The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner 9780804762489

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 10
Preface......Page 14
Acknowledgments......Page 22
Part One: Childhood and Youth (1918–1941):“Jerusalem without ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania,’ will it still be Jerusalem?”......Page 28
1. Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna: “A sad-eyed child,” March 1918–September 1939......Page 30
2. In Independent Lithuania: “Vilna is the birthplace of everything,” October 1939–June 1940......Page 42
3. Under Soviet Rule: “On the ruins of illusion,” June 1940–June 1941......Page 55
Part Two: Holocaust and War (1941–1944): “A terrible mountain of memory”......Page 66
4. Hiding in a Monastery: “A crimson life-line on the convent wall,” June–December 1941......Page 68
5. The Manifesto of January 1, 1942: “The rebellion began with the manifesto,” September 1941–January 1942......Page 84
6. The Establishment and Training of the Underground: “A man cannot be a hero at the expense of those he loves,” January 1942–Spring 1943......Page 103
7. The Wittenberg Affair: “On the senseless night of July 16,” March–September 1943......Page 133
8. The Last Days of the Ghetto: “And say with me / My mother / My mother,” September 1–September 24, 1943......Page 159
9. In the Forest and with the Partisans: “Of ten fingers, only the one left knows how to shoot!” October 1943–July 1944......Page 177
Part Three: Postwar Years in Europe and in Israel (1944–1949): “The Wilja and the Alexander [rivers] mingle together”......Page 202
10. From the Land of the Holocaust to the Land of Life: “Mammeh, may I cry now?” July–December 1944......Page 204
11. The Bricha (Escape from Europe) and the East European Survivors’ Brigade: “A nightmarish . . . an awful wandering,” January–July 1945......Page 217
12. Nakam—The Blood of Israel Will Take Revenge: “To kill six million Germans,” August 1945–December 1947......Page 237
13. Information Officer of the Givati Brigade During the War of Independence: “Everything depends on your courage in battle, face-to-face,” December 1947–December 1949......Page 265
Part Four: A Life of Activity and Creativity (1949–1987): “How, my friends, is my poetry different from yours?”......Page 286
14. Serving the Party and at Odds with It: “Has the time come to forgive Germany?”......Page 288
15. The Holocaust and Jewish History: “A poem in stone”......Page 298
16. The Kibbutz Rebbe: “I am alone in the fields”......Page 322
17. Family and Friends: “And everything I have done should be corrected, / Except my life with you”......Page 339
18. Finis: “One should not summarize, for God’s sake, not summarize!”......Page 351
Notes......Page 366
Writings of Abba Kovner......Page 412
Unpublished Sources......Page 416
Selected Bibliography......Page 422
Index......Page 426

Citation preview

The Fall of a Sparrow

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture e d i t e d by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

The Fall of a Sparrow The Life and Times of Abba Kovner Dina Porat t ra n s l at e d a n d e d i t e d by e l i za b e t h y u va l

stanford u n i ve rs i t y p res s sta n f o rd, ca l i f o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California English translation © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. The Fall of a Sparrow was originally published in Hebrew in 2000 under the title Me-’ever le-gishmi: Parashat hayav shel Aba Kovner © 2000, Yad Vashem and Am Oved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archivalquality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Porat, Dina. [Me-’ever le-gishmi. English] The fall of a sparrow : the life and times of Abba Kovner / Dina Porat ; translated and edited by Elizabeth Yuval. p. cm. “Originally published in Hebrew in 2000 under the title Me-’ever le-gishmi : parashat hayav shel Aba Kovner.” Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-6248-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Kovner, Abba, 1918–1987. 2. Authors, Israeli—Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Lithuania—Vilnius. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Jewish resistance—Lithuania—Vilnius. 5. Holocaust survivors—Israel—Biography. I. Yuval, Elizabeth. II. Title. pj5054.k67513 2009 940.53'18092—dc22 [B] 2009015729 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

Dedicated to Vitka Kempner A woman of courage and stature Abba Kovner’s life companion

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Hamlet, act 5, scene 2

Contents

Preface

xiii

Acknowledgments

xxi

Part One Childhood and Youth (1918–1941): “Jerusalem without ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania,’ will it still be Jerusalem?” 1. 2. 3.

Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna: “A sad-eyed child,” March 1918–September 1939

3

In Independent Lithuania: “Vilna is the birthplace of everything,” October 1939–June 1940

15

Under Soviet Rule: “On the ruins of illusion,” June 1940–June 1941

28

Part Two Holocaust and War (1941–1944): “A terrible mountain of memory” 4. 5. 6.

Hiding in a Monastery: “A crimson life-line on the convent wall,” June–December 1941

41

The Manifesto of January 1, 1942: “The rebellion began with the manifesto,” September 1941–January 1942

57

The Establishment and Training of the Underground: “A man cannot be a hero at the expense of those he loves,” January 1942–Spring 1943

76

x

Contents

7. 8. 9.

The Wittenberg Affair: “On the senseless night of July 16,” March–September 1943

106

The Last Days of the Ghetto: “And say with me / My mother / My mother,” September 1–September 24, 1943

132

In the Forest and with the Partisans: “Of ten fingers, only the one left knows how to shoot!” October 1943–July 1944

150

Part Three Postwar Years in Europe and in Israel (1944–1949): “The Wilja and the Alexander [rivers] mingle together” 10. From the Land of the Holocaust to the Land of Life: “Mammeh, may I cry now?” July–December 1944 11.

12. 13.

177

The Bricha (Escape from Europe) and the East European Survivors’ Brigade: “A nightmarish . . . an awful wandering,” January–July 1945

190

Nakam—The Blood of Israel Will Take Revenge: “To kill six million Germans,” August 1945–December 1947

210

Information Officer of the Givati Brigade During the War of Independence: “Everything depends on your courage in battle, face-to-face,” December 1947–December 1949

238

Part Four A Life of Activity and Creativity (1949–1987): “How, my friends, is my poetry different from yours?” 14. Serving the Party and at Odds with It: “Has the time come to forgive Germany?”

261

15.

271

The Holocaust and Jewish History: “A poem in stone”

16. The Kibbutz Rebbe: “I am alone in the fields” 17.

Family and Friends: “And everything I have done should be corrected, / Except my life with you”

295 312

Contents

18.

Finis: “One should not summarize, for God’s sake, not summarize!”

324

Notes

339

Writings of Abba Kovner

385

Unpublished Sources

389

Selected Bibliography

395

Index

399

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Preface

In March 1948 Abba Kovner celebrated his thirtieth birthday. Toward the end of May, two weeks after the establishment of the state of ­Israel was declared and two days before the Egyptian army invaded the Negev, its southern area, Kovner’s wife, Vitka Kempner, gave birth to Michael, their first child. Kovner wrote a poem about the fears of a man who has become a father after the Holocaust, calling it “No, No, No.” Kovner’s own sick father had died while he was still a youth and his mother had been murdered at Ponar, the killing site near Vilna, on the very day he left the ghetto for the forest with his comrades. His younger brother Michael, for whom the baby was named, joined the Soviet partisans and was killed on a mission. And now Kovner himself was a soldier, about to embark on yet another war for survival, although he was not at all certain that the previous war and the Holocaust had ended. The world kept turning while all over Europe Jews trying to return from the camps and forests to their former homes were being killed, and the criminals had yet to be punished. In the middle of the night, Kovner still awoke screaming from his nightmares. In my mind’s eye I can still see my father dying Behind my back I hear my mother’s voice as they kill her. My brother fell dead in forty-three On his birthday, in May, in May my brother fell. Oh night, how wrong you are! A man like me is not Hounded out of sorrow. These are not tears again Fear terrifies me, fear of a meeting With madness .  .  .

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And here my legs run, powerless run to see, My God, is my son still breathing? Of All Loves, p. 74

On the eve of the Jewish new year in 1949, Kovner, then information officer of the Givati Brigade, wrote festive orders of the day for his soldiers. He described his vision of the future after the gloomy present of the ongoing war: “Beyond the shell-scarred walls there are white houses. Beyond the scorched hills, fields bursting into bloom; the plain, the mountain and desert are all populated, and the red trails have become the roads to redemption.”1 Neither compromise nor partition, no luxuries beyond the means of the surviving people and the newly born country, but rather a Jewish state, as large as possible, with the plain, the mountain, and the desert, populated by as many Jews as possible; the son breathes and his father, who walked down so many bloody paths, carrying his dead family and his dead people on his back, could finally sleep at night without the fear of coming face to face with madness. Next to the Holocaust memorial column, which rises through all three stories of the Diaspora Museum located on the Tel Aviv University campus, there is a large open book titled Scrolls of Fire. Written by Kovner, it treats the sufferings of the Jewish people during their long history. It begins with a folktale about Jewish children in a shtetl (a small Jewish town) in the far north of Europe, its houses shrouded in snow, whose rabbi recounts the story of the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans. The rabbi tells the children how the high priest climbed onto the burning roof and threw the key to the temple up to heaven. “A hand was extended and took the key. The old man and the children were silent . . . and went their separate ways. . . . But that night one child, the child with sad eyes, saw the shining key fall from the sky and sink under the waters of the lake behind the village.”2 Thus Kovner introduces himself as the child with a mission, because only he had seen where the key sank and only he knew where to find it. The tale connects Kovner to the poem Scroll of Fire by Haim ­Nahman Bialik, Israel’s poet laureate, which deeply laments the destruction of the Second Temple and describes “the sad-eyed, white-winged angel”

Preface

whose prayer God answered, promising that even if the temple were destroyed, its last embers would never be extinguished. Since then the angel’s task had been “to guard the hidden tear in the cup of silent sorrow. . . . The fire burned his lips and heart, scarred forever, because they had been touched by the holy fire.”3 Kovner felt he had been burdened with a unique mission, burning like a holy fire, and it committed him always to be on his guard, to know in time what lay ahead and to warn of the Holocaust approaching Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, which would be destroyed, and of the key that would sink. It was up to him to light the flame of rebellion in the hearts of those caged in the ghetto and to lead them from there to fight in the forest and, afterward, to guide what remained of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, punishing on the way those responsible for the terrible tragedy, to renew the Temple in the Holy Land—the dwelling place that combined Jew and Israeli—and to forge the Zionism and Judaism of all generations into a new creation, providing a dwelling place that would be secure and populated, its houses white, its fields forever bursting into bloom, and to guard and preserve it, so that the embers might never be extinguished. That was how Kovner envisaged his mission. Abba Kovner’s life can be divided into four periods. The first period is 1918–1941, covering his childhood and youth in Sevastopol and Vilna in the midst of a large, loving extended family; his studies at the ­Tarbut (culture) Hebrew Gymnasium and later at the Faculty for the Arts at the Vilna University; his activities as a young member, guide, and leader of Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard), a Zionist-Socialist youth movement, in Polish- and Russian-occupied Lithuania; and the beginnings of his literary work. The second period, 1941–1944, took place during World War II and the Holocaust. When the Germans invaded Lithuania, Kovner hid in a convent near Vilna and from there returned to the ghetto to read his manifesto before the assembled members of the various youth movements still active at the time. In the manifesto Kovner asserted that Hitler was planning to kill all the Jews in Europe and hence self-­defense was their only alternative. He participated in founding and training the ghetto underground and eventually became its commander. When

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the ghetto was liquidated, Kovner and his comrades fled to the forest, where he commanded a Jewish partisan unit, part of the Soviet partisan organization. The third period, 1944–1949, includes the years between the liberation of Lithuania from the Nazi yoke and the end of Israel’s War of Independence. When Kovner and the partisans entered liberated Vilna, they searched for any Jews still alive and for whatever Jewish written material had survived the Holocaust, to bring them all to Eretz Israel (the Hebrew expression for prestate Israel) They also planned to unite the remnants of East European Jewry into one body and to wreak vengeance on the Germans. Kovner’s appearance before the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade in Italy was the climax of the meeting between representatives of Eretz Israel and the remaining European Jews, whereas his plans for revenge led him to British prisons in Egypt and Jerusalem. After his release from prison Kovner joined Vitka Kempner, Ruzka Korczak, and other comrades at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, located in the center of the country. During the 1948 War of Independence he was appointed information officer of the IDF’s (Israel Defense Forces) Givati Brigade and wrote its battle pages, among them the well-known page dealing with the fall of Kibbutz Nitzanim. Kovner’s first years in Israel were accompanied by an ongoing argument with the leadership of his movement, Hashomer Hatzair, and of his party, Mapam (the United Workers Party), with which the leftist kibbutzim, called together the Kibbutz Artzi, were affiliated. The argument began before he even reached Eretz Israel and continued until the death of Meir Ya’ari, his movement’s and party’s leader, in 1987, a few months before Kovner himself passed away. The final period, from 1949–1987, covers Kovner’s life as a public figure and writer and revolves around his involvement in Israeli public life and, despite the ongoing argument, in his movement and in his party. This period also covers Kovner’s dozens of years as a member of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and his attempts to give kibbutz holidays and ceremonies a Jewish character. His efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and of the long history of the Jews were many. Kovner struggled for years for a memorial and a research center to preserve the history of Hashomer Hatzair during the Holocaust and founded the museum at

Preface

Kibbutz Yad Mordechai and the Diaspora Museum at the University of Tel Aviv. He traveled abroad widely, wrote prolifically, and won many prizes, and his involvement in many varied public activities won him much public acclaim. Abba Kovner’s stormy life was part of the history of the Jewish people in the twentieth century: the life of a thriving Jewish center in Europe between the two world wars, the Holocaust, Israel’s War of Independence, and the founding and building of the state of Israel. However, he did not stand on the sidelines and observe; he left his mark on each of the aforementioned periods of Jewish history. Some of his statements and actions are still debated to this day and were the source of accusations leveled against him both during his lifetime and after his death. His critics’ main claim was, and still is, that he let his followers down by failing to carry out plans and visions they believed in and followed him for—although it was far beyond his ability to change circumstances. He never answered any of them. In addition to his literary output, Kovner wrote many articles and essays. Some of his speeches and lectures were transcribed, and he gave many interviews and recorded testimonies many a time. However, he left behind neither a diary nor any other continuous chronological testimony of the crucial events of his life, nothing to tell his side of the story, as did so many survivors, among them his own companions. He did not write his own biography because he often wavered between full appreciation of his role in history and fear of immodesty, of glorifying himself with “an old man’s megalomania.”4 Moreover, Kovner referred to his literary output as a kind of autobiography.5 In his great work on the Holocaust, The Scrolls of Testimony, for instance, a work that does in fact contain autobiographical elements, Kovner divides himself into two figures, Uri and Shaul. Uri is the intellectual who recognizes the limitations and flaws of decision making and action, meditates, and watches Shaul, who responds to the situation.6 This duality, the ability to objectively regard one’s own actions, had to find the proper vehicle for its expression. Kovner seemed to have decided that literature and poetry, with their symbols, metaphors, and images, could express the complexity and internal debate better than straightforward autobiographical prose.

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And the third reason: Kovner himself was convinced that arguments about issues whose time, place, atmosphere, and norms were different and perhaps forgotten would be to no avail. The exact nature of the past would always escape and the efforts to restore it would only deepen the sorrow and lack of understanding7 and would cheapen the events of the past and their significance and perhaps even turn them into petty personal or political disputes.8 During the thirty years between 1956 and his death in 1987, Kovner testified no less than twenty-five times, usually with the participation of his wife, Vitka, and of Ruzka Korczak, and he gave dozens of interviews to various media. Some of his many speeches and public appearances were also attempts to bear witness. In 1982, in one rare, candid attempt to reach a definition of the processes of historical continuity, Kovner revealed how he felt about testifying. He made three main points:9 1. “I am not sure if I have a conception . . . a clear idea about what happened during that period. If I had . . . I would have written the history of those times or described my experiences then.” 2. “I have different hours, different days, different times. . . . The event under discussion is so intense, its nature so dramatic, so unconventional, it would be an understatement to say its implications cannot be deciphered all at once. . . . In another hundred years it would trouble no less than today.” 3. He spoke not only about the Holocaust but also about every testimony given by every Jew about every era: “There are defense mechanisms. We defend our existence . . . our history . . . our deeds, the good years of our lives, etc. etc. The mechanism . . . represses failures. . . . First of all we are Jews. So we say we’d better be careful not to write anything that seems like a total Jewish failure. And rightly so. We’re Jews. As long as we are conscious of being Jews. As a Jew, you love your people. You can’t love and be objective at the same time.”10 Kovner used those three main points to define the essence and goal of his testimonies and interviews. With complete clarity he objected to saying “things which seem like a total Jewish failure,” while defining

Preface

himself as “a son of a people whose failures are in greater abundance than its successes.”11 Thus Kovner made historians and readers face the unresolved tension between the duty to testify accurately and the goal he set for himself: to transmit the Jewish heritage, culture, and history from the Diaspora, every Diaspora, to Eretz Israel so the present generation could live in peace with itself and with its memories and so that coming generations could respect and venerate their ancestors and carry their torch. “Even today, heritage and ideology are part of a continuum,” Kovner said, and therefore a testimony is not a vehicle for precise historical events but a means of giving every Jew material with which to construct a picture of the past that could be lived with. The individuals who testify, and first of all Kovner himself, take a national mission upon themselves to preserve the past in the name of the future: “Each one of us plays a role in Jewish history and is also its writer and its researcher,” Kovner said, thus offering a clue to his—and others’—testimonies.12 Why then write the biography of a person who shied away from writing it and gave many reasons explaining why he deliberately avoided doing so? First, because Kovner’s is a fascinating stormy life story of an extraordinary personality, and his views on past and present issues were original, sometimes far ahead of his contemporaries. Second, because his views and the issues he raised are still relevant: the responsibility of a leader to his followers and the tension between reality and the principles he promised to adhere to; the power that the word, both written and oral—and Kovner was an orator who entranced his listeners—­exerts in promoting a political or ideological position; punishment and revenge for wrongs inflicted by inhuman regimes, as a necessary means to restore order; achieving unity and continuity without enforcing uniformity; the role of every individual, not just the elite or the mavericks, in shaping the course of history; conduct in war, either when falling in captivity or when holding fast to one’s land, and being humane toward the enemy; foreseeing a looming national disaster and sending a warning on time. Those are still some of the themes of contemporary politics and tragedy. Third, Kovner’s life story is thoroughly Jewish and Israeli, and there is no understanding of today’s Israeli and Jewish reactions without being acquainted with the notions he introduced or advocated, because they still are at the heart of debates such as “like lambs to slaughter,”

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“death to the invaders,” “togetherness” and “differentness,” and “Judaism is a culture of a public.” Although there is always a tension between the local and the universal, the details of the local always carry universal significance. “A person who stays within his four walls is in the midst of an entire world,” said the ancient Hebrew sages. Indeed, the underlying themes of Kovner’s story are beyond time and place—sacrifice, guilt, comradeship, first love, life companionship, illusion, and the weight of a mission that motivates human beings. Were Kovner to rise from the dead and see his biography written, would he agree to the title, taken from Hamlet, “The Fall of a Sparrow”? He could have argued that he lived a full and rich life, soaring to heights of activity and creativity. But the Holocaust and its aftermath, no matter how well explained and presented, will always carry the bitter taste of human failure. And when Kovner passed away, as a sad-eyed old man, Israel and the Jewish people were again active and creative, and as the angel was promised, the embers were not extinguished, but Kovner could not feel that the heavy mission he undertook—to guard and preserve them and to shape them according to his vision—was completed.

Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude is extended to Vitka Kempner, Kovner’s life companion, who allowed me access to all the materials in her home, including files containing sensitive subjects and letters sent to her by Abba at various times during their life together—all the materials, except, that is, for the handwritten notes written on the eve of his death, when he could no longer speak, which she has never shown to anyone. I particularly admire the way she spoke to me for hours and days without indulging in the currently popular trend of pouring her heart out about personal topics, but rather remaining reserved. She never boasted about her exploits as a partisan, despite the fact that they entitled her to the highest award a partisan could receive, but she always spoke candidly without avoiding embarrassing assessments. She never glossed over details about events, movements, or individuals, nor was she sparing in her criticism, sometimes even of Kovner himself. I cannot possibly thank her adequately for her help in finding materials that were not in her possession. She never asked to read the manuscript. This is not a formal or commissioned biography—no contract was signed—and our relations developed into trust and friendship. It is a privilege for me to thank as well the many people whose help I was lucky enough to receive. First and foremost the eyewitnesses, who devoted many hours of their time to answer my questions. I owe special thanks to the members of the Vilna ghetto underground, the partisans, and the members of the bricha (escape) and nakam (revenge) groups, who were unselfish with their time and unstinting in their efforts to find written materials that had been stored in their homes for years, hosting me most cordially. Thanks are due to the Kovner children, his

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daughter Shlomit and his son Michael, and to Kovner’s relatives and many friends; to the members of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh; to those who were instrumental in building the Diaspora Museum, the Givat Haviva center, and the museum at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai; to the members of various kibbutzim and committees of Hashomer Hatzair; and to the fighters of the Givati Brigade. The list is too long—more than a hundred names—to acknowledge individuals here, but all the names appear in this book and all were my eyes; I was not fortunate enough to know Kovner, meeting him only once for one brief encounter. In the more than 100 interviews recorded for this biography most of those interviewed described Kovner as a special and absolutely unique personality, respected to the point of awe, whether they fully agreed with or angrily objected to his statements and actions. The limitations of testimonies given decades after the events are well known; however, no piece of paper, no document could replace or do more than complement the colors, tastes, smells, scenes, quarrels, fears, loves, and hatred that rose from these memories. Warm thanks to all the witnesses. I would also like to thank my friend Professor Dan Laor, who encouraged me from the very beginning; my teachers, Professors Yehuda Bauer and Israel Gutman, both intimate friends of Kovner, whose views had an impact on their academic work; and Shalom Lurie from Kibbutz Merhavia, Elisha Porat from Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, and Yosef Harmatz, Kovner’s close friend, who were all generous with their help; and Fania Yocheles-Barantzowska, a citizen of Vilna, who kindly spent several days leading me on a walking tour around the city, through the ghetto alleys, the convent grounds, and the forests where the partisans camped. My thanks to Devorah Stavi, Genazim archivist; Ofra Kuzitz of the Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh archives; Yehudit Kleiman from Yad Vashem, for finding the material from Vilna and YIVO; Yossel Birstein and Yaron Sachish from the National Library; Dafna Olshanski of the Haganah archives; Hannah Shimoni from the Diaspora Museum; and the staff of Yad Ya’ari at Givat Haviva: Shlomo Bargil, Yehoshua Bichler, Yosepha Pecher, and especially Yonat Rotbein, Ruzka Korczak’s daughter. Special thanks to Mori Kantor of the Yad Tabenkin archives. All of them helped me willingly and took a deep interest in the work.

Acknowledgments

I would also like to thank my students: Dr. Liat Steir-Livni for her help; Rachel Hadaio for faithfully deciphering old cassette recordings; Dr. Haim Fireberg, who managed to find important material in the IDF archives; and Irena Catorovitch for being always there. Thanks to those who read the chapters and gave me invaluable criticism (according to the order of chapters): Misha Kovner, Shalom Lurie, Yitzhak Ziv, Dr. Yitzhak Arad, Yosef Harmatz, Prof. Yehuda ­Wallach, Pnina Tzachor, Dr. Daniel Yam, Hanoch Bartov, Ehud Rabin, Dr. Yehoshua Bichler, Prof. Israel Gutman, Prof. Miriam Schlesinger, Dr. Geoffrey Wigoder, Adam Rand, and Cesia Rosenberg-Amit. I mourn all those who have passed away since the inception of this project. Warm gratitude is extended to Elizabeth Yuval, who translated the Hebrew version, including citations from Kovner’s poetry and prose, most of which has not been translated before, and edited the manuscript. Her spirit and broad knowledge of Western literature made it a pleasure to work with her. I would like to thank Dr. Paul (Hershl) Glasser, senior research associate, and Dr. Susan A. Gitelson for naming me the Maria Salit-Gitelson Tell Memorial fellow at YIVO, New York, a place abundant with material concerning Vilna. My colleague Steve Zipperstein, the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, supported me with his good advice. Norris Pope, Director of Scholarly Publishing, and Sarah Crane ­Newman, Editorial Assistant for Humanities, both of Stanford University Press, were of great help. So were copyeditor Mimi Braverman and production editor Carolyn Brown. It is a pleasure to thank photographers Haim Goldgraber of Jerusalem and Mark Berghash of New York for their generous permission to use their work, and the Kovner family for readily allowing the use of photos from the family album and the citations from all of Kovner’s written works. William Lee Frost, president of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, a man of vision, generously supported the publication. Warmest thanks go to my family: my best friend and husband, ­Yehuda; our sons and daughters-in-law, Iddo and Natalia and Avichai and Mirit, for their constant support; and Guy, who kept me from drowning in the Internet ocean.

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I am fortunate to have them all as friends, students, and relatives. This book was written in memory of my parents, Ruth Gold ­Kostrinski-Kitron, born in Ratzki, Lithuania, and Moshe KostrinskiKitron, born in Telechan near Pinsk, Byelorussia, later one of the leaders of Latin American Jewry; and my husband Yehuda Porat’s parents, both born in Cairo, Matilde Greenberg Forti and Marco Forti, descended from Jews expelled from Spain to Italy—who ingathered us from the exiles.

The Fall of a Sparrow

Part One  Childhood and Youth (1918–1941) “Jerusalem without ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania,’ will it still be Jerusalem?”

Hours at Dawn My best friends took their knapsacks and went to the Tarbut school. My best teachers took their knapsacks and went to Ponar. Observations, p. 163

O n e   Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna “A sad-eyed child,” March 1918–September 1939

Abba Kovner was born in Sevastopol, at the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula, on March 14, 1918. His parents were Israel and Rachel (Rosa) Taubman Kovner; Rachel was born in Warsaw.1 On his father’s side Kovner was descended from a large, well-established family. His great-grandfather, Israel Kovner (born c. 1820), had at least two sons, one of whom was Michael, Kovner’s grandfather (born c. 1860). Michael and his wife, Rachel, had seven children, including Israel (born 1882), Kovner’s father. Kovner’s cousins, Misha and Eliezer Kovner and Clara Bar, and his sister-in-law, Neuta Kovner, can name twenty-five cousins, including Abba Kovner and themselves. Another one of Israel Kovner’s descendants was Meir Vilner, one of the leaders of the Israeli Communist Party, and although he was originally Berl Kovner, it was as Meir Vilner that he signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Abba Kovner was the middle child, born between Gedalia (Genia), who was born in Feodosiya (a port and vacation site in the Crimea), and Michael, born in Oszmiana, near Vilna.2 Apparently all the Kovners descended from the same line in Kovno, hence the name. Haim Kovner, who today lives in Bnei Brak (an ultraOrthodox suburb of Tel Aviv), has a genealogical list given to him by his grandfather, traditionally written on the inside cover of a Bible, detailing the Kovner family tree. Semion (Simon) Kovner, a highly decorated Red Army soldier, immigrated to Israel and brought a similar family tree with him. The tree begins with the pogroms of 1648–1649 and continues through the generations until it reaches the most important rabbi in the dynasty, the Vilna Gaon (the highest title attributed to a rabbinical scholar), Rabbi Mordechai-Eliezer Kovner, who in the 1860s pub-

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lished innovative interpretations of certain portions of the Torah titled Ram’s Horns. His grandson, Shlomo-Zalman, preserved the details of the dynasty on the book’s inner cover, the pride of the family, and wrote a foreword detailing Mordechai-Eliezer’s wealth, modesty, and generosity.3 Haim Kovner republished the book a hundred years later and presented it to Abba Kovner shortly before his death. Most of the large family perished in the Holocaust. Those who left Lithuania before the war and those who survived or were born later form a microcosm of the Jewish people: a pre-1917 revolutionary and an Orthodox Jew, a physician and a literary critic, Red Army soldiers and rabbis, artists and lawyers, kibbutz members, scientists and ideologues. “All the Kovners are creative people,” said Leon, an artist living in Haifa, “and attached to the family,” continued Clara Bar, Kovner’s first cousin.4 Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, Abba’s father, Israel, then in his 20s, settled in Sevastopol with his two brothers, Zalman and Shalom, and his sister, Rivka, Abba’s uncles and aunt, because in Lithuania, which was then part of czarist Russia, only a limited number of Jews could study in the high schools and universities. The brothers and sister lived fairly close to each other and kept moderately traditional (but not Orthodox) Zionist households, which were always full of guests and financially comfortable (Shalom was an expert appraiser of antique ­jewelry, even the Crown’s). They were close and celebrated the holidays and often dined together, husbands, wives, and their dozen or so children. Years later Kovner described the family in one of his poems, sitting together around the dinner table on a Saturday evening, his grandmother wearing an “immense pearl necklace” that had been handed down from generation to generation for 150 years (El, p. 48). The family was warm, educated, and affluent. Kovner’s cousins loved him and admired his eloquence, his sense of humor, and his pranks, and they valued his willingness, from an early age, to recite and read aloud for everyone’s entertainment.5 To this day Kovner’s cousins and sister-in-law recall the devoted care Kovner took of close family members, such as his older brother, Genia, and his ­sister-in-law, Neuta. They remember how modest and warm he was with them, even when he was famous and had been awarded many prizes.

Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna

Kovner’s parents were already middle-aged when he was born. His father, Israel, married relatively late, in terms of the conventions of the time, and was almost 40 when he fathered Abba. Those who were well acquainted with Israel called him die zeideneh Late, “the silk patch,” or sometimes Edelman, “the noble one,” and described him as modest, honest and wise, fair of countenance, and always well dressed. Following the family tradition, Israel was always ready to help those in need. At least three of his nieces and nephews lived in his house for long periods of time, before and after his marriage, and were treated like sons and daughters. Kovner resembled his father in character, whereas Genia took after their mother, who was a bustling, sharp-tongued, short-tempered woman, the ruler of her household. She was tall and beautiful— “Madame Kovner,” according to Kovner’s cousins—a talented woman and loving mother who admired her children, especially Abba. Her house was warm and open and a pleasure to visit, particularly at mealtimes. Kovner loved his mother deeply, especially “her hearty laugh, her black braids, her white-clothed table and the aromas of her cooking.” He cherished the values she instilled in him: “My son, do evil to no man,” she said when she saw him holding a weapon in the ghetto. He felt great pity for her suffering: “Her heart, her liver, the broken veins of her legs plagued her and filled the house with the smell of medicine, and sighs lingering in the air” for years (Scrolls of Testimony, pp. 55 and 144). From childhood the sight of her legs made him shudder. Her personality and her fate, more than any other’s, was the central pivot of his poetry and his innermost pain. When Kovner was 4 years old, his father was arrested by the Russian secret police. After the civil war (1918–1921) private commerce was forbidden in the Soviet Union and heavy fines were imposed on the “bourgeoisie.” It is also possible, according to Kovner, that Zionism compounded the crime of commerce.6 His father’s imprisonment was little Abba’s first unpleasant experience in life, and he remembered it well, recalling it often in later years in his poetry. His mother and uncles collected a huge sum of money and managed to secure his father’s release after a few months. In 1926, when it became obvious that not only could Jews not make a living in the Soviet Union but also that their

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lives as Jews, their religion and nationality, were being systematically destroyed, Israel and his brothers and their families returned to Lithuania, where they restored their wealth and continued their close family relations. Toward the end of the 1930s the socioeconomic condition of Polish Jews worsened, Vilna’s Jews included. When the generosity of Kovner’s father became known, the needy turned to him and all received charity or security for their bills. He was especially generous with fees for students of the Hebrew Gymnasium, part of the famous Tarbut network, where he was on the board of directors. Thus the family fortunes gradually dwindled, and 13-year-old Kovner, who for the first time in his life heard his parents (usually a loving couple) quarreling, wept bitterly. His tears fell onto the pages of the book he was reading and were absorbed by the paper, and for the first time he asked the question that he was later to ask again and again in times of pain and remembrance: Where do tears disappear to, tears and voices and souls and desires, which are, if his question can be so phrased, realities, even though beyond the tangible and corporeal.7 Kovner considered himself a citizen of Vilna: “I have a city,” he used to say, even after having left, “which I draped in the poems of my youth.” During the 1930s Vilna was a lovely place, with the wide Wilja River running through it, and a narrower river, the Wilejka, encircling it. Two high hills, many splendid churches, and much greenery added to its beauty. The city was founded in the tenth century and became the Lithuanian capital in the fourteenth; Jews began living there in the sixteenth century. Kovner absorbed the scenery and the uniqueness of the Jewish community, always, in his written and spoken communications, including tales and stories of its famous personalities and beggars, and never ceasing to yearn for it. “[Vilna is] a city that . . . comes toward me” (On the Narrow Bridge, p. 132), and he kept seeing its beauty wherever he looked, all his life (Scrolls of Testimony, p. 157). For Kovner, figures from Vilna’s historical Jewish past were part of present community life, especially the Gaon Rabbi Eliahu (Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman), who in the eighteenth century shaped the image of the Litvak, the Lithuanian Jew known for his logic, critical mind, and independent thought, having no admiration for the exhilaration of the

Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna

pious or the dances of the Hassidic Jews. “There was no Jewish home,” wrote Kovner in a nostalgic essay, “in which Rabbi Eliahu was not present,”8 hinting in his writings that he wished to follow in the Gaon’s footsteps. Writers, poets, and thinkers were active in Vilna. At the outbreak of World War II the Strashun Library, which opened in 1882 across from Rabbi Eliahu’s synagogue, contained tens of thousands of books and was the most famous Jewish library in Europe. Every thinking young person in Vilna, Kovner included, found a seat at one of its long tables. During the 1920s and 1930s, when Vilna and the surrounding areas were under Polish rule, the Jewish community reached its cultural zenith, although materially it was quite poor. On the eve of World War II the Jewish population of Vilna numbered around 60,000 souls, about a third of the city’s population. Thus, and for good reason, Vilna was called the Jerusalem of Lithuania. It accommodated a unique blend of religious and secular Jews, parties of every shade of the political spectrum, various educational systems (from kindergartens to teachers’ seminaries and from heders [religious pre-elementary small schools] to yeshivas [Talmudic seminaries]), and a wide variety of newspapers and publications, both dailies and periodicals, in Hebrew, Polish, and Yiddish—Vilna was a world center of Yiddish. All Jewish natives of Vilna were and are proud of the intellectual richness of the community they grew up in and of the way history and Vilna’s famous denizens influenced one another. Kovner viewed Jewish Vilna as the source of his own tendency to be a misnaged, that is, in constant opposition, like every other Litvak who was a spiritual descendant of the Vilna Gaon: “I was doubtless a rebel while still in my mother’s womb,” Kovner wrote (On the Narrow Bridge, p. 114). From a young age, Kovner was independent in thought, examining everything in his own way. He entered the Hebrew Gymnasium when he was 12, and although most of the other children had been studying together for five years, Kovner was immediately accepted into the class elite and became one of its most prominent members.9 Miriam Zimnavoda, who during the 1930s taught at the Reali School in Haifa, sent the Tarbut Gymnasium in Vilna dried flowers accompanied by notes written by her students, even though she knew no one at

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the school. Kovner’s teacher responded in kind by inspiring his students to correspond with hers. When Kovner was 15 and had already learned Hebrew, he sent a letter from “Vilna, Poland,” to “our brothers in Eretz Israel”; the letter was dated Sivan 17, 1933, as Kovner made sure to use the Hebrew date. He wrote, “Our longings are immense, both for you and the ground you tread on. Every day we spend in exile, we wait impatiently and yearn for the day when we will be able to be in our beloved Land of Israel and to take part in building it.” The letters that arrived from Eretz Israel were read and reread and then bound into albums.10 The albums—and most of the youngsters who kept them—were destroyed in the Holocaust. However, toward the end of 1961, Zimnavoda, still in Haifa, contacted Kovner. She had kept the old letters and located him in Ein Hahoresh as soon as she heard him testify at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. His immediate written answer to her was nostalgic and sentimental because her letter, enclosed with an old one of his, brought back the days of his childhood and youth. Between those days and his adulthood, Kovner wrote to her, “there stood a terrible mountain of memory.” After he received her letter, he went on writing, “I spent an entire day and night [imagining myself] going up and down the stairs at Number 4 Zavalne Street. I opened every door in the Tarbut Hebrew Gymnasium (they were all alive, all sitting in their seats in class!).” He then remembered himself being late for physics, leaving the old school building with his textbooks under his arm, and walking along the Wilejka and over the bridge and then back along the river; he thought about a bottle into which he had inserted a message when he was a boy and cast onto the water. Once again he was young and striding through his city, Vilna, and the world was still whole, intact, and had not yet shattered into fragments.11 Kovner was 14 when his father, who was then in his early 50s, died in terrible pain from a serious case of tuberculosis. The burden of the house and children fell on his mother’s shoulders. Their financial situation deteriorated, and she had no choice but to open a small restaurant, where her excellent cooking was praised. A large portrait of Kovner’s father hung on the wall, reminding them of better days. His death was a terrible blow, and Kovner expressed his sorrow in poems. His father

Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna

appeared often in his writings, and the years did nothing to dull the pain of his premature death, of the emptiness in the house, of the loss of a man he had both loved and respected, of whose talents and pleasant voice he was proud, and of everything he could have learned from him had he only lived longer.12 In 1935, when he was 17, Kovner left the Hebrew Gymnasium, having decided, with the hubris of a young man, that his studies were contributing nothing to his development as an individual, that the teaching methods were outdated, and that he could learn what interested him by himself. His goals were pioneering in Eretz Israel and the proletarianization of the Jewish people, and he felt—as did many of his generation—that a future pioneer did not have to invest time and effort in diplomas and universities. Despite the financial situation at home, Kovner did not work after he left the Gymnasium, but he saved on tuition fees (which were quite high) and did in fact study on his own. When his friends came to visit, they found him poring over books on philosophy and psychology, but most of the time Kovner sat alone in the Strashun Library or spent days studying the Talmud with the old men in the yeshiva. Writing poetry, which he had begun two or three years previously, occupied more of his time, perhaps because of his father’s death. Kovner wrote in Hebrew, which at that time was beginning to replace Yiddish as the spoken language among Zionist youth following great efforts to introduce it into the Hebrew Gymnasium. However, intensive reading and writing made way for a new occupation in which Kovner later invested all his time, effort, and thoughts: his membership in the Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard) Zionist­Socialist youth movement.13 The Hashomer Hatzair branch in Vilna was one of the largest and oldest of this youth movement; it had been established in 1920, just a few years after the movement itself was founded in Poland. Kovner immersed himself in its vibrant activities and social life far more than he did in its ideological and political principles. It was a distinction he made early in his youth and that he continued when he came to Eretz Israel, where he was more of a member of the “educational movement,” as Hashomer Hatzair was then called, and less a member of its political party, Mapam, or the Kibbutz Artzi, its kibbutzim movement.

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In his speeches and essays Kovner dealt infrequently with Hashomer Hatzair ideology, which drew its inspiration from a variety of different and sometimes opposing sources and whose uniqueness stemmed from their synthesis. Hashomer Hatzair guided its members toward personal fulfillment of the ideal of becoming a kibbutz member and toward ideological collectivism, the construction of a socialist society in Eretz Israel in the spirit of Marxist thought, and a search for a combination of Zionism, pioneering, and a realization of the Soviet idea of equality. That ideology was transmitted through an independent youth culture, with young members in turn leading and educating younger members. But Hashomer Hatzair’s real gift was in creating its own style, different from the other youth movements. It formed cohesive groups that were emotionally close to a leader whose authority and personal example were decisive and who was at once a father figure and a teacher imparting knowledge and ideological values. The groups engaged in scouting, trips, folk dancing, symbols, and flags and used them to foster strict, demanding norms of morality and behavior. In many of the branches Hebrew was spoken, and from afar the members lived the life of Eretz Israel, photographs of whose scenery and famous individuals were hung on every wall. “ ‘Otherness’ . . . in the face of our usual surroundings,” was Kovner’s novel definition. The determination and single-mindedness with which the members lived group life was almost religious in nature, and in Vilna there was also the special nature of the community itself. Members of Hashomer Hatzair were convinced that a Vilna branch of the movement could not be divorced from the well-rooted ancient tree of Vilna Jewry that had been growing for generations or from the deep well of Jewish values from which those who were born there drew. Not only Hashomer Hatzair but also “young members from all the youth movements represented the strength of the devotion, fidelity and willingness to sacrifice which Vilna Jewry had been amassing in surprising abundance.”14 Between 1934 and 1938, from age 16 to 20, Kovner invested all his time and energy in the youth movement’s local chapter and became one of its central figures. At the same time, between 1936 and 1938, he studied for external matriculation examinations, which he took in 1939, just

Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna

before the outbreak of World War II. He also studied at the Tarbut teachers’ seminary for Hebrew teachers, supporting himself by giving private lessons.15 Kovner was unmistakably born a leader. His name, Abba (“father” in Hebrew), suited the responsibility he took upon himself and the way the younger members thought of him. Throughout his life many other groups and individuals felt the same way about him.16 He headed the local branch, its governing body, and the regional leadership. His physical appearance was also exceptional. He wore his hair long and dressed like the older Hashomer Hatzair members, with his shirt collar rather than his jacket collar uppermost, wide pants stuffed into his socks—and in later years, into his boots. His dress was influenced by the Bolshevik revolutionaries, and he turned it into his own personal style. Kovner wrote, in exceptionally beautiful Hebrew, a great deal for the group’s newspaper, which was posted on the clubhouse wall. His sense of humor was well known in the movement’s summer and winter camps. “He was as familiar with happiness as he was with sadness.” He was always an intellectual challenge, always had an original way of asking questions or discussing problems, and impressed everyone with his self-control and seriousness. The younger members admired him, and the movement instructors recognized his leadership qualities. “He radiated authority,” they said, fifty years later.17 Together with his younger brother, Michael, Kovner drew pictures and illustrated the newspaper and wrote all the directives, daily orders, and letters. He also lectured on a wide variety of topics, and the Friday evening activities he organized were unforgettable. Kovner made sure that all the members participated, and his dramatic voice, echoing through the dark hall, made the atmosphere seem mystical. He combined great creativity and deep introspection with a talent for organization and efficiency. “He behaved with a certain amount of ‘play,’ which at first was felt to be superficial, but in fact within him a feeling of purpose was at work, forcing him to live a life of perfection,” said Yitzhak Zalmanson (later Ziv), Kovner’s instructor.18 Many mention the external appearance that Kovner chose for himself even in his maturity and the way he sat on the sidelines and listened when others spoke and, when they had finished, the way he took over, like an actor on stage directing

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himself. However, the sense of mission Kovner radiated was stronger, and eventually his appearance became a tool for self-­expression and not an end in itself. Yet Kovner’s leadership was threatened from within. In 1936, at a general meeting attended by hundreds of members, Esther Novick and Berl (Berke) Kovner (who had become romantically involved) announced that they were leaving the movement; they had not previously discussed the matter with Kovner, who was a close friend and relative. They intended to go to Eretz Israel privately, that is, without waiting for a “certificate” (immigration permit) at one of the training farms where other members had rotted for years. They wanted, they said, to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,19 where future students could receive immigration permits upon presentation of matriculation diplomas. Worst of all, they left to join the Communists, against whom Hashomer Hatzair had been struggling, and it could only be assumed that their leftist tendency had matured long before. In 1938 Esther and Berl left for Eretz Israel, and in 1940 they joined the Communist Party and became its leaders. For the sake of secrecy they changed their names to Vilner and Vilenska, after their beloved city. Kovner must have nursed a grudge, for relations in Israel during decades to come were cold, to say the least.20 During his many creative years after World War II, Kovner often returned to the three mainstays of his childhood and youth: his parents, Vilna (“the city of his ancestors,” “the city of his childhood”), and the Hashomer Hatzair “nest,” as youth movement branches or chapters are fondly referred to in Hebrew. He intertwined legends and stories from Jewish sources—remembered incidents and tales from local and family folklore—when writing about his family and Vilna and the local chapter and from them created pictures full of meaning and symbolism, which for him were the essence rather than the details of the incidents themselves.21 Thus Kovner portrayed a family that was Zionist, poor but deeply immersed in Judaic studies, and down to earth. His relatives, however, told a different story. The portrayal that Kovner advanced could have been created because Kovner needed a fitting background for a left-wing Zionist, as many other Zionist leaders had done in referring to their families. However, it is also likely that Kovner had no recollection of his father’s being bourgeois and remembered little

Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna

of the good years in Sevastopol. He himself admitted to never having investigated family history and remembered mostly the life of poverty and the Zionist aspirations that in the 1930s were part of his home and school atmosphere in Vilna. His need was perhaps the beginning of his lifelong search for significance—for himself, his kibbutz, his movement, and his people—the kind of significance that comes from values born in Judaism and that he hoped Zionism would never lose. Perhaps that was why Kovner kept describing his family as having values that were not particularly religious but rather Jewish and humanistic, as desiring to emigrate to Eretz Israel, as having an interest in intellectualism rather than materialism, as fostering prodigies and extreme generosity (his ancestor in Kovno), as searching for a direction in life and as being part of the cream of Eastern European Jewry whose intellectual treasures were lost in the Holocaust. It was the duty, Kovner felt, of today’s generation to remember their ancestors lest they be the poorer for the loss. Kovner also described Vilna as an entirely distinctive place. He kept returning to the tale of Prince Gadimin, one of the first princes of Lithuania, who asked the gods whether to build a city there and was told that he would succeed only if he sacrificed a girl who was her mother’s only child. The sacrifice was found, and the child, wearing a white dress and holding a wreath of flowers, approached the handsome prince sitting on his noble steed, surrounded by his knights. A rock detached itself from the top of the mountain and rolled down, striking the flowers and sparing the child. The astonished prince immediately decided to build his city where the flowers had been sacrificed and the girl had lived. The story captured Kovner’s imagination, and he retold it in several different versions, naming Vilna “the city built on mercy,”22 perhaps to emphasize the difference between Vilna’s builders and destroyers, who spared no living soul, child or adult. In the same vein Kovner described the Gaon, Rabbi Eliahu, as working miracles with his prayers, such as having a cannonball once fired at the Talmudic seminary remain fixed in its roof, indicating the victory of faith over power, or of using the library’s heavy volumes—Kovner recounted more than once—for defensive positions in the ghetto, when the underground members had no other alternative. Again, the intellect and spirit of Vilna and its scholars protected those waiting for battle.

