out throughout Europe to cause as much damage to the Germans as possible. But they were not willing to collaborate directly with Plan A, and preferred to assist the avengers with uniforms, gasoline, certificates etc. At the same time, they apprised Eretz Israel of the situation, the leaders of the Yishuv, and reported that there was a group in Europe planning a large scale operatio.  It is quite clear that there was no one in Eretz Israel willing to accept this”.

Porat adds that the Brigade was walking a thin line.  Its members could not realize their wish for revenge to such a large extent in case the British discovered what they were doing and would disband the Brigade – thereby preventing the continuation of vital operations for saving the remaining survivors. “In fact, the Brigade was a thorn in the side of the British. Why would they need 5,000 Jewish soldiers in Europe? If it weren’t for Churchill, who had forced it on the army, the Brigade wouldn’t even have existed. The British keep an eye on them and realize that all sorts of things are happening under their noses. Jews reaching northern Italy at that time are placed in refugee camps, and the Brigade soldiers provide them with whatever they can steal from the army bases, and assist them in immigrating to Israel.  In other words – the British become the supporters of immigration to Israel, which they oppose.

“At the same time, they realize that jeeps keep disappearing during the night, and start to suspect that they are being used for revenge operations. This is why the strategy is changed and the Brigade is sent to Belgium and Holland. However, in the meantime, 5,000 trucks of Jewish soldiers pass through Germany, with flags, and Stars of David, and with motorcyclists making contact between the trucks. This is quite some convoy, and it is noticed by the population, and the Brigade sabotages everything it can while passing through Germany. Some of the British officers actually like the Jewish soldiers and their thirst for revenge. They say – What, didn’t we destroy Dresden in retaliation for the bombing of Coventry?  And so, they sometimes turned a blind eye”.

Also, when the Nakam group asked for the blessing of the Yishuv leaders in Eretz Israel, it encountered a certain coolness. David ben Gurion, who met with one of them, rhetorically asked whether ‘the murder of six million Germans would bring my six million Jews back to life’. If that’s not possible, ben Gurion said, then he wasn’t interested.  On another occasion, he said that he wanted to build and not waste his efforts on ‘running after Germans and spitting in their faces’.

Things were more complex with Meir Ya’ari, leader of HaShomer HaTzair. The idea of revenge was not foreign to Ya’ari, as he had sent the German Department of the Palmach to Europe with the order to ‘Be the seed of revenge!’.  On the other hand, according to Porat, Ya’ari strongly opposed the plan to poison the potable water. There was also antagonism between Ya’ari and Kovner: Ya’ari was not willing to accept the fact that such a charismatic young man would run around doing whatever he wanted without the permission of the ‘Admor from Merhavia’ (Meir Ya'ari).

Did the Yishuv leadership put a spoke in the wheel of the group?

“Nachum Shadmi, Commander of the Haganah in Europe, had enough to contend with, when he suddenly had the job of making sure that the group of avengers didn’t run wild or do something that would harm the Yishuv. 

It was also true that the Yishuv wanted revenge – after all, most of the Jews in Eretz Israel had come from Europe and had lost their close families.  However, the Yishuv had other ideas.  First of all, to bring the remaining survivors to Eretz Israel. The perception was primarily that the world was in ruins and only we, the Jews in Eretz Israel, could or wanted to take care of them. Secondly, there was a desire to emerge from that period with a country. If the Yishuv was to assist in the murder of millions of Germans, who would support the establishment of a Jewish state?  However, Moshe Sharett has been quoted as saying that he wanted to take revenge on the scale of thousands of SS personnel, and not ‘one corpse here or one there’. Nonetheless, there were those in the Yishuv who believed that the Haganah should carry it out in a controlled way”.

When Kovner arrived in Eretz Israel, he felt like a fish out of water, despite being a ‘shmutznik’ (a member of HaShomer HaTzair) and a fighter as well as a partisan commander. Senior members of the Yishuv treated him with suspicion, which he realized was due to the plans for revenge. Porat imagines that he felt that they wanted to keep him on a tight rein simply because they hadn’t witnessed the atrocities at first-hand.