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Vilna, varied and complex, proved that coexistence among the various sectors of a Jewish community was possible, that a youth could study both rabbinical texts and at the secular Hebrew Gymnasium and could solicit donations for Zionist purposes in the same spot where his grandfather had solicited support for students of the Talmud, that different and opposing trends could form a whole, because “differences of opinion are the cornerstone of Jewish culture.”23 Kovner felt that beyond the ideological differences separating the various factions, sects, and parties, the Jewish people were united in their lives and fate, and because that unity had been realized in Vilna, it both could and should be realized in Eretz Israel. “Vilna no longer exists,” he wrote after the Holocaust. “Vilna without Jerusalem in its mind’s eye is not the Jerusalem of Lithuania; however, will Jerusalem without the Jerusalem of Lithuania remain Jerusalem?”24

Tw o   In Independent Lithuania “Vilna is the birthplace of everything” October 1939–June 1940

The poems of Kovner’s youth written in Vilna and those written in the ghetto were lost during his escape to the forest. “The rivers of sewage snatched away my notebooks of poems which the hand of a dear friend remembered to take from over the barricades” (While Still There Is Night, p. 7). Only two poems and an article remained, but they illustrate the force of the shock felt by Lithuanian Jewry in general and the Vilna community in particular when World War II broke out. Toward the end of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a mutual nonaggression pact, and the war began a week later, with Germany invading Poland from the west and the Soviet Union from the east. During the twenty years between the two world wars Vilna had been Polish, but at the end of October 1939, only a few weeks after the Russians captured it, Vilna was restored as the capital of independent Lithuania. Eight months later, in June 1940, the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania; the annexation lasted a year, until the Germans invaded in the following June. The poem A Man at Night was published in January 1940 in De Profundis (Mima’amakim in Hebrew), the Hashomer Hatzair youth newspaper, in Vilna and Kovno. It was an optimistic piece, full of the strength of youth, the manifesto of a young man rebelling “against Moses, the supreme prophet,” and promising to replace the Law of Moses with Zionist redemption and socialist vision. However, in the same issue Kovner published an article revealing both his vision, expressed in the poem, and its collapse; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed by Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939, sent shock waves through Russia’s admirers, Jewish youth included (and Kovner was no exception), and served to illustrate the gulf between vision and

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reality, ideology and rule. World War II broke out just a week after the pact was signed. Germany invaded Poland and immediately implemented the first stages of its overall program for the Jewish population—that is, the establishment of ghettos and the inception of forced labor. The action was taken with the mute approval, or at least acceptance, of their ally, the Soviet Union. Kovner, like other Vilna Jews, learned what was happening in Poland in the early months of the war from the refugees who streamed into Vilna, among them members of Hashomer Hatzair. “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact turned our world upside down,” he said.1 Kovner felt that not only had he been duped and betrayed but also that imminent devastation was not far off, and he wrote that the world would become “a gallows for the Jewish people,” ending, “Bring me the song of destruction.” He again used the words of the miracle man in Haim Nahman Bialik’s lamentation for the Second Temple, The Scroll of Fire, as if the destruction of the Third Temple, this time in the Jerusalem of Lithuania, were close at hand. It is difficult to know whether the words “gallows for the Jewish people” and “the song of destruction,” written in 1940 before the killing began, should be understood literally, as they are today after the Holocaust, as total murder and annihilation. Was Kovner using them to describe the condition of Polish Jewry as described by the refugees? Was he giving voice to the terrible sense of apprehension pervading the Jewish population in both Europe and Eretz Israel regarding the outcome of a world war, should Hitler choose to start one? Perhaps he was referring to a national-cultural destruction visited on Lithuanian Jewry by the Soviets, the same sort suffered by Russian Jewry with the establishment of the Soviet Union. Lithuania was then still independent but obviously a small country sandwiched between two giants and would be conquered by one of them if war broke out. It seemed more likely that the Soviet Union would invade Lithuania, for after agreeing to return Vilna and the surrounding districts to Lithuania, the Soviet Union immediately erected a series of military bases near the Polish border, bringing in thousands of soldiers, as permitted by a secret clause in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Could Kovner have had a feeling of general and total disaster for the Jewish people even then? What was stronger, his need to weigh the perceived threat or a poet’s desire to use the sweeping power of words? The same question was raised again more forcefully when, in the Vilna

In Independent Lithuania

ghetto in early 1942, Kovner wrote a proclamation calling for rebellion and when he wrote battle pages to inspire the Givati Brigade in 1948. On June 15, 1940, the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania. During that month the second and last issue of the Hashomer Hatzair youth newspaper was published, this time called A Voice De Profundis, which included another poem by Kovner, A Path, whose tone was one of despair: “I shall not rise again . . . and the flag of redemption will not be unfurled.” The attempt to be encouraged and to unfurl the flag ends unsuccessfully; the speaker will leave behind only a path, and footprints upon it, the footprints of a man who, even in the first days of Soviet rule, understood the discrepancy between a drunken sense of veneration from afar and sobriety at close quarters. At first glance this short description of the events and Kovner’s written reactions to them might seem sufficient regarding the brief interim period—less than two years—between Polish and German rule in Vilna. However, during that time events occurred that had a long-term influence on the Jewish community after the Germans’ entrance into Lithuania and later. “What happened in Vilna [at that time] had repercussions which directly affected the entire ghetto, and later in the forests and even after the end of the War,” said Kovner many years later. “There was a direct, full continuity. . . . Vilna was the birthplace of everything.”2 The Red Army entered Vilna on September 19, 1939, and the soldiers were received, especially by the Jews, as the city’s saviors from the Germans. Russian soldiers remained until almost the end of October. By the time they left, they had emptied the city of all portable goods, machines, vital commodities, and raw materials, had established a system into which young Jews were integrated (principally students and workers with leftist tendencies), and had arrested activists of every shade in the political spectrum. They were surprised to discover the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim (i.e., the collective training farms where the Marxist worldview prevailed), and commissars were sent to lecture them against Zionism and emigration to Eretz Israel. Some of the kibbutzim and local chapters, Vilna’s among them, registered themselves with the authorities. However, on Saturday, October 28, the Lithuanians entered their ancient capital with full marching band only to discover themselves in the minority in an almost empty city.

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The economic situation had deteriorated, and the national picture was complex; there were 60,000 Jews in the city, 120,000 Poles, and only a few thousand Lithuanians. The Poles mourned the loss of their city, and both they and the Lithuanians were furious: the Poles because the Jews were happy that the Red Army had entered the city and the Lithuanians because the Jews were happy to have been released from Polish anti-Semitism. This led to demonstrations that, on the first day of the Lithuanian entrance, immediately developed into pogroms against the Jewish population; the disturbances lasted for days.3 Zionist youth movement leaders had already arrived in Vilna from both parts of Poland, especially Warsaw, and had prepared themselves, together with youth movement members and additional groups of refugees, for self-defense. A flyer distributed to the entire Jewish population stated that “the independent Jewish defense force . . . in Vilna calls you into the streets to defend the life and honor of Vilna’s Jewish population” and to prevent, in the words of Shmuel Breslav (a member of the Warsaw Hashomer Hatzair leadership who had arrived in Vilna), the continuation of “the painful humiliation.”4 The incident was forgotten in the storm of events that followed, even though it contained elements that later developed more fully, such as the tension between Lithuanians and Jews over the relationship of the Jews to the Soviets and the organization of the youth movements for concerted action. In addition, it was Mordechai Anielewicz, later commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who set the conditions for the Jews in the face of Lithuanian rule and proclaimed that Jews would defend themselves independently and not as police mercenaries.5 Polish Jewry reconsidered its chances when it learned, with great excitement, that Vilna had been returned to independent Lithuania. Although the general opinion was that such independence was temporary and doubtful, “rumor enveloped the house of Jacob” and a wave of refugees began moving toward Vilna.6 The first winter of World War II was a terrible one, as though Nature itself were protesting the deeds of mankind. In temperatures reaching 35°–40°C below zero, refugees were generously helped across the border by Jews living in towns near the crossing points, especially Lida on one side and Eišiškes on the other, and by means of a smuggling network set up by the pioneer youth movements connected through the Hechalutz Center.7

In Independent Lithuania

About 10,000 refugees arrived in Vilna and 4,000 in Kovno from the Soviet and German areas of Poland. The refugees were the elite of Jewish society, a diverse, aware public whose contribution made an immediate impact on Vilna’s cultural and public life. Writers and teachers, journalists, public figures and community activists, and no less than 150 well-known Zionist leaders made their way to the city. In addition, approximately 2,000 Talmudic students and rabbis fled from the Communist regime, which threatened their studies, and from the Germans, who threatened the lives of Jewish men wearing traditional garb. About 2,000 adult members of the pioneer youth movements desiring to preserve their movements’ existence and to emigrate to Eretz Israel arrived as well. In the midst of the exodus toward Vilna, Dror-Hechalutz (another major Zionist pioneering youth movement, mainly in Poland) and Hashomer Hatzair began cooperating; the inception of their relationship during the war, for better and for worse, later defined a “covenant written in blood.”8 The pioneers, like the Talmudic students, were young and without the burdens and responsibilities of families, and they were separated from their parents, but they had well-defined objectives. In his article in De Profundis, Kovner asked, “Why, Vilna, why on earth did Fate leave you to gather up this human tide / are you proud, oh motherly city?”9 The answer was only too clear: It was his Vilna, and exclusively his Vilna, with its clearly Jewish uniqueness, that had been chosen by history as the only open door through which it might be possible to escape life imprisonment among the Soviets and the death sentence handed out by the Germans, a saying prevalent among many Jews even before the death sentence’s true nature became evident. Fleeing eastward, the Warsaw youth movement leaders arrived in Kowel and Rovno in eastern Poland and decided to divide forces. Some would continue to Vilna, others would return westward to the area conquered by the Germans, and some would remain where they were, in territory already conquered by the Soviets. The last group went underground to continue their work for their movement, because even then it was obvious that the Soviets would not permit them to engage in Zionist activity.10 The movement leaders again ratified the decision when they reached Vilna, giving it added significance both because the movements’ center of gravity had moved to Vilna from Warsaw and

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because Lithuania was at that time independent and therefore contact could be made with Eretz Israel and the Western world. “Someone must stay with the hundreds of young members [who were left behind in Poland]. . . . I do not have the moral right to flee the danger alone,” wrote Mordechai Tenenbaum (later Tenebaum-Tamaroff), a leader of Dror-Hechalutz. He returned from independent Vilna to Nazi-­occupied Warsaw, as did many others. More left Vilna for the Soviet area of Poland and went underground there.11 Kovner was correct in his observations about continuity, about processes born in Vilna and on the way there. Vilna was the beginning of the ghetto uprisings; these were young leaders who, after long, difficult journeys through a hard winter, had arrived at a safe haven, even if it was temporary, and from which it was at least possible to attempt to leave. They volunteered, or lived up to the decision they reached with their comrades, to return to the German and Soviet conquered territories. That decision, made by almost all the Zionist youth movement leaders (except Beitar’s), was worthy of respect, for it meant more than taking personal, moral responsibility for the fate of the young members left behind. They considered themselves the only ones left “to stand guard over Jewish lives, now and in the future”12—the only ones because the older Zionist and Jewish leadership that had come to Vilna from Poland had made no similar decision, not as individuals and not as groups. It was the beginning of the youth movements’ assuming responsibility and leadership during the war and the Holocaust. Although they did not officially represent the Jewish population at large or the various communities, they did present them with their points of view and decisions and felt responsible for the general public, even if that public had not chosen them to do so. Kovner, as leader of the Vilna Hashomer Hatzair chapter, did not fully participate in the decisions made by the members who arrived in Vilna or in their daily lives, and he was particularly concerned with what would happen when, as expected, the Soviets entered the city.13 The refugees, including members of pioneering youth movements, organized themselves into groups, “kibbutzim” and “houses,” leading active lives of culture and public service, diametrically opposed to their financial situations, because in most cases they lacked even the most basic amenities. The youth movements expanded the Hechalutz Center, which they

In Independent Lithuania

had begun on the roads, because more movements were joining, all together being titled the Coordination. Many local Jewish organizations, as well as overseas ones, particularly the Joint Distribution Committee, offered the refugees support, care, and sympathy. Despite the good relations between local Jewry and the refugees, the refugees remained a separate entity, an elite that was never truly assimilated into local society. The 700 Hashomer Hatzair members who arrived in Vilna also lived separately, numbering about a third of the Coordination members and almost half of the Hechalutz Center. They were organized into twelve kibbutzim, and lived in crowded, poor housing conditions. Even there, without heating and using their coats as blankets, they sang their songs together for hours and argued into the night about what was happening in Eretz Israel and about their relationship with the Soviet Union, and the local inhabitants came to listen to them.14 Kovner, only half-belonging to the refugees’ Hechalutz Center and in any case free of any direct responsibility for them, observed them and decided that they were not like the general run of refugees. He was deeply impressed by the pioneers’ resolution to work and not receive charity from the Joint Distribution Committee or the Vilna Jews. “They are refugees who do not act the way one would expect in a situation of ‘refugee-ness.’” He was impressed, as a young educator, to see ideals and values passing the test. Memories of his childhood experiences as a refugee, when the family pulled up its roots from Sevastopol and moved to Vilna, made him decide he would never be a refugee again. Here, watching the antlike organization of the young refugees, he understood that a small framework gives the individual security and that even in misfortune the individual can distance himself from distress and can think and act, especially when the framework has intellectual authority. Kovner himself had established such frameworks before in the Hashomer Hatzair chapter and would do so later during the period of Soviet occupation, in the ghetto, in the forests and afterward, and again in the Givati Brigade and in his kibbutz, Ein Hahoresh. He was always busy nurturing the group to which he belonged, unifying it and writing to it, “shaping its social fabric,” in the words of one of his instructors.15 It was in Vilna that Kovner met Vitka Kempner, “who later became my life companion; I saw her in the street holding a knife and pulling

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up and cutting grass along the sidewalk, relief work that no one really needed, done only for the sake of personal and pioneering self respect, so as not to live on charity.”16 Kempner was born on March 14, 1920, in Kalish in western Poland, two years to the day younger than Kovner himself. Her parents were Zionists and had sent her to study at a Zionistoriented Jewish school, although the language of instruction was Polish, with Hebrew taught as a second language. She considered herself a Polish patriot, and later, in Vilna, she was called assimilated, as were all those whose attitudes or manners were in the least degree not completely Jewish. After she successfully passed her examinations and received a general matriculation certificate, she left for Warsaw and took Judaic studies with the well-known professors Moshe Shor and Meir Balaban.17 She was at home when the war broke out at the end of the 1939 summer vacation, and the panic in Kalish was enormous. They were terrified by the might of the Germans, who collected all the Jews of the city and brought them to an abandoned church, abusing them physically. Kempner fled through a window with some boys and her younger brother, promising herself that she would never undergo such treatment again. To this day she is convinced that the founders of the underground and the fighters in the rebellions were those whom the Germans did not humiliate. She herself was never hit: “No German ever touched me.” Her parents begged her to remain with them in the church; she never saw them again, and her flight through the window was her farewell to them. She heard rumors of Vilna as a possible solution, a place to go to, and eventually she made her way there, traveling along snowy dirt roads. At the Hashomer Hatzair Refugees Center she met Ruzka (Reizl) ­Korczak, who was one year younger than Kempner and an active member in the movement in her hometown of Plock, a city on the Wisla (Vistula), northwest of Warsaw. Korczak too had left a warm, traditional Yiddish-speaking Zionist home, arriving in Vilna after a torturous journey. “From the day we met until the day she died [March 1988],” recounted Kempner, “we were best friends, we were twin souls; we went through everything together, except for a short period [during the bricha and the nakam].” Faithful to the Center’s decision that no work was beneath the dignity of the worker, together they went out to haul buckets of water and to wash pig bristles, which were to be made

In Independent Lithuania

into brushes. It was hard work and unkind to their hands. Between consignments of bristles they would pull up weeds in the streets; the old streets of Vilna were paved with round stones called cats’ heads, and weeds grew between them. Passersby were amazed to see girls from “good homes” doing such work. They refused to become housekeepers: “I was always a rebel,” says Kempner, reminiscent of Kovner, who referred to himself as a “rebel in [his] mother’s womb.” The members let them have their way because in any case they had no idea what housekeepers did.18 It was during the period when Kempner stayed in the Hashomer Hatzair refugees’ center that Kempner saw Kovner for the first time. “I remember it as a powerful experience. He was definitely a citizen of Vilna, I could tell, they had a special kind of pride. He was very distant. He would come and observe but he didn’t speak to anyone, as though he didn’t really belong to us. He belonged to the Vilna movement and we were refugees. . . . He wore special clothing, britches pushed into his socks, and he always took great care about the way his hair looked.” He wore a blue coat, buttoned up, of the kind called Stalinowka. He stood there for a long time without saying anything, and no one dared approach him. “His external appearance was very striking and inspired respect. We knew he was a poet,” said Cesia Rosenberg. Kempner made a bet that she would approach him, and she did, speaking to him for a few minutes about some trivial matter. That was, however, not the beginning of their relationship.19 In 1937, when he was 19, Kovner met his first serious girlfriend, ­Hadassah Kamianitski, who had been born in Vilna and was a member of the local Hashomer Hatzair chapter. “She was tall, slim, very fragile and delicate,” said Rosenberg. “Gentle, kind-hearted and very charming,” said others. “It was a great love,” said Kempner. According to Kovner, it was “the usual banal story: A nineteen-year old boy and a seventeen-year old girl on a park bench. / They touched hands for the first time, / and a barefaced knee did not hesitate / to say what their silence could not” (To, p. 37). At the end of November 1939, in honor of the twenty-second anniversary of the October Revolution, the Hashomer Hatzair Center and the Vilna chapter held a general joint council meeting. The participants heard evidence of the movement’s destruction in Poland, “the

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best of our movements,” and sent telegrams to members in the areas under German and Soviet occupation—“Be strong! Be strong!”—and to the executive committee of the Kibbutz Artzi in Eretz Israel, to inform them that “the cry of destruction filled our mouths and strangled our blessing, but rest assured: your young brothers are standing guard on the walls.” The ideological conclusion was “to remain faithful to both our Zionist responsibilities and Socialist consciences.” Meir Ya’ari answered: “We are proud of your standing guard over the values of the movement, the Zionist vision and the pioneering spirit. Keep on, we support you!”20 The cables and the conclusion seem to have been formulated by Kovner, because his style is greatly in evidence: “with hands balled into fists,” “cry of destruction,” “blood redemption.” The document was not signed; Kovner never signed any of his public statements because he viewed them all as cooperative efforts produced by a group of which he was merely a part. He only signed his literary creations, which in his eyes were a private, personal matter. The council decided to continue Hashomer Hatzair activities in both parts of Poland in the hope that the Soviet Union would change its attitude toward Zionism, and in the meantime it began to look for ways to emigrate to Eretz Israel. If there were a conflict between the two, Zionism would prevail.21 Kovner is mentioned in the minutes as the only one who openly criticized the Soviets’ conduct during their September-October stay in Vilna.22 Again Kovner was the misnaged, the one who objected, had queries, made life difficult. Perhaps that was the start of his tendency, as an individual, to the rightist side within his party later in Israel. Correspondence with Ya’ari continued, but there was “a lack of understanding between us, arising from your lack of information about what is happening here.”23 It was here, immediately after the outbreak of World War II, that the complex postwar relations between Ya’ari and the survivors, Kovner first and foremost, had their roots. In fact, it was not only Ya’ari in faraway Kibbutz Merhavia, the center of the movement in the valley of Jeesrael, who was not aware of the situation. In March 1940 the members of the Hashomer Hatzair leadership in Vilna reached a decision that in retrospect was obviously completely unrealistic, namely, that it would be possible and they should make every effort to emigrate to Eretz Israel from the area occupied by the Germans. Among

In Independent Lithuania

themselves, members noted the fact that Hitler had been in power in Germany for six years and that nothing terrible had happened to the Jews there. There would no doubt be pogroms in Poland—although certainly not in Warsaw—but if they held firm for three or four more years, Hitler would certainly fall from power and Poland, the country where they had been born and raised, would rise again; it was out of the question that a country the size of Poland could cease to exist.24 Eventually the Hashomer Hatzair refugee center organized daily life. Most of the members went out to work (primarily in carpentry), a reading room was opened, and there were many who studied in the city’s educational and cultural institutions and libraries. Yet staying in Lithuania only increased their desire to leave, if possible, for Eretz Israel. They conducted intensive correspondence, and pioneers from all the movements justifiably blamed the Eretz Israel movement leadership for preferring the adult Zionist functionaries to them. Their complaints led to the receipt of “the minute stream of the first entry certificates, leading to tremendous excitement and much hope.”25 After all was said and done, during the period of Lithuanian independence, 406 refugees left Vilna, generally through Western Europe, 22 of whom were pioneers (10 from Hashomer Hatzair and 12 from the other movements). Among them were Zelig Geiyer, one of the leadership’s old guard, who brought with him the minutes of the November meetings, a diary in which the Hashomer Hatzair refugee center members wrote personal thoughts and experiences, and the newspapers that had been published. The movement’s flag, which had arrived from Warsaw in Vilna, was brought as well and was turned over to Merhavia for safekeeping. The adult leadership, both general and Zionist, struggled to leave Lithuania and to save themselves individually. There was a striking difference between the adult and youth movement leaders, which was later also reflected under German occupation.26 Lithuania’s independence lasted eight months, until the country was annexed by the Soviet Union. It was a period during which Vilna became the uncontested Jewish center of Eastern Europe, the only open channel for communications with Eretz Israel and the rest of the world, an effervescent center of cultural activity, and although every group lived its own life, as was only natural, the contact between them was mutually productive and enriching. Today Kempner notes how in Vilna

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she felt proud to be Jewish, different from what she had felt in western Poland; there she felt “Zionist and Polish at the same time.” Cesia Rosenberg, who also arrived in Vilna without her family, wrote about the unifying process undergone by the refugee members of the movement, saying, “What would have happened to me had it not been for the movement? How strange that here, in a strange city, I feel, perhaps for the first time, how significant and important it is for my life.”27 In retrospect, Kovner could identify three main factors at work during the period from October 1939 to June 1940: cooperation, leadership, and lack of preparations for the future. With regard to cooperation he noted with satisfaction the Coordination, that is, the enlarged ­Hechalutz Center, because it incorporated almost all the Zionist youth movements, and the warm reception of the many refugees by Jewish Vilna. Cooperative public activity was, for him, the basic condition for Jewish existence, and he kept coming back later to the question of “the entire Jewish people [klal Israel],” which should have been placed above and was more important than differences of opinion, and he kept considering himself as representing the idea of togetherness and of the public itself. “A new leader for the time of trouble was born in Vilna,” he said, referring to Mordechai Anielewicz, who stood at the head of the defense movement during the 1939 Vilna pogroms and who returned to Warsaw to tend his flock. Kovner noted with admiration the depth of the relationship between individual and general needs, a relationship that was created, he felt, by remaining faithful to the standards one had set first for oneself, as they were reflected in his movement’s education.28 Although Kovner had high praise for the Hashomer Hatzair refugee center in Vilna, he was also bitterly critical: “The clear eyes of a pioneering movement were struck blind,” and its members did not foresee the looming disaster and had not read Mein Kampf, preferring Bialik, Marx, and Ya’ari.29 The criticism was unfair and retrospective; there is no evidence indicating that Kovner himself had already read Mein Kampf. Had other movements and parties or other European leaders and groups, Jewish and gentile, read the book and tried to understand it for what it was, as a warning for what was to come? It was indeed a pity that most of them had not. The Jewish leftists in the Zionist movement and the public at large, in Eretz Israel and in Europe, delved into

In Independent Lithuania

Soviet ideology with a will, investing most of their efforts therein at a time when the leadership of the Soviet Union turned a deaf ear to Zionism and Jewry was but one of a thousand issues facing it. The Jewish movements and leaders made no similar effort to understand Nazism and to read the works of its founders, although the Jewish people were a main issue, standing at its very center. Perhaps it is not a question of blindness. People and societies lived with their traditional, familiar ­values and modes of behavior when Nazism, not similar to any other rule or idea ever experienced, arrived on the scene. The severity of Kovner’s criticism stems from the awful pain that is still present today. Why could what was going to happen not be seen beforehand, and could any leader or movement have prevented it? These questions will never cease to plague us. Yet the words most appropriate are those of philosopher Akiva Ernest Simon, who concluded that whoever says, after the Holocaust, that he knew what would happen, is saying of himself that his mind worked the same way as Hitler’s did.30

27

Th re e   Under Soviet Rule “On the ruins of illusion” June 1940 – June 1941

28

On June 15, 1940, Soviet forces went into action from without and from within. Military bases had already been established in Lithuania, and when the Russians left at the end of October 1939, a loyal following remained behind. In accordance with the agreement regarding the division of spheres of influence in Europe, Russia annexed the three Baltic states. The Wehrmacht had entered Paris the day before; Norway, too, had surrendered, and Italy’s entrance into the war had closed the Mediterranean to civilian transport. It was one of the darkest months of the war. For the Jewish community in Vilna, the official entrance of the Soviets was the first stage of its destruction. The immediate dismantling of every non-Communist organization, large and small, was ordered, including national and cultural institutions. Communities and political parties could no longer exist, nor could any lessons having a national character be taught, such as Bible studies, the Hebrew language, or Jewish history. The large Jewish libraries were closed and were merged with those permitted to remain open; newspapers ceased publication. Economically, the improvements gained under the Lithuanians evaporated because private industry was nationalized, destroying traditional Jewish livelihoods, and work could be obtained only through the offices opened by the new rulers. On the other hand, a wide variety of free higher educational opportunities were offered, and the possibilities for work and advancement were open to all, at least theoretically. The fact that a number of Jews—there are various opinions regarding how many—were integrated into the Soviet administration and into the universities made them hated by both Poles and Lithuanians, and despite the small numbers, all Jewry was identified with the occupation. Need-

Under Soviet Rule

less to say, free emigration was out of question. It seemed as though the window Lithuania had opened to Eretz Israel and to the world had been slammed shut. According to Kovner, because Hashomer Hatzair knew that the Russians were coming and that the youth movement would be declared illegal, a leadership council met between June 13 and 15. So fearful were they that they did not wait to see how the Soviets would act, calling the meeting two days before the Red Army entered. They voted to disperse the movement but not to disband it. They would be careful and stay in small groups and scatter gradually according to the situation as it developed; indeed, the Soviet attitude toward the Zionists and their youth movements had become increasingly truculent during the year of occupation. First the Soviets demanded that the Zionists present themselves and then that they register, at the same time trying to convince them that Zionism was unnecessary. Eventually they instituted surveillance of the Zionists and later began arresting them, and on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 many Zionists were deported and exiled.1 During the first days of Soviet rule the chief political commissar ordered all representatives of the political parties and movements still active to report to his office. From that moment on, ideological choices had to be dealt with as they occurred, and the first choice was whether or not to do as ordered. Kovner, as head of the Hashomer Hatzair chapter, sought the advice of Dr. Jacob Wygodzki, who had been head of the community since the 1920s and was one of the figures most admired by Vilna Jewry. He told Kovner that he himself had sent a letter to Stalin, calling the Soviet Union’s annexation of Lithuania an opportunity for a change in Soviet policy, both toward Jews and, more important, toward Zionism. He encouraged Kovner to petition the commissar to allow the continuation of Hashomer Hatzair activities.2 In any case, the Vilna chapter had already registered with the Soviets less than a year earlier, during their rule in Vilna during September and October 1939. According to his own accounts, Kovner reported to the commissar, who asked him, because Russians cannot pronounce the “h,” what “Gashomer Gatzair” was. Having received a thorough explanation, the commissar asked whether, if permission were given for the chapter to

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continue its activities, it would mean working toward leaving the Soviet Union. Kovner said it would, but nevertheless the response was positive; if this response were in fact the case, Hashomer Hatzair’s Vilna branch would have been the only Zionist organization officially permitted to exist. However, as Kovner stood at the door on his way out, the commissar told him that in a few days he would be required to provide a detailed list of the names of active members—a familiar trick. “As I closed the door I knew I would never give him such a list, and decided then and there to disperse the movement.”3 Other evidence describes the event in a different light, as a meeting of four Hashomer Hatzair leaders, Kovner included, with a polite and noninsistent commissar; in this version the request for the list came later.4 Apparently, in time the events merged in Kovner’s memory into a fast-moving dramatic moment described in the first-person singular, perhaps because as time passed Kovner became more and more personally responsible for the movement, certainly in the ghetto and later in the forests and after the war. When relating his dramatic description of the meeting (in which he and the commissar were the only dramatis personae) in Israel decades later, Kovner admitted that for him it was not the exact testimony or description of the event that was important but the story, which could serve future educational work.5 In any case, the Hashomer Hatzair branch decided to become a Zionist underground and to continue admiring the regime while hiding from it and being wary.6 Kovner called a meeting of the chapter members and announced that they would cease their activities. He folded and concealed the flag, the anthem was sung, and hundreds of younger members burst into tears. The place had been their nest, their home, when public expressions of anti-Semitism increased; it had sheltered them when the Soviets came. For them the leadership’s decision was an ideological betrayal, and Kovner’s younger brother, Michael, even called him a traitor, but despite the bitterness and pain, the decision had been made. For weeks after the dispersal, Kovner did not speak to any of them, “knowing they viewed [him] as a traitor.” He then called together five of his most loyal followers, his brother Michael among them, and instructed them to find out whether members continued to meet; when he learned that they did, he began to form the underground, realizing they had revealed

Under Soviet Rule

themselves as having “public-­spirited, educational, movement-oriented courage.” According to Kovner, most remained faithful to the movement.7 However, the fact that the Soviets were strengthening their foothold caused many members to rethink the situation and ask themselves how realistic Zionist ideology was under such conditions, and some of them did join the Komsomol (the Soviet youth movement). Moreover, after the war broke out, the Soviet Union was not only a socialist dream but also the only barrier between Jews and total German domination and Third Reich ideology, and that also caused many to join them. The underground’s first task was to find—or invent—new methods for continuing their activities. As soon as the younger Hashomer Hatzair members understood that they were not being dispersed but rather that necessity dictated a new modus operandi, they enthusiastically began to construct underground cells. They were organized by the leadership into groups of five—a method “learned from reading pre-Revolutionary literature,” recounted Kovner—and only the most reliable members were accepted. Key members were sent to places outside Vilna disguised as Christians. In private homes and outside the city limits they continued to study Hebrew, hid books taken from the great libraries closed by the Soviets, which had been the symbol and heart of Jewish Vilna, and even held a few seminars.8 The leadership’s main role, besides organizing life under conditions very different from those previously known, was dealing with emigration to Eretz Israel. Under the Soviets the desire to leave became a virtual fever, especially because most of the foreign embassies had moved to Moscow and the institutions and organizations that supported refugees had been forbidden to operate. The situation worsened when the Soviets announced that by the end of January 1941 all individuals would be required to receive Soviet-Lithuanian citizenship; it was clear that after the ultimatum expired, Siberian exile awaited them. The stateless refugees knew that if they did not act immediately, they would remain prisoners. Endless series of ideas, enterprises, improvisations, and forgeries were dreamed up by refugees of all ages and political persuasions. The requests and negotiations conducted between Jewish figures and organizations in Lithuania and elsewhere and the Soviet authorities in Lithuania, Moscow, and Western capitals led to a sudden, although

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quite short, opening of the borders, unique until the mass emigrations permitted in the early 1970s. To this day there are many conflicting opinions on why Moscow allowed not only locals but also Polish refugees to leave Lithuania, and the Soviet authorities dealing with the details of emigration were themselves full of contradictions.9 Instructions arriving from Moscow enabled the gradual emigration of more than 4,000 souls, the overwhelming majority of whom were refugees, from Lithuania through Russia: from Vilna to Moscow to Odessa to Turkey to Eretz Israel, or from Vilna to Moscow and, by means of the trans-Siberian railroad, to Japan and from there to Shanghai. The process necessitated visas and semi-visas, valid or not, which were distributed by some of the more humane consuls before the embassies closed. About 2,500 people left through Siberia and Japan, another 1,200 through Istanbul (about 500 of them pioneers), and a few hundred from Moscow and then to Iran and India. Together with those who had left during the Lithuanian period, the number of ­émigrés reached 5,000. The last group left in March 1941, during the days of surveillance and arrest before the mass exiles. Among those leaving through Istanbul and Iran were 130 Hashomer Hatzair members divided into five groups. Some of them had authentic travel documents and some did not; most of those without true documents had papers forged by a member of the Vilna chapter.10 Seven of the members of the Hashomer Hatzair leadership, most of whom had come to Vilna from Warsaw and other parts of occupied Poland, also hastily left. They did so not only because they refused to take Soviet citizenship but also because the NKVD (Narodny Kommi­sariat Vnutrennikh Del [People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs]) had been on their trail since shortly after the annexation. Each member of the leadership quickly received an “escort” to accompany him wherever he went.11 However, the emigration of the seven Hashomer Hatzair leaders is still bitterly debated, because leaving was contrary to the proclamation made by the Hashomer Hatzair refugee center’s council to the effect that “the active part of the movement [in Vilna] is ready to accept any role, mission, act or sacrifice required to preserve the movement during the difficult days ahead,” and some of those who emigrated were among those who had formulated the proclamation.12

Under Soviet Rule

There was no question but that Kovner would remain in Vilna. He was not one of the senior members who had waited for years to leave, and moreover, he was a local resident, not a refugee. He may have had a certificate, having finished his matriculation examinations and having applied for admission to Hebrew University, but it would seem more likely that he could leave because he was listed as “son” on the passport of his uncle Shalom, who had emigrated to Eretz Israel in 1934. Shalom’s son, Abrasha, was too old to be included in a parent’s passport, and Kovner’s first name, Abba, and Abrasha were similar enough that Kovner could pass as Shalom’s son. In any case, Kovner never mentioned the issue, and none of the members of the leadership living today remembers his leaving being discussed.13 Both Chaika Grossman, a prominent Hashomer Hatzair member who gave up a valid certificate following her movement’s decision, and Kovner registered at the university in Vilna to have a cover story and a minimal amount of protection. It was a first-rate university and tuition was free, and the youngsters were eager for an education. Grossman studied economics and excelled in Marxism, and Kovner studied sculpture at the Academy for the Plastic Arts next to the university, realizing a childhood dream. At night he worked in a toy factory.14 At a meeting held at Kibbutz Ha’ogen on 1973 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Kovner spoke about the Jewish leadership during the Holocaust. In a section of his speech, which he called “As Lamb, As Shepherd,” he condemned the adult Jewish leadership for having fled from Poland to Vilna at the outbreak of the war, “riding or walking,” leaving 3 million Jews behind them with no leadership. When it came to the leadership of his own movement, he simply said that “objectively speaking, the senior leadership of Hashomer Hatzair and most of the adult members left and emigrated to Eretz Israel without leaving so much as one Kibbutz Artzi shaliach [delegate] in place for the critical time in the circle of fire.”15 He did not mention the names of those who had gotten out in time, saying that “they were lucky to have gotten out and the country was lucky to have had them get out. . . . In the ever-tightening circle of fire, only the young were left, most of them little more than children, barely youths who suddenly had to function as adults.” Kovner was referring to the

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younger members of Hashomer Hatzair (and by emphasizing hatzair, which means “young” in Hebrew, he referred to them as being the true members of the movement) and to the young leadership to which he himself had belonged. These young members matured gradually, beginning with the Soviet annexation, and filled the ranks of the leadership as its older members left. Kovner combined the two, the general Jewish leadership and that of Hashomer Hatzair, saying indirectly that this movement, which had a tendency to praise itself for its uniqueness at every Holocaust memorial day held after the Holocaust, had not acted differently from any other. He twice repeated the phrase “circle of fire” in which the lambs had remained trapped, abandoned by their shepherds. It was a terrible rebuke, and those against whom it was turned never got over it, not even when they turned 70 and 80. As Kovner spoke, the leaders of the movement, among them Ya’ari and Ya’akov Hazan, Ya’ari’s partner in leadership, sat writhing in the first row. They had hoped the thirtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising would be a day of rejoicing for the movement that had educated the uprising’s leaders, and Kovner turned it into a day of torment. No wonder Hazan could not sleep after the meeting, writing Kovner a long letter the next morning, hesitating for many weeks before actually sending it. “Injustice, injustice as bitter as hemlock” was what Kovner had done to the movement, and the issues he raised should have been discussed in terms of “mercy, charity and love,” which in Hazan’s opinion had been sorely absent from Kovner’s remarks.16 Twelve years later, at the seminar held in Israel, the theme of which was the Hashomer Hatzair refugee center in Vilna, Adam Rand, who for years had felt the finger of guilt pointed at him, rose and painfully described “the trauma” and even the inferiority complex he felt because he “had personally been saved from the boat before it was wrecked while other members had not. Without knowing beforehand, [we] finished our work at the point beyond which the abyss opened.” He repeatedly justified those who left “without knowing beforehand” what was going to happen, doing the right thing at the time. “Were we too blind to know?” he asked Kovner, who had accused the movement of having been struck blind and of being too busy with itself and its daily affairs, instead of reading Mein Kampf. According to Yosef Shamir, “As

Under Soviet Rule

the main leadership we had authority, and the responsibility rested on our shoulders. When we left, the younger leadership felt it had been orphaned.”17 To his last day Rand was no less tormented by the fact that the very leadership that determined that Grossman would give up a valid certificate and that other members would return to Nazi-occupied Warsaw had all emigrated to Eretz Israel. “We never knew or imagined that they [Tossia Altman, Yoseph Kaplan, Shmuel Breslav, and Mordechai ­Anielewicz, all movement leaders who did return] were leaving for their deaths, . . . we knowingly and willingly agreed that our forces would be divided between various tasks and missions. Knowingly, yes, but without properly assessing what would happen under Nazi rule” and without comprehending Nazi military might and organization and the speed with which they would conquer and destroy. However, those who remained in Vilna and later emigrated to Eretz Israel lost their confidence and personal emotional integrity because they had unknowingly made what they later regarded as a terrible mistake. “Will I be forgiven my unbearable sin, that you, all of you, every single one of you went up in flames during the last battle, while I remained alive,” wrote Yosef Shamir from his kibbutz in the Negev, Ruhama, in “To a Friend Who Is No Longer with Us” (the essay’s “friend” is Shmuel Breslav, Shamir’s closest friend, who was killed in Warsaw). For close to fifty years, according to Grossman’s biographer, Rand and his family were next-door neighbors of Grossman and her family on Kibbutz Evron, and not one word passed between them during all that time because of the terrible mistake, the accusation in Grossman’s face and the words of Abba Kovner.18 Answering Kovner, Rand did not mention that the leadership, which left after six to eight months of Soviet rule, was under heavy surveillance and that there was no way of knowing whether or not they would have been arrested and sent to Siberia if they had not left. Nor did he mention that most of them were senior members who had waited years to leave and who had performed every possible job required by the movement. He also did not note that at that time the uppermost command was to emigrate to Eretz Israel to join the Zionist undertaking, which had suffered difficult years. Nor did he say that

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he and his friends believed—and there could have been no mistake, because there were written records—that Hitler would be quickly defeated and Poland rebuilt. Perhaps Rand made no mention of those arguments because as the years passed, the accusations grew stronger, because after the Holocaust it was futile to discuss justification for deeds done before the beginning of the mass murders, and because later events dwarfed everything that happened before. At the end of March 1941, when the last group had left Vilna, the Soviets closed the gates. The younger leadership no longer dealt with emigration to Eretz Israel, having given it up in despair. They were busy keeping the various groups in hiding in contact with one another and with the leadership in Lvov (Lemberg) and Warsaw.19 They did not have much time at their disposal, because the surveillance and arrests worsened. About 35,000 Lithuanians, among them 5,000–6,000 Jews, some of whom were refugees from Poland and some of whom had refused to accept Soviet citizenship, were exiled to the wilds of the Soviet Union. The archives in the eastern bloc having been opened for inspection, today some Lithuanian researchers are convinced that these numbers are fundamentally wrong and that 17,500 Lithuanians and 2,500 Jews were exiled.20 The Jewish participation in carrying out the expulsions added to the Lithuanians’ anger, and their opinion, which is today accepted as “fact,” was that many Jews had collaborated with the Soviets in the expulsions. After several thousand refugees had left and several thousand others had been expelled, nearly 60,000 Jews remained in Vilna, and they were still there when the Wehrmacht invaded Lithuania. Even during the Soviet period the foundation for what would come later was being laid, and Kovner again saw the connection between the two eras. The loyalty of the underground core was tested during the difficult period when its members shared the little they had with one another, protected one another, and, according to Kovner, reacted to the situation instead of going to pieces. That core was at the heart of the ghetto underground, and that was as true for members of Hashomer Hatzair as it was for those of the other movements. The groups of five, formed when they went underground in 1940, served as a practical base

Under Soviet Rule

afterward, during the ghetto era. Thus the Coordination, which was founded during the youth movements’ wandering to Vilna and which continued to be active under the Lithuanians, became the underground organization under the Soviets and served as the common basis for the ghetto underground. That was not the case with the adult Zionist leadership, which Kovner and others judged so harshly for disappointing them twice—once in fleeing to Vilna and again in adapting so well under Soviet occupation.21 It was a serious accusation, and one that ignored the fact, according to Rand, that at the time calculations were made without knowledge of the German character. In the considered opinion of the adult leadership, who had arrived from Poland and who had, for the most part, left their families behind, the men were in danger, particularly those in key positions. None of them ever imagined that women and children would be systematically murdered, and when it became clear, in retrospect, that even had they stayed, they would not have been able to save their families, terrible guilt feelings of having abandoned their loved ones would dog them for the rest of their lives. It was a pity that Kovner never mentioned Apollinari Hartglass, the last chairman of the Zionist Federation in Poland. When news reached Hartglass about the ghettos in Poland and he realized that he would always be known as the leader who had evaded the fate of his community, he tried to commit suicide in Italy, where he had fled from Warsaw on his way to Eretz Israel. If only, for the sake of balance, Kovner had mentioned that the peoples of the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, Russians included, and all the peoples of Eastern Europe and their leaders in the eastern bloc after World War II had been adapting themselves to Soviet rule for decades and that only the merest few had managed to survive in the face of Big Brother. Kovner pronounced judgment, even thirty years later, using the criteria according to which he and his friends had lived then, when they were young and idealistic and committed to sticking it out to the end, without having to bear the responsibilities of families. As a result of Vilna’s particular history, a multifaceted Jewish life was created, and as a result of the years that passed before the German invasion, a model of youth movement and interparty activity existed that left its imprint on later events. Kovner was born into that model and worked

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hard for its continuation. However, during the Soviet occupation the Jews of Vilna changed, and the influence of those changes during the German occupation was negative, such as the dwindling of material resources and the dissolution of community frameworks, and were exacerbated by the dismissal or exodus of the leadership. The Lithuanians begrudged the Jews their warm reception of the Soviets and their participation, great in Lithuanian eyes, in the mechanism that oppressed the Lithuanian people, and their feelings were cruelly expressed during the Holocaust.22 Vilna’s Jewry were murdered during a relatively short period. By December 1941, more than two-thirds had been killed, and therefore any discussion of the remaining third, even if it was once part of the whole, is a discussion about a totally different population.

Part Two  Holocaust and War (1941–1944) “A terrible mountain of memory”

The murdered Jewish people Whether silently or aloud, speaks to the living Jewish people thus: “You, who could not help us, listen with your ears and hearts to our Testimony, the last vestige of life; Try to understand what it means to cease to exist, and What things strengthened our spirits at moments of parting; .  .  . Could you spare a moment to think about us, Innocent of sin, and free of shame?” Scrolls of Testimony, p. 5

Fo u r   Hiding in a Monastery “A crimson life-line on the convent wall” June–December 1941

On June 22, 1941, the German army invaded the territory held by the Soviet Union, and Lithuania was the first of their conquests. Every testimony and memoir concerning the Holocaust in Vilna begins with a description of the harrowing transition from a hot, sunny Sunday in June, when most of the city’s inhabitants lazed in parks or worshipped in church, to a sudden state of war. The heavy aerial bombing caused massive explosions, burning buildings, and clouds of smoke, and the populace, ignorant of the true situation, ran mindlessly from place to place. The same day, but even more so on the next, Vilna residents began to pack their belongings and flee, using any possible means of transportation or even going on foot. The Red Army withdrew in a panic that infected the city’s inhabitants. After two days of heavy aerial bombardment, Wehrmacht tanks entered the city, which fell without a battle, in fact, without a single shot being fired. Several thousand Jews, especially those connected to the Soviet administration and the refugees from Poland (including members of the youth movements), hurried to catch the last trains. When the bombardments began, the Hechalutz Center called on the members of all the movements to rally against the Germans, but in the prevailing confusion nothing practical could be done. The speed of the Red Army’s retreat could not have been predicted, nor could anyone possibly have known that the systematic killing of the Jews would begin in a matter of days, and most of Vilna’s Jews were trapped in the city.1 On June 24, the day the Germans entered the city, the remaining Hashomer Hatzair leaders met in the street and again, as during the days en route to Vilna, decided to divide their forces. Some members

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would flee to the east with the retreating Red Army and try to enlist in its ranks and do their best to keep in contact with members from their new places of residence; the others would remain in Vilna. In fact, most of the members of the Hashomer Hatzair refugee center continued their wanderings and left for the east, parting from the few members left in Vilna and meeting them again only after the war.2 Kovner was determined to stay, as he had during Lithuania’s independence: “He was a man of Vilna, and his place was there.”3 However, in all his later writings Kovner never discussed the decision, probably because his entire family was in Vilna and they never weighed the possibility of flight. Moreover, the younger Hashomer Hatzair members and Kovner’s girlfriend also stayed. Grossman, herself a refugee (having arrived from Bialystok), announced that it would be easier for her to stay because she could pass for “Aryan.” Yet after she had said good-bye to those who left for the east and was alone, she broke down and cried the tears of the abandoned; some of her friends had already left for Eretz Israel, and the others had rushed to the trains as though Vilna were in the grip of a plague.4 The columns of those fleeing eastward—soldiers, civilians, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles—were bombarded on the main roads, which were littered with the dead and the dying and useless vehicles. The Germans arrived from the east and outflanked the fugitives who left the main highways for the side roads, where they met Lithuanians, peasants for the most part. The Lithuanians turned those they could identify as Jews over to the Germans, claiming they were Communists, or killed them outright and stole their possessions. Here and there peasant women stood by the roadside and offered the refugees milk, but they were few and far between.5 Even during the first days of the German occupation, a fatal combination was already at work: Lithuanian cruelty (which broke out with an unpredicted ferocity) and familiarity with their Jewish neighbors (whom they identified and turned in), the helplessness of the Poles (who could not even save themselves), and the Germans’ tenacious organizational ability. When the Germans entered Vilna, they found, as in other parts of Lithuania, a population that was sympathetic to the new occupier, happy that the Soviets were gone, and hoping to receive political in-

Hiding in a Monastery

dependence from Germany. Members of right-wing organizations attacked the last retreating Soviet soldiers, with whom Lithuanian leftists had fled. Lithuanian organizations active before the German invasion were now eager to fight alongside the Nazis, and they distributed flyers calling, in the most brutal fashion, for the destruction of the Jewish population, the seizure of Jewish property, and the creation of conditions that would not permit continued Jewish existence in Lithuania. However, even though the Germans’ most enthusiastic supporters gradually became aware that Lithuanian independence was not on the German agenda, they continued their pro-German policies. In Vilna they organized under the name Lithuanian Self-Defense, a cruelly ironic name for gangs of thugs who attacked Poles and murdered Jews at a time when no more than a quarter of the city’s population was Lithuanian.6 The Lithuanians carried out a terrible wave of murders at nearby Kovno and in the countryside as soon as the Germans arrived. When Einsatzkommando 9 entered Vilna in early July, it immediately became clear that the wave had reached the city’s Jews as well. Einsatzkommando 9 belonged to the Einsatzgruppen, the SS units that followed in the Wehrmacht’s train, and their principal mission was to kill the Jews and Communist Party activists who had remained behind. The activities of national Lithuanian institutions were drastically curtailed, and only those dealing with urban matters were left intact. The Lithuanian police force was placed under SS command, and right-wing units were integrated directly into it.7 That left little behind the facade of Lithuanian independence, and the Lithuanian murder of Jews, whether committed on their own initiative or under German aegis, brought them nothing in return. The coordinated effort of the two German authorities, the SS and the army, and the Lithuanian units began on July 4 and marked the beginning of the oppression and eventually the destruction of the Jewish population in Vilna. The German military government issued decrees, which the Lithuanian urban administration put into operation. The Einsatz­ gruppen sent Lithuanians to kidnap and murder Jews, sometimes participating themselves, while the Wehrmacht kidnapped Jews for forced labor. The Jews called the Lithuanian kidnappers chapunes, and some were local youths who received a small bounty from the Germans for

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every Jew turned in. They broke into homes at will, robbed and beat with no fear of retribution, and made the lives of the Jews intolerable. In addition, the first decrees issued determined the definition of Jewish identity and the subsequent wearing of a yellow star. The decrees restricted movement, shopping, and entrance into public places and ordered confiscation of property, forced labor, and the establishment of the Judenrat (the local Jewish council). The first Judenrat established, after several candidates and parties had refused, was chosen in its entirety by Jews and included most of the parties and well-known figures active before the Soviet period, during which time, as noted, Jewish institutions had been disbanded and their leaders arrested. The Judenrat continued the traditional leadership and was considered as such by the Jewish population.8 The Judenrat’s first duty was to supply the workforce and prevent uncontrolled kidnappings, but events moved too quickly and Jews were being kidnapped to be killed, not, as they had thought, to be put to work. From July 4 onward, Einsatzkommando 9 murdered Jews on a daily basis, but that was not known with any certainty by the Judenrat. Its members, like the rest of the community, alternated between terrible fear and delusions of safety. Kovner kept a small pocket diary in which he noted, as briefly as possible, the most important events affecting the entire community. He wrote of Aktionen (the systematic raids to round up the Jewish population), decrees, Ponar (the killing site close to Vilna), and Jews in nearby towns and camps. Kalendar fun Groil, he called it—calendar of horrors. On July 9 Kovner summed up the general situation: The Lithuanians kidnapped you and the Germans let you go—to be killed or overworked.9 The kidnappings continued day and night, in homes and on the street, accompanied by robberies, beatings, and abuse. Jews began to hide in melinas, hiding places in attics and cellars (in Yiddish, “a temporary place to sleep”). Kovner shrank from the idea: “I was covered in shame at the idea of hiding myself in the back of a closet.”10 The overwhelming majority of those kidnapped were male, to prevent organized self-defense and to preserve the fiction that they were being sent to work. A few of them were returned, which reinforced the illusion that

Hiding in a Monastery

they had been kidnapped for work. First the victims were sent to the large Vilna prison, Lukishko, and from there to Ponar. Ponar used to be a summer vacation site a few kilometers to the south of Vilna, and it became the Vilna killing field. Those brought there were shot in groups on the edges of pits, first mostly by Lithuanians and then also by members of the Einsatzkommando. By July 20 about 5,000 Jews had been killed, sometimes as many as 500 a day. The Jewish population knew immediately that Lukishko was a collection point because the large gloomy building with its enormous prison yard stood within the city. During the first weeks, however, the Jews did not know that the men were taken from there to Ponar or what actually happened when they got there.11 In July, at the height of the kidnappings, some members of Hashomer Hatzair, Kovner among them, went to the Dominican Convent of the Little Sisters at a small place called the Vilna Colony, about 6 kilometers outside the city on the road from Vilna to Wilejka. “First of all we decided to hide Abba in the convent. It took us a long time to overcome his objections. We explained at great length, saying we were thinking only of the interest of the movement and no personal considerations were involved. It took a lot to convince him,” wrote Chaika Grossman.12 Others went into hiding in the city, mostly women, including Grossman, Kempner, Rosenberg, and Korczak. Jadwiga Duziec, with the help of Irena Adamowicz, arranged the contacts with the convent. Both were devout Catholics and heads of the Democratic Wing of the Polish Scout Movement, a Hashomer Hatzair sister organization. They had known the leaders before the war and had come with them from Warsaw to Vilna in the first stream of refugees. During the Soviet period the members of Hashomer Hatzair had found Duziec and Adamowicz a hiding place in Vilna, and when the Germans came, they were only too happy to return the favor. “It was a strange alliance,” according to Kempner, “between leftist atheists and Catholics.”13 Duziec knew Vilna well and was on excellent terms with the convent’s mother superior, Anna Borkowska, an exceptional woman. Like her, Duziec and Adamowicz were among the few who put into literal practice the Christian values on which they had been raised, devoting their time and effort to helping their friends. Duziec gave her life as well, for she was captured by the Gestapo in the ­summer of 1944, just

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before the city was liberated. She and Adamowicz had already hidden other Jews in various convents and monasteries and had obtained documents for them.14 Sixty adult Hashomer Hatzair members remained in the city, in contact with one another and with the handful of Dror-Hechalutz members.15 At the same time the mother superior and her nine nuns warmly accepted Kovner, Arieh Wilner (who had arrived from Warsaw), and others. In all, between fifteen and twenty individuals hid in wooden structures on the convent grounds. The nuns thought the conditions too harsh, but in comparison to what was available in the city and later in the ghetto, they were luxurious. On occasion the nuns managed to find hiding places on neighboring farms and estates and took in other Jews, so that sometimes their number reached thirty. The convent grounds were surrounded by a high wall with but one iron gate, which was opened from the inside when the bell was rung. There was no wall around the central building, a two-story wooden structure, not elaborate but pleasant. A large dog, well remembered by all visitors, guarded the iron gate, and a priest named Zawecki, whose vows enabled him to come and go at will, aided the mother superior in running the convent and served as father confessor to the nuns. In October, at the height of one of the Aktionen, Kovner’s mother and brother Michael fled to the convent as well, taking with them Sala (Shulamit), Genia and Neuta’s 4-year-old daughter; Genia and Neuta remained in the city and came for visits. In a short summary of her memoirs, the mother superior recounted how she herself brought the child to the convent on a sled and how, after long weeks in a melina, they could not convince her that she was finally allowed to speak. Michael, pale from hiding in the ghetto in a small, airless, unlit attic, improved considerably in the convent and worked in the fields. Rosa, Kovner’s mother, and the mother superior spent long hours deep in conversation, especially discussing the question of a merciful God who permitted such events to take place. At the convent Rosa put to good use her talent for cooking full meals out of almost nothing. Kovner walked around dressed in a monk’s habit or in an apron and kerchief, because his obviously Semitic features endangered them all. “He was my right-hand man,” wrote the mother superior, and he was serious

Hiding in a Monastery

about the daily chores he took upon himself. Those in hiding did their best to repay their hostesses by working hard in the convent fields and kitchen, taking care of the cows and pigs, and drawing water from the well. They ate little, sharing the nuns’ simple meals, which consisted mainly of potatoes and milk, and were more than grateful for the food and hiding place. Kovner, Michael, and one other man in hiding slept in the cow shed, according to testimony.16 The nuns were young women in their 30s; the mother superior was a few years older. They were all well educated, and some of them held academic degrees. None of them, including the priest, tried to convert those in hiding. Quite the opposite, Kovner taught the nuns Hebrew, and they regarded him as a man of letters. The mother superior conversed with him and the other Jews at length in an attempt to understand what a kibbutz and Eretz Israel were. In her memoirs she said that during the Lithuanian period Duziec had brought her to the Hashomer Hatzair refugee center, where she tried to understand Marxism and discover if the gap between Marxist theory and Catholicism could be bridged. In addition to taking care of the Jews in hiding, the nuns exploited the mother superior’s connections to obtain documents and money for them and to secure information and hiding places for their relatives in the city.17 The handful of Jews stayed in the convent for nearly six months, leaving it for three reasons. The first was because their presence increasingly endangered the nuns. Rumors swirled that the convent would be closed because the Germans had instituted an anti-Catholic campaign, especially against the Polish clergy and its influence, and because the nuns were known to hide Jews and to coordinate their actions with the various underground organizations. In October 1941 news reached the convent about German treatment of the Poles and about convents, monasteries, and churches being closed, with the men and older women being sent to forced labor camps and the younger women being sent to brothels for the soldiers. Shocked and horrified, the mother superior and the priest, Zawecki, decided not to wait to see what would happen but to close the convent and disperse its members while they still could. The second reason that Kovner and his fellow Jews left the convent was their desire to rejoin their comrades and community. Kovner was

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of the opinion that they should all leave for the ghetto, which had been established in early September. That, he claimed, was really their place, and the convent was at best a temporary shelter. Another movement member hiding in the monastery claimed that those who could, especially those who looked Polish, should save themselves with the help of the Polish underground, because the ghetto was nothing but a death trap; he was married and his wife was pregnant. In the end, according to Kempner, they decided that whoever wanted to could leave the movement and the ghetto and go wherever they could. A stormy argument broke out, and Kovner never spoke to the man again, not after the liberation of Vilna and not even later, in Israel.18 There was one more reason for Kovner’s return to the ghetto. In a letter written in 1970 to his friend, writer Aharon Zeitlin (son of the Hassidic author Hillel Zeitlin), Kovner noted that in leaving for

Plan of the Vilna Ghetto. From Ghetto in Flames by Yitzhak Arad (Jerusalem, 1980).

Hiding in a Monastery

the convent, he had had to leave his girlfriend, Hadassah Kamianitski, behind in the ghetto and the separation was difficult for him. She had refused to leave her mother, but Kovner and she corresponded, letters full of worry for one another. “It is impossible,” she wrote, “to describe the ghetto, but it is pure hell.” Kovner kept her letters with him wherever he went, and today they are in his home at Ein Hahoresh, kept by Kempner. Kovner told Kamianitski how to reach the convent and begged her to escape and come to him if the Germans should begin an Aktion. She was to pull the bell rope next to the iron gate and call his name. One autumn night, he wrote to Zeitlin, after everyone had gone to sleep, he was awakened by the ringing of the bell. The guard didn’t hear it and it rang again. This time the mother superior got out of bed, flashlight in hand, and went to see who it was. When she opened the gate, there was no one there, and the dog wasn’t barking, which was unusual. When Kovner went back to visit the ghetto, he learned that on the same night, Hadassah and her mother had been taken to Ponar. He refused to accept her death and continued in his letter to Zeitlin that he had “perfect faith there were entities [such as tears, voices, and bottles cast out upon the waves] that did not fade away.” Only infrequently did Kovner manage to think about those who were murdered at Ponar as being dead, and after Ponar he refused to believe in the ultimate nature of mortality. He ended his letter by saying, “The tormented traces of what happened [that night] keep turning up in the echoes of the bells in my poetry.”19 Hadassah was 21 when she died; Kovner was 23. They had been together for four years. When he learned she had been taken to Ponar, he lay on a bench for 48 hours at the residence of the Hashomer Hatzair members in the ghetto, deep in mourning, without tears. For a long time afterward he went unshaven, and his friends mourned her with him. Grossman, writing in sorrow about the loss of Hadassah, agreed that although it could not be considered resistance, going with one’s mother was an honorable choice, demonstrating sacrifice and adherence to an ideal.20 Kovner went back to the convent and even there spoke to no one about his loss. “He suffered in silence,” wrote the mother superior, “consumed with sorrow. I did not have the courage to speak to him about what had happened. . . . I prayed for him.”21

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Kovner left the convent primarily because of the decision to organize a resistance movement in the ghettos. In December Kovner and Wilner told the mother superior that they had decided to return, Kovner to the Vilna ghetto and Wilner to the Warsaw ghetto, and a short time later Grossman and Edek Boraks, another important movement member who hid in the city, to the ghetto in Bialystok. In retrospect Kovner viewed the convent as the place where the idea for the ghetto uprisings matured.22 Initially the mother superior refused to permit them to leave, promising to hide them and all their friends either in the convent itself or in the neighborhood and to save them all.23 That was the moment of decision, when those who had been in hiding rejected the possibility of individual salvation. They could have yielded to the mother superior’s entreaties and her claim that they had the same right to live as every other human being, that they were still young and had their lives ahead of them. The tradition in which they had been brought up—that the collective was more important than the individual, the future more important than the present, the ideal more important than life—tipped the scales. After years of having lived together with the same ideology, it was doubtful whether, had they acted differently, they could have continued to look each other in the eye. And those who did were rejected. Kempner told the mother superior that they were going “because the fate of the Jewish people had been decided” and because they “wanted to try to be its spokesmen.” Because they had made up their minds, the mother superior declared that she would go to the ghetto with them, saying, “Your fate is mine.” They left the convent one at a time, and she went to the ghetto gates with Kempner and Adamowicz, but the guards, both Jewish and Lithuanian, who knew her, refused to allow her in.24 Parting from the young men and women was painful and difficult for the mother superior, and she wanted to know what she could do to help. Even in the convent Kovner had asked her to use her many connections to get them weapons, and she had vehemently refused, trying to keep them from a conflict that would only result in the deaths of more Jews. “I don’t know how Abba managed to convince her” to use those connections, wrote Grossman.25 On several occasions Kovner himself described how, within a few weeks of their leaving the convent

Hiding in a Monastery

in December 1941, the Jewish policeman stationed at the ghetto gate summoned him. The mother superior had come, three hand grenades hidden beneath her habit, and told him she had not changed her mind, she still wanted to join the Jews, “because God is now in the ghetto.” In her memoirs she confirmed that she did bring one grenade and that Kovner took it gratefully, telling her it would be easier for him to die if he were armed. Then he convinced her to return to the convent. He himself turned his steps back into the ghetto, carrying the hand grenade, and, he recounted, as “I mixed in with the columns of Jews returning from their day of forced labor, I felt my soul torn. What would happen if it fell from my hand, or if I tripped and fell and because of me a whole community were to trip and fall as well! . . . Till that day I had never touched a hand grenade, I didn’t know how to use one.”26 In April 1948 Kovner attended the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising with a delegation from Eretz Israel and found Borkowska (the mother superior) in a tiny, poorly furnished room, “two by four.” She told him that the convent had been temporarily disbanded in March 1943, the first time the mother superior was interrogated, and that about six months later two nuns were arrested, one of whom was sent to a concentration camp near Kovno.27 In her memoirs the mother superior was too noble to mention that perhaps the fact that they continued to hide Jews was what aroused the Gestapo’s interest in them, and she did not tell Kovner that after the war she informed the head of the order she would no longer devote her life to a God that behaved in such a fashion toward human beings. In 1984, when it became possible to travel to Poland, an emotional ceremony was held in Warsaw in the mother superior’s honor. It was attended by representatives of official institutions and of the various former partisan organizations. Kovner delivered the key address in Polish and presented the former mother superior, who by then was 80, with a certificate in the name of “Yad Vashem and the Jewish people . . . and the friends remaining who were witness to her bravery and the nobility of her soul.” He crowned his speech by calling her Ima, the Hebrew word for mother, as she had been called by them in the convent. From then until her death she received packages from and corresponded with some of those she had saved, and she signed all her letters “Ima.” The

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letters were personal, as if written to the family she had never had. That same year a tree was planted at Yad Vashem in honor of the nuns, and certificates of esteem were sent to those still alive in 1984.28 My Little Sister, the poem in which Kovner describes a young Jewish girl who hides in a convent, is loaded with bitter irony and barbed sneers. About the “sisters,” the nuns in the convent, he writes, “What innocence, what purity of faith!” About the seemingly sterile, otherworldly atmosphere of the convent he writes that “the bells break their expectations / into measured rations / for appointed feasts.” About Jesus he writes that he “swings back and forth / on thin limbs.” Even about the mother superior he writes that “her heart throbs, perhaps with too much piety and power / and perhaps she also has nowhere to flee.” He rebels against the tranquility of those whose world, with God’s help, continues to exist, even when thousands of people are being killed just across from the convent (“Possessed by God, blanketed by silent flowers: bathed in deep salvation”), and he sneers at young women yearning for love, the only man in whose lives is a crucified Christ on the wall. The only one capable of human attachment is the giant dog who guards the gate, the only one whom the little sister calls “my brother.” As far as the Holy Trinity is concerned, Kovner writes that “And the Son sees / and the Father stares,” and neither of them does anything.29 When Kovner met Borkowska in Warsaw in 1984, he did not tell her anything about the poem, which in the meantime had received both the Brenner and Israel Prizes for literature, because “there was no point in it,” as he later mentioned to his friend Hanoch Bartov, the author.30 In point of fact, how could he have translated ironic and erotic passages for her or described her convent as apathetic and alienated? Why did he even write such a poem? The nuns had fed and hidden close to thirty Jews and helped many others for long months, risking their own lives daily. They were so strict with themselves that they embarked on a regime of silence, asceticism, and isolation for much of the day; they were women who had decided to retire from the world and with whom close intellectual relations and bonds of mutual respect had been formed, at least with the mother superior. It is possible that the little sister is a metaphor for the Jewish people, “my sister the bride” from the Song of Songs, and that Kovner is taking the Christian world to task for its

Hiding in a Monastery

indifference to the suffering and death of the Jews, as has been suggested by literary critics. The poem, which stirred its readers to “awe and amazement,” became a symbol of Jewish-Christian relations during the Holocaust.31 Why, however, is it done at the expense of those little sisters who provided such a rare example of humane behavior in adverse conditions? It is possible that Kovner was moved to write so bitterly about the convent not only to close national accounts but also as the result of his great personal pain: Perhaps she who came to the convent wall at night “with wailing fingernails” and requested the bell to break the silence killing them all was Hadassah, and it was as if she were asking for refuge on the night when only he and the mother superior had heard the ringing of the bell, the night on which “the dog . . . never barked at all.” The sisters look at her “as if she were speaking ashes”; he himself did not save her and she never reached the safety of the convent. She was murdered the same night and her body was later burned, like the others. He did not have the opportunity to say good-bye to her when she left with her mother. “Mother went heavily . . . to the edge of the redeeming pit. / . . . / My blessing did not light up your eyes. My curse / came too late—to say good-bye to you, / even with just one whispered word” (My Little Sister, pp. 13, 41, 64, 71–74). Hadassah had no illusions when she accompanied her mother to the pit instead of saving herself. Kovner, on the other hand, left his own mother in the ghetto when he joined the partisans in the forests during the last days of the ghetto. He never forgave himself, and years passed until he dared, as he wrote to Zeitlin, to write about Hadassah, walking through the night beside her mother, a kind of eternal reproach to him. In July 1941 the German authorities consolidated their administration. The civilian commander was reinforced by military and SS appointees, and each staff had officers responsible for Jewish affairs. The commander of Einsatzkommando 3, who was also commander of the security police and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the Security Service of the SS), SS Standartenführer Karl Jaeger, was chiefly responsible for the murder of Lithuanian Jewry, and Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Schmitz was in charge of Jewish affairs for the SS and the police.32 Lithuania was

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divided into five districts, two of which were Vilna and the surrounding area. Vilna’s civilian governor was Hans Christian Hingst, and his adjutant, Franz Murer, was put in charge of the ghetto. Martin Weiss and Horst Schweinberger acted as liaison officers between the Lithuanians and the German units and were therefore also known in the ghetto. Murer and Weiss were the worst of thugs, torturing and killing for pleasure. Alexandras Lileikis, whom survivors are still trying to have tried for his crimes, was in charge of the Lithuanian security police in Vilna; and Junas Sidlauskas, head of the department of Jewish affairs, was in charge of executions.33 The hierarchy was complex and complicated, including civilian, military, and political police authorities, both German and Lithuanian. It is therefore no wonder that the survivors remember most of their tormentors as belonging to the Gestapo, a synonym for every unit that tortured and killed. Nevertheless, the Jews, both as individuals and as bearers of collective responsibility, were quick to notice the tension between two opposing (or at least, temporarily opposing) factions within the German authority: One conspired to kidnap and swiftly murder, and the other wanted to exploit the Jews as a workforce as much as was possible. Therefore the Jews did their utmost to find work among the Germans and Lithuanians and especially to obtain a work permit, a schein, which would protect them from kidnapping. On August 1, 1941, the system went into effect. The measures instituted during the first days of the military government were decreed anew by Hingst, Vilna’s civilian governor. There were to be exact records of names, and Jews would be identified by a yellow Star of David; their property would be systematically confiscated; they could not appear in public places, and many other restrictions were to be imposed. On August 6 the following orders were proclaimed: A ghetto would be erected, closed and cut off from its surroundings. And the next day, August 7, Murer was to be brought 5 million rubles, which was then half a million reichsmarks, an enormous sum. A million and a half rubles and 16.5 kilograms (36.3 pounds) of gold were collected. The language in which the money was demanded and the treatment received by the members of the Judenrat during the collection made it obvious, if the Jews still needed clarification, that the gangsters who had taken

Hiding in a Monastery

over, especially the lower echelons, could do as they pleased without fear of retribution. The third blow dealt the Jews that month was the death of the 86-year-old Wygodzki, who had been the much-admired leader of the community for decades, “the father of the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” He was arrested and died in torment in prison. His death, “an honorable death,” as was later reported, made the community feel as though it had been orphaned. There was no one who could follow in his footsteps and his death was “the beginning of the end of [the former] Jewish leadership . . . and the void he left began to be filled by a new leadership,” wrote the historian Yitzhak Arad.34 Compared to the 5,000 Jews killed in July, August was a “quiet” month, with 450 victims, but the preparations made in September for the erection of the ghetto led to the murders of thousands of Jews. Following the pattern set in Poland, the Germans decided to locate the ghetto in the city’s ancient Jewish quarter. Those who lived there were taken to Ponar and killed by Lithuanian volunteers, who, under the direction of a few Germans, murdered not just men, as they had in July, but mostly women and children and even some Jews who held work permits. In addition, most of the members of the Judenrat, ten in number, were murdered, either because the Germans realized that they did, in fact, represent the best interests of the Jews or because they felt that without them it would be easier to move the Jews to the ghetto. On September 5 rumors spread to the effect that the ghetto would be opened in the ancient part of the city. It was divided into two parts separated by a narrow street, both surrounded by wooden fences. After a long, sleepless night and with no previous announcement or warning, within 24 hours, 50,000 people were evicted from their homes and sent to the two ghettos. About 7,000, all of them cruelly beaten on the way, were sent to Lukishko, and after they had been stripped of their last ruble and wedding ring, they were taken to Ponar.35 On September 3, Kovner wrote in his little pocket diary about “the first lump sum from the destruction [of the Jews].” Kempner and Korczak thought, as did many others, that life would be somewhat easier in the ghetto and that at least the unbridled and unpredictable kidnappings would stop. They both went to the ghetto almost empty-handed, walking in a long procession of Jews that wound

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through the city streets on a particularly hot day, most of them burdened with featherbeds and packages and children but with no way of transporting them. Those who could left their property with neighbors, and if possible, even their children and old parents if they could be hidden. They had had almost no time to make preparations but grabbed what they could carry and left their homes, leaving them to be robbed, or they destroyed what they could rather than leave the fruit of their labor to others. As they walked along the road, some Poles came to offer them bread in a gesture of sympathy, but Lithuanian police drove them away to show everyone who was in charge. “Like crows attracted by the smell of death, the scum of the city came out, called by the scent of loot,” wrote Korczak. When they arrived in the ghetto, they were crammed into the houses of people who had recently been murdered and whose belongings were still strewn around; only then did they understand. “The room was still alive,” Korczak wrote, “and from all sides the shadows of those who lived there stared out at us.” As soon as they entered the ghetto and found themselves among other Jews, the newcomers permitted themselves to express their sorrow, “and it was like a gigantic insane asylum,” she wrote.36 The Germans and Lithuanians collected their 1.5 million rubles and treated the Jewish population in Vilna more cruelly than in the other ghettos in Lithuania, at Kovno and Shavli. Perhaps the Germans felt that because Vilna was an important Jewish center, the destruction of its population had to be given special attention. The Lithuanians wanted their capital to be Lithuanian and had not yet forgotten what they considered the “Soviet-Jewish connection.” On September 6, 1941, the Vilna ghetto came into being without its elected leadership and without the 10,000 Jews who had already been murdered. The ghetto lasted for two years, until September 24, 1943. “The hunt for human beings went on as planned for almost a hundred thousand hours, that is, two full years, three months and five days, endless, endless, and the Jewish people had not defense and no savior. No refuge, no way out” (Scrolls of Testimony, p. 11).

Fi v e   The Manifesto of January 1, 1942 “The rebellion began with the manifesto” September 1941–January 1942

By the morning of September 7, 1941, the Jewish population of Vilna had been confined into two cramped ghettos. The larger one was called the First Ghetto and housed 30,000 people, and the smaller one was called the Second Ghetto, holding 10,000. They were horribly overcrowded, and because there was no communication between the two, relatives lost contact. On the same day, Franz Murer appointed a Jewish council for the First Ghetto. It could not be considered a continuation of the former council, which had represented Vilna Jewry with personal and public stature. Murer’s council appointed Jacob Gens, who had been a captain in the Lithuanian army, as chief of police, and Salk Dessler as his chief assistant.1 The broad political and ideological spectrum that had characterized Jewish Vilna was no longer represented, and most members of the newly appointed council belonged to the Bund, the Yiddish-speaking leftist workers’ party, whereas most of those in the police department belonged to Beitar, the right-wing revisionist youth movement. The council was again known as the Judenrat, a German name given by the occupiers, not by the Jews, thus signifying that it did not represent them. Previously, wrote Kovner, when the first Judenrat’s members had been chosen by the Jews, “they were public servants.” Later, when they were chosen by the Germans and hoped that by working for them, they could save Jews from being killed, “they were the servants of an illusion.” Finally, when everyone available had already been chosen for membership and the ghetto was about to be liquidated, the Judenrat members “were the servants of destruction.” Nissan Reznik, one of the Hano’ar Hazioni leaders in the ghetto, simply said, “We no longer had Wygodzki to turn to. We had no leaders.”2

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The Second Ghetto also had its appointed council and police force, but their days were numbered. As soon as the ghetto was erected, the old, the sick, and children were brought there, even from the First Ghetto, as were those who did not have scheinen. Because it was obvious that the Second Ghetto was lower in status, people transferred themselves to the First Ghetto as soon as they could. About 2,500 managed to do so before the rest, about 6,500, were killed in a series of four Aktionen that took place during the first three weeks of October. The first Aktion was carried out simultaneously in both ghettos on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most sacred day of the Jewish calendar, which fell on October 1. The Germans often chose to attack on Jewish holidays, both in the ghettos and elsewhere. Voices raised in prayer were replaced by screams and the noise of doors being slammed and furniture broken. It was the first Aktion since the Jews had been herded into the ghettos, and it shattered the illusion that perhaps once inside they would be left in peace. The second shattered illusion was that work permits would grant their holders a certain degree of immunity, for, scheinen notwithstanding, Jews were removed from the ghetto. The third illusion was shattered during the first Aktion by the Judenrat and the police, whose members, particularly the police, aided the Germans by rounding up Jews and assembling them at the gate. The rationale was that it was better to collect the required quota themselves than to have the Germans and Lithuanians enter the ghetto and run riot as they usually did, in which case the number of victims would have been far greater. They assumed that they were saving the rest, because more permit holders would remain in the ghetto, workers needed by the Germans.3 It was decided that Grossman and Kempner would stay outside the ghetto with forged documents to set up a communications network for the movement members imprisoned inside. Kempner kept her hair dyed blonde until the end of the war. Kovner dedicated his last book of poems to her “in remembrance of the days / when you were a platinum blonde / playing with the Germans” (Sloan Kettering, dedication). She became skillful in quickly removing the yellow star from her clothing on her way out of the ghetto and putting it back on on her way in, and she became equally adept at getting back in by easing her way into groups of returning Jewish workers.4

Manifesto

During the first days of the ghetto, in September and October 1941, the activities organized by Hashomer Hatzair members, with Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff ’s full cooperation, were the same as they had been during the first days of the German occupation: to keep in contact and encourage one another, to find and share means of keeping alive (especially money and documents), and to save lives by using rented apartments and false names. In addition, the links between the various movements, established during the weeks before the ghetto was erected as a modest continuation of the Coordination, continued operating. Tenenbaum-Tamaroff represented Dror-Hechalutz, Reznik represented Hano’ar Hazioni, and Edek Boraks represented Hashomer Hatzair; Kovner and Grossman represented Hashomer Hatzair for the entire community.5 The contacts (cut off at the beginning of the war) that Jadwiga Duziec, Irena Adamowicz, and the mother superior arranged with Poles were renewed, so that information could be received from beyond the ghetto, but these contacts were primarily used to try to tell the outside world about the wholesale murder being committed in Vilna. The issue of when it became known that those taken to Ponar were murdered was local. The issue of when it could be divined that the Germans were operating according to a comprehensive, premeditated program, even if not every stage had already been determined, concerned the entire Jewish population and was the focus of every ghetto or community consciousness, and it is the key to understanding the ghetto’s internal life. Drawing conclusions from known facts was entirely different from internalizing the incomprehensible idea that everyone was in mortal danger and would therefore act accordingly, ignoring normal prewar beliefs and assumptions. A number of factors prevented the Jewish population from understanding the situation as it really was. First, it was Lithuanians, and especially the 20,000 men organized into units and various other collaborators such as the kidnappers, who actually committed the overwhelming majority of murders of Jews in Lithuania, Vilna included. The German authorities deployed themselves as the framework within which the Lithuanians acted. The Lithuanians were those who began killing women and children, which encouraged the Germans to devise a program for the wholesale killing of all the Jews with the aid of local

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populations in other countries. The Germans did their best to represent the murders as spontaneous outbreaks of anti-Jewish sentiment initiated and organized by Lithuanians, and that was also done to head off any criticism that might be heard within Germany.6 Second, the Lithuanian excuse was that the killings had been carried out in retaliation for the aid the Jews had given the Communist regime, which had deprived Lithuania of its independence and oppressed and exiled Lithuanians. Some Jews even understood that the first Aktionen were meant to be “German [and Lithuanian] revenge on the Soviet Jew[s] who had aided in building and abetted the Communist regime,” according to Tenenbaum-Tamaroff.7 Third, although they could not have known it at the time, Lithuanian Jewry was the first of the European Jewish communities to be affected by the Final Solution. For months Vilna had no knowledge of the murders in nearby Kovno or about the sorties made by the Lithuanian killing squads into the neighboring small towns, from which there were almost no survivors. In April 1942, Adamowicz brought Vilna the first news of Kovno. On the other hand, it was known that a large ghetto had been functioning in Warsaw for two years and that there were tens of thousands of Jews in ghettos in Bialystok and Grodno living relatively quiet lives without Aktionen. Therefore they assumed that Vilna was in the clutches of a “raving mad German commander issuing private orders on his own initiative,” according to Korczak. The reference was to Murer, Martin Weiss, or Horst Schweinberger, whom the ghetto population had seen in action firsthand;8 however, the Vilna Jews neither saw nor came into direct contact with the complex German system and those who were, in reality, deciding their fate. Fourth, in July, the first month during which the Jews of Vilna were murdered at Ponar, only incomplete bits of secondhand information reached the city. August was relatively quiet, and only in September, when the Aktionen in the ghetto began, did the first survivors, most of them women, crawl out of the pits at Ponar and report in no uncertain terms that they were killing everyone. The Judenrat forbade anyone to meet with them, but even individuals far removed from the Judenrat had the greatest difficulty in believing the survivors’ accounts. Pessia Aharonowicz, who arrived wounded at the home of Dr.

Manifesto

Mark Dworzecki, the ghetto children’s physician, managed to convince him, although he hesitated for a long time before believing her. Others, however, were certain she had gone mad, and she stopped telling her story.9 It was in Vilna and Lithuania, the first places in Europe to see mass murders, that people began to doubt the stories of those who had escaped death, whether they recounted them to Jews who lived nearby and were candidates for the same fate or to those living in safety. Perhaps the opposite was true: that those who lived near the killing pits or the train stations from which the transports left did not believe, because if they had, they could no longer have continued living. In the Vilna ghetto, however, the inhabitants still believed that those who left had been taken to work, and the Germans reinforced the illusion with repeated promises, between Aktionen, and by letting a few people return every now and then (“a bone the Germans threw us,” said Kovner during the Eichmann trial) and by forging letters that were sent from a fictitious third ghetto and work camps. “They kept giving you a spark of hope . . . that maybe your name wasn’t on the list.” The decrees never mentioned life and death, only certificates and work and other ghettos.10 Therefore “they expected lives of misfortune, torment and torture, but that millions could be murdered never occurred to anyone, not in their worst nightmares.”11 How, in any event, could “the horror of the method” be understood, as Kovner phrased it at the Eichmann trial held in Jerusalem in 1961 when, with the distance in time, he tried to explain the process of perception to the courtroom in Jerusalem as well as to himself. Why was it first in Vilna that they understood what would eventually happen, “an understanding which, at the time of its utterance, had no proof but was solely the fruit of intuition and hypothesis,” according to Israel Gutman, the Yad Vashem historian, an understanding that all European Jewry had a common fate waiting for it: death.12 Why was Kovner the first to voice the hypothesis as a given fact, and not only for Vilna but for all of Europe? Perhaps the gradual accumulation of facts and information, month after month, led him to the conclusion, and that is what has to be examined. Grossman, Boraks, and others, as previously noted, visited the convent after the ghetto was erected in September. The nuns fed them and

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left them with Kovner and Wilner to analyze the situation at length, based on their description of the events in the ghetto. Zawecki, the priest who frequently visited the convent, told Kovner that masses of Jews were being taken out of the ghetto to be killed. In simple language and sure of his facts, he described how they went and he made Kovner realize it was a matter of mass murder. A peasant who came to the convent occasionally told Kovner that large caravans of Jews were being taken away in horse-driven wagons confiscated from farmers. The Jews were led to a certain point beyond which they were made to run, and the owners of the wagons were forbidden to continue to Ponar, which was “the last stop” (Scrolls of Testimony, p. 118). A farmer from the Ponar area told Grossman about hearing shots and inhuman cries, and she heard rumors that “all East Poland Jews [were] doomed,” but she thought that “not a single person believed them.” Boraks, on the other hand, claimed that “everyone knew they were being killed.” Dr. Abrasha Weinrib, director of the ghetto hospital, wrote that “there wasn’t a single person who didn’t believe it.”13 The ghetto swung between disbelief and despair. On September 4, Kovner wrote in Yiddish in his pocket diary that he had received “the first greeting from Ponar: Trojak.” Eleven-year-old Yehudit Trojak, a teacher named Tema Katz, and some other women had managed to escape from the pits at Ponar. Kovner, who then entered the ghetto for the first time, heard their long, horrifying stories. What the young girl had to say sounded authentic, and not only to Kovner. Dr. Weinrib later described how he had treated her wounds and summoned Kovner immediately because he had been a member of Hashomer Hatzair in his youth and had admired Kovner greatly then. Yehudit behaved quite maturely and was precise when she told her story to Kovner and the others present. Members of the various movements met six other survivors in the ghetto hospital and methodically wrote down their stories and found them almost identical. The reports spread throughout the ghetto: Jews who were brought to Ponar were shot. More peasants who lived near Ponar and acquaintances and former neighbors all recounted that they could hear gunfire throughout the daylight hours and that the place had been enclosed in barbed wire and no one was permitted to approach.14

Manifesto

When Kovner fully comprehended the fate of Jews taken from the ghetto, he wanted to commit suicide. Jewish Vilna was being murdered, what point was there in continuing to live?15 But so long as the Germans wanted the Jews dead, suicide was out of the question, and remaining alive meant fighting them. Kovner’s first step was the manifesto he wrote, warning of the certainty of all-inclusive mass murder and calling for self-defense, which took form gradually, and a few more months of Aktionen passed until the manifesto was written and read. At convent meetings “Abba tossed out the idea among the four of us [Kovner, Grossman, Boraks, Wilner], that the murder was not a local matter,” and he had come to a conclusion, even if it was still not in its final form. Kovner had already defined the need to found and arm a militant organization, to inform the Jewish population of “the cruel and bitter truth of the Germans’ plan for total [Jewish] extermination in Eastern Europe,” and to call on the Jews to defend themselves.16 The ghetto inhabitants were beginning to have similar thoughts about upcoming slaughter. Korczak, who remained inside the ghetto after Kempner left to join Grossman in the city, continued to live in the same crowded room on Strashun Street with other members of the various movements. She wrote later about “thoughts of despair . . . because of the news . . . from the Lithuanian cities and towns about ­Aktionen and carnage. A great wave of riots and expulsions flooded every area the enemy conquered.”17 The members began to discuss the details they had heard, but only with close friends, not daring to voice their thoughts fully—not to mention the fact that at that time most of their energy was expended in simply staying alive, adapting to the conditions of life in the ghetto, and finding the strength to bear the loss of friends and relatives.18 By early October 1941, counting those murdered in the first two Aktionen, about 12,000 people had been killed since the beginning of September. The small group, which became the Hashomer Hatzair leadership in the ghetto, met for the first time, about twenty strong, in the room in which ten of them were living. They tried to pull themselves together and evaluate the situation objectively. Kovner said, although phrasing it as a question, that if Hitler meant to exterminate the Jews, they would see destruction as never before witnessed in the history of

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the Jewish people and that there was no consolation, not even in a victory, which would come, alas, too late. Previous calamities in Jewish history had had geographic or political borders and a new center could always be established elsewhere, but the present catastrophe was being orchestrated by the power holding all Europe in its thrall. Therefore only in centers outside Europe would there be a possibility for national renewal.19 It was the first time Kovner had expressed his terrible fear before a large group and not just in front of a handful of close friends, but the same fear had been gnawing at the entrails of many of them: “I knew what he was thinking. After all, we were all facing the same problem,” wrote Grossman. “None of us,” wrote Korczak, “actually dared say it.” The others present at the meeting later said that the thought filtered its way into their consciousness, one drop at a time, without cessation.20 Rumors slowly became perceptions, and they were openly discussed by other youth movement groups, and later at intermovement and party meetings.21 During the third week of October the Germans announced that the Jews of the Vilna ghetto would have to carry “yellow certificates”; until then they had used whatever documents came to hand. According to Kempner, after the order had been issued, the suggestion proposed by Kovner, that they had to organize an uprising, began to take form, because the distribution of specific certificates indicated that the Germans had long-term intentions and a method of implementing them. It was during the “Aktion of the yellow certificates” that Hadassah Kamia­nit­ ski and her mother were taken, and in vain, wrote Korczak, her friends looked for her “fair, erect figure.” Two factors made Kovner sense the approach of general impending disaster: Hadassah’s death and the deliberate German planning of slaughter according to certificates, as opposed to the wild Aktion of Yom Kippur. Thus in October the movements began sending members, particularly women members (circumcised Jewish men could be easily identified), to find out what the situation was in places beyond Vilna and its immediate surroundings and to try to discover whether the Germans were acting as methodically elsewhere.22 By early November 1941, the number of those killed in October and the first days of the month had risen to 11,000. “The rivers of blood from the recent mass murders of ‘yellow certificate’ holders had barely

Manifesto

stopped flowing when in the narrow ghetto alleys of Vilna” the first Jewish ghetto partisan organization “was forged,” wrote Kovner of the turning point. According to Grossman, the “historic decision” was made in the convent two months before the writing of the manifesto, and she described Kovner as sitting in his shed on the convent grounds, planning a militant organization by candlelight: its cells, its connection with other ghettos, its contacts with the Poles (to obtain weapons), its open way of informing the ghetto inhabitants of the bitter truth that death awaited them all.23 In his memoirs, poet Avraham Sutzkever wrote that the “yellow certificate Aktionen” influenced the unification of the ghetto’s Communist organization and its decision to contact other ghettos to find out which were thinking of an active struggle against the Germans. In addition, according to Reznik, at the end of October and the beginning of November, close to two months after they had entered the ghetto, they “discovered that [the Communists’] outlook regarding self defense was close to our own and they were not averse to a common action,” even an immediate one.”24 The idea had nothing to do with political affiliation, and it was shared by Hano’ar Hazioni, a center movement, and the Communists and other movements alike. As if to confirm their fears, another yellow certificate Aktion was carried out on November 3. From one Aktion to the next the number of Lithuanians and Gestapo surrounding the ghetto increased; accompanied by dogs, they hunted people in every cellar and attic. By then the hiding places, the melinas, were even chimneys and garbage cans. There were melinas in which entire families hid for days on end, terrified of any noise and with no way of finding out what was happening outside. Sometimes fathers and even mothers smothered their babies, and grandparents sacrificed themselves by breaking out to distract those hunting their families.25 During November a few hundred more Jews were murdered, far fewer than in the preceding months. By mid-December 1941, the number of Jews killed since the Germans had entered Vilna reached about 33,500 (perhaps even more according to other calculations), of the 57,000 who had been in the city when the killings began. A period of relative calm followed, lasting until the summer of 1943, and the number of inhabitants remained fairly constant at about 20,000.

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However, at the end of November no one knew that the Aktionen were behind them, and the killing spree that had annihilated twothirds of the Jewish population led to more extreme reactions. On the one hand, some youth movement members called for self-defense, and on the other hand, some sought to “leave the ghetto and this accursed Vilna” and to move their activities to a quieter ghetto. Anyone who could, individuals and fragments of families, picked themselves up and fled the trap. At the beginning of December, what was left of the Coordination in the ghetto held a meeting, and the opinions expressed regarding a possible course of action were clearly divided according to movement affiliations. Tenenbaum-Tamaroff (of Dror-Hechalutz) proposed that members be moved to a more secure location—Warsaw or perhaps Bialy­stok. Boraks (of Hashomer Hatzair) and Shlomo Entin (of Hano’ar Hazioni) were opposed, claiming that there were no secure places and that there was no way of being sure both those cities would not suffer Vilna’s fate. Present also were Reznik, Grossman, and Korczak. The members of Hano’ar Hazioni and Hashomer Hatzair saw an uprising as their only chance to die honorably. “We didn’t believe,” said Reznik, “that any one of us would remain alive,” and all those who survived still remember and share the feeling.26 During the second half of December there was a skeleton meeting of Hashomer Hatzair members at the convent, and they decided that they had no alternative but to defend themselves with arms and to issue a manifesto to the ghetto youth in Vilna and elsewhere.27 Accordingly, and because the other movements (with the exception of Dror­Hechalutz) were in agreement, Boraks, Entin, and Israel Kempner, Vitka’s brother, left for Warsaw at the end of the month representing not only their three youth movements but also the entire Coordination. After the meeting Kovner returned to the ghetto and did not leave it until two years later, when he took to the forests to join the partisans. The same spirit was expressed at a Hashomer Hatzair council meeting held during the last days of December in the ghetto, at which Kovner claimed that “everything that has happened so far means only one thing: Ponar, that is to say, death. And not even that is the whole truth. . . . Vilna is not only Vilna, and Ponar is not merely an episode, it

Manifesto

is a complete system,” thoroughly thought out, although its details were as yet unknown. Escape, therefore, was nothing more than an illusion; it meant abandoning the weak to their fate and struggling in a strange city, where a refugee would be cut off from his roots. “There is no safety in flight,” and only dozens or hundreds would be saved, not the millions of Jews under the jackboot of the German occupation.28 Many of those present remained unconvinced and could not agree with Kovner that total destruction awaited the ghetto or that all the Jews under the German yoke would be killed. There were those who thought that emigration to Eretz Israel was still “the foundation of our lives” and that the leadership should move to Warsaw. Others noted their responsibility to the ghetto, which would pay with its life for their actions once they took up arms. There were those who were still undecided, those who hesitated, and only some who agreed with Kovner. Kovner tried to sum up the meeting by asking who would “take upon himself the responsibility for all of us going to our deaths like lambs to the slaughter? . . . The fundamental principle is that we cannot but defend ourselves! . . . A great light will shine upon us when into this dark bloodbath comes the understanding that we are the Lords of Death. Then even our lives will be lit.” That was to be the essence of their resistance to the Germans, to decide their own deaths, to determine for themselves how and when they would die, and it gave them a reason to go on living. “And he rose up . . . and dressed himself in the raiment of the Jews and put one yellow patch over his heart and the other on his back and returned to his fellow men in the ghetto. Uri was twenty-three years old on his return to the ghetto and young men and women went after him” (Scrolls of Testimony, p. 118). Thus Kovner described his return from the convent to the ghetto as soon as he understood that the murders taking place were methodical in a comprehensive, dramatic, biblical description of fast-moving events reminiscent of the book of Kings, which lists the ages of kings when crowned and when perished. Kovner was 23 when he went back to the ghetto. The book of Judges is used as well: Kovner returned to the ghetto, read the manifesto, and chose “three hundred faithful young men and women” from among those who had joined the underground immediately, as Gideon had chosen the 300 who lapped

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the water, and with them saved Israel (Judges 7: 6–7). In reality, again, events moved more slowly and the situation was more complex. The night of December 31, 1941, was the ideal time to hold a meeting because it could be camouflaged as a New Year’s Eve party. It took place in the pioneers’ kitchen at 2 Strashun Street and was attended by dozens of youths from Dror-Hechalutz, Hashomer Hatzair, Hano’ar Hazioni, and Akiva and smaller groups from other movements. After midnight, Kovner read aloud the manifesto written at the convent, titled “Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter!” He called on those present to rid themselves of the illusion (proof that there were still many who believed) that those led out of the ghetto were taken to a different one or to a concentration camp. They had all been shot, he said, and would never come back. He then read the manifesto’s two main tenets: first, that Hitler is plotting to massacre all the Jews in Europe and the Jews in Lithuania are the first in line. It was the first time that anyone in occupied Europe had hypothesized in writing that events were not local and performed for a specific reason but rather the manifestation of a centralized, complete program contrived by the Germans’ highest echelons, directed against all of European Jewry. Kovner presented this tenet as clearly and forcefully as he could, not as a possibility but as an “absolute certainty.” The second principle was the conclusion drawn from such a perception, namely, that there could be only one genuine response and it was to defend themselves and choose death “as free fighters.”29 Kovner called on all Jewish youth, and on Lithuanian Jewry, not to let themselves be massacred like lambs. The die had been cast, he said, using the first person plural, for “us, Lithuanian Jews.” The manifesto was handwritten first in Yiddish and then translated by Kovner into Hebrew, then into Polish and Lithuanian in versions that would be suitable for non-Jewish underground organizations. Additional Hebrew and Yiddish versions were prepared for other ghettos, and all were printed and distributed throughout the ghetto and outside as well (by means of women couriers).30 At the meeting Kovner read the Yiddish version and Tossia Altman, a prominent movement leader on a visit from Warsaw, read it in Hebrew, an event everyone present and still alive after the war never forgot. “I remember every detail,” said Haim Morocco (later Marom), a Hano’ar Hazioni mem-

Manifesto

ber, “the noise of the celebrations being held outside the ghetto, the snow, the scores of members who had stolen inside, the excitement of hearing Kovner read the manifesto in his deep voice.” “We were electrified,” said another individual. “His face radiated light,” wrote Korczak, who later kept the manifesto as a treasure, in the forests and until she reached Eretz Israel, “and his voice was strong and full of the pain he felt.” “Ponar means death,” said Littman Moravtchik (later Mor), “and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was in shock: Ponar means death.” The room was silent for a long time after Kovner finished reading, and then they expressed their feelings in a quiet song: “To put our necks under the knife—no, no, never.”31 Kovner did not remember the singing, but years afterward he described the sound of his own voice as seeming special even to him that night, the inward fire shining forth from his pale face as he sat alone behind a folding table, like a cantor in a synagogue before the ark. He remembered everyone’s eyes were focused on his lips, “full of wonder and identification with him,” as “he was revealed to them as their leader. . . . He received their unreserved loyalty and faith because he had no authority or power.” With that description detailed in his Scrolls of Testimony, Kovner united his two characters, Shaul and Uri, the practical one and the dreamer, because the time had come to leave words behind and progress to deeds. The sense of mission and uniqueness that had filled Kovner since youth made him feel constantly responsible, a responsibility he felt at that crucial moment shared with the kings and judges of Israel before him. Having no hard evidence, how did Kovner find the temerity to write that Hitler was plotting to kill all European Jewry? Until the end of 1941, mass murders were committed by shooting the victims at the edges of pits and ravines on Soviet soil in vast reaches of territory stretching from Estonia to the Crimea, but that was not all of Europe. Nevertheless, Kovner went straight to the heart of the matter, to the centrality of the Jewish question in Nazi ideology, and the party heads’ determination to devote their strength and energy to the extermination of the Jews as a condition for rebuilding the world as they imagined and desired it. More than once Kovner was asked how, as a young man, only 23 years old, he could take upon himself the responsibility

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Kovner’s manifesto read in the Vilna ghetto on January 1, 1942. Givat Haviva Archive, D.1.4630. Courtesy of Givat Haviva Archive and the Kovner family.

Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter! Jewish youth, do not believe the perpetrators. Of the 80,000 Jews of the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” only 20,000 have remained. We saw how they tore from us our parents, brothers and sisters. Where are the men, hundreds of whom were kidnapped by the Lithuanian “Chapunes”? Where are the naked women, and the children, driven away on the horrible Provocation night? Where are the Day of Atonement Jews? Where are our brothers from the second ghetto? All those forced out of the ghetto never returned. All the roads of the Gestapo lead to Ponar, and Ponar is death! Throw away illusions. Your children, husbands and wives are all dead. Ponar is not a camp­—everyone was shot there. Hitler has plotted to murder all of the Jews of Europe. The Jews of Lithuania are doomed to be first in line. Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter! True, we are weak and helpless, but the only answer to the hater is resistance! Brothers! Better fall as free fighters than live at our murderers’ mercy! Resist! Resist to the last breath. The 1st of January, 1942, Vilna, in the ghetto. Translated by Dina Porat

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of telling an entire population that certain death awaited it. He had no answer because he did not know for a fact what Hitler’s program was, but rather felt it. It was a hypothesis based on a strong gut feeling, and he was completely convinced he was correct. At Yad Vashem in 1982 Kovner said that the manifesto had been a kind of battle cry to those who were about to die. Therefore “I used words as a weapon to shock the young people, to encourage them to look into the abyss without fear. The way to achieve that was to tell the most cruel and not the most just truth.”32 Thus Kovner admitted that what he had written was “words as a weapon,” not truth based on evidence but the desire to shock, to carry his listeners away with the force of his words. However, what he wrote was not, for him, merely rhetoric. His deep conviction gave his words power. What influence did the manifesto have in Vilna and farther afield? A distinction should be made between the reactions to its two main points: agreement with the idea that European Jewry was in fact going to be wiped out, and agreement that the only possible path was self-defense. The two are not necessarily related. Indeed, the first point of the manifesto, the annihilation of all European Jewry, was, according to Gutman, “rejected and viewed with much hesitation,” and only later was it generally accepted by “underground youth movements and their leaders as the sober, correct interpretation of the situation.”33 According to Korczak, it was “a conceptual revolution. How many people are capable of following the reasoning behind such an idea? Every human being wants to live and does so convinced until the very last moment that it will never happen to him!”34 In the ghettos of Warsaw, Grodno, Kovno, and Bialystok serious public figures considered the contents of the manifesto as unthinkable, a wild exaggeration.35 It was not even quoted or referred to by the extensive Warsaw ghetto underground press. The reaction to the second point, the call to rebellion, was different. There can be no doubt about the manifesto’s influence on the preparations made for a fighting underground in the Vilna ghetto and in other ghettos. It was the first public call to armed self-defense that was written, read, and distributed with the objective of rousing a rebellion in every ghetto, and it was done before any non-Jewish underground

Manifesto

movement had been organized anywhere else in Europe, with the exception of Marshal Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. Kovner later called the manifesto, and with justification, “a fundamental, insightful document which sharply pointed out the ghetto’s central dilemma and paved the way for the formation of resistance movements in Vilna and the other ghettos.”36 Yet according to Korczak, the arguments they had before the manifesto was read had been about dilemmas and difficulties that were certainly not solved then and that did not seem to evaporate as soon as the manifesto became known. In Kovner’s opinion, the difficulty in absorbing what had been said was not only personal but also general. The basic condition for absorption and understanding was, he thought, “the realization that all Jews had been condemned to a common fate,” and the understanding that sharing the fate, for better or for worse, was more decisive than their differences, both internally as Jews and externally in the eyes of the enemy.37 However, in examining where and when the underground took up arms, it would seem that Kovner was wrong and that it was not just a feeling of national Jewish solidarity and uniqueness of fate that was the condition for their willingness to deal with the idea of total annihilation but rather the certainty that annihilation was already being implemented and that “the manifesto came up out of the pits of Ponar,” as Grossman put it. Kovner was aware of the limitations of any manifesto, no matter how well written and stirring it might be. “It would be hasty and unjust to link the result to the initial idea. None of us would dare say nor would it be true” that rebellion broke out in one spot or another because messengers brought the manifesto and encouraged an uprising, because there were many places where it was received and no rebellion started, and vice versa. The only conclusion that can be drawn, then, is that the powerful impact of the manifesto notwithstanding, the unprecedented idea was usually grasped only when large-scale killings had already begun.38 The manifesto of January 1, 1942, is a key document in the history of the Holocaust and the Jewish people. Its reading symbolized a turning point in the consciousness of the Jews in conquered Europe as a people. It is no wonder, then, that both individuals and various movements that take great care to preserve their personal and collective stories want to

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have it known that they had a hand in the manifesto and that no other individual or movement had sole historical priority. That is the reason that Dror-Hechalutz wanted to show Tenenbaum-Tamaroff as participating in the composition and reading of the manifesto and Yitzhak Zuckerman as understanding the program for the methodical annihilation of the Jews as well as and no later than Kovner and the reason that Hano’ar Hazioni wanted to say that Reznik and others sent a request to the convent for Kovner to write a manifesto. It is easy to forget that the remnants of the youth movement members in the Vilna ghetto and in fact in all ghettos were a group of young men and women groping to find their way in the cruel, unprecedented situation visited upon them, cut off from adult leadership, whether Jewish or not, lacking adequate means or preparation, losing their families, their numbers dwindling from one Aktion to the next. Only in retrospect did even Kovner understand that “the idea, which later seemed so simple and correct, and after the Holocaust so obvious to those who had not been there, was then paradoxical, unthinkable, unreal and abstract, even in the eyes of those who later implemented it with their blood.”39 Today worlds of meaning are read into every step they took or word they uttered, as if then they could have been nothing else but determined, consistent, and unequivocal. In his poetry Kovner expressed the sensation of bearing a terrible burden because he understood the methodical nature of the destruction and the responsibility that placed him apart, alone and accused before the ghetto population, like the messenger in ancient times who brought bad tidings and was outcast or killed, much as David ordered the execution of the messenger who broke the news of King Saul’s death. In his poem “The Key Sank,” Kovner wrote about the one who, terrified, “shed his shoes, ran up to the threshold, knocked on the door / and from his hidden knowing cried, there is death there / there is a stake in the circle—blood . . . / only his shadow, white, rises at the windows” and “they will be lost, he mumbled. You will be lost, he stumbled on his words. Am I the destroyer, am I the seer?”40 It was to Kovner’s immense credit that he was the first person to state publicly, clearly, and uncompromisingly the same intuitive knowledge many other youth movement and political party members who survived

Manifesto

in the ghetto had and that he realized Jews were faced with a comprehensive plan being implemented in a completely unprecedented way. It was to his credit that he drew the clearest conclusions immediately and acted unhesitatingly to make them known. Realizing the price he would have to pay for taking the path he had chosen caused him great heartache, and the pain continued to gnaw at him for years. Kovner noted a few words for himself, which he later threw into a drawer in Ein Hahoresh, and they express, in essence, the distinction between a leader who is praised by those close to him and the personal price he pays for his actions: “I am in the ghetto: Savior Killer Cheered And the mother: Killer.”

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S i x   The Establishment and Training

of the Underground

“A man cannot be a hero at the expense of those he loves” January 1942–Spring 1943

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As soon as the manifesto had been read, Kovner devoted his time and energy to making preparations for self-defense and a ghetto underground. “We didn’t work for the Germans even one day,” said Kempner. “Everything paled in comparison and we took time for almost no other activities, only those that would camouflage what we were really doing. We took part in no public or cultural activities,” continued Kovner.1 In the meantime, while the underground-in-training was growing, life in the ghetto went on. During the eighteen months or so from the time the Aktionen stopped at the end of 1941 until they were renewed in the summer of 1943, the remaining population lived relatively quietly, doing slave labor and trying to organize community life. The contrast between the lives of the underground and the majority of the inhabitants was immense. The underground’s members prepared for the day they would confront the Germans, when the unavoidable (in their opinion) end came for the ghetto; on the other hand, most of the ghetto inhabitants lived from day to day in the hope that the war would end while they were still alive, feeling there was no need to force the issue because in any event, the end seemed so close. “Our intention from the very beginning, our first thought . . . was to organize the underground on the widest possible public base,” said Kovner. “And on that base, perhaps more than in any other ghetto, the underground was founded.”2 That was not an overstatement. Only the Vilna underground had members from the ghetto’s entire political spectrum, from the revisionists to the Communists, and not merely as an umbrella organization. It was set up in barely three weeks. For Kovner

The Underground

it was proof that unity could be reached despite deep-seated, longstanding political differences. It was achieved, in his opinion, “thanks to the atmosphere in Vilna,” where members of the community were “first and foremost Jews.”3 It was only natural that, of all the political and social groups, DrorHechalutz would join the underground. Its members were the closest to Hashomer Hatzair in ideology, had good personal relationships, and had cooperated with them on the way to Vilna. At the beginning of January 1942, a few days after the manifesto had been read, Kovner and Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff met again, along with other members from both movements, apparently more than once, but neither side succeeded in convincing the other: Hashomer Hatzair members wished to organize for a battle in the Vilna ghetto, whereas most of the Dror-Hechalutz members considered it logical to first leave for a relatively more quiet ghetto.4 It can be assumed that personal factors also stood between Dror-Hechalutz and Hashomer Hatzair at that time: Tenenbaum-Tamaroff was extremely talented and charming, full of original ideas, courageous and resourceful, and he knew how to inspire his comrades with his own enthusiasm. After Kovner returned from the convent, there may not have been enough room for both of them in the same small ghetto, and so Tenenbaum-Tamaroff left to put his ideas into action. Thus in early January a group of Dror-Hechalutz members left Vilna, both sides having consolidated their positions, and only a small group remained, led by Yechiel Scheinbaum, a longtime movement leader.5 Almost at the same time four other groups were contacted: the Communists, Beitar, Hano’ar Hazioni, and the Bund. In his testimonies Kovner puts them in that order but makes it clear that the blows dealt to the ghetto before and immediately after its closing were so great (two-thirds of Vilna’s Jewish inhabitants had been killed by the end of 1941) that no movement could be judged according to its past or tradition but only by what remained. In other words, once the Jews had been herded into the ghetto, the importance of previous principles and ideologies declined, and what became paramount was what occurred on the personal, human level. Thus the order in which the various bodies were approached did not reflect their importance in the ghetto at

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the time or reflect on their joining or refusing to join the underground immediately. Kovner first turned to the Communists because he had heard that they already had an underground and because of his good opinion of their young Jewish members in Vilna. He and his friends assumed that the Communists had connections outside the ghetto. Those contacts could prove useful, and in any case, because of German policy, it was imperative that the two groups overcome their previous bitter differences. Two surprises were waiting for Kovner. First, the Communists had no such connections, because an active underground had not yet been formed in the city, but, second, after a few meetings it became clear that the Communists and the Zionist movements had much in common. As noted, in the autumn of 1941 during the Aktionen, the Communists had already agreed among themselves, if only in theory, that an underground had to be organized and ready to defend itself with arms. They now agreed that a national Jewish struggle had to be undertaken within the ghetto and that self-defense would be their prime goal, rather than leaving for the forests.6 The ghetto Communists immediately agreed to join forces with the Zionists and to determine national goals together. That was unprecedented and unknown in the other ghettos, where negotiations were prolonged and much harder and had different results. In Vilna the Communists agreed to join because they had been left without party support, since the Soviets retreated as quickly as possible and in disorder when the Germans invaded. The Soviets left behind no personnel or orders, contrary to what they had done when they left of their own accord at the end of October 1939. The Lithuanian Communists in Vilna who had not fled with the Soviets were still unorganized as far as underground activity was concerned. The Jewish Communists who remained in the ghetto, beaten and forlorn, had to make their own decisions, an exceptional and frowned-upon step within the party, and they had to hear other Jews say that the killings were a punishment for the community that tolerated Communists in its midst. They included Yitzhak Wittenberg, Chiena Borowska, Sonia Madeysker, and Berl ­Szerszenjevski, all of whom became central to the underground.7 “The certainty of annihilation,” as Grossman later called it, which was faster

The Underground

and more deadly in Vilna than in other places, brought even old diehard Communists closer to the people in their suffering. Kempner noted that “the Jewish national identification of a Communist in Vilna was stronger than that of a Hashomer Hatzair member in Western Poland.” 8 Kovner appealed to Beitar at about the same time but did not receive the same unity of agreement. Beitar’s ranks were split, and only some of its members joined the underground. A substantial portion of the ghetto police force belonged to Beitar, and Kovner turned with hesitation to Joseph Glazman, the ghetto’s deputy police commissioner, formerly the Beitar leader in Lithuania, and “not a man of Vilna.” Glazman was active in underground activities during the Soviet era and had started a Beitar group in the ghetto. He was known and well liked because he was personable and able to stand up under pressure, having joined the police force not because he agreed with its policies but rather because he wanted a source of information. It was also convenient for the Judenrat to have such a highly esteemed individual in its ranks, and at the time they had no knowledge of his other activities. Therefore, when approached by Kovner and Nissan Reznik, Glazman was ready to join forces with those trying to organize an underground and with ­Beitar members who had no other avenues of action. Reznik handled the negotiations jointly with Kovner, because his movement and comrades were already working hand in hand with Kovner.9 On January 21, 1942, only three weeks after the reading of the manifesto, a meeting was held in Glazman’s room at 6 Rudnicka Street, the building where the Judenrat had its offices. It was attended by Wittenberg and Borowska representing the Communists, Kovner representing Hashomer Hatzair, Glazman representing Beitar, and Reznik representing Hano’ar Hazioni. They were joined by Major Isidore Frucht, also a member of Beitar, who was considered a military expert. They founded the underground and decided that the staff was to be headed by Wittenberg with Kovner and Glazman as his informal deputies. Wittenberg, then 34 years old, had been active in the Communist Party for some time and had gained underground experience under the Poles; he had played key roles under the Soviets and was known as being talented and responsible. Kovner made most of the contacts to set up the underground, but compared to Wittenberg and Glazman,

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who was five years older than he, Kovner was young and inexperienced. Wittenberg was also chosen in the hope of forming relationships with the Soviets in the future. The group also spelled out their aims: first, their short-term goal, to establish an armed, fighting underground organization. In the long run, however, their ambition was to unite all the organized forces in the ghetto around the underground, and thus they called it the Fareinikteh Partizaner Organizatzieh, the United Partisan Organization. That same day Kovner inscribed three bold letters in his pocket diary: FPO.10 The FPO’s main long-term goal was to prepare mass armed resistance to any attempt to liquidate the ghetto. Self-defense was a national act, “a people’s struggle for its honor.” This first meeting determined the organization’s national commitment as well as their wish to act as partisans fighting in the rear and their desire to aid the Red Army in a common war against the Nazis, carrying out acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. Thus the national goals, which they all wanted to achieve, were integrated with the Communists’ commitment to be part of the Soviet Union’s fighting force. They had decided to call themselves partisans but they would fight in the ghetto, not the forests. In that case, did the name contradict the decision? The issue could not yet be put to the test because the decisions had been made in absolute isolation; there was still no non-Jewish underground in Vilna proper, and there were no partisans in the forests. According to Borowska, “We compromised. We wanted to fight in the forests and Kovner wanted to fight in the ghetto. So we decided to try the ghetto first, and if we saw it didn’t work, we would go into the forests.”11 Therefore the final decision was to reveal the idea of self-defense to other ghettos and to make contacts with outside fighting forces when they came into existence. The underground’s first act was to call all those outside the ghetto to return. They returned immediately: Kempner and others returned from Vilna, and Michael Kovner and others came back from the convent. Upon their return, their parents and neighbors told them it was considered the utmost folly for any young person with papers, especially if he or she looked Aryan, to reenter the trap. The underground’s second act was to make the January 1 manifesto official and to distribute it to the other ghettos, either as written or reworked by Kovner to

The Underground

suit time and place.12 In the meantime, the underground would hide its existence from the Germans, Lithuanians, and other ghetto inhabi­ tants, and so from the start they were on the horns of a dilemma: How could they both hide the underground and prepare for mass armed resistance, which had been originally emphasized as a prime target, without endangering the ghetto? “A man cannot be a hero / at the expense of those he loves. Whether to live or die / the decree will be the same for us all” (The Key Sank, p. 155), wrote Kovner, describing both loneliness and exaltation, and the heart-rending dilemmas accompanying the decision to found a militant organization. Once the underground was officially founded and having decided to unite forces, the FPO immediately undertook negotiations with members of the Bund, the Yiddishist leftist workers party. Only after a solid month of internal party deliberation, which took place primarily between old and young members, did the Bund’s youth movement, the Zukunft (“Future”), join the FPO. The senior members were opposed, not only because they were against joining forces with Zionists but also because in the meantime they had been given working positions in the Judenrat and its institutions. Avraham Chwojnik, the representative of the young Bundists, joined the underground staff, and Reznik followed as the representative of Hano’ar Hazioni. Other Bundists active in the underground were Shmuel Kaplinski and Asia Bick, Chwojnik’s girlfriend.13 The staff of the underground was composed of five members, one for each of its founding movements. Scheinbaum’s group remained independent until they joined the Struggle Group, founded in the spring of 1942. Its leader, Borka Friedman, belonged to Beitar. Thus, toward the end of 1942, a second underground formed, not allied to any political party, although DrorHechalutz and Beitar members were prominent in it. It was headed by Yechiel Scheinbaum and was therefore known as Yechiel’s Struggle Group or the Second Struggle Group. There were two main differences between the undergrounds: The FPO was carefully constructed and scrupulously examined every new member, whereas Scheinbaum’s group favored the idea of a mass grassroots organization and initially rejected the concept of a hermetically sealed movement.14 They were organized along different lines: The FPO was a structured, hierarchic

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group with rules, and the Second Struggle was a collection of groups whose common interests were managed by its activists. The Vilna ghetto was relatively peaceful from the end of 1941, when the Aktionen ceased, until the summer of 1943. No one knew the ­Aktionen had ceased, certainly not for a year and a half, and they continued to cast their shadow over the ghetto inhabitants, who still bore the day-to-day burden of staying alive. At the beginning of December 1941 about 20,000 Jews (15,000 according to the commander of Einsatzkommando 3, which was in charge of the killings, because 5,000 with no proper papers were sheltered inside), about one-third of Vilna’s original Jewish population, were crowded into what Kovner referred to as the “seven alleys.”15 No one who visits those old, narrow streets today can understand how so many people could fit into the two- or three-story buildings, which open onto small courtyards around which stood neighboring houses. Most of the buildings are still standing, although some of them have been empty for decades, uninhabited since the day their last residents left. In his pocket diary Kovner wrote in Yiddish, “Every street—a city.”16 The Aktionen had ceased because German losses at the front and the murder of Jews and Soviet prisoners had led to a severe shortage of skilled labor. The Lithuanians had already realized that instead of political independence, they had gained oppressive rulers, and they evaded working for them whenever possible. Thus the remaining Jews in the ghetto became valuable, and new work permits were distributed. If only for a year and a half, the interests of the Germans, particularly the army and the civilian government, which needed workers, coincided with the aspirations of the Jews, who paradoxically needed the Germans to stay alive. They were trapped, because Jewish work increased German might, allowing them to continue their war efforts and murder the Jews later. Beginning in September 1941, when they were forced into the ghetto, the heads of the Judenrat hoped that the Germans would be defeated before they managed to kill all the Jews, and they tried to keep the ghetto organized, working, clean, and efficient. Of the 20,000 Jews in the ghetto, about three-quarters were over the age of 15 and could work. Early every morning, thousands left the ghetto in “brigades,” groups of slave laborers who worked in and around the city under the

The Underground

German and Lithuanian whips. Kovner, watching the scene repeat itself each day, saw it not as a necessity forced on them by the situation but as an insult and the incarnation of their helplessness. When the fence went up around the ghetto, the brigades went out through the gate every morning and returned to the trap every evening, running around frantically inside, “from wall to wall, [or] standing there with their hearts gaping.” The essence of the ghetto in two words: “gaping hearts” (The Key Sank, pp. 144–145). Kovner was convinced that any attempt to work and organize ghetto life was a waste, as it was founded on an illusion that would shatter, for “our eyes see, how a giant hand / has already placed the ram’s horns in the thicket,” and everyone would be brought to the binding [i.e., the sacrifice] (Scrolls of Testimony, p. 138). Nevertheless, Kovner saw how, in their wretched living conditions, an awe-inspiring community life was created. By September 1941, under the aegis of the Judenrat, the community had already established departments to deal with food, health, lodging, and labor, which were the most pressing issues, and by early 1942 they had added departments for social aid, education, culture, and financial matters. A Jewish police force divided the ghetto into three areas, and there were criminal, labor, and sanitation monitoring groups. The ghetto was clean and without epidemics, even though it was located in the oldest section of the city and its sanitation facilities were both outmoded and overtaxed—they had never been meant to bear the weight of such a large population. Two public bathhouses were erected, and no one could get a bread-ration card without a certificate stating he or she had taken at least one bath a month. Tremendous efforts were invested in matters of cleanliness and sanitation, and collective punishment was inflicted on those who did not keep their apartments clean. In the school infirmary, Dworzecki inoculated children against epidemics whenever he could obtain the necessary drugs, and supplementary food rations were distributed. Vitamins and medications were manufactured in the ghetto itself.17 There were public lectures and regional physicians and nurses, and boiled water was distributed. The Jewish police punished those who threw their garbage in public places and detained them in the ghetto jail, which they erected and were in charge of. They had the power to imprison the inhabitants for a number of hours for various

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infractions, such as not wearing the yellow patch or tardiness in leaving for work. There was a legal system to deal with more serious crimes, and it was run according to strict regulations by those who had been the best of Vilna’s lawyers and jurists before the ghetto was established. The hospital had a staff of 150; the infirmary was open around the clock. Laundry and barber services were available, and four open kitchens distributed tens of thousands of free meals a month. A “winter committee” gathered clothing, which was laundered and distributed to the needy, and a public committee composed of representatives of all the political parties distributed aid, particularly to the intelligentsia, a group that deteriorated rapidly in the ghetto. The lawyers, teachers, writers, and artists established their own trade unions. There was an old-age home; there were kindergartens, orphan asylums for infants, and shelters for children who had fallen into a life of petty crime. The ghetto police and members of the youth movements invested tremendous efforts in working with the children and turned them into an internal transportation unit, even trusting them to deliver precious foodstuffs in their wagons. They were also used as informers against people who committed “sanitation crimes,” and that earned a great deal of criticism, because the ghetto did not want the children trained as tattletales. There were at least 5,000 people of whose existence the Germans were unaware, and thousands more without sheinen, the work permits. The Judenrat distributed the rations received from the Germans to every­one, although they had been intended for a far smaller number of mouths and were inconsequential to begin with, less than half of what the Lithuanians and Poles received. Six hundred fifty grams of bread (about a pound and a quarter) a week was not even a cruel joke, so all the inhabitants’ resourcefulness and powers of invention were put to work to raise the number of certificate holders entitled to rations and to smuggle food in through the gate, the focal point of ghetto life, notwithstanding the punishments and beatings received by those who were caught. The smugglers were simply slave laborers returning from places where it was possible to obtain food through bribery, theft, barter, or sale. The Judenrat bribed Lithuanian guards and smuggled food into the ghetto in the false bottoms of garbage wagons and hearses. Needless to say, there were also underworld thugs who smuggled for

The Underground

profit and those whose jobs or acquaintance with functionaries brought them close to the miserable food sources, but the Judenrat attempted to moderate the polarization between “rich” and “poor.” For example, a license from the police had to be obtained to open a business, and one of the conditions was to have a member of the intelligentsia as a partner, because they were at the bottom of the economic ladder. Despite the continual lack of necessities and despite the temperature, which in the winter dropped to −25° or −30° centigrade, no one died of hunger or froze in the Vilna ghetto, and there were few suicides. In addition, most felonies were committed against the rules and regulations imposed by the Germans and the Judenrat or in an attempt to improve living or working conditions in some way, even at someone else’s expense; few real crimes were reported. There were almost no cases of murder (not only in Vilna, but in the other ghettos as well), with the exception of two committed by the same members of the underworld during robberies. The murderers were caught and hanged by the Jewish police on Judenrat orders without German involvement; an informer responsible for the death of dozens of people in another ghetto was also hanged. Afterward there were no more cases of robbery or murder in the Vilna ghetto; there was almost no theft, extraordinary when the terribly crowded conditions are taken into account. A public library was set up at 6 Strashun Street, and it housed 45,000 volumes rescued from the consolidation and closing of libraries under the Soviets and from confiscation and transfer to Germany when the ghetto was erected. The ghetto’s inhabitants were asked to donate any books that they still had in their possession, and Kovner donated the books that had belonged to Hashomer Hatzair. Of the population of 20,000 Jews in the ghetto, 2,500 were registered readers, and during the summer of 1942, the library had 5,000 visitors a month. At the end of the year there was a celebration in the ghetto theater to commemorate the 100,000th book being borrowed from the library, which meant that during one year each person had read an average of five books. The library was run by Herman Kruk, a librarian and Bund activist and a ghetto historian who was one of its most prominent intellectuals. The library building also housed an archive and a department for scientific activity headed by Zelik Kalmanovitch, who was greatly admired and

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was, before the ghetto’s establishment, one of the heads of the YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, known for its scholarly output. Despite a public debate as to whether or not “one can have a theater in a graveyard” and whether or not the Judenrat was attempting to dull public awareness of reality and impending dangers, an orchestra was founded, as were a theater, two choral groups (one Yiddish, the other Hebrew), and a music school with 100 students, to say nothing of two elementary schools and a four-class high school. In time the arguments were overcome, and the theater and orchestra attracted large audiences, which sometimes bought tickets for charitable purposes, and thousands came for evenings to hear original works performed. Plays translated by Avraham Sutzkever were performed, and his songs were copied, read, and sung. The Cultural Department pasted posters on the walls inviting people to lectures on mass psychology and to group discussions on the natural and social sciences. In the interim periods between Aktionen, long lines of readers waited at the library doors, and “many began to study there on a permanent basis.”18 Performances and lectures were organized on Sunday mornings for workers who came home late at night. All those activities were the handiwork of a population that was for the most part hungry and tired, dressed in rags, and mourning its dead, and today one can only ask where they found the strength and whether it was the influence of the history of Jewish Vilna and whether at any time in human history anyone had undergone and withstood what the Jews in the ghettos had. Kovner wrote about it all with a mixture of admiration and scorn. He admired the terrific life force that rid itself of old illnesses and depressions. When the first shock of the ghetto had passed, he saw his mother decorate the melina with curtains, as though there were windows there. “Her hair was combed and her clothes mended . . . and to her eyes, especially to her eyes returned something of their old beauty and sparkle” (Scrolls of Testament, p. 114). And she, who had always suffered from infirmities of all kinds, cried out of guilt at her returning strength and at the life she continued living for herself, despite the fact that part of the family had already been killed. Time went by. In July 1942 Jacob Gens, the police chief, was appointed by Franz Murer as the “ghetto representative,” and thus he be-

The Underground

came, officially at least, its ruler, after having undermined, with German blessing, the former head of the Judenrat. Gens, who had been an officer in the Lithuanian army and was married to a Lithuanian woman, could easily have been assimilated among his comrades in arms. However, he divorced his wife so she would not have to share his fate, left their daughter in her keeping, and entered the ghetto. He was driven to the role of ghetto representative by a strong ambition to become a leader at that difficult time, by having leadership qualities and the strong Jewish-national emotions of a Beitar member, and by being an officer trained to excellence in carrying out missions. Thus the police became a decisive factor in the ghetto. Salk Dessler, Gens’s deputy, was in no uncertain terms a servant of the Germans, leading a life of debauchery with his cronies and uninterested in public matters. One wonders whether Gens, having realized Dessler was vile and utterly worthless, kept him as deputy so that he could be the target for the ghetto’s loathing or whether he was forced by the Germans to leave him in place.19 Most of the policemen in Vilna, with the exception of those who belonged to youth movements (chiefly Beitar) and of course with the exception of underground members who had been planted in the ranks of the police force, were drunk with the power they thought they had, and some of them acted with great cruelty. As early as the first Aktionen they helped remove people from their hiding places, and later, when daily life had become routine, they joined the groups that made people’s lives miserable, such as the gate guard, which was a ghetto nightmare.20 Such were the conditions under which the underground was organized, aware that what they stood for was unwelcome and contradicted the illusions the ghetto was fabricating for itself. First the FPO had to make sure the underground members worked or were at least registered at a workplace, so as to not arouse suspicion. They did their best to find jobs that would aid the underground in some way: Wittenberg worked as a ticket taker at the bathhouse, where it was only natural for him to meet almost everyone. When Gens was appointed chief of police, Glazman resigned as his assistant and, taking the matter under advisement with the underground, became head of the housing department, enabling him to find places to live and hide. Kovner said of himself

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that he was “illegal within the ghetto. I did not work, and it is possible I was viewed as a parasite, because anyone who did not work ate the bread earned by someone else. I never had a ration booklet or anything else.”21 Grossman, Borowska, Boraks, and others also did not work, devoting all their time and energy to the underground. Members who worked outside the ghetto had other tasks to perform as well. ­Korczak, Michael Kovner, and Sutzkever and his friend, the author Shmerke Kaczerginski, who was also close to the ghetto Communists, worked in the YIVO building, which was left outside the ghetto. By virtue of its prewar treasures, Vilna became the center to which the Germans took the Jewish materials and libraries stolen and looted from other Jewish communities for later shipment to Germany. It pained the Jews to see the Jerusalem of Lithuania plundered of precious materials, and it was horrifying to see the leather bindings and parchment pages of Bibles turn into boots. The YIVO workers were scornfully called the Paper Brigade by the rest of the ghetto because at work they were not beaten, as was customary, but they also could not obtain food. They smuggled documents, as well as certificates and pictures of special value, and hid them in the ghetto and sometimes in the YIVO attic. Contacts were made with non-Jewish acquaintances who also hid some of the material, such as Ona Simaite, a Vilna university librarian, and others who sold weapons to the Paper Brigade to be smuggled into the ghetto for the underground.22 Most of the FPO members performed their daily labors and at the same time organized themselves into an underground. They wanted to increase their numbers, but new members had to be carefully examined, and “they were put to the test, undergoing exhaustive personal interviews and having to prove their bravery by disappearing for three nights, . . . transmitting an announcement, breaking the curfew to pass information, going through holes in walls and across roofs,” according to Kovner, whose responsibility it was to evaluate recruits.23 Those rejected, both youth movement members and especially nonorganized youngsters, have not forgotten the insult to this day, although many did not take into consideration that accepting young and inexperienced members, sometimes the only providers of their families, would endanger them and the ghetto at large.

The Underground

In the middle of 1942, after about half a year of activity, the movement groups of three became underground “Fives,” with each such group composed of members of different movements. The Vilna ghetto was the only place where an underground was formed that was not composed of separate groups but rather had members of the various movements fully integrated into each Five. The formation of the Fives was the result of the trust that the underground’s youth movements and party members had in each other, especially between their representatives at the underground’s headquarters and the central activists. “We became good friends,” “It wasn’t important which movement you came from,” “We relied on one another,” said those who lived through the war as partisans, and over the years they have not changed their testimonies, even if there are differences of opinion and grudges regarding other issues and even if they do belong to different political parties. According to Kempner and Borowska, especially close friendly relations were formed between Kovner, Wittenberg, and Glazman, who were the chiefs of staff, and between those three and Borowska, Kaplinski, and Madeysker, each of whom, in his or her own way, was an extraordinary personality. “It wasn’t easy for Abba to form close relationships,” said Kempner, “and those formed during the days of the underground were among the deepest and most meaningful in his life.”24 And he lost them all. Without a doubt Kovner contributed to the situation with his total dedication and by fostering close relationships among the members of the Fives. He was certain that belonging to the underground made all its members party to a common secret, separated them from the masses in the ghetto, and gave them “a sense of internal calm and serenity of the sort only found among the faithful. . . . They were radiant and lucid” (Scrolls of Testimony, p. 120). Life was worth living again, wrote Hasia Taubes, then a young Hashomer Hatzair member, and “we felt we had conquered the humiliation and the feeling of helplessness.”25 In the ghetto Kovner lived with other Hashomer Hatzair members in what they called a shituf, a commune, and those who worked shared what little they had with the others, Kovner among them. Dozens of others passed through every day: from younger members to arms instructors and those responsible for hiding weapons,

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to members who came to renew relationships that had been broken off and those who came for evenings of lectures and group singing or to warm themselves in the atmosphere of friendship and mutual aid. According to Kempner, “If the commune was a home it was thanks to Ruzka Korczak.” Not far from them, on the opposite side of the narrow street, lived the Kovner family: the mother, brothers Michael and Genia, and Genia’s wife Neuta and their young daughter, who had been brought back from the convent by Michael. Rosa worked her magic in the kitchen and cooked for the commune’s members as well, feeding them almost daily. They called the pot they carried from her house to the commune “the children’s pot,” but there was never enough to eat. Michael was responsible for weighing and rationing the bread. “I still remember how each of us wanted to give the other more,” wrote Grossman. “Ruzka, Vitka, Abba and Edek cheated when they weighed so that the others would get more.”26 The underground continued to grow and take shape, and the number of Fives slowly increased. Four groups constituted a division, and five or six divisions, that is, about 100–120 individuals, constituted a squadron, and all together there were about 250 in two squadrons. Glazman commanded one squadron and Kovner the other. The staff, which included Reznik and Chwojnik, with Wittenberg at the head, started a number of other units, for arms instruction, planting mines, machine gunners and grenade throwers, communications, and intelligence.27 The couriers transmitted messages, especially from headquarters to the various units, about meetings of the Fives. In the tiny ghetto it was almost impossible for many inhabitants to meet at once, and certainly not on a permanent basis; the system of groups composed of youth movement members meant that one group did not necessarily know who was in another group. Members have stated that after they immigrated to Eretz Israel, they met others from Vilna who had been in the underground whom they had never seen before. Glazman founded a special unit in order to gather information from key officials in the ghetto and then to follow the development and actions of the other underground groups. It was also decided that the unit’s members, especially the women, would work for Germans and Lithuanians to find the answers to the two most urgent questions of the day: What

The Underground

would the ghetto’s fate be, and more important, when would its fate be decided? One of the duties of the Special Unit was to inform the underground of the names of agents, informers, and agents provocateurs within the ghetto, their addresses, and descriptions, so that they might be identified and followed. Glazman, who had served in the Lithuanian army and was responsible for training, gave a course to prepare members with a military background as instructors, and they became a training unit themselves, giving lectures and practical instruction in various secret places in the ghetto.28 Kovner wrote a daily information sheet called a “political bulletin” by him and the “Secret Front Communication” by underground members. The sheet was duplicated and distributed by Rachel Markowicz, who was a sort of headquarters office manager. The bulletin included news from the front as received by the radio kept in a cave at 3 Street of the Carmelites or in the hospital basement. One of the most prominent bulletins was a radio broadcast by Swit, the Polish Underground in London: “The Warsaw ghetto has fallen in battle!” recorded in April 1943 and distributed among the members with Kovner’s addition, ­Gloria ­victis, “Glory to the conquered.” (In his little notebook Kovner wrote in Yiddish, “Brave Jews. Warsaw ghetto. Gone!”) Stalin’s orders of the day were distributed in the bulletin, and there was great anxiety in the summer of 1942—“The Germans are at the gates of Eretz Israel!”—and great joy when the Germans were defeated at Stalingrad. The order of the day for June 30, 1943, showed how important the bulletin was to its readers; it gave encouragement to those cut off from the rest of the world, shielded them from the self-assured German newspapers, and reminded them of the constant precautions that had to be taken. One bulletin read, “N. W.’s group, 6-20, which carelessly left the bulletin where the lecture was held, will be deprived of the right to receive it for a period of two weeks beginning today, and a notice of same has been sent to all members of the organization.”29 The order, and others, was signed by Kovner using his underground name, Uri. Some of the bulletins were preserved and made their way to archives in Eretz Israel. Kovner wrote the daily page, the order of the day, the rules and regulations, and leaflets prepared for special occasions. He edited additional versions of the manifesto, some of which were translated into Polish

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and Lithuanian and seemingly written by non-Jewish anti-Nazi organizations, in which he called on the local population to rise up against the Germans. “Death to the invaders!” his manifestos called to the “Polish brothers.” The revised manifestos were distributed in the city at night by ghetto youths—Liza Magun was responsible for communications with the city—and a printing press was set up outside the ghetto.30 During the year and a half that the underground was active, its structure improved and its numbers grew until in the summer of 1943 it numbered between 250 and 300 men and women. In addition, there were those whom Kovner called the “periphery,” individuals who for various reasons either did not or were not allowed to join the organization itself but who could be trusted to fight when the time came, and some of them had weapons that they had obtained for themselves; they were also about 250 or 300 strong.31 While the structure of the underground was being defined, its members dealt with other issues as well, such as obtaining weapons and training with them, sabotaging German factories and equipment, most importantly railroads, creating ties with non-Jewish elements and with other ghettos, and crystallizing the FPO’s ideology. Kovner wrote down, on small pages as was his wont, the underground’s activities, titling the notes “everyday labor.” A few days after the meeting at which the underground was founded, the first pistol made its way into the ghetto, stolen by members who worked in a large arms and ammunitions depot set up by the Germans in Vilna’s suburbs. The underground started to accumulate arms on a modest scale, and members proved themselves ready to be caught and tortured without revealing secrets, especially names. Liza Magun was shot at Ponar after being brutally tortured. “Dear Abba,” she wrote in a note smuggled out of the Gestapo prison, “I am calm. I know what I am giving my life for. I am sure you are doing everything you can to effect my release.” The slogan used to call members in to report in emergencies became Liza ruft, “Liza is calling.” Baruch Goldstein, an FPO member, stole parts for a machine gun, assembled it in the ghetto, and named it after her. Kovner would use the same practice in the Givati Brigade during Israel’s War of Independence. “All during the war,” he confessed, “my own personal problem, which plagued me day and night, even in my dreams, was how I would stand up under torture. . . . I never heard

The Underground

of anyone who broke down. It still amazes me.”32 He seemed to be almost jealous of those who stood the test and never knew if he himself would stand firm or crack, and at the same time he felt weighed down by an endless sense of responsibility and guilt, even years later, at having been one of the founders of an organization that risked the lives of its members to such an extent. Kovner was in awe of the way the members related to the “holy battle” and of the way he himself felt about the “dark, sacred steel of our first gun.” The words sacred and holy were often repeated when both Kovner and other members of the underground spoke about their weapons, as was the phrase “leaving slavery behind and becoming free,” a reference to the biblical Exodus from Egypt. Just as the youth movements’ single-minded devotion to togetherness and changing the world had once replaced religion, the underground provided the youths who had grown up on romantic revolutionary literature, public responsibility, and national image with an outlet for their yearnings. Their regard for weapons was almost religious, and acquiring them became a symbol of the possibility of being the master of one’s fate and overcoming difficulties, which is, in fact, the essence of both Zionism and of the Israeli attitude toward the acquisition of armaments. Kovner made it a point to call the members of the underground kempfer (“warriors” in Yiddish).33 By the summer of 1943 a few dozen pistols had been collected along with some rifles, hand grenades, and submachine guns. The arms had been stolen from the Germans or bought from the local population, which had weapons left by the Poles at the outbreak of the war and the Soviets when they retreated. All kinds of stories were told in Lithuania and the ghetto about arms caches, and according to one of them, Gens knew where one was. The money to purchase arms came from the FPO, “which divested itself of all its possessions with holy devotion: money, a good dress, a watch, a wedding ring—the last souvenirs of wives and parents who had been murdered. It reminded them of Biblical times when the Israelites in the desert divested themselves of all their jewels and ornaments to build the Tabernacle.” Money was also raised through the sale of stolen German equipment and by forging and selling identity cards. There were also coins found in the Gestapo building where the

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clothing of those murdered at Ponar was sorted. That, wrote Grossman, was “loathsome money.”34 In addition to arms brought in from outside the ghetto, the underground manufactured its own hand grenades and Molotov cocktails and repaired, cleaned, refurbished, and produced missing parts. Instruction manuals from the YIVO library brought by members of the Paper Brigade taught them how to manufacture and operate bombs and mines. From time to time Kovner gave exact instructions for the care of weapons during training and for their storage afterward, and he memorized the series of pamphlets called “The Soviet Commander,” which dealt with strategy and leadership. The main problem was not acquiring weapons but getting them in through the checks at the gate and then hiding them in places where they would be both accessible on short notice and hidden from ghetto eyes. It was obvious that the consequences would be disastrous if a weapon were discovered. “Anyone who has not been in a ghetto will never understand the fear created by collective responsibility. . . . Are we entitled to endanger the lives of thousands of the last Jews if by chance we should be detected carrying a weapon? Fully aware of the responsibility we take upon ourselves, our answer is yes, we are entitled, we are obligated,” wrote Kovner.35 Weapons were hidden in four different sites and had to be moved periodically lest they be discovered. Caution paid off, however, and only one instance was documented in which someone was caught. Ghetto Jews were also never accused of taking part in sabotage outside the ghetto. The efforts to obtain weapons involved sabotaging German equipment and facilities, especially because it was done in the same slave labor places. The warehouse from which Baruch Goldstein stole two machine guns was the same in which a group of underground workers sabotaged parts of dozens of machine guns and hundreds of tanks sent to the Russian front. They also sabotaged motors and cannons, removed screws from planes, and cut telephone lines. Kovner distributed detailed instructions regarding sabotage and opportunities for extending it. The most famous act of sabotage was the derailing of a German train carrying weapons and soldiers, the first such act carried out in Lithuania, whether by Jews or gentiles. In early June 1942, about half a year after the underground was established, Kovner hinself prepared a mine

The Underground

The mine produced by Kovner by which a German train was derailed for the first time in Europe, 1942. Courtesy of the Kovner family.

a­ ccording to instructions found in a YIVO manual. He read the manual from cover to cover and constructed an amateur mine.36 Kempner made many trips between the ghetto and the railroad line looking for the best place to plant the mine. She went disguised as a blond peasant and carried newly forged papers. The success of the mission depended on finding a suitable place, because many of the plants and factories where the Jews worked were near the railroad track, and it was out of the question that they come under suspicion. In addition, the underground had no information regarding the train schedules or the extent of their security arrangements, and Kempner spent many nights in nearby groves of trees, observing. On June 8, 1942, she went out again (this time with two members of the FPO), and the train was blown up and they escaped back to the ghetto. The underground held a party, and Wittenberg gave a speech. No one suspected the Jews of being behind the explosion, but it looked suspicious: A train had been derailed and there were no Soviet partisans in the area? Korczak and Kempner—her legs wounded—sat next to one another. Korczak asked what Kempner had been thinking about during those long nights, alone in the forest, and Kempner replied, “To execute the mission and not to fall into their hands alive: I had

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no cyanide.” Poet Hishke Glik wrote a poem in Yiddish about her, the girl with the velvet skin, leaving the forest exhausted, snow on her hair and a weapon in her hands, bringing a little victory “for our new, free generation.”37 Half a year later, on New Year’s Eve 1942, Kovner and Rachel Markowicz blew up another train, and there were others that were derailed. When a train carried Wehrmacht soldiers who had done nothing to the ghetto and who were on their way to the Russian front, their own nightmare, and the cries of the wounded could be heard and at heart FPO members felt guilty, someone would cry out, “In return for Ponar!” to lift their spirits and remind them of their goals. “I never felt guilty,” said Kempner. “I did whatever I could. Abba always felt guilty,” and he wrote about it openly: “And there was no one on earth like Saul, innocent and haunted by feelings of guilt, laid upon his heart like a hot stone,” but he never wrote why.38 Once the FPO had been established and its members began to acquire arms, train, and carry out acts of sabotage, they had to make connections and decide what their position would be regarding the ghetto population, the Judenrat and the police, and Jewish and nonJewish elements outside the ghetto. Relations with the ghetto population were primarily influenced by the paradox of the need to conduct underground affairs in absolute secrecy and the desire to represent the ghetto and to fight its fight, a struggle that would be a national act, “the struggle of a people for its honor.” To that end they had to ascertain what the opinion-making intelligentsia were thinking, particularly those not identified with the Judenrat and certainly not with the police. The moral support of Zelik Kalmanovitch was especially important to them, called as he was “the prophet of the ghetto.” He was a member of the YIVO board of directors and edited its periodical, performing his research in Judaic studies as though it were holy. His son, Shalom Lurie, had emigrated to Eretz Israel in 1938, and Kal­ manovitch had a warm spot for the country and its settlements. “The Germans cannot harm me,” he used to tell people in the ghetto. “I have a son in Eretz Israel!”39 Kovner admired Kalmanovitch and wished to see himself in the same light, as a self-designated Jewish morality teacher, needing nei-

The Underground

ther authorization nor formal academic degrees. However, despite his admiration and their common background, at a meeting initiated by Kovner it became clear that there was an unbridgeable gulf between them. Kalmanovitch thought, or at least hoped, that the period of stability that began in the ghetto early in 1942 would continue and prove itself a period of calm and a return to life. In no way did he think that the Jewish people had already been defeated because they were “the people to whom God had revealed Himself, from whom God had originated to conquer the world.” In April 1942, still confined in the ghetto, Kalmanovitch wrote that “history has already proved that the triangle whose sides were the Jewish people, moral law and the Creator are a reality which has withstood innumerable tests,” and therefore, “could anyone entertain doubt as to which side is the stronger? . . . The valor of the Jewish people has not been and cannot be defeated.” 40 Kalmanovitch told Kovner in no uncertain terms that he did not agree with the underground’s policies, feeling that extreme actions were liable to bring about a catastrophe. If they were determined to fight, they should leave for the forests one by one and not endanger anyone else. “The ghetto should live as long as possible with as much strength as possible,” said Kalmanovitch.41 Kovner was profoundly disappointed and greatly at odds with himself. He was utterly convinced that the destruction of those left was merely a matter of time, but what if the esteemed Kalmanovitch, who was old enough to be his father, was right? Years later Kovner wrote that, had he been ten years older at the time, Kalmanovitch would have convinced him. When Nathan Alterman, a poet whose opinions carried a lot of weight, asked Kovner, on their meeting in Eretz Israel in 1945, “whether inside, in his innermost being, there was a piece of Kalmanovitch, arguing and demanding,” Kovner answered, “with all clarity and all strength—Yes.” 42 Indeed, after Kalmanovitch had been sent to the camps in Estonia, beaten and tortured to death, Kruk found his diary and hid it in the ghetto library. When the war ended, the partisans returned to Vilna and Sutzkever found the diary and sent it to YIVO in New York. When it was translated from the original, almost biblical Hebrew into Yiddish in the early 1950s and published in New York, Kalmanovitch’s opinions became evident. “Young boys . . . have defiled the name of God . . .