Despite this, Kovner met with Haganah leaders Yisrael Galili and Moshe Sneh, and asked for an especially effective poison ‘with no taste or smell, which could dissolve in water without leaving a trace’. He also asked for assistance in obtaining vehicles and manpower, and that the Haganah should instruct their people in Europe not to hamper his group.  Kovner promised that the avengers, in turn, wouldn’t involve any public Jewish authority, either in Eretz Israel or in the Diaspora. Responsibility would fall solely on them if they were arrested or put on trial. Galili was prepared to promise that they would provide contacts in Europe and would arrange the return of Kovner there – but there were two conditions: the group would answer to the Haganah and would only carry out Plan B, which was designed to inflict damage on the detention camps holding SS personnel.

“I hereby admit and confess that I wasn’t straight with Galili and Sneh” Kovner later wrote. “I wasn’t completely honest when I agreed.  I sent a coded message to my friends in Europe that Plan A should be discussed with no one until I arrived.  I lied with a clear conscience”. It is quite clear from this that, contrary to his promise, he planned to go ahead with Plan A.

How did the Yishuv leadership see him? Could it be that they thought that Kovner had lost his mind following the atrocities he had experienced?

“Yes. One of the people in the Yishuv said that ‘If only fifty people became unhinged because of the Holocaust, then that’s very few’. The avengers, however, were sure that they were helping to realize the Zionist dream, and that their idea would be received with open arms – they even thought that afterwards it would be possible to start a new chapter in the international life of the Jewish people besides being a deterrent to all our enemies.  Initially, they wanted to send a message to the Arabs that, if they had any ideas like those of the Mufti, they wouldn’t work. The Jewish people would retaliate. They were surprised to find out that the Yishuv leadership didn’t agree with them and were only prepared to accept Plan B.  Some of the avengers were very angry with Kovner, who had boarded a ship to Eretz Israel without consulting them”.

If they believed in the outcome of this operation, then they should take their revenge. What was so important in getting approval?

“Since they are Zionists who dream of immigrating to Eretz Israel and put down roots there, they don’t want to take action of their own accord, especially not Kovner.  With the support of the Yishuv they wouldn’t be considered as terrorists. The operation takes on a totally different light”.

In the meantime, Kovner had managed to obtain some suitable poison for inserting into the water system. He packed it in with his kit and sailed to Europe, but was arrested en route, probably because of his false documents. Nevertheless, he managed to transfer the poison to a Jewish Brigade soldier with instructions to whom to deliver it. The soldier, however, threw the package into the sea without even knowing what was inside it. 

Kovner was sent into isolation in an Egyptian jail. A few months later, he was transferred for imprisonment in Jerusalem where he stayed until Golda Meir managed to get him released. During this time, his perception changed, as described by Porat in her book: “Until then he, just like his friends in the group, had set his heart on implementing Plan A, as in ‘Let my soul die with the Philistines’, i.e. choosing to die. Being in jail (…) made him think that now he should choose life: to look forward, to the future, immigrate to Eretz Israel, build a state. Choosing life also meant cancelling Plan A, but he couldn’t say that to his friends, the avengers, and also couldn’t say ‘Live your life’ to any of them! Such a decision should come from within, and inducement from without wouldn’t help”.

While Kovner was in custody and the package of poison was sinking into the depths, the avengers had to make do with Plan B. The target selected was the Nazi POW camp in Nuremberg. The method: to poison loaves of bread. The arsenic was distilled in Paris and handed over to the avengers by members of the Palmach German Department. One of the group members, Arie (Leibka) Distal, managed to get a job in a bakery supplying bread to the POW camp. The night of 13^th April 1946, was the time chosen for the operation.

After receiving the rubber bottles containing the arsenic, Distel had to take them into the bakery.  With his experience of smuggling things into the ghetto, he knew how to carry this out. He secured the rubber bottles to his body, wrapped a wide raincoat around them, and walked into the bakery. Then he hid them in three water barrels which were available in case of fire, after which he placed them under the wooden floor. When the time came, two of Distel’s friends slipped into the bakery and hid in large bread baskets until all the employees had left for the day. Towards midnight, they started their assignment, under the pale light of the moon shining through the windows.  The bottles were removed from their hiding place, the lethal liquid was transferred to pails, and the three of them used brushes to spread it on loaves of bread which were ready for delivery. They needed to keep on mixing the liquid in the pails so that the poison wouldn’t sink to the bottom, and also so that the color of the liquid should be the same as that of the bottom of the loaves which Distel made sure to arrange in the same way as they had been found.