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[and] the attempt to equip themselves with weapons is the fruit of that defilement. It is the fruit of the exhaustion of all thought . . . and of the desire to live. . . . [They are] cowards and confused thinkers . . . [and] bring shame on the tens of thousands who have died.”43 Nevertheless, and despite the public disputes that arose and notwithstanding the disappointment Kovner felt at Kalmanovitch’s not having understood the spirit coursing through the underground, Kovner was still the moving force behind the publication of the diary in Israel in its original Hebrew. It was issued by Moreshet, a publishing house identified with the Hashomer Hatzair fighters in the ghettos. “It was a noble act on Kovner’s part,” says Israel Gutman today, even if twenty-five years have passed since its publication in New York. Kovner and Korczak worked together on clarifications and footnotes, and Lurie prepared the manuscript and wrote a profound and deeply moving foreword about his father.44 Kovner later painted a picture of his last moment in the ghetto: It was empty, and he was the last one to enter a manhole leading to the sewer. Just before he did, his eyes passed over the city, one last look before leaving it forever, and there was Kalmanovitch on the empty street, walking to where the Jews were taken, clutching a book to his chest. There were just the two of them, “for only if there are two witnesses will the scroll of the destruction of the Temple be included in the Book of Chronicles” (Scrolls of Testimony, p. 158). Two witnesses, because there was not only one answer. After the failure of the discussion between Kovner and Kalmanovitch, which had been meant to open a channel to the ghetto population, efforts were concentrated on finding connections outside. The underground had begun its career “without a god, without a king, without a close friend,” according to Kovner.45 Outside there was still no organization they could contact, with the exception of the Armia Krajowa (AK), the nationalistic Polish underground directed by the Polish government in exile in London. Kovner was in contact with the AK for almost two months, especially with an eye to obtaining weapons. However, the AK was right-wing and anti-Semitic and regarded the FPO as a Communist underground, and explanations were to no avail. Not only was contact

The Underground

broken off, but later, when the Jews left the ghetto for the forests and hiding places, many were murdered by nationalistic Poles.46 In the summer of 1942, six Lithuanian Communists born in the Vilna area (and carrying a radio) parachuted in and set up camp in the Rudniki forests, south of Vilna. They were the FPO’s first contact with Moscow, however indirect it might have been. After a while the Lithuanians told the FPO that partisan headquarters in Moscow recognized the FPO and its aims and considered them part of the general Soviet partisan movement. The FPO was to step up collecting intelligence and carrying out acts of sabotage, and, most important, a group of its men would work with the Lithuanians and set up a partisan base in the forest where they could train. Still, the FPO, Kovner especially, insisted that their first and only objective was to fight in the ghetto.47 For a few weeks FPO members collected intelligence, which was transmitted to Moscow: troop movements, trains, facilities, and units posted to Vilna. Some members even changed places of work to be able to obtain more information and to facilitate contact between the Lithuanians and the Polish Communists. However, the small group was exposed and caught before it managed to give the FPO what it had promised, and wireless communications between them and the partisan command were broken off.48 In September 1942, nine months after its inception, the underground again found itself isolated from the outside world. Headquarters chose two young women, Sonia Madeysker and Cesia Rosenberg, to cross the lines near Velikiye-Luki, where a break in the front had been noted and active partisan units could help them. Their mission was to inform Moscow, if they could make their way there, or at least the Soviet command beyond the front lines about the destruction of European Jewry, about Ponar and the FPO, and to transmit the information they had collected. The trip was Kovner’s pet idea. He prepared the travel documents and the information, all written in code in tiny handwriting on thin paper. Inside their clothing they sewed information about Ponar, the underground and its activities, and most important, “a cry for help, for arms.” Kovner decided on the route and prepared the cover stories and made the two women learn everything by heart. When Rosenberg was asked whether she thought it was an act bordering on the insane to send two young women, despite their “Aryan”

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appearance, to cross the front lines hundreds of kilometers away, she said that in the first place, perhaps even Kovner though it was mad, but they could only choose between one death or another, “so that dying on the way to Moscow had no particular significance.” In the second place, she said, from the time she presented herself to Wittenberg, who gave her the mission, she “walked around as though [she] had sprouted wings,” excited and grateful for the trust placed in her. The dangers of the trip worried her less than whether or not Moscow would understand what destruction meant and what the aims of the FPO were. In the third place, there was the weight of Kovner’s personality. The underground was in awe of Wittenberg, who was older and more experienced, and actually in awe of all those who had underground experience, such as Madeysker. But members “felt differently about Kovner. . . . Intellectually and ideologically he had a most unusual position. . . . His influence was different.” Kovner shook Madeysker’s hand before she left—“He was always radiating warmth when he sent us out”—and told her that they had thought to equip them with a compass and cyanide, but finally decided against it.49 Madeysker and Rosenberg set out, fell into the hands of the Germans, and were released thanks to their acting abilities; they tried to penetrate the region held by the partisans, and, having crossed the ­Velikiye-Luki, heard sounds of gunfire from the front. They again fell into German hands and were sent back to Vilna, where they escaped from their escorts and returned to the ghetto, terribly disappointed at having failed after being so close to the break in the front. They told their story at FPO headquarters, the first time they had seen all the commanders together. Rosenberg seemed less sorry about having failed in her mission than at having disappointed Kovner. He broke the silence when they had finished and spoke with great feeling about their courage and determination. “The chances were very slim, almost non-existent, but the temptation to try was enormous! The temptation to shatter the isolation, arrive in Moscow and from there reveal to the whole world the terrible truth about what was going on inside the ghetto walls, shock the enlightened countries, cry out for help. The miracle did not occur, but we celebrate the miracle of your return,” because previous missions had cost comrades’ lives. That is what she remembered him as having said.50

The Underground

In retrospect, perhaps it was just as well that the messengers did not reach Moscow; the underground could continue deluding itself that the Kremlin would be shocked into action and that help would be on the way. In January of that year, 1942, Stanislaw Molotov, then the USSR’s foreign minister, send a missive to London that dealt with, among other issues, German acts of cruelty carried out within the borders of the Soviet Union in general and those directed against the Jewish population in particular. Those crowded together in the underground headquarters at 12 Strashun Street in Vilna had no knowledge that the missive had no connection whatsoever to Stalin’s attitude toward the Jews, and they certainly could not know (and had they known, would not have wanted to believe) that their fate was on neither Moscow’s agenda nor conscience. The inherent irony was tragic, if not terrible: The underground was willing to sacrifice its members, young women and good comrades, in the mistaken belief that the Allies, and especially the power closest to their hearts, did not know what their situation was and that once they knew, they would act accordingly. When Moscow was later sent a detailed report from the forests about the “martyrdom of the Vilna ghetto,” it did not even send confirmation of receipt, and the partisans received no response from any level of the government.51 They spent six more months isolated in the ghetto until the Soviet partisans arrived in the region near Vilna, and contact was made in the spring of 1943. The underground not only believed in the Soviet Union and its attitude toward human beings and their suffering but also invested enormous effort in aiding the families of Soviet officers trapped in Vilna when the Germans invaded and Soviet captives tortured by the Germans. Their physical condition was awful; their shoes were rags wrapped around their feet, and in a stupor they slumped off to slave labor, starving, bent, and guarded by Germans. The underground provided them with forged documents, gave them accurate information about the front, and helped them escape from the camps; the non­Jewish Communists did not dare help them. In his “everyday labor” notes Kovner detailed the help given them and how in the forest they later met with some of those they had rescued.52 The underground tried to contact other ghettos. The FPO in Vilna (where the manifesto had been written and the idea of rebellion born

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and where the prototype underground organization uniting the various political forces had been formed) considered itself responsible— and Kovner in particular saw himself responsible—for communicating those ideas to the other ghettos. When Grossman went to Bialystok in February 1942 as an FPO emissary, she carried the manifesto and a letter from Wittenberg to a Communist activist requesting that the Communists join a united front. However, neither the model for unity nor the one for organization was accepted, not there and not in Warsaw, reported Grossman, Boraks, and Entin, who had been there until March. In any case, Grossman went out again in April 1942 to organize an underground in Bialystok, this time with Boraks, who followed his heart, despite Kovner’s fierce objection—he did not want to lose the two of them. Another delegation was sent to Warsaw with a second manifesto, basically the same as the first but stressing that Jews were being murdered in many places. In particular, the revised manifesto warned against the illusion that economic considerations would save the ghettos. Kovner reiterated the central point of German policy: that their final goal was the annihilation of the Jews and that economic considerations might delay it for a short time but would never override it. He wrote and sent the manifesto during a time of relative quiet in the ghetto, when it was easier for the inhabitants to think they could save their lives by working.53 The members of the delegation were two sisters, Sara and Rushka Zilber, and Entin, all of whom were caught and killed. In June 1942, contact was made through Adamowicz with the Kovno ghetto, and after that with the ghetto in Shavli, greatly influencing the establishment of underground organizations there as well.54 Contact with Warsaw and Bialystok was cut off in the fall of 1942 after the delegation had been captured, mainly because the annihilation of the Jews had begun in both Warsaw and the General Government, the area in central Poland occupied by Germany. It was no longer necessary to inform the Jews of what had already been made obvious. Moreover, in various unconnected places, said Kovner, young people had all reached the same conclusion, because they had been educated for self-realization, sacrifice, mutual responsibility, and the renunciation of the individual.55 He was referring to an identical conclusion reached in many places at the moment of mass destruction—there were about fifty

The Underground

locations where Jews took up arms of all kinds—whereas previously each place and movement had reacted according to its own lights. Thus there was no longer the need for—or the possibility of maintaining—links between the ghettos, and each was closed off and left to its own fate. In the meantime, the Second Struggle Group that had come together toward the end of 1942 strengthened its base and increased its ranks. It was joined by other groups that had arrived in the Vilna ghetto from the camps and from other ghettos that had been obliterated, such as the group of Akiva members from Grodno, led by Moshe Kalchheim. Kalchheim had spent a great deal of time in the forests before arriving at the Vilna ghetto and was not afraid of being in the open, whereas the ghetto seemed like a cage to him, strangling its inhabitants and choking them with feelings of impotence and helplessness. Scheinbaum’s able leadership was willingly accepted by all the newcomers. The various groups either brought arms with them or bought weapons and trained using them. In the summer of 1943 the Second Struggle Group had close to 200 members, male and female, and was composed of various subgroups whose leadership made up the active nucleus, about 35 in number.56 It was no wonder that the Second Struggle Group’s rapid growth, especially during the winter of 1942 and the spring and summer of 1943, worried the FPO to no end, and the FPO leadership did its best to prevent the group’s further development. The complex relations between the two organizations should be viewed first in the light of their relationship with the Judenrat, especially with Gens, and second in light of the opportunity, which first arose in 1943, of leaving for the forests. Differences of opinion regarding fighting priorities separated the two organizations, and it was not just the FPO’s commitment to secrecy that prevented them from accepting every applicant; it was the feelings of superiority and the high-register rhetoric radiated by Kovner and his comrades (even if no intentional slight were meant), as later reported by survivors of the Second Struggle Group. Most of the 20,000-strong ghetto population knew nothing about the underground organizations until the middle of 1943. Gens knew and had had personal relations with their members before they were established, especially with Communists such as Wittenberg and Borowska,

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when he still thought the war would be won by the Soviets and their allies. From its inception, Gens coexisted with the underground. He wanted a working ghetto, utilitarian from the German point of view, whereas the FPO wanted to fight only when it was absolutely certain that the end had come, and they prepared for that moment in the interim. Dr. Abrasha Weinrib, director of the ghetto hospital, had known Gens well before the ghetto had been established. Gens would stretch out on Weinrib’s sofa, often drunk or florid from the stress of his burden, and openly speak of his dilemma about going into the forests and when and about what, in fact, resistance meant; he dreamt of Beitar and Masada, two places of Jewish sacrifice and suicide during the ­Roman rule of Judea; and exuding alcohol fumes, he would repeat that there was “no future in the ghetto, no future in the ghetto.” Eventually he had no illusions left regarding Germany’s goals and strove only to slow down the process of destruction. He knew, he admitted, that his influence ended at the ghetto gate, at Rudniki Street; on the other side he was as helpless as any other Jew. Gens did not hide from Weinrib his connection with the underground command, and he knew the use that they, especially Kovner, made of the hospital basement, where they hid men, a radio, and other equipment, and he knew a great deal about underground weapons and training but did not prevent any of it.57 Gens felt that his inclination, as an officer and member of Beitar, to join the underground contradicted his obligations to the ghetto. However, he always said that once the ghetto’s end seemed close at hand, he would remove large quantities of arms from a hiding place known to him and fight side by side with the youth. Coexistence was possible so long as the conditions that created it still existed. As soon as the Germans recommenced Aktionen, first in the cities and towns of Lithuania and White Russia but not yet in Vilna, and as soon as Gens was appointed a kind of general director for the entire Vilna area at the end of the summer of 1942, the conflict of interests began. When the uniformed ghetto police force left the Vilna ghetto for other, smaller ones, the underground remained quiet. However, when the police went, in October, to collect the old and sick from the Oshmyany ghetto—admittedly after a long series of negotiations with the Germans to reduce the number—to hand them over to the Germans

The Underground

and Lithuanians, Liza Magun was sent to warn them. The Oshmyany population did not trust her, and the Vilna ghetto, including Kalmanovitch, in retrospect and heartbroken, nevertheless agreed with Gens’s actions. The differences between the ghetto and the underground began to sharpen despite the fact that Vilna already knew of Aktionen in White Russia, and it was obvious the end was near. Kovner wrote the names of the towns and camps in his little pocket diary. At the end of October 1942 Glazman refused to conduct a similar Aktion in Swie˛ ciany and was arrested and detained in the ghetto jail, released through the efforts of Wittenberg and Borowska (with whom Gens was careful to maintain good relations); he was fired and sent to a work camp. It was the first skirmish between Gens and a member of the underground command, still unknown to the ghetto population, and it did not yet turn into a skirmish between Gens and the underground in general.58 Thus 1942 drew to a close. Kovner’s little pocket diary, its sparseness notwithstanding, reflected the weakening of ghetto spirit and the intensification of the efforts of the Jewish police and of German policy. In November Kovner wrote, “What is happening in Grodno, in December, Blood, blood, blood.” In February 1943, Kovner wrote another list of place names, and in March, he scribbled, “The heavens have clouded over.” In the spring it was clear the seemingly quiet period of a year and four months after the Aktionen of the winter of 1941 was over and that the end of the ghetto was only a matter of time: Blood. Blood. Blood.

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S ev e n   The Wittenberg Affair “On the senseless night of July 16” March–September 1943

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“On July 16, 1943, the commander of the Vilna ghetto underground, Yitzhak Wittenberg, acceded to Gestapo demands and surrendered himself to his killers to save the ghetto from collective punishment.” Kovner added this comment to a poem he wrote in 1986 while being treated for throat cancer in a New York hospital. It is the only poem he ever dedicated entirely to Wittenberg, and in the one sentence comment he tried, toward the end of his life, to write finis to the incident. “For forty-three years, the night of July 16,” Kovner tossed and turned in bed. He wept and cried out not only on the anniversaries of the death of Wittenberg, the underground’s commander, in the cellars of the Gestapo, again and again going over the events, but also because he had had many “July 16 nights” during the forty-three years before he wrote the poem. The weeping went undocumented, he said, because he never wrote his version of the Holocaust, including the Wittenberg affair. Two things are evident from the poem and the comment. First, Wittenberg was not betrayed: not by the inhabitants of the ghetto, not by the underground, not by the Communist Party in Vilna, not by the Communist cell in the ghetto, not by Jacob Gens, and not even by Salk Dessler. He surrendered of his own volition. Second, the title of the poem, “This Day, the 16th of July” (Sloan Kettering, p. 77), and its last lines relate to the events of July 15 and 16, 1943, which was a month and a half before the Aktionen that emptied the Vilna ghetto. Would the ghetto have been destroyed at that time in any case, with no connection to the Wittenberg affair? Did Wittenberg choose to relieve himself of the awful responsibility as commander early, in case the Germans decided to destroy the ghetto because he had not surrendered to them?

The Wittenberg Affair

“Life in a ghetto is a series of little respites between surges of panic,” said Kovner.1 In February 1943 the Germans suffered a decisive defeat at Stalingrad, and the front slowly moved westward. As they retreated, the Germans destroyed the Jewish population concentrations still extant. They blamed the Jews who had escaped the final stages of annihilation for the increase in Soviet partisan strength and terrorized the Lithuanian population even more than before, further limiting the opportunities for Jewish movement and organization. The Lithuanians, in an attempt to change their image as cold-blooded barbaric murderers, blamed the Poles for the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. Both Lithuanians and Poles accused the Jews of helping the Soviets to kill, exile, and enslave them.2 The trap was closing on the remaining Jews wherever they turned. Their only hope was that the advancing Red Army would arrive before the Germans could leave Eastern Europe entirely empty of Jews. At the beginning of March 1943 it was rumored that all the smaller ghettos and forced labor camps in the Vilna region, of which Gens was in charge, would be destroyed. At the same time news came of an ­Aktion at the Grodno ghetto, and as if to turn the clock back to the days of the first Aktionen in 1941, new certificates were distributed in the Vilna ghetto.3 Gens’s efforts to convince the population that they were in no danger were of little avail. In April the German actions became, if possible, more brutal and cynical. On the one hand the Germans sent close to 3,000 Jews from the small still-remaining ghettos to the Vilna ghetto and the labor camps, and on the other hand they sent about 4,000 from those same ghettos to Ponar instead of to the Kovno ghetto, as they had promised Gens, and commenced killing them. The last group to leave the boxcars, Jews from Swie˛ ciany, saw through the ruse and fled en masse, fighting the Germans and Lithuanians with sticks, a few weapons, and their bare hands. Only a few dozen escaped and the rest, hundreds of them, lay shot to death in the nearby fields until the Germans forced the Vilna ghetto police to collect the bodies and scattered limbs and bury them, filming the scenes all the while. They then sent the ghetto the personal possessions and food of those killed, “a present for the starving Jews,” wrote Kovner through clenched teeth, and Gens

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agreed to accept them because of the awful shortages of every imaginable commodity.4 The police and workers who brought the articles told the story, causing an emotional storm and filling the synagogues to overflowing with people who prayed and wept bitterly. The return to former tactics was obvious, because this Aktion, like those in 1941, killed thousands of men and women who were fit to work. Gens’s oftrepeated slogan, that the Germans needed an efficient, working ghetto, had shown itself worthless, and Gens himself was exposed as powerless. In nearby Kovno, where the ghetto had excitedly prepared itself to receive 4,000 souls, the Judenrat secretary wrote in his diary that he had received information that the expected Jews were no longer alive. “People are gloomy and in despair. Will our turn come soon? Lord God, where art Thou?”5 In March, with the first signs of the change in policy and after long deliberations with the leadership and the Fives, Kovner wrote the FPO guidelines. The document contained eighty-six articles detailing the goals and principles of the underground, and it was signed by the five members of the underground command. The guidelines dealt with the underground’s organizational structure, the commanders of the Fives and how they would contact each other, recruitment, and rendezvous points (one at 3 Deutsche Strasse in time of call-up [“Liza calling!”] and another should the command be paralyzed). It also dealt with alternative slogans, with the lone fighter who might be cut off encouraged to continue fighting, “no matter what, . . . with sticks and knives . . . and even without any sort of weapon”; leaving the scene of battle and hiding in a melina would be considered treason. The document stressed enterprise, quick decisions and the commanders’ personal example, the nature of commands and means for transmitting them, and the absolute need to be sparing in the use of ammunition and to guard weapons at almost any cost. “The struggle we are planning for and about to enter will be the supreme test for each and every fighter.” It was a strict, uncompromising code that demanded that the fighters present themselves at the rendezvous point regardless of what they had to do to get there, to fight no matter what the conditions, to remain on the battlefield even if they were unarmed and had no commander or orders to follow.6 It was a demand for the absolute sacrifice of the individual

The Wittenberg Affair

and the organization on the altar of self-defense. The word forest was not even mentioned, nor were any goals beyond the fighting itself. On April 4, 1943, the same day the passengers on the Kovno train were murdered at Ponar, Kovner composed the “guidelines’ further clarification.” He, like the rest of the ghetto, knew nothing of what had happened until the next day, but from the beginning of April, a few weeks after the guidelines had been distributed to the underground membership, the situation worsened and immediate, unequivocal answers had to be found for questions such as how the organization would act if part of the ghetto were destroyed. According to the clarification, the underground would begin to fight only when the entire ghetto was in danger of liquidation, because action taken too early would be suicidal. It would leave the ghetto defenseless and be viewed as provocation, which might bring about internal strife. The dilemma of the lone fighter was addressed as well. As opposed to the position taken by the original document, according to which the lone fighter was to fight even if conditions were suicidal, he or she was now expected and ordered to retreat and remain alive as long as possible. The underground did not yet leave for the forests because the organization’s goal was socionational—to organize the struggle of the Jews and to protect their lives and honor— and not to escape to the forests for personal safety. They would go into the forests only once the battle in the ghetto was over, and they would take as many Jewish fighters as they could to continue fighting as an integral part of the partisan movement. As far as the melinas were concerned, hiding in one of them was still considered treason, as had already been noted twice in the original guidelines.7 This “manual” of the underground was national-Jewish with a goal to defend the ghetto’s life and honor, and it placed the underground squarely in the camp of the partisans (who had already begun operating in the nearby forests), but not before the national mission had been accomplished. The underground’s Jewish and socialist aspects were spelled out in the manual as well—the Jewish more than the socialist— and only two elements were missing: Eretz Israel and Zionism. These two elements had been the pioneering youth movements’ focus and goals for personal, national, and socialist realization, a source of comfort and authority, the ideal of courage and controlling one’s fate, but

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they disappeared with the guidelines and the further clarification. As the destruction of the Jewish population progressed and became the only factor in their lives, Eretz Israel became a retreating dream; it was no longer relevant in the face of the daily horror. And Eretz Israel, regardless of its desire to send aid, could not reach them and had not been a physical reality for Lithuanian Jewry since the German invasion. The underground members still dreamed of immigration during the relatively quiet days in the ghetto and continued studying and speaking Hebrew, singing songs and celebrating holidays, but there was a hopelessness about it. Expressions such as “a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley” and “pioneer” dropped out of their vocabulary, replaced by “forests” and “Ponar” and “the last Aktion.” In 1941, when the members of Hashomer Hatzair had discussed the possibility of fighting as a response to the Germans, Korczak could still ask what they would say to a child in Eretz Israel (in her opinion, even a child in Eretz Israel could judge them) who might ask why and how they allowed themselves to be led helplessly to their deaths. In 1942, on Passover eve, when Jews ask questions, at the modest seder ceremony held in the ghetto, Kovner asked his listeners what the difference was between blood spilled at Ponar, leaving no trace except for a tragic lesson learned, and blood spilled in Eretz Israel, from which new life sprang.8 However, the idea of Eretz Israel had been shelved, only to be resurrected when they left the forests after the Liberation. Distancing themselves from immediate Zionist aspirations made it easier to cooperate with non-Zionist elements, such as the Bund and the Communists, because they too, at least for the duration of the war, had postponed their original political ideologies, having realized that Jewish annihilation was nonpartisan. Cooperation among all Jews was the order of the day and expressed the need for a united ghetto, which Kovner had seen as the foundation for all such activity. Instead of commitment to Eretz Israel, the underground concentrated on the FPO’s activities, not on taking part in the ghetto’s cultural and communal life, and, as Kovner explained to Kalmanovitch, on shutting themselves off behind the wall of secrecy that kept the ghetto from knowing of their existence. On the last day of April Kovner wrote a few words in his pocket diary about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which had broken out on

The Wittenberg Affair

April 19, 1943. Its impact was immense on both sides; the Germans, who had in February suffered a crushing defeat at Stalingrad, were shocked and determined not to permit another embarrassing Jewish rebellion. From that point on, the Germans’ policy toward the ghettos and camps and toward those who escaped to join the partisans was influenced by the bitter surprise of the uprising.9 The ghetto and the underground derived tremendous satisfaction from the uprising and were inspired to hope that when the time came, they would do no less, and it reinforced the FPO’s ideology of fighting in the ghetto as a national struggle. In all probability, the uprising influenced the unification of ghetto forces. The consolidation and strengthening of the Soviet partisans in the forest and the killing of Jews by the retreating Germans sharpened FPO principles, as manifested by the guidelines and their clarifications. The Second Struggle Group continued to cling unequivocally to the thesis that self-defense within the ghetto was absurd, and the group was furious with Kovner for accusing those who left for the forests

Kovner (third from the right) with Yishuv leaders, on the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto revolt, in the destroyed ghetto, April 1948. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Kovner family.

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of seeking personal salvation.10 Nevertheless, at the end of April the FPO and the Second Struggle Group began negotiations, and in May an agreement was reached, although contrary to FPO demands, but it did not actually unite the two organizations. The members of Yechiel Scheinbaum’s group joined as an independent unit and not on an individual basis, with the exception of a few. They retained their weapons instead of pooling them with the FPO, and Scheinbaum joined the command as his group’s representative. The ideological contradictions were not officially settled, but the rank and file were willing to compromise; those belonging to the Second Struggle Group would fight in the ghetto if fighting broke out before they went into the forests, and the FPO would leave for the forest if fighting within the ghetto proved impossible. Nothing was formally said, but the compromise “could be felt in the air.”11 Going into the forest had been on the agenda since the beginning of April 1943 and the recent murders at Ponar. Groups of youths reached the forests, coming from smaller ghettos that had been eliminated. Some of them came to the ghetto on their way and were given arms. Some of those who had already reached the forests came to the Vilna ghetto to take more youths with them and to convince the FPO to send its own groups. In June Jewish youths came to Wittenberg and on their own initiative brought letters from Soviet partisan unit commanders, such as Colonel Fyodor Markov, who commanded the partisans in the Narocz forests. The Soviet commanders proposed that groups of fighters from the ghetto join them. The FPO command refused.12 Some of the ghetto youngsters decided to take the initiative, and one of them, Moshe Shotan, was carrying a list of those who intended to go with him when the ghetto police arrested him. Gens gave him a dressing down and told him in no uncertain terms that if youngsters left the ghetto, only the children, the elderly, and the infirm would remain, and the Germans would execute them without delay. “I will fight for every day, every hour of life, with all my strength, and history will judge me,” Gens said. The Russians were advancing and the Germans were retreating; Gens knew about the FPO and its arms, and when the time came, he would fight with them. He promised Shotan he would do so, as he had done on innumerable previous occasions, and Shotan was as-

The Wittenberg Affair

tounded by Gens’s determination and could find no answer. However, Shotan recovered, accused Gens of fostering illusions and of interfering with the actions of those who could fight and perhaps survive, and threatened to tell Markov of his position. Because Gens was extremely interested in good relations with the Soviets, hoping they would arrive first, and because most of those on Shotan’s list were refugees who in any case did not work for the Germans in the ghetto, Gens finally agreed to let them leave.13 Toward the end of June Himmler ordered the police and the SS chiefs in the former Soviet territories to eradicate the “superfluous” ghettos and to turn the rest into SS concentration camps. Transferring authority from the civilian government to the SS and posting new commanders in what remained of the ghettos made life even more miserable.14 In June and July the Germans also liquidated most of the small forced labor camps, officially because Jews had been escaping from them and maintaining relationships with the partisans, but in actual fact as part of the policy of general annihilation. Few Jews were left in the Vilna region, and anxiety increased over the fate of the ghetto. The Germans organized mass murders of Lithuanian dissenters, and under a system of collective punishment the population paid a high price in human life. The worsening situation only served to reinforce Gens’s adherence to his policy. He no longer agreed to let youngsters leave for the forests, bring in arms, or make contact outside the ghetto, and he himself waged an all-out war against the underground and those who wanted to leave. Searches at the gate were intensified, and Gens decided to move Kovner, as well as Haim Lazar, an active member of the underground and of Beitar, Gens’s own movement and a member from Scheinbaum’s group, who had all been particular thorns in his side, to a forced labor camp. The three hid, Wittenberg intervened, and, as in the case of Joseph Glazman, forced Gens to capitulate.15 However, when a group of Scheinbaum’s men, including Vilna ghetto inmates and even officers on the police force, escaped into the forest, Gens felt himself on shaky ground. On June 25 Glazman was handcuffed and arrested. On his way to the gate members of the FPO, policemen among them, attacked his captors and freed him. The ghetto was on the brink of civil war, both sides backing down only at the last

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minute. It was clear that the ghetto population had just learned that an underground existed in its midst and that they supported it. Direct negotiations were held for the first time between Gens and members of the FPO’s underground command, and it was only Gens’s threat of not being able to continue leading the ghetto and turning the responsibility over to the FPO that led to a compromise. Glazman would be taken to a forced labor camp but brought back untouched a short time later, and the FPO would recognize that it could not direct the ghetto or become an alternative leadership and that Gens would remain in control.16 In that case a compromise was indeed reached, but the general circumstances were such that any event could easily become a crisis, and one was not long in coming. Kovner testified no less than six times about the Wittenberg affair,17 and all his testimonies hinged on one main point: lack of knowledge, lack of facts, having to make decisions while shrouded in fog. The FPO members did not know that Wittenberg, their commander, was at the same time a ranking member of a Communist organization called the Underground City Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party, founded in Vilna in the spring of 1943. They also did not know that the chairman of the Communist Party cell in the ghetto and hence Wittenberg’s superior was Berl Szerszenjevski, who, in the FPO, was merely another rankand-file member and Wittenberg’s subordinate. As was usual among the Communists, said Kovner, there was a separation between the Underground City Committee and the ghetto underground. “Wittenberg would report to us about matters of importance relating to us, but not to them. . . . Had we known he was a member of the City Committee, under no circumstances would we have agreed to let him be on the Committee and head the FPO at the same time,” and with one of its “watchers” observing him in the ghetto, that was out of the question.18 Communist activity in the city was short-lived. A few days before July 8, 1943, the Germans, aided by an agent who had penetrated the Underground City Committee, captured Waclaw Kozlowski, a nonJewish Communist who had liaised between the committee in the city and Wittenberg and Szerszenjevski. The Germans tortured Kozlowski, and before he committed suicide, he gave them Wittenberg’s name as a

The Wittenberg Affair

Communist in the ghetto who had connections with the city, not as the head of the ghetto underground. That was also unknown to the FPO members at the time. On July 8 or 9 Bruno Keitel, the new head of the German security police, an even worse murderer than his predecessor, arrived in the ghetto and demanded that Wittenberg be handed over to him. Wittenberg went into hiding for a week. The FPO was immediately informed of the Germans’ demand by Yitzhak Auerbuch, a Jewish policeman who was also a member of the underground. Auerbuch had been near the offices of the Judenrat when the Germans came to announce their demand.19 It is noteworthy that the arrest of Kozlowski and the subsequent German demand was made known to the FPO by a policeman, a member of the underground who happened to be in place when Keitel was in the ghetto, not by Communist FPO members and, most disturbingly, not by Wittenberg himself. Would things have turned out differently had Kovner and his comrades, the non-Communists in the underground, had more information earlier? The most telling fact in Kovner’s eyes was that Wittenberg himself did not immediately inform his friends in the ghetto underground about the arrest and death of Kozlowski, despite the trust and friendly relations that have been mentioned again and again not only by Kovner but also by all the witnesses from all the political parties and youth movements. For many years Kovner carried the insult, the disappointment felt because an admired leader and commander had hidden from them even meetings that took place in the ghetto and because Wittenberg did not leave the ghetto only on FPO business, did not belong to them alone; his loyalties were divided between the FPO and another body no less important to him, and the idyllic situation, which was so dear to Kovner, had perhaps not really existed. Szerszenjevski was the secretary of the ghetto’s Communist cell, so “Wittenberg was the party messenger in FPO headquarters, period. And if we chose a Communist [as commander] they decided who he would be.” Kovner was then asked, logically, “When they chose Wittenberg as leader of the underground, wasn’t it your choice?” “It was our choice,” he answered, but he refused to clarify and changed the subject.20 On the night of July 15, a week after the German demand to hand over Wittenberg, Gens called for a meeting with the underground

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leaders on the pretext of having matters to discuss. Kovner certainly did not know it was entirely possible that Wittenberg himself had arranged the meeting with Gens in the hope of discovering exactly what had happened in the city and how much Gens knew and what he intended to do. That, at least, was the testimony of Abrasha Krizowski, a Communist and close friend of Wittenberg’s.21 The significance of the connection between the Jewish Communists in the ghetto and the non-Jewish Communists in the city became completely clear only when it came time to decide Wittenberg’s fate. About a week had passed since the arrest and death of Kozlowski. The members of the underground command hoped, although they had no proof, that the danger of Wittenberg’s arrest had perhaps passed. Gens tried to arrange a private meeting with Wittenberg (but did not succeed) and then spread rumors that he had already told the Gestapo that he, Wittenberg, had disappeared and was no longer being sought. According to these rumors, Gens’s objective was to extract a promise from the FPO not to use force if and when the ghetto was reduced from 20,000 inhabitants to 10,000, half being transferred to work elsewhere. The FPO decided to accept Gens’s invitation to meet in his rooms and listen to what dangers the ghetto would face at the end of the relatively quiet period. They wanted to make it clear that the FPO would consider another large-scale Aktion, even if presented as a work transfer, as an attempt to liquidate the ghetto and that its members would react with force. That night Glazman returned to the ghetto with Gens’s knowledge but without his permission and therefore did not participate in the meeting.22 Late at night on July 15 the other members of the underground command went to the Judenrat building. Armed Lithuanians (or, according to other versions, Germans) entered the room and demanded to know who Wittenberg was. Gens pointed him out, and the Lithuanians bound him and led him in the direction of the gate, despite the rigorous protests of the other FPO members (who were unarmed) and despite Kovner’s threat that Gens would be punished; her close relationship with Gens notwithstanding, Chiena Borowska spat in his face. Outside stood a guard of underground members, stationed there because they were suspicious of Gens, particularly because his relations with the underground

The Wittenberg Affair

had deteriorated. Korczak, who was standing close to the room where the meeting was held, ran out to rally more underground members. At midnight they used force to release Wittenberg, and he immediately announced a general mobilization, distribution of arms, and the manning of the emergency positions. And then he went into hiding.23 There is no conclusive answer as to whether the Germans knew of the underground’s existence, because there is a lack of German evidence or any other concrete proof. However, it is clear that the Germans responsible for the ghetto, and to an even greater extent the Jews responsible for it, lost no time. Even as Wittenberg was going into hiding, Gens announced that the Germans had threatened to enter the ghetto and destroy it unless Wittenberg was handed over to them within a prescribed number of hours. Gens called in police and then arranged a ghetto mass meeting. He caused turmoil by announcing that the problem could be summed up quite simply: Because of Wittenberg and the underground and its irresponsibility, the entire ghetto was likely to be wiped out. Gens’s plan was obvious. Glazman and Kovner were second in command after Wittenberg. Gens had already tried to get rid of Glazman twice and then to send Kovner to a forced labor camp. Wittenberg was next in line, and Gens was exploiting the arrests in the city and the German demand that Wittenberg be handed over to them as a Communist to get rid of him as an underground commander. It was Gens who pointed Wittenberg out to the armed Lithuanians (or Germans) in his office. He admitted to underground members present at the time that he was ready to comply with Keitel’s demand and hand over Wittenberg. This time, after Wittenberg had been released, Gens did not enter into negotiations with the underground, as he had during the Glazman affair, nor did he give up, as he had when Wittenberg told him that he would not hand over Kovner, Lazar, and a member of Schein­ baum’s group no matter what the cost. For the first time, Gens sent not only for the police but also for the negative underworld elements of the ghetto population, the starkeh (as the thugs were called—starkeh is Yiddish for “strong”), and then incited the general public against the underground. He called them “the runny-nosed kids with the sticks,” referring to their relatively young age and lack of military experience. It was an attempt to create moral pressure that the underground, whose

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ideology of public responsibility was well known to him, would not be able to withstand.24 Delegations arrived at headquarters and were received by the members of the underground, armed but surrounded. They came to beg the leadership to hand over Wittenberg and spare the life of the ghetto. When an immediate affirmative reply was not forthcoming, some of the crowd attacked with clubs and rocks, but the leadership ordered the younger members not to use their weapons. They were to go out into the street and face the assembled Jews in an attempt to make them realize that they could not trade Wittenberg’s life for their own, because in any case the ghetto’s fate had already been sealed. On the brink of civil war, Gens inflamed the general atmosphere by exploiting the ever-present fear that the Germans would enter the ghetto, with predictable outcome. However, the Germans were nowhere to be seen. Gens and Dessler, the Germans’ eyes and ears, came and went and brought what Gens called German ultimatums into the ghetto, making the situation more volatile at every turn, but the underground leadership suspected they might not be quoting German demands accurately. The German ultimatum came too close to Wittenberg’s release, both at midnight, according to ghetto inhabitants with an observing eye. Even Masha Rolnik, then a young girl writing a diary, noticed the closeness of events, and so did Mendel Balberyszki, a wellknown journalist. He wrote that the ghetto was not under siege, that there were no signs of any coming Aktionen, and that according to public opinion at the beginning of the night, it was a matter for the Jews to settle among themselves.25 As time passed, Gens increased pressure by sending more delegations to the underground command. He was trying to make it clear that he was not the only person who wanted Wittenberg handed over; the rest of the population did as well, including its important and respected public figures. During the night that Wittenberg went into hiding, Glazman came back from the forced labor camp but was still wanted by Gens, and he remained in the ghetto in spite of Gens; so it was Kovner who handled negotiations with the delegations. Toward the early morning Gens no longer sent uniformed policemen, whom Kovner did not trust, and instead sent public figures who were known

The Wittenberg Affair

to him and acceptable. During the night the Jewish police set a precedent by coming armed with guns, unheard of in any ghetto. Many times Kovner described the attempts of Dr. Milkonovicki, known before the war as a clever, honest lawyer, to serve as mediator. He brought back scraps of information that when pieced together seemed to indicate the Germans knew only one name, Wittenberg, which they had gotten from Kozlowski, and as a result were looking for him. He also brought back Gens’s repeated promises that if Wittenberg withstood torture and could stand up to Kozlowski and deny the relationship between them, Gens would do everything he could to get him away from the Germans. It is doubtful whether Gens could have kept the promise, because he must have known that Kozlowski had not withstood torture, and in such a case, the promise was simply a lie.26 In addition, and perhaps most important, Gens gave the underground his word of honor that no Aktion had been planned for the near future. The ghetto was quiet. “It had never been quieter,” said Kovner, quoting Gens’s emissaries. Gens kept repeating that he wasn’t setting a trap for Wittenberg and the underground, and the proof was that no one else had been harmed and the Germans wanted only Wittenberg. The easiest and quietest way to write finis to the whole affair would be to hand Wittenberg over, as he, Gens, was trying to do. The underground, however, was certain that the demand was an act of provocation, if not Gens’s then Dessler’s, and only the repetition of Kozlowski’s name made that position slightly less firm; Kovner simply did not know if Kozlowski was still alive. Gens was playing a double game; he told the assembled Jews that the Germans would immediately wipe out the ghetto if Wittenberg were not handed over, and to Kovner he sent emissaries claiming the ghetto had never been as quiet and that no Aktion was forthcoming. Despite the prohibitions and attendant dangers, people left their houses and met in the streets to find out what was happening, and rumors quickly spread unchecked. Opinions were exchanged and the situation was evaluated. Others hid in melinas long since prepared with great care for just such an emergency. Ghetto life had sharpened their senses, and they could smell events about to occur before they knew the details.27 As the hours passed, the atmosphere became more and

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more tense, and Wittenberg still had not been found. In the early hours of the morning of July 16, the exhausted crowd took up the slogan, “One or 20,000,” and they increased their harassment of the underground. There were scuffles and shouts, and a house-to-house search was conducted for Wittenberg. Gens’s minions tried yet again to convince the underground to turn him over; independent delegates tried their hand at mediation; rocks were thrown, hatchets used, and there were exchanges of blows. At least eight underground members who had been beaten and dragged to the Judenrat courtyard were arrested; some of them had even been shot by weapons belonging to the police and the underworld, chiefly by Dessler’s emissaries. Hysteria seized the public. A policeman was shot and wounded while trying to prevent underground members from taking arms from a cache. “People’s faces expressed hostility, madness and a tremendous desire to live. . . . ‘Let us live! Let us live!’ shouted the looks on their faces . . . and awful hatred, profound, turned against us,” wrote a young female underground member. “The Jews looked at us as though we were their murderers,” wrote Shmerke Kaczerginski. “Our members became street victims and our own mothers cursed us.” Those who would later be killed, testified Kovner at the Eichmann trial, rampaged through the narrow alleyways of the ghetto against those who wanted to fight, just to gain another hour of life. “It was terribly human, but terrible nevertheless.”28 The underground realized that the ghetto was against them and would not fight at their side. They sensed that the population had no sympathy for the underground, which had been fully revealed to them for the first time during those twenty-four hours; they had been only partially exposed during the affair of Glazman’s release. But the ghetto population knew that they were deluding themselves and that the Germans would not let them live. “Something told them those events . . . were nothing more than the beginning of the end, and those hunted young men had the right idea in preparing themselves for the final battle,” wrote Lazar. Some underground members did not agree that the general public would not fight with them against the Germans no matter what happened. In the opinion of many, the organization had won understanding and admiration, and if a serious Aktion had in fact begun at that time and an appeal had been made to use force to oppose it, the

The Wittenberg Affair

response would have been enthusiastic, especially from the unorganized ghetto workers, those who had no one to care for them and no party affiliations, the men in the street. Perhaps, even without a large-scale Aktion, there were those who understood the situation exactly as the underground did and would have joined in the fighting.29 Gens’s speech to the assembled population inflated the rumor of a coming Aktion. The uproar that broke out served to whip the ghetto into a frenzy of panic. As the night progressed and the ultimatum was extended hour by hour and as the turmoil grew greater, the underground leadership became convinced that the general public, at least that part that had given voice to its feelings, would not answer the call to fight the Germans. At dawn, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, stood on opposite sides and shouted at one another. During the night the underground’s understanding, spelled out in detail, that when the ghetto became a battle scene, its inhabitants would be swept away and would join the fight, was shown to have been completely wrong, or so they thought. The hope of a rebellion, “which we fostered with great devotion, with infinite faith and longing,” sputtered out, wrote Cesia Rosenberg. They would have to make new plans.30 However, a new discussion could not be held, not only because of the pace at which events were unfolding but also because their leader, Wittenberg, was going from one hiding place to another. The young fighters were armed and at their stations or mingling with the crowds in the street to try to explain their position. Thus what happened to the leadership did not happen to either Wittenberg or the young fighters. The leadership, which initially was firmly opposed to handing over Wittenberg to the Germans and which had practical plans to fight, found itself in the early hours of the morning besieged, exhausted, and surrounded by the very people it wanted to defend and whose honor it wanted to save. The full weight of the responsibility for the immediate fate of the ghetto weighed heavily on their young shoulders, and they saw themselves as obligated to prevent an apparently imminent civil war, even if they were convinced that the general public was wrong and that handing over Wittenberg would not bring salvation. The possibility of actually fighting the Germans, who had not yet entered the ghetto, was out of the question. To break out into the city on their way to the forest

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or to fight Germans whose positions were unknown, they would have had to use force to make their way through the crowd attacking them. Wittenberg did not experience the crisis and had no knowledge of events, and therefore he was still loyal to the underground’s fundamental tenets. His ideological position was that abandoning the ghetto was out of the question unless they received information that the Germans were about to destroy it, at which time the underground would call on the population to break through the gates, protected by arms. Therefore Wittenberg adamantly refused to give himself up. He did not know that Kovner, who had replaced him during the night, had received delegations begging him to spare the ghetto, nor did he know that at first Kovner refused to negotiate with them and that only afterward, when the crowd began to physically attack the underground, did the leaders begin to hold discussions with the delegations—and without them— which lasted for hours. There were various suggestions, such as surrendering with Wittenberg, committing suicide en masse, or breaking out of the ghetto and escaping to the forests. The members, most of them younger than their commanders, were certainly faithful to the organization’s ideology, and they waited outside for the sign to begin fighting or to break out, unable to understand why it was so long in coming. In the meantime, the curtain went up on the last act. At dawn, July 16, Dessler brought Keitel’s final ultimatum: If Wittenberg was not handed over by 6 that evening, the ghetto would be bombed from the air and tanks would be called in to destroy whatever was left. According to less dramatic versions, the ghetto would be destroyed by more conventional means. There was no way of knowing whether the ultimatum was genuine or the work of Dessler acting under the aegis of Gens, because so far the Germans had been neither seen nor heard in the ghetto. Wittenberg, who had spent the previous week in various hiding places, went from one to another of them during the night, disguised as a woman wearing a long black dress, his head covered with a kerchief. He was apparently caught once or twice and used force to escape, and communications between him and the underground leaders were cut off. “We didn’t want to know where he was,” said Kovner at the Eichmann trial. As time passed and it became obvious that the underground commanders were holding meetings at which he, their leader, was not

The Wittenberg Affair

present, Wittenberg wanted to know what his comrades’ opinion was. First of all he wanted to know what the Jewish members of the ghetto Communist Party cell thought, apparently because he was first of all a member of the party and Szerszenjevski’s subordinate, and thus it was their decision he waited for. And it can be assumed that he hoped they might have additional knowledge about the arrests in the city and about how that would affect his situation.31 Thus two sets of deliberations were under way: those held by the underground leadership and those held by Communists within the underground—Chiena Borowska, Berl and Rosa Szerszenjevski, Sonia Madeysker, and others. It was the Communists who first said that Wittenberg had to give himself up, because Kozlowski knew and had given up only him, no other ghetto Communist. Kovner and the others did not know that the Communists had discussed the matter and had decided that their commander, who was also a comrade, was to sacrifice himself to save the ghetto. They thought that during the intermittent conversations in the besieged underground headquarters, each member of the Communist cell had already expressed his or her opinion individually, as they had, but not that another group decision had been made elsewhere. Later that night the underground leaders began to suspect that the Communist cell in the ghetto was trying to decide what to do. Indeed, Borowska, Krizowski, and Alexander Rindjiunski, all of them Communists, later confirmed that the opinion of the Communist cell was unanimous because they feared it might be a matter of the ghetto’s partial or total destruction and because they were concerned that other developments of which they had no knowledge had occurred in the city.32 According to several testimonies, Krizowski was too diligent in searching for Wittenberg and in mediating between Gens and the underground. He also went back and forth between underground headquarters and the Communist cell, reinforcing the supposition that on the one hand, it was the cell that had declared that Wittenberg hand himself over and, on the other, that Gens was doing his best to pull strings behind the scenes to make sure the Germans got Wittenberg.33 In his hiding place Wittenberg heard of the decision taken by the Communist cell regarding his fate from Madeysker, who trembling and unwilling, had been sent

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by her comrades without Kovner’s knowledge. Describing it afterward, Kovner said, “Then Sonia disappeared . . . in the middle of the night.” Wittenberg, stunned, asked Madeysker if it was her own personal opinion as well and if such a decision had really been made. She described the situation in the ghetto leading to it. Apparently communications had been severed between Wittenberg and underground headquarters but not between Wittenberg and the Communists. Perhaps the Communists had hidden him in a place known only to them; otherwise, how would Madeysker have known where to find him? What did Krizowski mean when he testified that Madeysker had told him to pretend to be doing his best to find Wittenberg, apparently to hide the fact that as Communists both he and she knew where he was? This is also confirmed by Zenia Malecki, an underground member in whose room Wittenberg had hidden part of the night and where Madeysker had come several times to speak with him.34 In the meantime, the Communist comrades in the ghetto were urging the underground leadership to tell Wittenberg they had reached the same conclusion. According to Nissan Reznik’s testimony immediately after the Liberation in the summer of 1944, “The ghetto authorities promised he would be returned unharmed, and then the heads of the Communist Party arrived and demanded he be turned over, claiming we couldn’t fight against the ghetto population. They pressured the under­ground leaders into issuing a verdict.” With heavy hearts the leaders—Kovner, Glazman, Reznik, and Avraham Chwojnik, accompanied by Borowska, Madeysker, and Szerszenjevski—went to Wittenberg’s hiding place. The only one still alive today is Reznik; Borowska passed away recently after speaking her mind. But both agreed: “Nothing was decided, certainly nothing was put to a vote. Everyone said what he or she thought. We exchanged opinions.”35 Wittenberg did not tell them that Madeysker had already spoken to him, but rather asked whether they thought he ought to turn himself in. According to Kovner, the only answer he got was silence, silence as assent. Wittenberg’s revolver was lying on the table. He thought about suicide, but the Germans wanted him alive, and he did not want to die. After a few moments Kovner said to him, “Look, there are Jews standing in the streets and we will have to fight them to get to the enemy.

The Wittenberg Affair

Maybe [the Germans] will stand there and laugh. That’s the situation. Give the order and we will fight. Are you prepared to do it?” According to Kovner, Wittenberg then asked Madeysker and Szerszenjevski what they thought—should he go or not—and they said it was the comrades’ opinion that he should. Nevertheless, Kovner, Borowska, and Reznik said they left it up to him. According to Reznik, their “express position was that it was up to him. He could accept the Party’s decision or not and go or not, as he chose, and the underground leadership would support him.” According to Borowska, “Nothing was final until he said he had to go.” According to Kovner, “The commander had the last word on every matter. We had faith in him and respected him. In no other important issue, and certainly not in a matter of life and death as this was, would the command come to a decision without him. It was out of the question.” Immediately following the events, Madeysker poured her heart out to a friend, saying, “We felt lost, it was hell, we didn’t know what to do and couldn’t find the right answer.”36 Wittenberg, as head of the underground, could not give the order to attack the ghetto population because the underground was an integral part of it; that was why they had not previously gone into the forest. The population was made up of their remaining fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters. Nor could he call on the population to revolt when an Aktion was just around the corner, because on the surface it was not apparent. On the other hand, no one could be sure the Germans were not shortly planning to initiate the final Aktion; no one wanted even a partial Aktion on his conscience. Wittenberg felt he was left with but one course of action. He handed his gun over to Kovner and appointed him commander of the underground. He took counsel with no one regarding Kovner’s appointment, deciding on the spur of the moment and choosing him over Glazman; although Glazman was older than Kovner, his position in the ghetto was insecure at best and he would do better going into the forest, which is indeed what happened afterward. When Wittenberg’s girlfriend, whose room had been his last hiding place, saw him give the gun to Kovner, she began to scream at all those present, accusing them of treason, murder, and useless sacrifice, holding on to Wittenberg and refusing to let go. Wittenberg freed himself and left for the gate.37

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There was complete silence along the way as he walked to the gate through the crowd of ghetto inhabitants. The populace was stunned. Hostility evaporated and was replaced by a sense of awe and admiration for a noble individual sacrificing his life and for his comrades, who were sacrificing their leader for the public good. They were discomfited at having “snatched a few days away from the Angel of Death,” wrote Mark Dworzecki, and at having sacrificed a man and fighting one another instead of joining ranks against the real enemy. Wittenberg had become the ghetto’s savior and had proved that he and his organization were unstinting in their devotion to its security and honor. Members of the underground stood in the streets to pay their last respects, some of them saluting, some with fists upraised, the younger members understanding nothing of what was happening. Many wept. He “died as a martyr for the ghetto,” “was sacrificed for the crowd,” “will be called holy,” “walked like a king,” “like our ancestors at their deaths,” according to various testimonies and memoirs.38 The use of such traditional expressions to describe an individual who was a longtime Communist shows how much his sacrifice spoke to the ghetto’s heart, even if its continuing safety was temporary at best. As he went to his death, he became part of the community. “Remember this day!” says the shoemaker in Kovner’s poem about July 16, “more power to the nation which has such sons.” After Wittenberg had made up his mind to surrender to the Germans, he asked his friends to bring him cyanide and then asked for a few minutes alone with Gens. Gens met with him alone, as he had requested, but Dessler and Krizowski were close at hand. According to hearsay evidence from Auerbuch (the same police officer who belonged to the underground and had heard the German demand for turning Wittenberg in), Wittenberg warned Gens that he knew too much about Gens and therefore that it would be worth Gens’s while to make sure the Germans released Wittenberg without torturing him until he revealed whatever secrets he might have. Gens, however, who had apparently been frightened by whatever Wittenberg had said to him, had a different solution. He raised his glass in a toast, and the next day Wittenberg’s body was found in one of the corridors of Gestapo headquarters without a mark on it. The Germans would not have killed such

The Wittenberg Affair

an important prisoner without having gotten all the information they could out of him, and the results would have been disastrous. According to the testimony given by one of the cleaning women, three glasses were found in Gens’s room, but only two were in evidence; one had disappeared. If that was true, it is possible that Gens poisoned Wittenberg before he was led away; the underground had not had sufficient time to smuggle him the cyanide he asked for. Thus Gens did what the Germans had demanded of him and had surrendered Wittenberg, and they could suppose he died of poison he had on his own person, and indeed they took no further steps against the ghetto or the underground at that time.39 In the first order of the day written after the event, Kovner answered the questions that remained unasked, namely, who and/or what had led Wittenberg to do what he did? “As a result of the tragic situation in which we found ourselves, Wittenberg, leader of our organization, of his own accord and with our agreement, turned himself over to the Gestapo. History may blame us for having done so. Perhaps in the future no one will understand our situation and that the path we chose was the result of the enormous responsibility we shouldered for the ghetto and its inhabitants, against whom we could not, were forbidden, to fight” (emphasis in the original).40 Kovner thus predicted that what had happened was too complex to be understood, and the more time passed, the harder it would be to clarify the situation, and he was more than right. The affair gave no peace to those involved who were given to selfscrutiny or who learned of it, and they voiced their opinions in different ways, from criticism to stage plays. Directly after the affair, when going into the forests was again on the agenda, Shotan met with Gens. “They see me as a traitor, an enemy agent . . . a murderer, one of the Gestapo,” Gens told Shotan. “To tell the truth, I thought they would put up some kind of resistance, that they would fight, rise up. . . . When I heard that instead of preparing for battle they were talking, I realized I had not been wrong about them. . . . Poor innocent Wittenberg, what a lamb, he lived for the Party his whole life under the illusion they were his friends.” In this emotional monologue Gens was trying to prove that he was not solely responsible for handing over Wittenberg to the Germans, and at

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the same time he knew it had solved nothing. He poured his heart out, telling Shotan that he, Gens, who wanted nothing more than for the ghetto to live, “I, least of all, believe myself. I know, I understand, I felt I was lying to myself, but I was at my wits’ end . . . completely helpless.”41 Kovner examined the underground’s conscience when he reached the forest, and he too poured out his heart and noted blunders. In a long missive to the Hashomer Hatzair partisans in the forests of Lithuania and White Russia, he wrote of the mistakes made by the FPO, especially regarding Wittenberg: Perhaps it had not really been necessary to turn him over to the Germans. Kovner admitted that in the forest he saw the affair in a different light. He heard about events in other ghettos and in other areas, experienced fighting as a partisan with hundreds of other Jews, and came to the conclusion that he was no longer sure they had done the right thing. “He went. He went and that was our great failure. A moral failure,” Kovner said years later.42 Under the circumstances the members of the underground command seem to have made the only possible choice. However, so far as the young fighters were concerned, those with whom Kovner went into the forests about two months after the Wittenberg affair, it was a failure they could not understand and it lowered their morale. The underground members who did not participate in the leaders’ decision could not easily overcome the failure “and till today cannot accept it because they did not hear the story [of the events of the night of July 15] to the end.” “After the Wittenberg affair some of the young members of the FPO lost their faith in Abba. In the end it turned out that those of us who were younger guarded the idea more jealously than he,” said Kempner.43 Kovner himself was tortured for years by feelings of terrible guilt, perhaps because at the time Wittenberg had adamantly refused to hand him over to Gens. However, according to Rindjiunski’s memoirs, “This time individuals who had different, opposing world views were united in their opinion that the correct choice had been made because there was simply no other. No one had any doubt about the honesty of the organization’s leaders, and we were forced, with great sorrow, to accept the decision, terrible as it was.” 44 The Communist Party had a different opinion. According to Kovner, in the forests and after the war there was criticism within the party and

The Wittenberg Affair

investigations were held to find out how a cell could surrender its commander. Avraham Sutzkever, who recounted the incident in Moscow, was told that all those who were responsible should have been shot. According to Rindjiunski, who remained in the Soviet Union until 1959, the investigations continued afterward, and Szerszenjevski, who had been responsible for the cell, was attacked particularly viciously and was never again promoted.45 Kovner asked to be tried by history and historians, wishing for a trial that would either sanction or condemn. He kept repeating that restraint and sacrifice in the particular situation were more exalted than the heroism of actual fighting, both for the person who gave his life for his community, even—and especially—when he did not believe that his sacrifice would save it, and for the underground that knowingly relinquished its commander, an extremely rare occurrence in the history of underground organizations. That is the conclusion Kovner presents to history and historians for their sanction and, more important, for the approval of his underground comrades who survived the ghetto and the forest. Kovner felt sanction was not forthcoming. The affair was dealt with briefly in two scholarly books that were complimentary to Kovner,46 but in his opinion, the playwrights were unjust to him and his comrades, and he felt that literature and drama had more influence on public consciousness than research. No fewer than ten plays were written about the Wittenberg affair. Some of them were never finished, including those of Sutzkever, Kaczerginski, and Peretz Markish. Some were finished but never staged, including those of Wittenberg’s girlfriend, Borka Friedman, Yitzhak Sadeh (The Warriors), and Nathan Shacham (Wing to Wing). Plays were also written in Lithuania and France, and The Ghetto Bird, written by Hava Rosenfarb in Canada and staged in Tel Aviv in 1966, was a resounding failure.47 Yet no play was as painful or made him feel the point had not been made as Yehoshua Sobol’s Adam (“Man”). In the winter of 1982 Sobol was the Kovners’ guest at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, and they spent many hours honing details and events and discussing how they would be presented on the stage. Kovner hoped the play would give him the opportunity he had been waiting for to show the affair in its true light. Before

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he died in 1987, Kovner managed to read the text Sobol worked on for a number of years and was devastated. Wittenberg was depicted as a simple, ordinary person (hence the title of the play), prey to external forces and a puppet of the Communist underground, and his sacrifice was in no way a heroic act. The underground was depicted as weak and flawed, mostly interested in saving its own skin. The ghetto inhabitants were portrayed as coming apart at the seams, without even one who could rise above the situation. In the play Kovner held a secret ballot with the result of three in favor of turning Wittenberg over to the Germans and two in favor of his committing suicide. Gens was portrayed in a favorable light, firm and knowing how to stand firm. The play was a reflection of Sobol’s political opinions: One should negotiate with the enemy, as Gens did, and not use force, as the underground wished to do. With great delicacy but deep disappointment in his guest, Kovner wrote to Sobol that he, Sobol, had not understood the situation at all. “One of the characteristics of the affair was the tension between knowing and not knowing, or between knowing and intent, tension which led to emotional and intellectual strife for each of the individuals involved.”48 That was the motif of all of Kovner’s testimonies regarding the Wittenberg affair: making decisions in situations in which not much was known. In the summer of 1989, two years after Kovner’s death, the Israeli national theater staged the play, which ran for about thirty performances and closed in the face of public outcry, during which former ghetto fighters attacked Sobol in no uncertain terms. According to Kempner, “If the only thing the underground’s founders were interested in was saving their own skins, why did they return to the ghetto instead of remaining in the convent?” Reznik said, “We never had secret ballots. We were young people between the ages of 17 and 22, inexperienced but having to make tragic, fateful decisions.”49 One of the books Kovner reread most often was The Topic of the City, by Siegfried Lenz. It deals with the leader of an underground group in a Scandinavian town occupied by the Germans who was ordered to surrender to save forty-four hostages. The ascetic, intellectual leader and his deputies converse at great length. If he does not surrender, “what-

The Wittenberg Affair

ever he does in the future, he will be accompanied by 44 dead souls who will examine him and to whom he will continually have to justify himself.” If he does surrender, “there will no longer be a justification for anything, not for our struggle, not for our torments.” “Every story [is like a river and] has its delta,” says Lenz. The only way the owner of the story can keep it as his property is to put it on paper, with all its mistakes and outcomes, before it is too late.50 Kovner tossed and turned in his bed, “never having recorded his weeping,” and did not write, and in the meantime other developments in Israeli society enabled other streams of the Wittenberg story’s delta to be absorbed in the country, and he missed the boat.

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E i g h t   The Last Days of the Ghetto “And say with me / My mother / My mother” September 1–September 24, 1943

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After Wittenberg’s death, at the FPO’s most difficult moment, Kovner became its commander. Joseph Glazman was still with them but only for a short time before he left the ghetto for the forests to join the Soviet partisans organizing in the surrounding area. The idea, which had constantly been on their minds since spring, was more acutely debated. It was clear to the underground command that the dream of taking to the streets as the vanguard on the ghetto’s last day was only a dream. The inhabitants wanted to fight, but for every additional minute of life regardless of the consequences. It became increasingly difficult to recognize the signs pointing to the ghetto’s imminent destruction and even to make preparations to take to the streets alone, because the Germans were determined not to get involved in street fighting and would use deceit to avoid it. Gens had already shown that he was not above anything, and his handling of the Wittenberg affair had stripped him of the little credit he had with the underground; they cut off relations and left him in the dark about leaving for the forest.1 Colonel Fyodor Markov’s emissaries came to the ghetto again, demanding that only men with weapons go into the forest, and it was hard for the underground leadership to refuse the young members, who could already smell the heady perfume of freedom in the forest. The senior members also exerted pressure: Glazman was being hounded by the ghetto heads and had lost all faith that the Jews would follow the underground into rebellion, and Berl Szerszenjevski had been afraid of informers ever since the cell in Vilna collapsed. Kovner opposed Mar­ kov’s demands because that meant abandoning the women, whose numbers were relatively high within the FPO, and if they “took the

Last Days of the Ghetto

small quantity of arms we had and sent out the best men left, the tiny force remaining within the ghetto would be without leaders, weapons or a solution to their problem.”2 They therefore decided on two plans of action. First, the underground would remain in the ghetto in the hope of staging a rebellion on its last day, and, second, a first group would go into the forests and set up a base—help could be sent to the ghetto when the fighting started and they could escape there when it ended. Despite the Wittenberg affair, when the underground had been cursed, wounded, and arrested (to say nothing of the fact that it had lost its commander), many in the underground, especially Kovner, had not given up the idea of rebellion. Perhaps it was time to say the dream was over, gather their weapons, say a final good-bye to the Jewish Vilna that no longer existed and to the remains of their families, and join Markov. Kovner would have saved himself and his friends much heartache had he done so, before he became entangled in later events. Eight days after Wittenberg died, a group of twenty-one men left the ghetto, led by Glazman and including Haim Lazar and Izia Mackewitcz, who with Kempner had blown up the first train—a mixed group under the leadership of Beitar. It was called the Leon Group, after Wittenberg’s underground alias. “[The group] will honor the commander’s memory in a battle against the enemy,” wrote Kovner in the order of the day before they left. On the way fourteen weaponless youngsters from a nearby forced labor camp joined them, and the price was paid immediately. The group was ambushed, and nine FPO members were killed in the skirmish. The security police and the SD in Lithuania reported that a group left the city on July 25 to join “the bandits,” as the Germans called the partisans, and a commando unit had been sent to catch them. The group was inexperienced and neither destroyed their documents nor captured the shepherds they met along the way, who must have informed on them immediately.3 The Germans identified Glazman’s group through the documents seized in the ambush, and no less than thirty-two of their family members and work inspectors were sent to Ponar and killed. A few days later all the workers in the same forced labor camp were also murdered. It was the first time that relatives and others had paid with their lives for the activities of the underground. Gens, furious at a group’s leaving

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without telling him, exploited the emotional tide following the executions and announced that for every individual who left in the future, all those connected to them in any way would pay the price; to avoid this consequence, Gens said, they should all inform on anyone acting suspicious before anything happened. Thus Gens set those still in the ghetto, especially the work inspectors, against the youth. He also told the underground command that as a result of the skirmish with the Leon Group, the Germans definitely knew about an armed organization in the ghetto, and he himself intensified the search for arms and demanded that they be turned over for hiding until the final day of battle. In the meantime, underground members stopped leaving for the forest. The leadership, headed by Kovner and facing a deteriorating situation, nominated replacements for Wittenberg and Glazman. All of them, Kovner included, felt that Wittenberg could never be replaced. His age had made him something of a father figure, and he left them as orphans, bearing a heavy burden. Nothing was the way it had been before Wittenberg’s death, wrote a young woman. “We became despondent and apprehensive, fearing we would not be able to do what we had taken upon ourselves.” The same security police report noted that at the end of July the ghetto was in a panic over rumors of forthcoming large-scale Aktionen.4 Before the underground members could decide whether to renew their plans to go into the forest and how to keep their weapons from Gens, another blow fell. On the morning of August 6 more than a thousand workers were surrounded in their workplaces outside the ghetto by German and Estonian soldiers. After the Kovno train affair no one believed they were being taken to work in Estonia, and scores were killed and wounded attempting to defend themselves and escape. Everyone asked themselves whether the last moments of the ghetto had arrived. In fact, those captured were taken to Estonia and a few days later sent letters, written on German orders, asking for food and warm clothing. It became a ritual in which Gens calmed the agitated ghetto population and made all sorts of promises. This time the Germans even came themselves and assured them that it was a matter of employment—and demanded thousands more workers. About 1,500 people—relatives of those kidnapped on August 6, refugees, and those who were unem-

Last Days of the Ghetto

ployed and in need of permits—presented themselves of their own free will or were forced to do so.5 On August 31 Gens again girded his loins and went out to make speeches, calm the population, and ask for patience: Their suffering was almost over. In August the Red Army had liberated Orel, Belgorod, and Kharkov, but for every city liberated, the Germans liquidated a ghetto or camp. August saw the end of the death camp in Treblinka and of the ghettos in Be˛ dzin, Sosnowiec, and Bialystok, when armed resistance or rebellion broke out there. After the surprise of August 6, the FPO sent close to 200 men and women into the forests of Narocz, about 120 kilometers east of Vilna, where, under the aegis of Markov, Glazman had set up camp with the remains of his group. The Second Struggle Group sent a few dozen more to the Rudniki forests, which were closer to the city, about 60 kilometers to the south. The ghetto began to empty out and was disintegrating. The underground leaders, however, had not yet given up. The 200 who had left were for the most part young refugees from neighboring cities and not FPO members. “Albina” (Gessia) Glezer (a young Jewish paratrooper and a high­ranking Communist from Moscow who had been sent to rehabilitate the party in Vilna after the debacle of early July) entered the ghetto to convince the underground leaders to go into the forests, because that was where their battlefield was, but her suggestion was rejected. “Because of ideological considerations they had their hearts set on defending the ghetto,” wrote Avraham Sutzkever.6 The fear of another failure, bringing in its wake executions of friends or family, also contributed to their staying inside the ghetto. A short time before Gens’s last palliating speech, the Germans announced that, beginning on September 1, the ghetto would be closed off, and all those who had jobs outside its walls would henceforth work inside. It was only too clear that another Aktion was being planned. “Every­one is in the trap,” wrote Alexander Rindjiunski. Although they had been expecting it, it came as a surprise to everyone, the underground included.7 On September 1 the ghetto was surrounded by Estonian SS soldiers and German forces. They broke in at 5 a.m. and began grabbing whomever they met, chiefly men. It was the first time the ghetto had been closed off and entered since the Aktionen of 1941. Jews ran to hide

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in the melinas, and Kovner, in the name of FPO headquarters, issued the mobilization order, “Liza is calling.” One battalion concentrated itself at 6 Strashun Street, at the library, and another took up positions at 6 Szpitalna Street, in the courtyard of the bathhouse. Couriers raced back and forth to complete the mobilization, and those responsible for weapons ran to their storehouses. The original plan had been to take up positions at the workshops at 11 Rudnicka Street, close to the ghetto’s main gate, and to attack the Germans as they entered. However, because of an informant, the second battalion was trapped before it could take weapons, which had been moved a short time before September 1, following Gens’s searches. “Another quarter of an hour and the weapons would have arrived,” said Kovner in sorrow and anger.8 About twentyfive fighters managed to escape from the small bathhouse courtyard, and the others were rounded up and sent to the train station and from there to the camps in Estonia. The informers, those who had acted in accordance with Gens’s policies, were Brigadier Heymann and another, whose identity is a matter of question. Knowing weapons had not yet been distributed, they called in the Germans with the express intention of preventing a battle and at the same time capturing young Jews and sending them to the forced labor camps. The attack dealt a severe blow from every point of view, because of the many members taken and because of the loss of a strategic, well-planned battle position. Kempner had been in the Szpitalna courtyard. “It was our worst failure, nothing before or after could be compared to it. What happened in the bath house courtyard is my worst memory.” She escaped and ran to headquarters, where no one yet knew that the second battalion had been captured, and told Kovner what had happened. “Abba broke down when he heard the news. He had been in the library, and he went back in and wept. I had never seen him cry before. It was a sorrow more profound than what tears could express. He saw nothing left to live for, no point in carrying on. It was a crisis for him, more difficult than Wittenberg’s death, which was a whole day of quintessential crises.” She sat next to him for hours and tried to talk to him. “Suddenly we understood that after all our training and preparation we were still like all the other Jews, no different from them; it was the most awful and tragic helplessness. And that helplessness was the essence of the Holocaust,”

Last Days of the Ghetto

she said.9 The awful crisis, the hours during which Kovner, head of the underground, was closed off in the library (even if only intermittently, because he recovered and continued to take charge), partially explain what happened that day. Another event worsened the feelings of crisis and helplessness, which Kovner never forgot, returning to it in all his writings and in every description of whatever touched him as a private individual or as a former leader of the ghetto underground: “The day I thought was the day of battle,” when the Estonians and Germans broke into the ghetto and the fighters organized at their position at 6 Strashun Street, Kovner’s mother came running from the family’s apartment, which was on the same street, hands raised in supplication: “What will happen to me, what am I to do?” “I had no answer. And the fact that I had no answer has troubled my sleep ever since. For that reason, to this day my mother is in every poem I write.” Empty-handed, Kovner stood before her, having no solution for her generation. Years later, in his poem The Key Sank, Kovner describes the ghetto population, standing silently, and opposite them the underground, on the bank of a river. The mother asks her daughter to take her to the other side, and the daughter says, “Is it better for both of us to die together, tell me,” and the mother answers, “My curse is not upon you, go / for in my purse I have a razor blade waiting.”10 The last words of My Little Sister are: No one will carry my mother’s bed with me, No one will approach my mother’s bed with me .  .  . And say with me My mother My mother.

The speaker is alone facing the world and the essence of all: My mother, my mother, echoing “My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof!” (2 Kings 2:12), lamenting the death of the prophet Elijah. The tragedy of neither side being able to help the other only intensified Kovner’s feeling of helplessness, born of the realization that he could do nothing to save his captured comrades, and they were hurried to the gate before he could help them or even knew

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what had happened. Kovner, however, was obliged to continue as commander, and he began giving orders for reorganization. The first battalion, stationed at 6 Strashun Street, received the weapons intended for those who had been captured, and the underground concentrated most of its forces there. Another, smaller position was set up at 7 and 8 Strashun Street, and a few dozen individuals under Yechiel Scheinbaum (with Korczak as second in command) took their stand at number 12. ­Strashun Street is a short street, narrow and winding, and number 6 ended at the ghetto wall, with 7 and 8 somewhere in the middle, and 12 at the corner of the entrance to the street. As far as its place in the ghetto was concerned, number 6 was primarily a defensive position, not central enough to be used in an offensive. Because the barricade was located in the library, it was built of heavy volumes that had been printed in Jewish Vilna generations before, as if the spirit of the city would defend and protect its young fighters. It was a symbolic scene to which Kovner was to return again, as though to the essence of his Jewish Vilna. At around 9 in the morning the underground was armed and ready for battle. Kovner wrote a manifesto to the ghetto inhabitants, and it was distributed in the streets and melinas at noon: “Jews! Defend yourselves with weapons! Do not believe the murderers’ false promises! Anyone who leaves by the ghetto gate has only one road to travel and it leads to Ponar. Ponar means death! Jews! We have nothing to lose because no matter what happens we will die! Neither flight nor cowardice will save our lives! The only thing that can save our lives and honor is armed resistance. Brothers! It is better to fall in battle in the ghetto than to be led like sheep to Ponar! Know this: within the ghetto walls there is an organized Jewish force which will rise up with weapons. Join us in revolt!” The manifesto called for Jews to take to the streets and fight with axes, metal bars, and sticks in every room, courtyard, and street, inside and outside the ghetto. It ended with the following call: Long live liberty! Long live armed resistance! Death to the murderers! September 1, 1943, Vilna in the Ghetto United Partisan Organization Headquarters, FPO11

The emotional manifesto, whose main points were repeated several times for the sake of emphasis, was not convincing. It referred to ­Ponar,

Last Days of the Ghetto

the Germans’ false promises, and the Judenrat, which betrayed the Jews and helped the Germans. However, the camps in Estonia seemed like a genuine possibility for the ghetto because they had proved to be real. Jews preferred to be exiled or to go into hiding rather than to take to the streets and fight. Even the underground did not physically take to the streets to sweep the masses along with it, nor did it initiate a strike at the Germans and their collaborators. Gens, who knew the underground was ready for battle and who was determined to prevent a clash that would signal the immediate end of the ghetto, demanded that the German in charge immediately remove from the ghetto both his forces and the Estonians, who were running amok and grabbing anyone they found. The Germans left after Gens promised that he and his policemen would bring the necessary number of workers to the gate. Thus in effect Gens began a civil war within the ghetto, in which police and informers searched for Jews hiding in melinas and brought them out by force, while the Jews hid in every conceivable corner. During those last days of the ghetto hatred for the informers and police and for those who betrayed other Jews reached its height and was later manifested in the forest: “I was running around in the ghetto and saw Lotek Zaltzwasser accompanied by police officers open a melina full of crying children and screaming mothers, and drag the men out,” recounted Kempner. “I caught him by the arm and yelled, ‘Lotek, in the name of God, what are you doing, have you gone mad!’ He had once been my brother’s friend and even a member of the underground. And he betrayed and abandoned us and went over to Gens. After we went into the forest I returned, found him in hiding and brought him back with me so he might be executed, and I am proud of having done it.”12 The fighters were waiting at their stations, but there were no Germans or collaborators in the ghetto. The day passed. In the early evening it was made known that the police had succeeded in rounding up and bringing to the gate only 600 men. As a result the Germans reentered the ghetto, and having been informed that there was a large melina at 15 Strashun Street, they went directly there. When no one answered their call, they blew up the building with those hiding inside. Scheinbaum, who from his position at 12 Strashun Street could see what was happening and who thought the Germans might advance

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toward his building, opened fire, and the underground members began throwing hand grenades. Scheinbaum leaned out of a window to get a better look and was killed on the spot by German fire. According to his widow, Pessia, who was next to him at the time, “Our people stopped fighting. They were in shock. . . . Ruzka [Korczak] wept.”13 Korczak pulled herself together and ordered a retreat, and using the attics and other passages, the remaining fighters arrived at the central position at 6 Strashun Street. The Germans blew up the building at number 12 as well, and the retreat saved the lives of those who had been stationed there; in retrospect Korczak had done the right thing. The Germans did not advance to the other two positions; darkness fell and they left the ghetto.14 The disappointment was immense. The battle had not proceeded as planned, and the preparations, which had increased during the days and nights that preceded it, came to naught. According to the machine gunner at 7 Strashun Street, “I had very clear, strict orders from Abba not to fire until they came right in, because I didn’t have a lot of ammunition.” According to Kempner, “We had decided to let the Germans advance as far as possible into the street and then to shoot them at close range. We didn’t have much ammunition. Scheinbaum, in a brave but impulsive act and in direct disobedience of orders, caused us to fail. We had waited for months for the chance to fight, and now we had no one to fight against.” Kovner did not blame Scheinbaum directly, but he could not help but feel more keenly that they had missed their chance: “I wanted at least a good number of victims [i.e., dead Germans]. . . . Yechiel Scheinbaum had been an outstanding military figure in the Polish army. . . . What would have happened on September 1 if he had not gotten off that unexpected shot?”15 After dark the leaders met at headquarters to discuss the situation. The second battalion had been captured, meaning that their forces had been diminished by a quarter, a terrible blow. Most of the other FPO fighters were concentrated at the end of Strashun Street, which was closed off by the ghetto wall, and they could fight only if the Germans advanced to the middle of the street, and that did not happen. In the meantime the ghetto Jews had entered their melinas, and Gens, who did not for a moment abandon his policies, had no way to retreat. He

Last Days of the Ghetto

continued collecting men and women during the following days. About 1,500 men and 2,200 women and children were sent to Estonia at the beginning of September, and when a few hundred men were lacking, Gens convened his auxiliary police force, which had been helping the regular officers, and turned them, his own men, over to the Lithuanian police. During September the ghetto population dwindled to about 11,000, that is, slightly more than half. What next? “All the plans, expectations and prayers of the FPO evaporated into thin air. . . . There was no longer any hope . . . [that] the battle would turn into mass resistance. . . . The uprising, should it take place, would be no more than the act of an isolated few, with no general national value,” wrote Korczak in sorrow. “We didn’t dare look each other in the eye.” Kempner, who sat with Kovner before the discussion took place, said to him, “So what if there was no uprising? The most important accomplishment was the existence of the underground, the desire to fight, that’s what gave the youngsters in the ghetto a goal. What difference does it make where we fight? Let’s take our members into the forests and continue the fight from there. The main thing is the fight itself.”16 Kovner dedicated his last poem to Kempner in memory of that day, when they sat in the library together and she tried to give him a reason to go on living, in the memory of her “lilting laughter which encouraged and said: there is still someone here / alive and happy! And many, so many lay shrunken and awed in / their ash-black shadow” (Sloan Kettering, p. 131). Kovner called a meeting of the leaders that night and tried to resolve the predicament of the end of the ghetto. Dispatching workers to Estonia created the illusion that there was still time, still a choice. Gens, who had always said that when the end came, he would take the weapons out of their hiding place and stand shoulder to shoulder with the fighters, also did not agree that the end had come. Quite the opposite, he managed to prevent the ghetto from sensing the moment had, in fact, arrived and thus prevented a battle between the underground and the Germans. “The crowds passed before us and saw us holding our weapons, but they also saw the trains and preferred being sent somewhere else. . . . They didn’t want to be killed.” The underground thought that perhaps, even if the ghetto did not join them, they

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might take to the streets themselves the following day when the Germans came again. In reconstructing the discussion, of which no written records exist, Kovner said, “Most people were unarmed, what would happen to them? And what if in the meantime it turned out [the Germans] weren’t going to destroy the ghetto? It was a terrible dilemma for us: what right had we to decide their fate . . . ?” The two questions for the uprisings in the ghettos and camps were always when and how? When and how would they know the last hour had come? According to Kempner, “Abba always saw both sides of the coin. He was always in the middle of a dilemma that didn’t have a yes or no answer, and he wasn’t a person of clear-cut decisions. He wasn’t always asking himself whether he had come to the right decision, but if he had the right to take the responsibility for the lives of others.”17 The Germans did not reenter the ghetto. The next day Scheinbaum’s funeral was held, and the armed underground, with Kovner at its head, not hiding anymore, accompanied the coffin to the gate, and when they came back from the forest, they erected a tombstone over his grave. About 2,000 more Jews were taken out to four forced labor camps, and 9,000 were left in the sealed-off ghetto. Shortages of everything, but first and foremost food, increased from one day to the next. With heavy hearts and the feeling they were deserting an idea, a community, and a place, the underground leadership decided not to begin a battle that would only be suicidal; instead, they would gradually leave for the forest. The Aktion lasted for three more days, during which the underground remained at their posts while the police ran back and forth taking whomever they could find. There had been no contact between the two sides since the Wittenberg affair, but the underground had its informers within the police force and the police force had theirs. In the seven alleys of the small, emptying ghetto, the sides followed each other’s actions closely, especially after September 1. On the second day of the Aktion the underground’s informers reported that the Germans, accompanied by Estonians, Lithuanians, and Jewish policemen, were on their way to the bathhouse courtyard of 6 Strashun Street, where the main underground’s position was; the fighters who manned it had been ordered not to open fire. The Germans and their entourage entered the courtyard accompanied by Gens. The

Last Days of the Ghetto

fighters hid inside the building, their guns cocked and ready. Gens’s informers had told him they were there, and they knew he knew they were there. He called to them to come out; no one answered, and after a few minutes of utmost tension, Gens and the others left the courtyard.18 The underground had decided not to fire on the Germans and their flunkies so as not to provoke a suicidal battle and endanger the remaining half of the ghetto and so as not to kill, in the ensuing battle, the Jews who had accompanied the Germans. Gens, who knew they were there, decided to save their lives—and his own, which would have been in danger had the Germans found out he knew where the underground was holed up. Nissan Reznik, Chiena Borowska, and Kovner fiercely denied, each in his or her own testimony, the suggestion made after the war that there had been any contact with Gens or that they had reached an understanding with him at that time. After the Aktion, which lasted for four days, Kovner made a speech before the members of the underground in the courtyard of 6 Strashun Street. He described the bitter disappointment of those who had wanted to fight and had lost their arena. He encouraged them in the hope that the desire to fight would find a way to express itself at a different time and place. “The speech Abba Kovner gave on Saturday, September 4, 1943, is an experience I will remember forever,” wrote Rindjiunski. Some of the fighters were happy, because they were eager to go into the forest. They decided that the last group, especially those who saw abandoning the ghetto as a breach of regulations, would stay at the position at number 6 on the off chance the Germans tried to kill the Jews remaining in the ghetto.19 In the meantime, messengers had arrived from Markov and a call came from Glazman, who was in the Narocz forests, to join them and establish a Jewish partisan unit. During the second week of September five groups of about thirty Jews each left the ghetto for the Narocz forests—members of the FPO and anyone else who chose to join them, taking with them weapons that had been hidden in coffins in the graveyard. They left by way of subterranean tunnels or through attics, because the ghetto was sealed and guarded, and only gravediggers were allowed in or out. Zelda Treger and Kempner were responsible for the meeting point and escorted the group from the ghetto to the graveyard, and from there one

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of them went through the city with the group and continued on with it for 10 or 15 kilometers until they met with a guide from the Narocz forests. About eighty or ninety FPO members who were still in the ghetto, including most of its leaders, left for the nearby Rudniki forests because in the meantime another order had come from the partisans’ headquarters. They hoped to return later to extricate the remains of the ghetto, among them members of their families who had stayed behind. In the meantime about seventy members of the Second Struggle Group, with no relation to the order and without telling the FPO, left for the Rudniki forests; coordination between the groups had ended when Schein­ baum fell.20 On September 14, while the last group of FPO members were waiting for guides to take them to the forest, Gens was shot to death in the prison yard by Rolf Neugebauer, head of the security police. Gens had been warned and could have escaped, but he refused to do so lest the ghetto be harmed in some way. According to Korczak and Arad, Gens was shot simply because “he was no longer useful to them” in a ghetto  they had sentenced to annihilation. The remaining half of the ghetto mourned Gens with all their hearts, as a leader whose protection and guidance would be sorely missed, and the general feeling was that he had not betrayed his own people but was rather a tragic, heroic figure who could have saved his own life and not even entered the ghetto and who had nevertheless taken it upon himself to save those he could using any means available, including cruel ones. In the forest Kovner said, “If Gens were to turn up here, he would be executed.” In 1975, at a convention in New York, Kovner said, “If Gens were to appear here before me today, I don’t know what I would say to him.”21 September 23, 1943, was the ghetto’s last day. German and Ukrainian units surrounded it, their cruelty matched only by the Lithuanians’. It had been announced that the entire ghetto population would be sent to camps in Estonia. The Jews broke into the scanty food stores and emptied them, and they brought supplies to the melinas. A few hundred decided to hide and hold out until the Red Army arrived. With no leaders and under the assumption that they really were being sent to Estonia, thousands of Jews presented themselves at the gate. From there they were taken to Rosa Square, a large, open area, one side of which faces

Last Days of the Ghetto

a hill on which stands one of the most beautiful monasteries in Vilna. There, under the silent sign of the cross, the men were forced to one side and the women and children to the other. The Ukrainians stole everything they could while the Germans ran amok in the ghetto as it emptied out, stealing property and equipment; the Ukrainians followed, blowing up buildings to find hiding places. After a night of pouring rain in the square with no shelter, the men were sent to Estonia, along with some of the women who were masquerading as men in order to go with them. The young women were taken to Latvia, the older women and children went to be killed at Majdanek, and the old and sick were murdered at Ponar. The ghetto was almost entirely empty, and those who had stayed behind were in hiding. Kovner never said good-bye to his mother and never saw her again. There were no eyewitnesses to his mother’s death because this time no one taken to Ponar survived. Kovner spent the rest of his life hoping that the door would open and he would see his mother on the threshold. He kept asking how it could be possible that sound waves could travel endlessly in space and “the cries of my mother were never heard anywhere.”22 Kovner was not the only person to leave a mother or a brother in the ghetto. Yosef Harmatz returned after the war and found his mother, and her first words were about his younger brother; Harmatz had not known that he had already died. The brother had also been in the underground, and because of its strict compartmentalization, Harmatz had never known. The sense of “if only I had known, I would have taken him with me,” never left him. Bluma and Rachel Markowicz left their mother behind, and Rindjiunski left his exhausted parents. The moment of leaving parents was replayed time and time again as they sat around the campfires in the forest. Should they have stayed with them, as Hadassah Kamianitski, Kovner’s girlfriend, had, and died together with them, or had they done the right thing in sentencing them to die, alone, without their children beside them, “the razor blade waiting” in their purses? Today there is no doubt whatsoever in the mind of Hasia Taubes, who was then an enthusiastic, dedicated member of the underground: “Leaving a mother behind is an act of moral bankruptcy.”23 On September 23 about ninety FPO members who had not yet left for the forest were waiting at 6 Strashun Street for guides who did not

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come. When the ghetto was surrounded, Shmuel Kaplinski was again sent to examine the sewer system, with which he was quite familiar, having used it to smuggle weapons into the ghetto. When it rained, the sewers were liable to flood, and anyone who entered would drown unless they knew where to wait.24 The day before, Kovner had sent Kempner and Zelda Treger to meet Sonia Madeysker outside. Madeysker had become the go-between for the reorganized Communist underground in the city since Wittenberg’s death. The next day, from the Vilna side of the ghetto wall, Kempner saw an armed unit of Germans ready and waiting to go in, and she panicked. “What would happen if they failed to get out? Everyone would die and I would remain alone in the world.” Without thinking twice she reentered the ghetto by scurrying across one of the roofs (“I did a lot of things without thinking. I just did them”) and came across Kovner, who was walking around the empty ghetto, weapon in hand, like the captain of a sinking ship. (“It was shocking. The ghetto, in which thousands of people were crowded when I left, was empty!”) She asked to be permitted to remain inside with the others, “and he became quite angry and sent me out again immediately,” where she had work to do. She pulled herself together and with Treger and Madeysker started making arrangements with two other underground members, Lithuanian Communists, without whom it would be impossible to arrange things in the city. All five of them were waiting for those who would leave at a point that had already been chosen. The underground members had received precise instructions to come with their weapons and without the remaining members of their families, and the ghetto was divided into sections that moved at the same time. Hundreds went into hiding in every possible place, from attics to sewers, having decided to hold on until the Red Army arrived. Thousands were walking from the gate to the square under German and Lithuanian surveillance (Kovner noted, “The ghetto was moving before our very eyes”). A few dozen underground members and other youngsters managed on their own to leave the surrounded ghetto or the columns of walking people and to arrive later by themselves in the forest or in Kailis, a camp that Kovner had designated ahead of time as a meeting place in case anyone got lost. And scores of underground members were the last to leave in groups, going from Strashun Street

Last Days of the Ghetto

to the entrance of the sewer system.25 Harmatz, who was with Kovner when they went into the tunnel, testified that everyone who came to the entrance, including people who were strictly speaking not members of the FPO but who were known to be on the underground’s periphery, joined them, the unequivocal decision to take only underground members and not family members or friends notwithstanding. Kovner was the last to enter, having first made sure that no one who could be seen was left behind.26 The nightmare of crawling through sewer pipes, three to four feet in diameter, lasted for seven hours. “We had the feeling we were being buried alive.” “I wanted to kill myself.” “Those were the worst hours of the whole war.” “I kept on walking and walking but I had no sense of time or direction.” “A tall person could only make progress crawling on his hands and knees, with the refuse of the sewers flowing right under his stomach.” Those were some of the recollections. Kaplinski navigated, but nevertheless they took a wrong turn and had to double back. They entered the sewer at noon and came out at seven in the evening, filthy and exhausted, smelling of sewage, some of them about to faint. Kaplinski, indefatigable, raised to the opening those whose stamina was gone.27 They had kept their weapons inside their clothing. Kempner, Treger, and Madeysker waited nearby in a ruined house on Ignatovska Street for hours without being sure where their peers would actually come out. After staying there for a while, they went out through the city in small groups. About sixty people led by Kovner arrived at the deserted Pushkin Palace, which stood on a green hill in one of Vilna’s suburbs, and about thirty people, led by Harmatz, went to the Kailis camp. After four of them were captured and killed on the way, Kovner was the only member of the underground leadership who remained alive, except for Glazman and Reznik in the Narocz forest. “Considering that the ghetto was full of Ukrainians and Germans,” said Kempner, “it was a miracle that only four of close to a hundred were lost. The underground members crept through the sewer system for seven hours, traversed the city twice to the Palace and the camp, took a route which passed through Rosa Square where there were thousands of people, and later on went to the forest at night, when the city was under permanent curfew and the Germans patrolled the streets

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all the time. We had been caged in the ghetto for two years and most of us had forgotten what it was like to walk through the city. Many got lost, and it was a good thing that a few hours before we went into the sewers Abba sent couriers to announce that anyone who got lost or who couldn’t get to the sewer entrance in time was to make his own way to the labor camp.” And it should not be forgotten that it rained hard during the night. Had the rain begun a few hours earlier, when the underground members were all in the tunnels, everyone would have drowned. Kovner said, “I was terrified we would come out of the sewer straight into the arms of Germans or gun-toting Lithuanians, and be killed.” Many had already tried to leave the ghetto for the city by means of the sewers, and some of them had been shot at as they emerged or had fled back into the ghetto. Kempner recounted that “in retrospect, it was our salvation. Almost all of us made it alive into the forest. Then every­one who had not left with us claimed we had deserted them. Looking back, when you forget about the circumstances, it seems as though it was the easiest thing in the world.”28 The group stayed where it was, whether in the palace or in the camp, for two or three days. Treger, Kempner, and Madeysker brought them food and acted as liaisons between them and the underground in the city. When the palace guard threatened to evict them and news came that there were no guides to take them into the forest, Kovner decided to use a map and take the lead himself. When they left, they had no idea who would be waiting for them or where. They again crossed the city in small groups. They had not eaten or slept for four days, and after creeping through the sewers for hours, their legs often refused to obey them; some of them said they were close to exhaustion, but they continued to cross swamps and muddy fields. On September 27, in the pouring rain, they entered the dark forest with no idea of where they were going. After a short while they fell into the open arms of four FPO members who had been sent from Narocz to establish the base they were heading for. The next day the group from Kailis arrived. Kempner and Treger— Madeysker stayed behind in Vilna—could barely contain themselves: “It’s a miracle,” they cried. “Everyone is here!”—despite the fact that for the few days of their trek they could have been discovered and no one believed they would survive.29 Thus, after having been caged in the

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ghetto for two years, from September 1941 (Kovner returned from the monastery in December) to September 1943, a new chapter began. It lasted for ten months, until June 1944, when the Jewish units left the forest to fight for Vilna’s liberation. Further and further away the city lies. Its body still warm, the bells ring. I never saw a city lying on its back like a bleeding horse, pawing the air with its hoofs and not rising. The bells ring. City city who will deliver its eulogy when its inhabitants are dead and its dead live in one’s heart. My Little Sister, pp. 35–37