They managed to spread the poison on a thousand loaves – “When we finished the first thousand, we hugged each other”, said Distel – before the guards made their rounds. The friends hid, waited for the patrol to go on their way, and then continued spreading the poison on another two thousand loaves. The guards came round again and, just at that moment, a strong gust of wind shattered one of the windows in the bakery and uprooted a door. Distel’s two friends ran off and he, himself, hid inside the bakery after concealing the equipment. At first light, he came out of his hiding place and joined his friends in the get-away car which the Brigade had provided.

A few days later, the AP Agency reported that there were numerous casualties in the POW camp in Nuremberg.  About 2,000 men were suffering from stomach poisoning and some of them were in a bad way, but none of them had died. The avengers had expected a much wider effect: they had calculated that 3,000 loaves of bread would suffice for about 12,000 of the 15,000 prisoners being held in the camp. On the other hand, says Porat, the members of the group appeared satisfied that they had managed to carry out something unprecedented. The low number of those poisoned, writes Porat, “emanates from the fact that the Americans had hospitalized those affected and made every effort to silence the commotion that had arisen. Perhaps the Americans were afraid that they, as the ones responsible for the well-being of the prisoners, would be charged with negligence and that is why they were quick to cover up the whole matter”.

What mistake did the avengers make? Why didn’t the operation succeed as expected? “According to the American report, the arsenic was of very high quality and the quantity was enough to kill tens of thousands of people – but this substance requires special handling. It should be diluted in hot water, and uniformly mixed but the avengers hadn’t had the knowledge to do this. They couldn’t make another attempt as, immediately after poisoning the loaves of bread, they were smuggled into Eretz Israel, in line with the agreement with the Haganah”.

However, this was not the end of attempts to take revenge. “Shimon Avidan, Commander of the Palmach German Department and who would later found the Givati Brigade, became friends with Kovner in Eretz Israel and heard all about his ideas. He also wasn’t for taking revenge on the six million, but was convinced that it was necessary to take some sort of revenge. When the group arrived in Eretz Israel, Avidan went to Europe without their knowledge and carried out isolated actions”.

Porat met with Avidan and talked to him, but he refused to tell her exactly where he had been and how many people he had killed. She says that, on the basis of her research, a total of about 1,500 Nazis were killed by Jews after the war.

It doesn’t sound like much when you think that, at the time, thousands of Jews were wandering around Europe thirsty for revenge. 

“This puzzled me: how is it possible that there is a clear-cut decree, everyone wants revenge – and yet, nearly nothing happened? Even the group of avengers didn’t think it was logical. They were looking for a deterrent, a large-scale revenge about which the whole world would talk. But, when they started getting organized in the winter of ’45, Jews were being amassed in the DP camps, and revenge wasn’t on their minds. They didn’t have the strength or the ability of organizing themselves and they had no weapons”. 

“But, beyond that, those Jews had an intuition that said: what will be will be. From now on, we shall build a new family, bring other children into the world, re-establish the Jewish people. Another crucial reason which deterred the survivors from taking revenge was the intense and ugly anti-Semitism raging throughout Europe. Jews trying to return to their homes to check whether someone else was still alive, were murdered on their own doorsteps. Kovner, himself, returned to the home from which he had been driven out, and sat on the sidewalk in deep despair. His neighbor berated him saying: ‘What, you’re still alive?’ That was a period when there was a wave of anti-Semitic murders in Slovakia, Lithuania and Hungary. 1,000 – 1,500 Jews were murdered in Poland alone after the war. This also convinced the survivors that there was no point in going back, that they can’t take care of the past including punishing those who should be punished. They would move forward”.

Were they supposed to brush aside the Holocaust? There was once a Jewish life, there will be a Jewish life, nothing happened in between?

“That is exactly what Abba Kovner’s group asserted. But, beyond all that, there was another reason for not taking revenge: it is simply not in the Jewish DNA. True, it is mentioned dozens of times in the Bible, but to get up and kill without a trial – is just not part of the Jewish character”.

“There is the amazing testimony given by a French officer who had been stationed in a German village with his unit. After a short period of time, he discovered a camp of Jewish survivors nearby. He noticed the physical shape they were in and their living conditions and couldn’t believe his own eyes. He took a few trucks, drove the Jews to the village, and gave them guns. His soldiers took the residents out into the street and the officer told the Jews to kill the locals and take their houses.

The Jews looked at him as if he had taken leave of his senses. ‘Why should we kill them?’, they said to him. ‘We don’t even know them. These are not the people who killed us. Maybe the residents of the village supported Hilter, maybe not, but we don’t kill people just like that’. The French officer said to them: ‘If we had been in your shoes, we would have killed them outright’”.