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N i n e   In the Forest and with the Partisans “Of ten fingers, only the one left knows how to shoot!” October 1943–July 1944

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In September 1944, the morning Hebrew newspaper Ha’aretz published a poem written by Kovner and signed with his underground pen name, Uri, called Your Heart Will Be a Lyre. The poem was written in the forest and was sent by way of Moscow to Eretz Israel. It expressed Kovner’s joy at being able to fight, the feeling that there was still a future, the strength and power imparted by fighting, and his thankfulness at participating in the wonder of victory. The poem suggested that the sinews of the Jewish partisans would be twisted into lyre strings, and with their brothers in Eretz Israel, singing a collectively written melody, they would turn their steps toward the sun. In this first poem sent to Eretz Israel, Kovner clearly states that the Holocaust could not be forgotten, even in the joy of meeting after victory: “But ah, how can we boast of redemption while our hands are in mourning? Of ten fingers, only the one left knows how to shoot!” Those living in Eretz Israel had to know that the fighting partisans were also Holocaust survivors, that they had suffered and needed time to mourn their dead. Here Kovner strongly expressed his opinion, which he would repeat often, that there was no difference between the partisans and the majority of the Jews, who did not really go like lambs to the slaughter. It was the partisans’ privilege to fight, but they were one finger like all the others and came from the same hand, from the people whose remains they were.1 Toward the end of September 1943, Kovner came into the forest leading ninety FPO members, and a new period began. Although he was only 25 years old, within a short time he became the commander of a fighting Jewish unit in the Lithuanian-Soviet partisan organization. Kovner had to deal with a great many issues, over most of which he had

The Forest and the Partisans

only marginal control. First and foremost, within the tangle of national conflicts and interests that took no account of Jewish life, he had to keep the unit alive and preserve its Jewish identity. He had to maintain its status and resist anti-Semitism, which cost many lives and intensified feelings of isolation and of sharing a common fate. He constantly needed to prove that Jews fought with no less bravery and were willing to make no fewer sacrifices—and perhaps even more—than non-Jews. He had to help them lead a semblance of normal daily life in a place where there were no conditions for human life, especially during the long months of a northern European winter. He had to preserve values and some sort of framework in situations in which human life had little worth, while both inside and outside the forest a cruel war of survival was being waged. Finally, and no less difficult, he had to moderate the tensions between his group and the others, because the relations between them remained what they had been in the ghetto and endless complaints were brought to Kovner, who at age 25 had to function as a father figure in a difficult, alien environment. In the forest Kovner bloomed in his role as a commander. He knew Russian from his Sevastopol childhood, and he could fully realize his ambition to fight, impossible in the ghetto. In the forest there was neither Gens nor crowded alleys nor—unfortunately—parents nor the stifling collective responsibility that had threatened him. And now, even the Germans menaced them from without, not from within. Throughout all their difficulties, in situations over which they had no control and in mourning their killed friends, there were many moments of satisfaction. Operations were well executed and praise was received, or a group of Jews successfully reached the forest. In his memoirs Dov Levin described how he and two other Hashomer Hatzair members were guarding the forest camp of the Kovno partisans when suddenly Kovner appeared. He came riding on a white horse, hatless, “armed like a Bedouin and wearing enormous boots,” with a submachine gun and a revolver and a pouch full of maps, his mane of hair in all its glory. Kovner sat with Levin and his peers in their sentry box and told them, in Hebrew, what the FPO had done in Vilna. Zelda Treger wrote that she went out again and again on whatever dangerous mission Kovner sent her because “we saw in front of us a person of great character, graced

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with tremendous morality, and we were willing to follow any command he gave.” Kempner told how four non-Jewish partisans wrested her weapon from her, and she arrived at headquarters on horseback, woke the Soviet brigade commander after midnight, and demanded and was honorably given back her arms, at which point she became a legend in the forest. Such stories vividly illustrate the achievements of the Jewish leadership in the forest,2 what such a life meant for a man of Kovner’s character, and to what degree the command of several hundred Jews, whom Kovner proudly represented at partisan headquarters, was compensation for the helplessness of the ghetto. It was only a short time until the permanent partisan command arrived and determined the affiliation of the Jewish forces from the ghetto. In early September about seventy members of the Second Struggle Group arrived in the Rudniki forest; they had left the ghetto immediately after Scheinbaum’s death on September 1. Their leaders were Elhanan Maggid, Nathan Ring, and Shlomo Brand, who contacted a group of Soviet paratroopers assigned to special missions but had not been accepted because the group could take in only a small number of armed men and that meant abandoning other members, especially the women. That was unacceptable and obviated the possibility of bringing other Jews, still hiding in the city, to join the group. When Kovner arrived with close to a hundred FPO members and met the members of the Second Struggle Group, the surprise was mutual and unpleasant. The Second Struggle Group thought that the FPO had gone to Narocz. In Kovner’s eyes they were simply deserters because they had not told him they were leaving the ghetto and had not waited to see if another battle developed; they had simply thinned the ranks of the underground, and there they were, together again.3 Kovner and his comrades were accepted into the Soviet-Lithuanian partisan organization, having had contacts with them while they were still in the ghetto before Wittenberg’s death. The Underground City Committee, trying to revive itself after the July debacle, was connected to the command in the forest, and its members knew some of the FPO, particularly the Communists. They had been both personally and politically acceptable to them in the ghetto days, unlike the members of the Second Struggle Group, some of whom had formerly been policemen

The Forest and the Partisans

and were politically right-wing. Until the arrival of a permanent command from Narocz, Kovner was placed in charge of the Jewish camp as a whole, including the Second Struggle Group, and Chiena Borowska was appointed political commissar, a post that existed in every Soviet brigade. The members of the Second Struggle Group resented the appointments not only because their own leaders would lose their standing but also because they would be disbanded as a group and integrated as isolated individuals into the unit. Kovner called everyone to their first muster and spelled out their combat and living arrangements, which were strict and obligatory because they were all under military discipline. He was attacked and criticized by members of the Second Struggle Group who had not belonged to youth movements and the underground: “He acted like Napoleon, everyone who knew him knew that,” remarked one of his critics, then a young man who never forgot that he had been rejected by the underground in the ghetto. In her book, Korczak was gentle in her criticism of Kovner’s unequivocal opening statements about what life in the Jewish camp would be like. She was of the opinion that had Kovner explained their situation patiently, his listeners would not have been so angry and offended. Never­theless she admitted that at that time such behavior would have been a luxury.4 With time many others arrived, and four Jewish regiments were established in the forest; their differences from the ghetto days, if not forgotten, were blunted. Command and sorties were determined according to ability and need, not political or group affiliation. The regiment commanders were Kovner (Hashomer Hatzair), who was in charge of all the forces; Shmuel Kaplinski and Aharon Aharonowicz (Bundists); Abrashka Rassel (Komsomol), and Jacob Frener (Beitar), none of whom was a member of the Communist Party. In the tradition of the time the regiments were named (in Russian) The Avenger, Death to Fascism, For Victory, and The Struggle. Eventually the regiment commanders learned which fighters, male and female, could be trusted to carry out active military actions, depending on character and adaptation to forest life. “No one was born into the underground or as a partisan,” recounted Hasia Taubes. “We had to learn everything as we went along. We were merely a group of young people who had just left our

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parents’ homes.”5 The command finally included former members of all the youth movements, and members of the Second Struggle Group and their commanders had respectable status within it. The records of one of the regiments contained many operations commanded by Maggid and Brand. “We were brothers in arms,” said Senka Nisanelewicz, then courting Treger (and later marrying her). “The atmosphere in our camp was usually comradely, informal, everyone wanted to participate in the operations,” wrote Alexander Rindjiunski. “In the forest we created a new family and were united by our common fate, our suffering and wanderings, and our shared experiences.”6 The shoulder-to-shoulder combat, undivided by party issues, that Kovner had dreamed of in the ghetto and the devotion to the tasks at hand and to comrades were all realized in the forest under his command and overcame later events. The regiments spent their first days with no cover and at night slept on the bare earth. They soon built temporary shelters of branches on a small island in the middle of the swamp. It made their lives miserable but afforded them a certain amount of protection, as it would be hard for the Germans to reach them in the depths of the forest. From there they embarked on their two most important missions: bringing more Jews into the forest and training as partisans. A group of women volunteered to contact the remaining Jews, most of whom were living in two forced labor camps within Vilna or still in hiding in the ghetto. To do so, they had to be able to overcome physical difficulties and orient themselves in the field; they had to play their parts in situations of constant danger and needed a sense of improvisation to escape from the clutches of Lithuanians or Germans. Still, within a month they had brought out close to a hundred Jews. Sonia Madeysker, who had remained in Vilna, was in charge of liaison with the forced labor camps and the Underground City Committee. By the beginning of October more than 250 Jews were in the forest. In the middle of the month, coming back from a sabotage mission, Kempner and Hayaleh Shapira spontaneously brought a group of sixty Jews from the Kailis camp. On their way to the forest they received an order from the partisan command that no more Jews were to be brought in. “What could they have done to me?” asked Kempner. “Sentenced me to death? We were already on our way. What was I supposed to tell the people with me, that they were going back to the

The Forest and the Partisans

camp? I pretended I never received the order.”7 Others who came to the forest on their own initiative increased the group to 400, divided into four regiments. At the end of November, underground members from Kovno began to arrive, about 200 of them divided into three regiments, forming a camp in a nearby section of the forest, and all on excellent terms with those from Vilna. Of the 1,000 partisans then in the forest, 600 belonged to Jewish units, not counting the Jews in the Lithuanian and Soviet regiments, and there were 200 more who joined the Vilna group in the following months. Needless to say, all sorts of Jews were in the forest: Communists and Hashomer Hatzair members (who identified more with the forest Soviet regime), revisionists and Bundists (who were terrified of the Soviets), and individuals with no ideological or party affiliation who viewed the Soviets as punishment. There was also social stratification, from the starkeh, the strong ones, the remains of the Vilna underworld, to members of the educated middle class who were made miserable by the lack of newspapers and silverware. The Lithuanians began calling the forest the Jewish State. The partisans headquarters’ order not to bring more Jews was instantly answered with a Jewish headquarters’ internal command to bring any group that might find its way into the forest to the Jewish camp by way of back roads and to continue bringing them in from the forced labor camps and from the city, but in small groups.8 At the first muster Kovner announced that fighters and nonfighters would not be separated but would live together in one camp where everyone’s life would be protected insofar as was possible. Not having separate camps was by no means an accepted or acceptable option in the partisan forests, where nonfighters were considered a burden and a nuisance. For Kovner, bringing in Jews and protecting them was a substitute for the national goals of the FPO, which had gone unfulfilled in the ghetto, and enabled him to be the pioneer who led his people and could establish a fighting Jewish camp. Their short-term goal was fighting the Germans under the obligatory partisan command, but their long-term considerations were first and foremost Jewish. The order not to bring any more Jews was given by Yurgis, the underground name of Henrik Zimanas. Yurgis had taught at the Jewish high school in Kovno, where Yiddish was the language of instruction.

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He arrived in the Rudniki forest from Narocz in the middle of October to take command of the Soviet-Lithuanian underground organizations in the forest and cities in the areas of south Lithuania, as commissar and first secretary of the regional party committee. He never revealed his Jewish identity and even tried to disguise it by growing a mustache in the style of the Lithuanian landholders. However, the interest he showed in the Yiddish partisan songs and the tears that filled his eyes when they gathered in his honor to sing their anthem, which Hirsh Glik had composed while they were still in the ghetto, made him suspect in their eyes. Yurgis even knew enough to tell those who had come from Vilna that Gens had in fact known about an arms cache and had not made it up out of whole cloth. Gabris, the underground name of the Lithuanian Marianas Micheyka, was the undersecretary of the regional party committee and later an esteemed supreme court judge. Third in command was Margis, a Pole whose real name was Vitold Senkiewicz, who opposed Yurgis’s dictate that no more Jews be brought into the forest. The fact that these three headed the partisan command greatly influenced the creation of the Jewish regiments and raises more sharply the question of whether anti-Semitism in the forest (and, in fact, anywhere else) depended on individuals and not just on official policy. All of the above notwithstanding, from Kovner and Yurgis’s first meeting, which to all outward appearances was a meeting of equals, it was clear that such a large Jewish camp was not to the liking of the Jewish member of the triumvirate and that Kovner would have a struggle on his hands.9 The arrival of the three began the second stage of Jewish lives in the forest, which continued until the spring. As soon as the Jewish partisans arrived, the Soviet commanders immediately began asking the question, repeated in various forms, “Why did you go like lambs to the slaughter? We’ve heard there were millions.” The Jewish partisans fought differently and made sacrifices different from the non-Jews because the question “burned deep in our souls,” said Kovner, and because they had no answer; only after the war did they understand that everyone had, in fact, gone like a lamb to the slaughter: Soviet prisoners of war, Polish officers, Ukrainian peasants. They fought to rid themselves of the distress the question caused them and their people, to avenge their families and the humiliations suffered,

The Forest and the Partisans

and especially to discard their sense of helplessness.10 They went out on missions as soon as they arrived in the forest, although they had few weapons, and Gabris wasted no time in telling them that they would not receive arms from the general partisan command. Their first mission, which was relatively simple, would be to cut the telephone lines on the main road to Vilna. Afterward Kempner was sent to the city with Shapira and two men. Their mission (which was successful) was to blow up sections of Vilna’s power and water system using limpet mines, provided by the Underground City Committee in Vilna through Madeysker. After that they learned to sabotage German installations and supply lines, roads, and railroads. With Kovner and Maggid in command, the Jewish partisans successfully set fire to a bridge and blew up train engines without a battle or casualties, raising the status of the Jewish camp. The sight of “the partisans’ faces lit . . . by the burning bridge, glowing with joy and revenge, is something I will never forget,” wrote one of the saboteurs. Those who returned from the mission received much praise and one large onion apiece.11 Documents brought to Eretz Israel, such as the records of The Avenger, Kovner’s regiment, and recommendations for medals of valor proposed by the partisan command after the war, detail some of the many operations executed by the Jewish regiments. Some missions were successful, and some cost lives or ended in catastrophe, such as casualties caused by friendly fire. To enable everyone to participate in combat, the Jewish partisans kept weapons in a central store from which they were taken and to which they were returned; thus no one owned a weapon and no one went out unarmed. It was a tactic that complemented the decision that there would be no distinction between fighters and nonfighters, and it was adopted only by the Jewish camp in Rudniki.12 Kovner insisted that women go out on every mission, and in time he was proved right. The women not only performed their duties in exemplary fashion but also gave the men personal examples to follow. According to Kempner, “Our worth in the forest was in our moral discipline; we never shirked our duty.” “I felt the fate of the female gender at large depended on my success,” wrote Korczak about her first mission. Kempner commanded a scouting unit of six men, and they would tease her because she did not permit them to nap or take more food

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from the peasants. Treger was the liaison with Vilna, brought medicines (which were of the utmost importance in the forest), transmitted fly sheets and weapons, accompanied Communist activists from the city to meetings in the forest, and coordinated sabotage operations, a kind of small, modest, impossible dynamo. “Our bravest heroes were our fighting women,” said Issar Schmidt, then The Avenger’s political commissar, who had been parachuted into the Rudniki forest from Moscow.13 Besides paramilitary operations and bringing Jews into the forest, daily life had to be organized, particularly the acquisition of food. Most of the time the Jewish partisans ate belanda, a mixture of flour and water without salt that rapidly turned black and caused bloated stomachs. Nisanelewicz brought Treger salt, a token of his love. Pessia, Scheinbaum’s widow, was in charge of the kitchen, a difficult job and one that required someone strong in character. One day, recounted Nisanelewicz, some of the men on guard duty took the potatoes she had been saving for the sick and wounded and fried them. She immediately told Kovner, who “was first and foremost still an educator,” and he treated the matter seriously. He found out which of the guards were involved and punished them by making them eat not only their own belanda but that of the regiment commanders as well. He and the other commanders went hungry for the entire day; the sinners could not bring themselves to swallow more than their rations, and their stomachs ached dreadfully all day long. “We were very angry with Abba and his ‘educational’ methods. In retrospect we understood that if he had not kept us on a straight and narrow path, it would have been almost impossible to make sure there would be enough food for everyone, including the sick and wounded and those who did not go out on missions and couldn’t grab something on the way,” said Nisanelewicz.14 It was extremely difficult to obtain food in the forest. “We turned into robbers, with a strict ethical code of honor among thieves,” said Kempner. They raided the peasants and took food by force, an act they were ashamed of but were forced into by circumstances. It was forbidden to take more than what was absolutely necessary to survive: no fruits and vegetables, no butter, only meat and flour. If the farmer had four cows, they took two; those were the orders, and anyone who disobeyed was punished. Because it was hard to resist temptation, espe-

The Forest and the Partisans

cially if the farm belonged to a Pole or a German, and because there was no way to monitor them, often the Jewish partisans did not follow orders, no matter how much Kovner preached. The raids also illustrated the complexity of the Jews’ situation, forced to choose between evils: The Lithuanian peasants hated the Soviets, who in their opinion were responsible (along with the Jews) for the loss of their independence in 1940. They hated the partisans, even those who were Lithuanian, for their support of the Soviets, and, needless to say, they hated the Jews, who were in the majority among the partisans. The Germans exploited their hatred, providing them with arms and encouraging them to become informers. As time passed, White Polish partisans appeared, rightwingers who were afraid that after the war the Soviet Union would take over western Byelorussia and the western Ukraine, which had been Polish before the war. They also armed the peasants, fought against the Soviet partisans, and murdered scores of Jews who hid with peasants.15 The Germans also established auxiliary regiments, a kind of local SS, made up of Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, or Soviet prisoners of war who knew that anyone who fell into German hands and returned from captivity would be killed by his own commanders. As a result, the forest and its surroundings were full of units hostile to the Jews. As for the peasants, they were easy prey for everyone, from the Germans to the Jews, and they became more embittered from day to day. Sometimes the partisans took revenge on villages that were particularly hostile and had caused them loss of life or were the home base of the murderers of Jews in Vilna. For example, about twenty partisans, Jewish and non-Jewish, razed and then set fire to the village of Konyuchi, having received orders from partisan headquarters in Rudniki to destroy it. The Germans photographed the ruins of the village with the intention of showing the world the true face of the partisans, “the red bandits.” Kovner mustered his men, announced the operation had been successful, and praised the fighters who had distinguished themselves. However, he said, the partisans should do nothing that the Germans could use against them. Kovner could not be too critical because the orders had been given by the partisan general command. He later sat individually with each of the fighters, spending several hours explaining, according to Nisanelewicz, that they “were partisans but

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first of all Jews, and we do not kill the way the Germans do. We were angry with him again, the poet-turned-partisan, who was trying to turn us into members of Hashomer Hatzair with its ideas about morality in combat. We were young and hot-headed, we had lost everything and were eager to take our revenge on the Lithuanians. In retrospect, of course, he was right again; we had gotten carried away.”16 In the meantime, daily life in the Jewish units settled into a routine, and the second phase of life in the forest began. In November the partisans moved to a new base because winter with its subzero temperatures was close at hand and they could no longer continue living in lean-tos. In a drier spot, somewhat removed from the mosquitoinfested swamp, they built dug-outs, sleeping places called zimliankehs, on large areas covered with twigs, ten people per section, about 30 centimeters (1 foot) for each person, with no blankets, mattresses, or privacy. There was a central aisle, and they brought in a kind of primitive heating stove.

Zimliankeh—partisans’ quarters in the Rudniki forest. Photo by Dina Porat, 1992.

The Forest and the Partisans

It was clear that not every woman was suitable for operations carried out outside the forest, or wanted to take part in them. Kovner therefore put them to work improving the conditions of the camp to forestall any objections that might come from partisan headquarters, which still had not accepted the presence of noncombatants. The nonfighting women set up a bakery, “laundry,” “hospital,” and workshop for repairing weapons, which served the entire forest. Korczak was appointed “sergeant master” of the camp, and she made sure everyone bathed in the semisauna, where boiling water was poured onto bricks. She instituted a method of scrubbing with ashes instead of soap, and louse infestations diminished. Before that the women had bathed in melted snow, but the men almost never washed and scratched day and night because of the lice.17 The diseases plaguing them in the ghetto disappeared and were replaced by scabies and boils caused by the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. Especially prevalent were sores on the feet and gum infections. Kovner lost several teeth and had to wait until after the war to have dental work done. There were few eating utensils, and the problem of clothing was acute because they came into the forest with only the clothes they were wearing. Every time the Soviets parachuted in weapons and supplies, the women took the parachutes and sewed garments from the cloth. All clothing had to be boiled because of the lice, and the colors ran when different-colored articles were by chance washed together. They used the woods as latrines, even in the winter. The menses of most of the young women ceased, and the others used rags they laundered for reuse. There were relationships between the young men and women, especially in spring and fall, which made them feel that the world still turned on its axis. Love flourished and couples protected and worried about each other. There were short-term relationships as well, and there were girls who did not take such matters lightly. “In the regiment the men knew whom they could make time with and whom not. They knew enough to leave me alone,” said Fania Yocheles, one of the women who went out on military operations, “and they respected us.” “In the forest,” sighed Nisanelewicz about missed opportunities, “there was almost no chance for couples to have privacy.” He slept next to a good friend, and when Treger agreed to enter into a relationship

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with him, the three of them slept one next to the other. Couples risked distancing themselves from the camp only when the weather improved and they were sure there were no Germans or anyone else in the area. Kempner slept with Korczak on twigs, which both of them heartily despised, and Kovner slept in the command zimliankeh. During the first stage in the forest Kovner was surrounded by a group of young Hashomer Hatzair women (almost none of the men were still alive), especially Kempner, Korczak, and Rachel (Rashka) Markowicz, in a way that left him open to gossip. Apparently Korczak was closest to him then. Kempner went out on missions and operations and spent a lot of time away from camp, but as time passed she and Kovner became close, as was only natural when two members who undertook prominent roles work together; he was the commander, and she became more and more well known from one operation to the next. His relationship with Korczak became, at least as far as he was concerned, a close, strong friendship, but that did nothing to prevent the situation from being unclear to the others or to keep them from gossiping.18 Kovner, Yurgis, and others took great pains to make sure that the Soviet command, which in other places treated Jewish women abusively, was not allowed the same freedom with respect to the Jewish regiments. They were walking a thin line, because the Soviet command had an unfavorable opinion of couples and of the presence of women in the Jewish camp in general; it was almost unknown anywhere else in the partisanka. Whoever broke a rule was strictly punished, and the punishment was almost always the same: The guilty party was shot to death with no undue hesitation. Losing a weapon was forbidden, as were falling asleep on guard duty and displaying good food brought from elsewhere. Giving birth was forbidden, although memoirs differ as to whether every child of the few born in the forest was immediately killed. There was no judge or jury, no middle road. Either someone followed the rules or he was shot. Nevertheless, the Jewish character of the regiments was preserved, even in the face of Soviet threats, and corporal punishment and executions were unknown. Non-Jewish partisans killed their wounded if they had to move, an idea unthinkable among Jews. Kovner gave orders in Yiddish, the lingua franca of the regiment members, and the songs sung

The Forest and the Partisans

around campfires were in Yiddish or Hebrew, not Russian. Sometimes they held social evenings, but holidays went unmarked. No one remembered exactly when they fell, and between gathering to receive orders, tours of duty within the camp, and going out on missions, sometimes for days at a time, they had no time for the holidays. Needless to say, May Day and other Soviet holidays were celebrated, often with special guests. In the spring, when Moscow dropped newspapers by parachute, after months of not having seen a printed word, the partisans would sit around the campfire, read the articles aloud, and discuss them. The base became a kind of home from which they left for the unknown and to whose warmth they were eager to return, and their friends, wrote Kovner, became brothers and sisters, waiting for them. Campfires were their only social focus, a kind of resting spell, a moment of sadness and introspection: “Beside the rustling fire, surrounded by the hostile, alien forest, the partisans, filthy, bearded and crawling with lice, would suddenly begin to sing quietly. The song immediately transported us ‘there,’ to the home which no longer existed.”19 That Jewish regiments existed within the Soviet command and did not hide either their Judaism or their Zionism, spoke and sang in Yiddish, had a commander respected by partisan headquarters, had autonomy within the regiments, and, what was most unusual in the forest, had a high percentage of women accepted as equals were achievements unprecedented in the partisan forests during the war. To understand them, the FPO groups that left the ghetto for the forests at Narocz and joined the partisan brigade named after Voroshilov and commanded by Colonel Fyodor Markov should be examined. Markov’s emissaries had entreated them, as noted, to leave the ghetto and come fight with the partisans. Joseph Glazman’s group arrived, having left a few days after the Wittenberg incident, as did other groups, including about 200 people from the towns around Vilna that were destroyed in August and 150 FPO members who came in September. Other groups had arrived much earlier, when the towns in Byelorussia were destroyed; some of them were youths who joined the partisans and others were from small family camps that had lived in dire straits and had suffered constant harassment. When Glazman arrived, Markov agreed to establish a Jewish unit that would take in all those who were already there and that would

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also be responsible for the outlying groups. The regiment was established at the beginning of August and called Revenge; the group grew to 250 members. Glazman sent Kovner a message written in Hebrew calling on the other comrades to join them in the forest: “We have established a Hebrew unit here. . . . I hope we’ll soon turn into a bravely fighting Hebrew battalion.”20 The regiment did not last even two months, and their disappointment was commensurate with their hopes, perhaps even greater. In addition to problems of acclimatizing to the forest and lack of arms, the regiment was subjected to anti-Semitic humiliation and harassment from the other regiments. After a few weeks Glazman was told that the regiment would be disbanded because the Soviet partisans were organized according to territory and not nationality and the local party authorities objected to the Jewish unit. Glazman asked that responsibility for the brigade be transferred to Yurgis, who was still at ­Narocz, and that it go with him to Rudniki. Yurgis refused and agreed only to include four partisans in the unit about to set out to establish a base in Rudniki (the four into whose arms the first FPO members who reached Rudniki had fallen with surprise). On September 23, the black day on which the ghetto was destroyed, Markov called the Jewish unit to a muster and told them formally that the unit would be disbanded and that their weapons would be replaced by revolvers. It was “an embarrassing, humiliating situation, . . . a burning hand of insult clenched my heart,” wrote Cesia Rosenberg. As soon as Markov had finished speaking, non-Jewish partisans passed among them and took their weapons, the same almost holy weapons they had collected in the ghetto at the cost of so much labor and so many sacrifices. The best weapons had been sent from the ghetto to Narocz with the comrades so they would not come into the forest empty-handed. The members of the disbanded regiment received nothing in return, not even the promised revolvers. To enable the entire brigade to buy new guns, the members of the Jewish unit were asked to hand in their valuables, and the next day they saw their watches and rings and coats decorating the commissars and their commanders and their mistresses.21 Had Kovner decided to accept Glazman’s invitation to Narocz, no trace would have been left of the FPO. Most of the Jews who joined

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Glazman’s regiment were brutally killed by partisans, peasants, and Germans, including Kovner’s younger brother, Michael. “Little Michtzik, fallen on the road,” Kovner eulogized. “The pain comes not from his being my brother” but from his being virtuous and talented, and it was he who should have stayed alive. “Little Michtzik, little Michtzik, there was no one like him!”22 Kovner’s brother Genia and his sister-in-law, Neuta, were still alive after having lost their daughter Sala during the ghetto’s last days, but Kovner had been closer to Michael, with whom he had undergone so much, and even physically they were similar. One after another, Kovner lost his relatives. Yurgis arrived at Rudniki from Narocz, but he did not immediately tell the Jewish partisans about the events there, perhaps because he had refused Glazman’s suggestion that they go to Rudniki together and had indirectly brought about the catastrophe. When he did tell, the Jewish partisans went into deep mourning and were furious at the disappointment and shame. Kovner called the events at Narocz “a bloody stain on partisan history, one which no pen could cross out.”23 He had a score to settle with the Soviets for the year they had controlled Lithuania, between mid-1940 and the German invasion in the middle of 1941. Even then Kovner could see the gulf between ideology and rule, between the inflated rhetoric and the wretchedness of daily life. In the Rudniki forests he met what he called a solid command, a Lithuanian-Polish command of local Communists, which enabled him and hundreds of Jews to survive in a way that, in contrast to other places, was reasonable and at times even respectable. Therefore, even the punishments imposed on them in Rudniki, the itchy trigger fingers, the severity with which orders were handed down, and the anti-Semitism experienced by Kovner and his comrades cannot explain the profound disgust for the Soviet regime Kovner felt when he left the forest. The explanation lies in the events of Narocz, perpetrated by individuals who had been raised under Soviet ideology. These events caused the disbanding of Vilna’s underground organization, which Kovner himself had fostered with so much love and care, and had brought about the cruel and senseless deaths of his best men and women friends and of his beloved brother. Moreover, when Kovner read the newspapers that were dropped into the partisan base from Moscow, he understood that Jewish ­partisan

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participation in the fighting had even then been erased from history, even while history was being made. The papers reported the heroism of the Lithuanian and Latvian partisan brigades without mentioning that most of their members were Jewish. “There was no area, almost no forest in Lithuania, White Russia, the Ukraine and Poland, where those who laid the foundation for the Soviet partisan movement, the pioneers of war in the forest, were not Jewish . . . and like most pioneers, most of them fell in battle,” said Kovner later.24 The efforts, the sacrifice, the valor of Jewish partisans in battle—all were in vain. Another affair added to the tense atmosphere in the camp. The party’s “special department” for internal investigations was headed by a militant Bolshevik named Stankewicz, whose first name the surviving partisans have forgotten, but they remember his nickname—“Think!”—because he beat his victims while ordering them to use their heads. The department gathered testimonies and conducted investigations, handed down death sentences, and executed six Jewish policemen who had collaborated with the Germans in the ghetto. Everything was done on the same party authority, which daily frightened the partisans. Issar Schmidt and other paratroopers who arrived from Moscow participated in the executions; only paratroopers, who had a special status in the forest and a reputation for being particularly loyal, participated. It was not known in the camp that the investigations and executions were the regular Soviet practice during the last phases of the war and afterward and that they took place arbitrarily, so the Jewish partisans suspected the accusation was directed exclusively at them. A general muster was called, the sentence for the six policemen was read out—after the fact—and Schmidt listed the accusations and the details of the investigation. Kovner spoke and justified the sentence: Forgiving anyone who collaborated with the enemy and participated in its crimes against the Jewish people was out of question. Although Kovner knew beforehand that the executions would take place and agreed that they were necessary—he did not have much choice because it was the special department’s regular and uncontested initiative that started the process—he requested Yurgis to stop them because of the fierce arguments among the camp inhabitants and the panic that prevailed for a while. In the rules and regulations Kovner wrote for the survivors when the war was over, one of the main points

The Forest and the Partisans

was the establishment of a Jewish court to try Jews who had betrayed their own people.25 The executions stopped, and life in the forest went on. The Narocz tragedy and the execution of the policemen occurred or were made known to the Jewish camp at Rudniki during the few short weeks between the middle of October 1943, barely three weeks after their arrival in the forest, and the beginning of November, and the two events made for unpleasant relationships and an unsettled atmosphere. As time went by and a daily routine was established, and the more the Jewish partisans went out on missions, an atmosphere of togetherness began to crystallize, fostered by Kovner, whose position as a leader strengthened. Officially, after the arrival of Yurgis, Kovner commanded only his own regiment, but in fact he was in charge of the 400 Jews in the camp. That second phase in the lives of the Jews in Rudniki, which began after the initial jolts, lasted for half a year, from November, when they moved to their permanent camp, until the spring of 1944. In the spring of 1944 the third and final phase began. It was already obvious what the outcome of the war would be, and every party made plans for the morning after. The White Poles increased their presence in the region to ensure later sovereignty, attacked the partisans, and killed the remaining Lithuanian Jews they found hiding in the towns and villages. The partisan command at Rudniki continued the measures begun by Yurgis in October to decrease the number of Jews in the forest to a minority, despite his ever-increasing respect for Kovner. Schmidt recounts that “not only Yurgis, [but] the entire partisan command respected Abba for his morality.” Yurgis notified Kovner of his plans to abolish the Jewish units because they, the Jews, had not brought sufficient weapons to equip everyone and because they had a negative influence on the surrounding population, and he, Yurgis, was interested in turning local hostility into sympathy and support for the partisan movement. Kovner fought back and reminded him of the great quantities of arms brought in by the Jews. He also claimed that the population was hostile to Jews in general, not just to his unit, and even if the unit were full of Christians, anti-Semitism toward its Jews would not change, but his arguments were of no avail.26 In the meantime, with the advance of the Red Army, more weapons

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and supplies were parachuted into the bases and partisan activity increased in direct proportion. Arms were distributed in the Narocz and Kazian forests, and Jews excelled in the fighting roles given to them and received better treatment. The Jewish brigades at Rudniki were given more arms, although they were still discriminated against. They needed weapons for themselves and to arm the 2,000 Jews still imprisoned in the forced labor camps; they had to make arrangements to bring them out lest they be killed at the last moment.27 The weapons were dropped in with the lack of order usual in the forest, and sometimes a sack would be caught on a branch and its contents would spill out. From such a torn sack members of Kovner’s regiment rescued two submachine guns and some of the “luxuries” intended for the exclusive use of the partisan command. “We got carried away again,” said Nisanelewicz. “Luxuries,” snorted Yosef Harmatz, “cigarettes that made you choke and tasteless chocolate.” The command accused Kovner of having sent his men to obtain the weapons and demanded to know who the culprits were. A few partisans were interrogated and even beaten by Stankewicz. Nisanelewicz was among them; he was severely beaten and asked to “think!” and then interrogated for six hours on aching buttocks because he dared to liken the special department to the Gestapo.28 Kovner made it known that names were not to be divulged. An investigation was opened against him as well, and according to standard procedure, he was sentenced to be executed. He gave Kempner his father’s watch and the pages he managed to write in the forest. Kempner, as was her wont, did not go into details: “I said good-bye to him that night, knowing they would shoot him the next morning.” The partisan command was politically subordinate to the Special Unit, which was headed by Stankewicz, and having pronounced the sentence, it had the full authority to carry it out, as it had carried out others. Nevertheless the command, especially Gabris, intervened on Kovner’s behalf and demanded that Moscow decide the issue. Until the answer arrived, they sent Kovner on a dangerous mission to attack White Poles, who had become a major nuisance. Had he been killed in battle, everything would have been settled as far as they were concerned.29 The death sentence was commuted. According to Schmidt, “Abba had not really been sentenced to death and we didn’t send any ques-

The Forest and the Partisans

tion to Moscow. They didn’t deal with such trifles there, and we could have killed anyone we wanted to.” However, Schmidt’s testimony strengthens the supposition that the affair of the weapons was meant only as an excuse to replace Jewish commanders with Lithuanians. Harmatz, who at the height of the affair was put in charge of the regiment’s Special Unit, although he was only 19 years old, was asked for an opinion. He immediately exploited the opportunity to suggest that the command leave Kovner alone because the affair of the sack was ambiguous. When Kovner was lying on his deathbed in New York, and his son Michael and Harmatz sat on a bench in the corridor next to his room, Michael told Harmatz that Kovner always thought he owed his life to him for his stand at the time.30 Kovner was returned to his regiment and placed in charge of the sabotage unit. Borowska and Kaplinski had also been relieved of their commands without much ado. Orders were no longer given in Yiddish and couples were separated, each member being sent to a different regiment. The Jewish partisans saw the new situation, especially the changes in command, as the loss of the accomplishments they had labored for. Actually, the Lithuanian who was appointed commander included Kovner in the command, and headquarters also continued to treat him as a central figure.31 He was invited to all the meetings at headquarters and received hints whenever Stankewicz was having him followed. Harmatz approached Kempner and suggested she convince Kovner to stop writing until the storm passed or that he find another tree in the depths of the forest, far from the one near the pine stump he was so fond of. Kovner gave some of his writings to Treger to preserve in a corked bottle, which she was to cast into the water as she crossed a river on her way to the city—he still believed, as he had in his childhood and youth, that words and sounds would never disappear. In general, recounted Nisanelewicz, even in the forests, if someone happened to forget who Abba Kovner was, he was quickly reminded.32 Additional signs that they would have to prepare for changing times included the pressure the commissars put on them to verify the political affiliations of each partisan and to convince them that their future was the Komsomol. That was one of Kovner’s goals in writing a long missive to the remaining comrades in the various forests, especially the

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Hashomer Hatzair members: not only to chronicle in detail the past events in the ghetto, which did not stop tormenting him, but for the future, to strengthen their socialist belief, which committed them to fight at the side of the Red Army despite their disappointments. Kovner suggested that they not get involved in arguments with Komsomol activists and that the best course would be to claim they were simply apolitical. He encouraged his comrades “not to sink into despair, no matter what,” and to continue their path because they had no other, “and to continue it to the end!”33 Therefore, at the beginning of July 1944, when the echoes of the Red Army cannons could already be heard in the forest, Kovner, Kempner, and Korczak debated what they should do immediately after liberation. First they decided to renew contacts with the surviving Hashomer Hatzair members. On July 8 Korczak went to the Kovno partisan brigade in the Rudniki forest to tell them that once the war was over, they were to concentrate themselves in central points, keep in contact with one another, and wait for orders regarding leaving for Eretz Israel. The orders and their contents were oversimplified, and the way Kovner, Kempner, and Korczak called themselves “the Hashomer Hatzair Secretariat in the forest” sounded pretentious. Kempner admitted as much: “Our movement no longer existed, but we kept thinking in national terms. What would history say, what would Hashomer Hatzair in Eretz Israel say, what would the fate of the Jewish people be?” However, it may safely be said that at that moment in the forest in July, the exodus from Europe began, because their orders radiated leadership and direction.34 The situation did not remain stable for long. On July 7 Red Army forces encircled Vilna, and one week later, having sustained heavy losses, the Germans surrendered. The Jewish partisans from Rudniki entered the city following the troops. Those who had left it through the sewers now returned with the victors, carrying their arms. However, they found the city empty of Jews. The Vilna they had grown up in and loved, the Vilna vibrant with life and culture, no longer existed. The ghetto was empty. Kovner and his comrades walked along the streets in mourning, asking the same question so many Jews asked themselves at the end of the war: Were they the last Jews on earth? They had not succeeded in rescuing the 2,000 Jews in the forced labor camps, who

The Forest and the Partisans

had been murdered during the days before the Liberation. Madeysker sacrificed herself in an attempt to get them out in time, and Kempner and Treger were almost killed as well.35 Returning to the main streets, the Vilna partisans met Ilya Ehrenburg, the famous Jewish-Russian author, then a senior reporter for The Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, whose thousands of articles,

Kovner at the entrance to the destroyed Vilna Ghetto, July 12, 1944. Photo by the Red Army photographers unit. Courtesy of the Kovner family.

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Left to right: Ruzka Korczak, Abba Kovner, and Vitka Kempner in liberated Vilna, July 1944. Photo by the Red Army photographers unit. Courtesy of the Kovner family.

sometimes several a day, won him great fame and popularity. He was accompanied by a unit of press photographers, and most, if not all, of the partisan photographs available today were not taken in the forest— for who then had a camera?—but rather during Ehrenburg’s emotional meeting with them on the streets of liberated Vilna. He was profoundly surprised to meet a Jewish partisan unit and their commander, who had been acting openly as a Jew and a Zionist under Soviet command.36 Yonah Degen, then commander of a Red Army tank squadron, fought the battle to liberate Vilna for the entire week. On the morning of July 13, when the battle was over, he entered the ghetto and found it empty. Near his tank he saw about twenty men wearing a collection of clothes and uniforms with red bands on their sleeves and speaking Yid-

The Forest and the Partisans

dish. He had not heard the language spoken for years, and it sounded to him as though it came from the mouth of the Messiah. They embraced and cried and toasted each other’s health, and a long-haired partisan youth said that it was a sign from heaven, that “a Yiddish-speaking Jew came in a tank to the ghetto and liberated it.” During the Eichmann trial in 1961 Degen secretly received a book of pictures of the trial, sent to him in Kiev—secretly, because contacts between Soviet Jewry and the free world were then forbidden—and there he identified the longhaired youth, by then a man, lamenting in Jerusalem the destruction of the Jerusalem of Lithuania.37

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Part Three  Postwar Years in Europe and in Israel

(1944–1949) “The Wilja and the Alexander [rivers] mingle together”

Circuits When the world war ended it ended For the whole world. I was in Bucharest on the third border Fleeing from my home To my home. .  .  . When the world war ends When it ends I leave Bucharest and wend my way around the world Perhaps I will find the back door to my mother’s house I will say Mama, Ma-ma It’s me. To, p. 66

Te n   From the Land of the Holocaust

to the Land of Life

“Mammeh, may I cry now?” July–December 1944

For Kovner the year following the liberation of Vilna began in the middle of July 1944, when the partisans entered the city. It ended on July 16, 1945, the second anniversary of Wittenberg’s death, with an encounter between partisans and survivors and the soldiers of the “fighting Jewish brigade” from Eretz Israel, operating within the British army, in northern Italy. The poem Circuits follows Kovner as he wanders through Europe after leaving his old home, ruined Vilna, for his new home, green-lawned Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh. Kovner passed through Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Italy on the exodus roads, out of Europe to the land of Israel, always hoping to find his mother’s home. For the last six months of 1944 Kovner stayed in Vilna and collected the remnants of its treasures and gathered the surviving Jews, and in December he left for Lublin, Poland. Even before he returned to Vilna, Kovner knew that virtually nothing was left. Almost all his high school friends and teachers had been killed at Ponar. The Hashomer Hatzair chapter, once numbering almost a thousand, which he led and fostered, had ceased to exist. Of the hundreds of Hashomer Hatzair refugees who came to Vilna from Poland, only a few score had survived in the ghetto. There was still hope that at least some of the hundreds who had gone deep into the Soviet Union when the Germans invaded would return, as perhaps would members of the underground who had gone to Narocz and even some from the second battalion sent to the camps in Estonia. Jewish soldiers and officers in Red Army uniforms had already told the partisans of the destruction of the towns around Vilna and throughout eastern Europe on

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their way to the city. They fell into each other’s arms, and the soldiers, half-crying and stammering in Yiddish, almost forgotten under the Soviet regime, told them they had come hundreds and hundreds of miles and passed through towns and villages and had not found a single living Jew. “I didn’t go to find out whether anyone in my family was still alive. I knew there was nothing to look for,” said Kempner, and the same was true of Korczak and others who had been born in Poland. Vilna itself, which had formerly stunned visitors with its beauty, had been badly damaged. Although most of its buildings were still standing, the ghetto area was completely empty.1 Kovner made short entries in a new diary, documenting events and his feelings of being neither here nor there. He asked himself in his empty Vilna, which “brought its roots to the stake. / How / how, little sister, / does one draw out the thread and spin the dream / now?” (My Little Sister, p. 68). Kovner, Kempner, and Korczak told and retold the stories of their return to Vilna, each unable to find release for years afterward. Kempner told about a group of Soviet prisoners, Kirghizes, passive and numb, whose commander had apparently transferred them from German captivity back to the Russians at the end of the war. Regardless of the circumstances, Russian captives who returned were invariably executed. On the way to Vilna the Red Army commanders ordered the partisan command to kill the Kirghizes immediately. And they were killed, said Kempner, one by one, by partisans with tears in their eyes and their teeth clenched in rage. It was a terrible shock, said Kempner: “When we were in the forest and people were killed for almost no reason it seemed necessary, to maintain discipline.” Here, as if offhandedly, forty people were killed, far from home, without interrogation, without being given the opportunity to defend themselves or notify anyone.2 On the other hand, on the same road to the city White Poles tried to convince the partisan command to hand over the Jewish partisans and thus prevent them from entering Vilna, which they claimed was Polish. It was obvious that the Poles, who had already drawn their guns, were planning to kill the Jews as they had during combat in the forest. Gabris absolutely refused to turn over his fighters and sent the Poles on ahead to be killed in the battles for the city instead of the Jewish partisans. Kempner personally witnessed the negotiations because she and

From the Holocaust to the Land of Life

her scouting unit were among those at the head of the column. She had been fearful that they all would be killed while on the main road, like the Kirghizes. It was years before her fears subsided, not only of Germans but of Soviets, of informers, and of arbitrary executions, arrests, and imprisonments.3 Korczak told and retold the story of the day she returned to Vilna and saw a Jewish child walking in the street with his mother, and she, Korczak, burst into tears and wept at the sight of a living Jewish child as she had not wept before. Kovner spoke of a mother and daughter he saw leaving the narrow alcove in which they had lived for months. The mother burst into tears at the sight of the partisans and the child asked, “Mammeh, may I cry now?” Following his first meeting with Kovner in Eretz Israel, the poet Nathan Alterman wrote the poem Mamma, May I Cry Now? which later became one of his best known comments on the Holocaust. At the Eichmann trial, when Kovner was asked about the first thing he had seen when he entered Vilna, it was as though the court already knew his answer would be the story about the little girl, which had by that time become the symbol of the tragedy of the Holocaust.4 It was some small comfort that after the surrender Jewish partisans publicly escorted columns of German prisoners, Wehrmacht officers and soldiers, police and SS officers, who offered no resistance. The partisan command gave the Jewish fighters the pleasure of making certain the Germans did not slip out of the encircled areas and, after the surrender, of being among the first to enter the city.5 On the other hand, no medals had as yet been awarded. Moscow sent decorations for all the fighters in the various partisan brigades, but the number of Jews was so great that the distribution was halted. Partisan headquarters had sent Moscow a list of the candidates for awards with just a few Jewish names on it. In protest over the unfair treatment, Kovner tore up the recommendation for his own medal in front of Gabris. In his diary he wrote, “They simply don’t want to show that Jews fought, and more than others. . . . Vitka [Kempner] is certainly entitled to be declared a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union.’” 6 In addition, during the memorial service at Ponar, representatives of the Lithuanian civil government gave eulogies for the Poles and Russians buried there, whereas the Jews, some of whose bodies still had not been properly buried and who had been the overwhelming majority

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of those murdered in Ponar, were not mentioned even once during the preparations for the service. In his diary Kovner wrote, “We decided, together with Sutzkever, not to go to Ponar today.”7 The Poles continued to pour salt on their wounds by moving into empty apartments in the ghetto and to show surprise that there were still Jews alive in the world. In various villages scores of Jews who had come back to look for relatives and property were killed, the last remnants. “They were murdered on their own doorsteps,” said Kovner. He, too, went to take a look at his family’s house, at 7 Poplavska Street, and longing and a sense of ruin lay heavily upon him. His gloomy prediction of total destruction had come true, and as the manifesto had stated, Lithuanian Jewry had in fact been first in line; he thought at least 98% had been murdered. Even if he did not know how many survivors would return to the city, he was only a few percentage points off the mark (94%). Kovner again loathed his life. A Christian woman who had been his neighbor passed by and recognized him as he sat mourning on the sidewalk. She said in surprise, “Are you still alive? We hate you, go away.” It was then, he recounted many years later, that he decided suicide was out of the question. The neighbor had shown him that the remaining Jews had to continue living, but not there.8 Kovner once told the poet Haim Guri that full pain comes only after the event, and therefore his worst hours were not in the ghetto or the forest, where they lived life intensely and there was little time for reflection, or in Vilna on his first day back. He knew few were still alive, but inside himself “for many many days, months and perhaps even years, dreaming and awake, I still expected to find those I most cared about alive, those for whom there was no real sign they could have survived, but somehow you never accept that. No one can understand the actions and behavior of many survivors after the war without understanding that awful, self-contradictory tension.”9 Nevertheless, soon after having arrived in Vilna, Kovner decided to pull himself together and operate within the new situation. He set certain immediate goals for himself and the two dozen Hashomer Hatzair members who had returned from the forests. One aim was to find and collect all the remnants of Jewish Vilna—the books and papers hidden in the ghetto before the partisans went into the forest, including those

From the Holocaust to the Land of Life

of the underground—so that the community’s history could be preserved and documented. Another, more important goal was to find and collect all the Jews who had survived and then to think about how to leave and when.10 The gathering of survivors began spontaneously. With the liberation of the city, Jews who had been in hiding for months in sewers and melinas or with Lithuanian friends, most of them in inhuman conditions, began leaving their hiding places. Jews fled to Vilna in the aftermath of the murders in the towns immediately after the Liberation; the Soviet authorities suggested that they concentrate there because they could not guarantee their safety in the face of the Polish-Lithuanian threat to their lives. Survivors also began arriving from Estonia, having managed to escape just as the forced labor camps were about to be wiped out.11 FPO members and remnants of other groups arrived from the Narocz forests and finally told their horror stories, “atrocities the likes of which we had never seen.” Younger Hashomer Hatzair members from Vilna who had fled to the Soviet Union in June 1941 when the Germans invaded and had enlisted in the Red Army, returned to their city and movement leader. They asked his permission to take off their uniforms and remain with the Hashomer Hatzair members. After some hesitation Kovner told them to continue fighting and not to desert; they had decided they would do nothing to subvert the regime.12 Kovner proposed a plan of searching for members, and again, as in the days of the Germans, the women set off: “Needless to say, we took our orders from Abba Kovner,” said Zelda Treger. The main order was to concentrate everyone in Vilna and from there to move south. Kempner left for Grodno, Treger for Bialystok, and Chaika Grossman in the meantime arrived from the same city; others left for Lvov and Minsk, and Korczak went to Kovno to renew the contacts she had made with the members of the Kovno brigade in the forest. They had an emotional reunion, and it seemed to her that “everyone was waiting for a word, a touch, to tell them to get up and go.”13 The other movements also began looking for their members, and so Nissan Reznik left for Pinsk, the city of his birth, and later for Rovno. A postcard arrived from Mari, Kazakhstan, from Hashomer Hatzair members who had fled east when the Germans entered Vilna. One of

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Kovner’s disciples, David Robinov, sent the card after having seen a picture of a group of partisans in Pravda, most probably one of those taken by Ehrenburg’s photographers. When the postcard came, Cesia Rosenberg left Vilna for the second time on a fantastic journey to look for her comrades in Central Asia. She got as far as Moscow, but her travel documents aroused suspicion despite Kovner’s careful forgeries. By pure coincidence she met four Hashomer Hatzair members, including Shlomo Kless and Mordechai Roseman (later commander of the refugees on board the Exodus) at the Moscow train station, on their way from Tashkent to Vilna with no idea at all of what had happened there during the war. After an emotional meeting they all went west together (“despite the fact that she had orders from Abba to go to Tashkent,” said Kless, as though she still had to fulfill any mission given to her by Abba, no matter what), but not before they had notified the hundreds of members in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian towns to await instructions. Once on the train back, Rosenberg unfolded some sheets of paper and read them the January 1 manifesto, the underground’s rules and regulations, and other documents, and they listened tearfully. According to Roseman, “Kovner never stopped thinking about the movement, and held dear the Hashomer Hatzair principle to look for any member with whom contact had been lost. When it was a matter of comradeship, his daring and creativity reached the boundaries of the absurd.”14 The memory of the event, of Kovner sending Rosenberg to find comrades who sent a postcard from the end of the world, was later carried by Hashomer Hatzair members as a symbol of limitless comradeship and loyalty. The same group of women went out again on roads free of German ambushes, but they had to cross the borders between the Soviet republics. The crossings were burdened with the endless checking and rechecking of travel documents and scrupulous examinations of their belongings, and sometimes of their persons, for signs of opposition to the regime, sometimes with brutal hostility. There were arrests and imprisonments and interrogations, and they were brought to places where they knew not a living soul and the war had not yet ended. They went on the missions as movement members and partisans. They had complete faith in the man who had sent them—in his vision, his

From the Holocaust to the Land of Life

leadership, and his dealings with them—and they went out, even if the missions were absolutely mad. The circle of “Kovner’s maidelach” (“young women” in Yiddish) had no erotic undertones, but rather the relationship was affectionate, as between disciples and teacher, soldiers and commander, pioneers and guide. The accomplishment was not in being close to Kovner but in proving they were worthy of his trust, in being chosen by a revered leader for missions whose value was general and not personal, as they had been educated. Men went as well: “We finally reached Italy,” said Dov Levin, “and Abba sent me back on a mission to escort brigade soldiers to Soviet soil. It was the last thing I wanted to do but I went. Even today when I think about it, I ask myself what a leader is. He said what he had to say and I accepted his authority, and I went.”15 A historical committee was founded, with members Shmerke Ka­ czerginski and Dr. Shmuel Amarant, formerly head of the teachers’ seminary in Vilna, Kovner, and Avraham Sutzkever as chairman. First they began gathering the material hidden in and around the ghetto, and they composed a questionnaire for an orderly record of survivors’ testimonies. It was, in Kovner’s opinion, the first questionnaire composed immediately after the Liberation. During the ghetto days only a small fraction of the enormous amount of material in Vilna had been hidden, and only a small fraction of that survived; most of it had been destroyed by fire and bombings and in the searches by Lithuanians and Poles for the gold they were certain was hidden in the ghetto; also, some of the material had been lost because during the winter the ghetto neighbors fueled their stoves with anything that would burn. Scores of survivors joined in the work, and some of them, Korczak included, spent most of their time at it. They hauled sacks of Bibles and periodicals to the ghetto’s former jail, the only building that remained untouched, and deposited the material, because the Soviet authorities refused to allocate a place for a Jewish museum or archive.16 In the middle of August, a month after their arrival, the historical committee started sending letters to the Lithuanian-Soviet authorities, asking for immediate aid: documents (because people had various and counterfeit papers or none at all), the establishment of hostels for the orphan children scattered in the towns and villages, help for the many

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survivors crippled during the war, a one-time stock of food, and apartments and furniture. Kovner signed the letter using his full rank, “Commander of the partisan brigade ‘The Avenger,’” in the hope it would make the necessary impression, because the partisans were genuinely admired after the war. It was an effort to solve the problem of the entire surviving Jewish community, which, as opposed to the partisans, had no food or documents and was not under the wing of any established institution.17 Until the end of September Kovner and Amarant worked hard at sorting and classifying the material. The authorities would not let them work in peace, and the beginning of the museum had to be put off because there was no money to pay salaries. Kovner prepared memoranda for the Soviet minister of education and for all the heads of the regime in Lithuania who were in Moscow in October, when preparations were being made to celebrate the revolution. The local commissar had been warned by Kovner that in both Moscow and the world at large, the prevention of the establishment of the museum would be viewed as an anti-Semitic act on the part of the Lithuanian government.18 Kovner met Justas Paleckis, the president of the Supreme Lithuanian Soviet, several times to discuss urgent needs, but the results were paltry at best; Paleckis’s powers were limited, and he did not have much seniority in the party. Kovner and Amarant sent their last memorandum to the local commissar in November. They reminded him that Vilna had been one of the largest centers of Jewish culture in Europe, the capital of publishing houses, libraries, and museums. They spoke of the Germans’ destruction of treasures, of the efforts made to hide books and documents in the ghetto, and of their ambition to gather and organize a library and materials for scientific research in a museum. They warned again, with great delicacy, that the whole world was watching their work with interest, and its cessation would cause unpleasantness in Moscow and in the Western World.19 Kovner did not for a moment delude himself about what the answer would be or about what the chances would be of renewing Jewish life in Vilna. All he wanted was to obtain the barest minimum necessary for survival, for the museum, and for the children until they could leave. He was also well aware of the fact that the memorandum was, in fact, an elegy to Vilna.

From the Holocaust to the Land of Life

Kovner’s efforts were indeed in vain, and there was no choice but to give up and take the most precious material out of Vilna as soon as possible. In 1946 Sutzkever and Kaczerginski smuggled out extremely important material, such as the diaries of Theodor Herzl, Herman Kruk, and Zelik Kalmanovitch and the letters of famous authors. They left for Poland and Paris and from there sent the material to YIVO in New York. Most of the material remained in the jail building, which was referred to as “the temporary Jewish museum”; it was later transferred to the party archives at the end of the 1940s, when evil times fell upon Soviet Jews, and later to the Lithuanian archives. It is noteworthy that in 1947, the year before the temporary museum was closed, Ehrenburg visited Vilna and deposited the material he had collected for his work The Black Book (which dealt with the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and which he had not been permitted to publish), on the condition that if anything were to happen to the museum, the material would be returned to him.20 Thus by a quirk of fate tens of thousands of books and documents that had been hidden by the Paper Brigade and other devoted activists are still in Vilna today. Most are in the convent that belongs to the National Library, where they were hidden by the director during the harsh years of the Soviet regime. A new era began in the history of Vilna and the remains of the Jewish community’s treasures when the Communist bloc collapsed and Lithuania became an independent state toward the end of the 1980s.21 Kovner and his comrades tried to find and bring to Eretz Israel the material from the Hashomer Hatzair archives in Vilna and the underground’s documents: the manifestos, the rules and regulations and their amendments, minutes of meetings, orders of the day, bulletins, and recorded testimonies. Before they took to the forest, they hid the underground’s documents in a storeroom in the library from which they had taken the books to build the barricade in the early days of September 1943. Korczak even took documents with her to the forest and managed to preserve them all, with the exception of Kovner’s copybook of poems, which was lost in the sewers. Kovner never parted with Wittenberg’s pistol.22 Upon returning to Vilna, Kovner and his comrades found a considerable portion of what had been hidden, although every­ thing was torn and filthy with ash. In his first speech in Vilna after the

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Liberation, on the eve of the Jewish New Year in 1944, speaking in the synagogue which had been left standing at the edge of the ghetto, Kovner reviewed the ghetto’s history, especially the establishment of the underground and its accomplishments. He read aloud the January 1 and September 1 manifestos, part of the battle orders of the FPO, and some of the supplements: “We found them . . . in their entirety here, among the ashes and scraps of paper.” That was the source of the name of Kor­ czak’s book, Flames in the Ashes. The handwriting, he said, was his own, “the command, mine, the voice, mine,” and he drew the pages out of the ashes of Jewish Vilna; but “material recording events is not enough: the pain and agony etched into the souls of the survivors will never be fully understood,” Kovner told his listeners.23 Although Kovner recognized that in the future past events would be unintelligible, he made a supreme effort to bring the Hashomer Hatzair material to Eretz Israel. That was its place, as Vilna was the place for the Jewish material. Material relating to the movement and the underground was not donated to the Jewish museum but kept by Hashomer Hatzair members until they could leave Vilna, showing that Eretz Israel had almost regained the place it had before the war—almost, because in Eretz Israel the material would be read and the public would at least know, even if they did not understand and, Kovner warned, certainly would not have the right to judge.24 The material that reached Eretz Israel was deposited in Hashomer Hatzair centers of education and commemoration. Did Kovner collect and take with him everything he found? Apparently so, with the exception of the Gestapo files concerning Jewish collaborators, which, Kovner testified in the 1980s, they burned.25 The underground had its own list of collaborators and, during the last days of the ghetto, before they went into the forests, had tried to take revenge on the worst of them. The detailed questionnaires used to guide those who recorded testimonies after the war included a question that appeared twice: Do you have data about Jewish traitors? Burning the files meant that the surviving Jews would settle internal accounts themselves and not allow them or their list to fall into Communist hands, because the Communists would kill anyone they saw fit, as they had in the forest, and in the Soviet historical version of the war, which would

From the Holocaust to the Land of Life

certainly be written as soon as it ended, they would depict the Jews as traitors. Those who returned from the forests, from the forced labor camps in Estonia, and from hiding places in the villages, bitter individuals and armed groups, killed more than a few Polish and Lithuanian collaborators, and those who accompanied groups of German prisoners meted out their own brand of justice, “as only partisans knew how,” said Kovner.26 “It was a terrible sight,” Kempner told Guri. “Our men screamed and cried out for vengeance for their mothers and sisters, and I think they simply killed them on the spot.” When the Soviet government stabilized, killings by Jews stopped, at least officially.27 That was Kovner’s view after the war regarding testimony: It would have to be such that posterity could live with it. It would have to serve the interests of national pride and not spotlight those who had stumbled morally, and it would take all factors into consideration, not painting an unfair picture, black or white. Having agreed with Kovner, Sutzkever edited his own poems so that those who had not been in combat would not be too severely censured. Kovner later wrote about his meeting with the young Yitzhak Rudaszewski, one of the Vilna ghetto diary writers, who asked him whether to leave in a description of Jews hiding in a melina, choking a crying child to death.28 Who knew into whose hands the diary might fall, said the youth; they might think the Jews were worse than animals. The Germans were the animals and we the victims, Kovner told him, and “victims have nothing to be ashamed of. No matter what happens, no shame can fall upon the Jews of the melinas” (Scrolls of Testimony, p. 151). It was the moment to voice an opinion regarding postwar writings that would show respect for the community he had loved, because in any case no one would ever understand what had really happened. In October, when the survivors had gathered in the city, the pioneers’ Coordination, which had existed during the days of the influx of refugees during Lithuanian rule and later served to unite the underground in the ghetto, was reestablished. The Communists did not join, naturally, but some of those who had been in the ghetto underground and had fought in the forest did not lose contact with their comrades. Those who had been given jobs in key positions, such as Yosef Harmatz and Senka Nisanelewicz, aided the Coordination’s members in obtain-

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ing the many documents and permits on which the new regime hinged. After the Coordination’s reestablishment, Kovner and his followers realized it was time to leave Lithuania for Eretz Israel. In the first place, the regime was solidifying, and it was clear that the more time passed, the harder it would be to obtain the documents needed to leave the country and cross borders. Kovner did everything in his power under the conditions prevalent at the time to ensure the survivors at least a minimal level of existence, and from then on those who decided to remain would be responsible for themselves. In his diary he wrote of the government’s refusal to take any action that might not indicate Lithuania was for Lithuanians.29 The response, or rather the lack of it, to his memoranda and frequent visits to offices, made it clear to him that the orphanage, the school, and the museum would not last long as Jewish institutions. Moreover, the mother superior whom Kovner had gone to look for as soon as he reached Vilna kept reminding him and Kempner of the blue skies of Eretz Israel, which they should never forget.30 On November 5, Amarant signed the final eulogy written with Kovner. The next day Amarant left with Korczak, as the Coordination had decided, to find a way to Romania. Their trip, a saga in its own right, was successful. Amarant got as far as Chernowitz and returned to Vilna to tell them there was a way. Korczak continued on to Bucharest, where she met the delegates of the Yishuv (the Hebrew community, numbering 475,000 souls in prestate Israel under the British Mandate), who decided to send her to Eretz Israel as soon as an unoccupied berth could be found. In their opinion, Korczak, having gone through what she had and having a direct, motherly way to open people’s hearts, was the ideal person to tell the public in Eretz Israel what had happened during the Holocaust and especially what the goals and needs of the refugees were. Korczak undertook the journey, although she had apparently not yet understood its significance. “If they had told me I was going to China, I would have believed them.” She agreed to go because the envoys from Eretz Israel radiated authority and because she had never refused a mission: “If something has to be done, you do it,” she used to say, and in any case going to Eretz Israel was the embodiment of a dream. Perhaps the reason was also that during the final months in the forest and those after the Liberation of Vilna, the relationship

From the Holocaust to the Land of Life

between Kovner and Kempner had strengthened and the two had become closer. The long trip to Romania, with all its attendant hardships, and the sea voyage to Eretz Israel may have seemed the right thing to do at the right time, a challenge that filled a void in her life and offered her some compensation. Korczak arrived in Eretz Israel in December 1944 and appeared before every possible audience to tell the story, in Yiddish, of what had happened in Vilna. Her speeches had great force, especially because she did not cast blame. She was considered the first witness who had come from the Holocaust, despite the fact that many had already come to Eretz Israel and spoken at great length. On a personal level it was a difficult year: She was alone, could barely speak Hebrew, and was far from her closest friends, especially Kempner, and although they wrote each other long, frequent letters, it was very hard for her to adjust and she felt “like a dog without a kennel.”31 Amarant returned to Vilna, and other groups began forming to leave along the same route. However, the first group was caught, and its members, including Amarant, were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment; the precious testimonies of survivors that Amarant carried with him were confiscated. The way through Romania alternately opened and closed, and in the meantime another route had to be found. Kovner decided that the next groups would follow just behind the front as it advanced westward to Lublin. Someone informed on Kovner, apparently a co-worker from the museum, saying he was planning to leave with important material, and that determined the time of his departure. There is no way of knowing if the informer knew what he wanted to take, but Kovner was eager to leave Vilna, the destroyed Jerusalem of Lithuania, to take the rest of Herzl’s diary with him and to reach Eretz Israel as a living symbol of destruction become resurrection. His plan was never realized. On the same evening that they came to arrest him, he fled by train to Lublin, wearing a Polish Army uniform and taking with him only the valuable material he always carried,32 leaving his Vilna, never to return.

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E l ev e n   The Bricha (Escape from Europe)

and the East European Survivors’ Brigade “A nightmarish . . . awful wandering” January –July 1945

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In December 1944 Kovner left for Lublin, where he stayed until the beginning of March 1945. He met with a group of partisans from Rovno, with youth movement members from the depths of the Soviet Union (the first of whom had returned with Cesia Rosenberg and gone directly to Lublin), with groups of fighters and survivors of ghettos such as the ones in Czestochowa and Krakow, and with survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Ideas that Kovner had begun formulating in the forest took their final form in Lublin, sorting themselves into three main categories: bricha (the exodus from Europe), hativa (uniting the survivors), and nakam (taking revenge on the Germans), all of which he committed to writing. On March 1, 1945, Kovner left with a loosely organized group for Romania, staying for three months, attempting to prepare what was necessary to implement the ideas. At the end of June Kovner left for northern Italy, where representatives of the Yishuv met the remnants of European Jewry, a meeting that can justly be termed historic. It took place in the middle of July, and it was then that Kovner gave his famous speech, “The Mission of the Last Survivors.” Two weeks later Kovner was on his way to Eretz Israel, and in the middle of August he gave his first speech before the heads of the Hashomer ­ Hatzair movement. They were eight of his life’s stormiest months, and the decisions made during them determined to a great extent the reception Kovner received when he arrived in Eretz Israel, the treatment he got from the movement’s heads, his place in Israeli public life, and even the eventual composition of his circle of friends.

Escape from Europe

Kovner told historian Yehuda Bauer later in Israel that, had the partisans and youth movement members thought only about their own emigration, they could have left Vilna earlier. “But what was uppermost in our minds then was how to give a personal example . . . and to motivate the survivors to leave the land of destruction for the Land of Israel.”1 Lublin had already been liberated and a provisional government had been set up, but Warsaw was still in German hands. Kempner, Zelda Treger, Rosenberg, Senka Nisanelewicz, Yosef Harmatz (who had decided to forgo a future in the Soviet Union), and others with no particular connection to the youth movements followed Kovner. Alexander Rindjiunski remained to direct the museum. Chiena Borowska and Shmuel Kaplinski also remained, and afterward, as high-ranking partisans, they received an apartment in the center of Vilna. Other groups represented in the Coordination left as well, some going to Lublin and some to the transit stations to the north and south, especially Bialystok and Lvov, to act as guides. Dozens soon became hundreds, some with documents forged by Yitzhak Kowalski and Gabi Sedlis, who used tools they took with them from the ghetto to the forest, back to Vilna, and finally to the escape route. Those who left either joined military units on the way west or hopped aboard freight trains and then went on foot to the crossing point.2 Kovner was surprised by the power of the word-of-mouth information passed among the survivors of Lithuania and east Poland and stressed in his testimonies that the escape, the exodus, had been spontaneous and that people had simply followed those who had given them a direction. It had not, he said, been because of his own leadership or the partisans’ charms but rather because most Jews were in a frame of mind conducive to picking up and going: Two years before the Kielce pogrom (during which forty-two returning Jews were killed in July 1946 following a blood libel), Jews had already been stripped of their property and killed on their own doorsteps, and attempts to rebuild Jewish institutions had been suppressed. Such conditions meant that for many Eretz Israel was the only place to go, even if they had never before considered it an option. In such a situation, in which Jews of every variety chose postcatastrophic Zionism, there was a genuine and

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natural need for a general unity with no relation to previous political allegiances, which in any case no longer existed. The exodus and the Hativa (“union,” or “brigade”) of East European Survivors were not his own invention, said Kovner; rather, they were born of the needs of the times, and he had merely been chosen by history to lead them.3 The exodus, which grew exponentially, brought its own responsibilities and had to be organized. In the first place, ways had to be found to leave Poland as quickly as possible before the war ended and the Soviet Union’s borders were finalized and sealed. When Kovner and his group arrived in Lublin, comrades were sent to find a route, and one was indeed located through the Carpathians to Czechoslovakia through Krosno and Sanok and from there to Romania. Treger and Kempner skillfully maintained the transit station at Krosno, and it was sufficient, according to an admiring Kovner, “for us to know there was a world power there.” They would walk around the marketplace, dealing with soldiers who would agree to transport escapees for a fee. Sedlis and Kowalski continued forging documents. Kovner met every group of escapees, briefed them, and warned them about keeping documents, medals, and pictures that would make Soviet border guards suspect them and, of course, about keeping pistols. He was, however, not always successful, because survivors were unwilling to part with the little they had managed to salvage from their past lives. He finally gave a short farewell speech and made a final check to be certain everything was in order.4 Meeting with the camp survivors was a moving experience, but they had to be provided with food and other basic necessities, sometimes scores of people a day, said Kempner, and the money ran out and had to be found anew on a daily basis. They took loans, most of which were later honored by emissaries from Eretz Israel. Exodus organizers were sent back to the Soviet Union to bring Jews out, and they bought gold cheaply there, reselling it at inflated prices on their return to Central and Western Europe. “We also robbed speculators,” that is, Jews who exploited the postwar chaos for shady transactions, said Mordechai Roseman and Kempner openly, as opposed to Kovner, who avoided the question.5 “The partisans are going” was the rumor spread among the survivors, who more than once had fallen prey to bandits and extortionists and were looking for protection. The partisans, hav-

Escape from Europe

ing learned the hard way how to be members of the underground and live in the forests, now learned how to cross borders illegally and find food from thin air. In the meantime, the Jewish institutions in Lublin began functioning again in conjunction with the provisional government. Kovner was bitterly disappointed by the Jewish government representatives’ legalistic attitude toward the exodus and by their desire to rebuild Jewish life, and by party divisions and power struggles, all occurring, according to him, when grass had not yet grown over the graves. The Jewish people had been killed and its institutions were being reestablished while he and his comrades felt guilty for surviving and continuing to live. “That winter in the house in Lublin [where he met with Jewish representatives], I experienced a feeling of emptiness such as I have never known in my life. Such a terrible gloominess . . . suddenly as though the desire to live had been taken away from us. The crisis of utilitarianism begot for me a spiritual crisis.”6 It was the same feeling Kovner had had sitting on the sidewalk in front of his parents’ empty house in empty Vilna, the feeling that there was no reason to continue living, but he again pulled himself together and initiated a series of meetings. Having first met leaders of Polish Jewry, Kovner became apprehensive that he might fail to prevent what seemed to him a miserable continuation of the remains of Jewish life in Poland, headed by casual functionaries, again dependent on foreign rule, not having learned their lesson. His opinion had not changed about the Jewish leadership, which had disappointed him all along—during the Soviet period in 1940, under the heel of the Nazi jackboot, and again after the Liberation. It was one of the sources of his desire for revenge, a stumbling block preventing life from returning to its prewar routine. It can be debated whether Kovner was hasty in passing judgment on the well-respected leaders he met in Lublin, such as Adolph Berman and Dr. Emil Zommerstein, and in cutting off relations with them.7 Kovner also met a group from Rovno in Lublin that included Yitzhak (Pasha) Reichman and his wife Dorka, the brothers Eliezer and Avraham Lidovski, Bezalel Kek, and about forty others from various places and political parties, most of them partisans. The two groups meshed as though they had worked together for years and decided to

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live in Lublin in the same building, in the same apartment with threestoried bunk beds. When Eliezer Lidovski and Kovner met alone, they indeed discovered that both groups had had similar experiences and had the same outlook on life.8 The Vilna-Rovno meeting gave birth to the idea to form the Hativa of East European Survivors, without political affiliation. The Hativa could both replace the Coordination and serve as the continuation of Jewish Vilna because it was based on a general public currently not interested in politics and because not much was left of the earlier youth movements and political parties. A fundamental fact, the extent of which was apparently unknown in Eretz Israel, was that except for “Asians,” members who had fled to Central Asia in the depths of the Soviet Union, only returning after the middle of 1945, there was virtually no Hashomer Hatzair left in Eastern Europe. Therefore in Kovner’s view the Hativa of East European Survivors was a continuation of his basic ideology: the striving toward a unification of the Jewish people and the responsibility of the pioneer to the community to blaze a trail for it. Kovner viewed the Hativa as a temporary solution whose main function was to make the survivors’ voice heard until they reached the shores of Eretz Israel. The Jewish world “which had gone into the inferno” had to speak with a different voice: Eretz Israel and the Diaspora had experienced the war differently, and Eretz Israel would have to recognize the Diaspora’s experience and not try to assimilate the survivors before their voices had been heard. Afterward, the Hativa, which was meant to be a message and not a political goal, would eventually disband. The second outcome of the Vilna-Rovno meeting in Lublin was deciding on goals and means: an immediate mass movement from Europe to Eretz Israel, because they had to exploit timing, circumstances, and leadership. They defined it as “the Exodus from Europe,” which meant the exodus of the Jewish survivors in Europe to Eretz Israel by illegal routes organized by groups who would lead them. They were leading a spontaneous, national grassroots movement, a revolutionary movement in the history of mass migrations, they claimed, new and unique in the history of the Zionist struggle.9 On January 17, 1945, Warsaw was liberated, and a few days later the survivors of the ghetto uprising reached Lublin: Yitzhak (Antek) Zuck-

Escape from Europe

erman and his life companion Zivia Lubetkin, who had been two of the leaders, Tuvia Bozikowski, Stephen Grajek, and others. The meeting of the last fighters in Poland and Eastern Europe was long and emotional. They sat for days and nights, recounting incidents and weeping, “and gave accounts of their souls.” Kovner felt that once again Dror­Hechalutz and Hashomer Hatzair members were uniting, as they had during the war. Afterward, Zuckerman and Kovner spoke in private for a long time but reached understandings on only a few points, as Kovner later reported to his comrades. Zuckerman said he was committed to the survivors’ remaining in Poland and that he was returning to Warsaw, not to renew Jewish life but to take care of the survivors, first of all the members of his movement. He thought that thousands could be expected to return from the forests and the camps, and someone had to be there to receive them. Kovner said he was continuing on his way with anyone who wanted to join him, and the wave would carry on as it had begun. At that point Zuckerman already had information from Zommerstein about the coming Soviet repatriation of Poland, and Kovner, who was unwilling to have any contact with Zommerstein or Berman, knew nothing about it.10 Zuckerman thought the new PolishSoviet government would help, whereas Kovner was of the opinion it would do everything in its power to sabotage a renewal of Jewish life, minimalist and temporary as it might be, and that it was a shame to waste a moment on illusions that would ultimately end in disappointment. Whoever remained under the new government for more than a minimum amount of time, Kovner argued, would later have to answer for what he had agreed or been forced to do. Zuckerman wanted to preserve his movement’s ideological uniqueness, whereas Kovner wanted a unity that would abolish the former parties, “their standards, flags and ways of thinking,” originating in Vilna’s model of unity. “That was the beginning of the serious disagreement between us,” Zuckerman later recalled.11 After a two-day stay Zuckerman returned to Warsaw; Lubetkin stayed in Lublin and lived with the exodus activists for several months, first there and later in Romania, until they left for Italy. There were also differences of opinion with the “Asians,” who numbered about twenty in Lublin by early 1945. They took Zuckerman’s side, claiming the movement had to be rehabilitated in Poland before they

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left, whereas the partisans claimed Jews should not settle in a graveyard. They had not experienced the Holocaust, and Kovner told them they had “come from the dark side of the moon.” He thought the differences of opinion were due not to movement ideologies but rather to what those involved had experienced: those who had been under German occupation, whether in the forests or in the ghettos, and those who had been in the depths of Asia. According to Kovner, the essence of being a partisan was activism and deciding one’s own fate. “There was something in the experience of being a partisan that gave us a wild kind of daring. We thought anything was possible.”12 During the exodus from Europe, still under the influence of the forest, Kovner never stopped torturing himself with the question of what he could have accomplished in the ghetto if he had only had the experience he later gained as a partisan. On March 1, 1945, the group that had formed in Lublin left for Romania: Rachel and Eliezer Lidovski, the Reichmans, Kovner and Kempner, Treger and Nisanelewicz, Shlomo Kless, Lubetkin, and Sedlis and his forgery equipment. Several parallel routes had just been opened with money from the emissaries from Eretz Israel; one of them went from Romania to Lublin. The void created when the group left was quickly filled by Roseman and the “Asians,” who returned in ever-­growing numbers and manned the transit stations. Emissaries were sent back and forth to encourage and guide the streams of refugees. There was no fixed escape route through which everyone passed; there were also independent streams that found their way alone to the central route or managed on their own without it, and various sectors of the Jewish nation met each other on the road. At that stage the number of those joining the exodus had risen from hundreds to thousands. “We never imagined we were touching one grain of a mountain of sand,” which would bring so many with it, said Kovner.13 Those who came were temporarily lodged in “kibbutzim,” which were actually collective housing and not the prewar training farms. They hoped to transfer the large camp to Eretz Israel by boat, aided by the emissaries of the Yishuv in Romania. The emissaries had met Korczak a few months earlier and therefore had a general idea of who was coming and what their histories were. The migrating Jews reached Romania early in March 1945. It was Kovner’s first meeting with the emissaries from Eretz Israel, eight

Escape from Europe

months after they left the forest, six months after Korczak left for Eretz Israel, three months after they left Vilna. He never forgot the differences in time and the fact that he and his comrades reached the emissaries, and no one from the Yishuv was coming in the opposite direction to meet them: “Everything revolved around that time span,” he said, referring to relations between the survivors and the Yishuv.14 A detailed story­ telling lasted a long time, but Kovner noted that they were speaking, as it were, two different languages, and for two reasons. First, they got things done in different ways. It seemed to Kovner that the emissaries favored legal methods, whereas the partisans had systems of their own. He thought the emissaries were lacking in inspiration and enterprise and were not fully aware that there were thousands of survivors on their way and thus had not prepared the means to purchase boats, as must be done in times of war. Second, the idea of the Hativa, an organ uniting survivors of various former political affiliations, as it was understood by the emissaries, was immediately translated into Eretz Israeli political terms, that is, to what degree it would be to the advantage or disadvantage of any political party. It was from the emissaries that the partisans first heard about the Jewish Brigade, because once the Soviets closed the borders on the eve of the German invasion of Lithuania, there had been no contact with Eretz Israel and they had no knowledge of events. Mula Ben-Haim, who in the meantime had opened a route to Yugoslavia and Greece, was immediately sent from Romania to Italy, along with Pinie Zeitag, a red-haired, fiery-tempered young man, whose reputation preceded him among the survivors: “We wanted to see someone from the Jewish Brigade . . . the fighting part of Eretz Israel.”15 Kovner strove to restore faith and a positive outlook in an evergrowing, pluralistic population of refugees, some of whose members had come out of the Holocaust suspicious of everyone and everything, some of whom lived not even for the day but for the hour. It was in Bucharest that Kovner met Auschwitz survivors for the first time, called in fact “the Auschwitz group” by the members of the exodus. There were five of them, one of whom was Yechiel Tsitinski, better known by his pen name, Katzetnick, and later known because he fainted while delivering a highly emotional testimony at the Eichmann trial. The survivors had arrived in Bucharest with six fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto

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­ prising whom they had met along the way and to whom they stuck U with exaggerated, embarrassing admiration. They insisted on living in the same room with the six and with Lubetkin; they arranged morning calls as if they were still in the camp, recounted the horrors of Auschwitz again and again and sang its songs, and refused to give up their striped prisoner suits; Katzetnick remarked every now and then that in any case he was no longer alive.16 Kovner had no idea how to deal with that kind of survivor; he was shocked and beginning to wonder how Eretz Israel would react to the Hativa, composed as it was of such a diverse population. “We didn’t yet know what Eretz Israel was, and if until the Liberation it was dream, after it we were filled with anxiety: would we be able to find a common language with them?”17 On Passover, which in 1945 fell at the beginning of April, a few dozen members met in the dining room of one of the kibbutzim. By then there were already about 1,300 people in and around Bucharest divided into twelve kibbutzim with formal refugee status and under the aegis of the Joint Distribution Committee.18 The representatives came to the meeting either according to their Holocaust backgrounds (partisans, “Asians,” camp survivors [particularly from Auschwitz]) or according to their youth movement affiliation (Dror-Hechalutz, Gordonia, ­Beitar, Akiva, Hashomer Hatzair)—about thirty individuals from all the youth movements together. Three emissaries from Eretz Israel had been invited: Moshe Auerbach, David Zimand, and Joseph Klarman. The meeting, apparently the first to have a large Jewish attendance after the Holocaust, opened with all rising in silence in honor of those who had perished during the war. Lidovski spoke of the terrible tragedy and expressed his feeling of being alone and isolated in a hostile world, guilt feelings for being alive, even if it were only by chance—it was not necessarily the good who had survived. He spoke of two other painful topics. First, he rejected out of hand the idea that the Jews had gone willingly to their deaths. Many others, of many nationalities, had done as they had. Second, he said it was absolutely necessary to have a final accounting with Jews who had betrayed their own people. The reception of some Jews who had arrived in Bucharest, the opening of cases against them on the orders of Kovner and Lidovski, and the testimonies collected concerning suspects made it clear that “they might be shot

Escape from Europe

not only from the front by a firing squad but in the back as well.”19 Lidovski’s direct and simple words underlined the fundamental problems and presaged the bitter discussions to come later in Israel: Like lambs to the slaughter? What was collaboration? Who would punish whom? What manner of men were those who had survived? Kovner gave the main speech. He and Lubetkin were the central figures in the public gathering in Romania, living symbols. Lubetkin, however, did not participate in the discussion, and her silence apparently manifested her objection to the developing trends. Kovner expressed deep anxiety that the Holocaust was not yet over, and he worried that the complacency and factionalism that had existed before the catastrophe would return, that the Jews would return to morally bankrupt concepts, and that life in general and in Eretz Israel in particular would prove stronger than memory. When catastrophe hit again, they would be lost, the result of the curse of forgetfulness. He went on to emphasize—for the Eretz Israel emissaries present to hear—that “Eretz Israel was Eretz Israel as long its breath came from the Diaspora, and now the Diaspora has stopped breathing.” It was not Eretz Israel that came to rescue the survivors and offer them solutions, but rather they, the survivors, by virtue of their experience, anxiety, and deep understanding, who would show Eretz Israel the kind of unity that could protect the Jewish people from another catastrophe. Other speakers suggested establishing “a party of witnesses,” an intellectual framework for people whose previous worlds had been destroyed. The survivors of Auschwitz spoke about a terrible vengeance, “to destroy city streets with tanks, [for] as long as one of the Aryan race remains alive we will not rest.”20 Kovner presented the principles of his plan at the first meeting and those that followed, but no conclusion was reached. They argued and discussed it in the kibbutzim for three weeks. Lubetkin’s silence during the meetings made it clear that she opposed the idea of the Hativa, and in personal discussions the emissaries opposed the actual establishment of a Hativa far more than they were willing to admit at public meetings, yet nevertheless Kovner managed to bring the majority over to his side. On April 26, 1945, the Hativa of East European Survivors was established in an atmosphere of elation. Kovner read out the rules he

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suggested for the Hativa, and they were generally accepted. The Hativa would include all the survivors “who will wholeheartedly serve the Jewish people,” with no relation to their previous affiliations. Jews who had betrayed their people would be condemned and not permitted to join. The Hativa would arise not as a result of interparty negotiations, but rather from the desire to unite to set the Jewish people free. The ideological and educational principles agreed on were personal realization and sacrifice, work, striving to emigrate to Eretz Israel, national self-defense, settling in Eretz Israel, Hebrew culture (to those who requested the addition of “religious culture and Jewish tradition,” Kovner replied, “We have proved ourselves to be more Jewish than any Jew”), mutual aid, and the establishment of a kibbutz made up of Hativa members. The political principles were the struggle for the unity of the kibbutz movement, for one workers’ union and one Zionist organization, for one undivided Jewish State, free immigration, and the abolishment of the Diaspora. A council of thirty was chosen, as were a members’ court and a central secretariat, which included Lubetkin, and an “Exodus committee.” After the discussions ended and the votes were taken, the assembly rose to its feet and sang “Hatikva,”21 the national anthem, written and sung decades before the state of Israel was born. A few days later Kovner, writing for the secretariat, published a dramatic order of the day about the historic event, and it was indeed historic. The survivors of Europe had united on their way to Eretz Israel, to reinforce it and give it a new impetus. They were setting out not as the pitiful survivors of an inhuman slaughter but as a populace able to inject the Yishuv with “new blood and new substance.” At that time the wording of the oath sworn by all the Hativa members was formulated: “I, son of the Jewish nation, do hereby swear on this land which has soaked up the blood of those whom I loved, and for the memory of the millions of those who were martyred, slaughtered, burned, tortured and violated, being fully aware of what I am saying, that I will carry out every order I receive, keep every secret and do anything I must to reach Eretz Israel.”22 A week after the order of the day was made public, Germany surrendered and the war in Europe was over. Bucharest went wild with joy, and in the midst of it all were the Jews, mourning. For them, orphans, the Hativa and the oath that joined them had a value

Escape from Europe

beyond the mere proclamation of principles. Kovner noted for himself, “What is the Hativa of European survivors? It is a miracle which will knit together the tatters . . . a symbol which will force people to think, demand an accounting, teach a lesson.”23 However, the rare phenomenon of unity among the Jewish people existed in principle only and for no more than three months. It practically fell apart at the first crisis, which came only six weeks later. On June 4 the Hativa members met and heard that in the secretariat’s view it could not continue in its original format. There were endless, exhausting discussions in which the speakers kept repeating themselves (Roseman, who chaired the meeting: “Why doesn’t someone say something?”), and someone came up with the idea of returning to the Coordination. Kovner admitted the need for change, but his fighting spirit, and that of Lidovski, seemed to be fading. The main factors that disbanded the Hativa were, first of all, that there were those who remained faithful to their original movements; in addition, the principles on which the Hativa had originally been based were too general.24 The Hativa activists, who were basically political individuals, were not long in asking themselves what would happen when each of them met his movement’s leadership in Eretz Israel. Second, it was the force of Kovner’s rhetoric that swept people off their feet and made them unite around him, and when he began devoting himself to a different matter, revenge, some of the glue that bound the Hativa together began to dissolve. Last but still important was the opposition of Lubetkin, the “Asians,” and the emissaries. It also became evident that again there had to be a change of plans when the Hativa leaders learned, to their immense disappointment, that the emissaries had provided for only one ship. In addition, while they were waiting, two soldiers from the Jewish Brigade arrived from Italy in May, having met the two sent by Kovner in the opposite direction at the border, each on his way to meet the others. As a result, a delegation of five left to inform the Jewish Brigade that thousands were ready to go.25 The emissaries from Eretz Israel in Bucharest received 100 immigration certificates for the Hativa, and it was decided that the old, the infirm, and children would go by boat, although they knew full well that some of them had never regarded Eretz Israel as a dream but rather as a haven, and a temporary one at that. However, they were the ones most in need

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of an immediate sanctuary, and the rest, more than a thousand, would again have to take to the road and go to the Jewish Brigade. Some of those who wanted to immigrate to Eretz Israel on the ship were requested to relinquish their places for the ill and weaker. They would be forced to again spend months on the road without knowing when their wanderings would come to an end, and they complained bitterly about Kovner later on, as had those who had not been accepted into the underground in the ghetto or those who had not gone out through the sewers into the forest. The emissaries in Romania allocated certificates to the Hativa activists and demanded that they go to Eretz Israel on the same ship (perhaps to get rid of them, said Kovner in retrospect). They refused, gave their certificates to pregnant women, and went on their way. Thus, by forgoing the possibility of immigration and continuing with the camp, the leadership forged, said the members of the Hativa, a firm moral position and won great trust for itself.26 After having sent scouts to Greece and Yugoslavia, the Hativa leaders concluded that the best way would be to go through Hungary—Roseman went first to Budapest—and from there to Austria and then to Italy. Activists again had to be sent back and forth, this time to announce in Poland that there was no open way to leave through Romania.27 Most of the others took the train to Italy, sometimes sitting on the roof for lack of seats, and watched as passengers were robbed, extorted, and raped by Soviet soldiers. It would not have taken much for the soldiers to have thrown those on the roof off the train. It was all Kovner needed to complete the picture he already had of moral corruption, of an administration built on graft and theft, of an army built on lies, of an individual’s fate having no value, and of the depth and intensity of anti-Semitism of these soldiers who were the liberators of Europe. “The liberators,” Kovner called them sarcastically, “didn’t move a single soldier to come earlier anywhere.” When they crossed the last border under Soviet control, in Graz, Austria, after the Russian soldiers had robbed them of their last watches, Kovner turned his face back and spat.28 In Growing Pains author Hanoch Bartov, who was then a young soldier in the Jewish Brigade, described his and his comrades’ amazement when Kovner reached them. He was, according to Bartov’s descrip-

Escape from Europe

tion, the first to arrive, the vanguard of the camp he led, and he came alone, at night, with his mane of hair, speaking the Hebrew of “there,” coming from the places from which until then no one had come, a very thin, unknown person whose body “fed and served the black fever” in his eyes, his “appearance marvelous, and he was one of us, really, speaking our language, coming to us straight from the forest, turning his steps toward that point of the border as though guided by a star.” Kovner was on his way to Brigade headquarters, asking what the survivors should do, but this first meeting already provided the answer: “My brothers, blessings upon your heads . . . even if your chariots arrived late. . . . We will arise and be on our way to you. Our brothers are waiting for me at the border . . . good-bye, we’ll get here.” And one day they began to cross the border. The survivors were the ones who were organized and found the Brigade, brothers who met brothers, and Kovner led them all, the stars showing him the way.29 Kovner himself was amazed by what he saw, “how they approached the border, . . . an immense crowd, how they rose, uprooted and marched from station to station at the sound of a short command, at the sound of the voices of the pioneers who led them, at the sound of our voices . . . and they asked for us and held our hand. . . . My God, the trust, the faith they had in us! . . . Looking at us with devotion, astonishment and love they obeyed and followed us wherever we led them.”30 In early July the rumor spread through the Jewish Brigade that Kovner with his comrades and a large group of refugees were nearing their camp in Tarvisio on the Italian-Swiss-Austrian border. “We were excited,” wrote Yehuda Tubin to his wife Shlomit at home in Eretz ­Israel, who passed most of his letters along to Meir Ya’ari and Ya’akov Hazan. On the evening of July 15, Kovner, Kempner, Kless, Dorka and Yitzhak Reichman, Bezalel Kek, Haim Lazar, Hayaleh Shapira and Nissan Reznik arrived. The survivors and partisans who had arrived before them “received A. K. with enormous excitement and enthusiasm, with hugs and kisses and cries of joy. Anyone in the Brigade who had any position at all was quick to welcome him. . . . Within a few hours everyone knew and liked him, even people who had never heard of him before.”31 “The Brigade,” said Lazar, “gave us a wonderful reception.” “We were partisans,” said Kempner, “tough and more than a

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bit cynical, . . . yet we felt like little children being greeted by loving relatives.” It was the first time since the outbreak of the war that they had met in Europe a multitude (the Jewish Brigade numbered about 5,000 men and women) that had been waiting for them and was happy to see them. The same Star of David that had been a mark of shame was suddenly a mark of honor, and the friendly relations and respect helped ease their hearts. “The meeting was completely different from that with the emissaries in Romania,” said Kovner. “We immediately found we had a common language with the soldiers.”32 The warm feelings were mutual. “They [the survivors] were a thousand times stronger and smarter than all the soldiers and envoys and non-envoys who came to Europe as if to organize the Exodus. Nonsense. Pinie Zeitag and Mula Ben-Haim and Kovner and Pasha organized it all. . . . They had sharp ears, keen senses. They were good at surviving. They were the best there was,” said Meir Davidson, later second in command in the Givati Brigade. “We [the Yishuv], we are the survivors, because the evil never reached us,” Davidson continued.33 The Jewish Brigade soldiers, who a few weeks earlier had begun to ask themselves if their job was finished now that the war was over, felt that they had finally arrived at the primary goal, the reason they had left their homes in Eretz Israel to go fight in Europe, and Kovner’s arrival opened a new era for them. In fact, the groups continued coming, and thousands more were expected. Davidson described Kovner as “a great fellow” with a deep, dramatic voice, mourning the destruction of the Jews in the Hebrew of Bialik’s poetry, whispering “sons of my people,” and everyone who heard him whispered to themselves, “sons of my people.” Kovner came with “a terrific plan. He was head of a large organization of partisans, ghetto fighters, soldiers and ordinary Jews. They came here as one Hativa, organized with iron discipline. They have no political parties. He was leading his Hativa to war, to breaking out, to Eretz Israel. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from the British, he had a plan: to generate, from here and from Eretz Israel, pressure which would force the British to let him break out.” That led to a renewed discussion in the Jewish Brigade of what the role of the Yishuv was with regard to the Diaspora and of the limits of what was possible. Kovner was not a prophet strid-

Escape from Europe

ing through the desert, staff in hand, but a commander with a vision and a bold plan, followed by a disciplined army ready for anything, “a movement like a force of nature . . . going to Eretz Israel to bring the Messiah.”34 Kovner and his mission cast a spell on them, Yehuda Tubin wrote home, and they used expressions such as “holiness,” “Messianism,” “miracle,” and “admiration.”35 On the following evening, July 16, a mass meeting was held against the background of spectacular scenery in the open air; hundreds of soldiers and survivors participated, and Tubin wrote to his wife that it was a tremendous experience. “Comrade Abba Kovner [was invited to] please come up on stage.” Kovner then invited onto the stage with him those who were left from the FPO, the Warsaw ghetto fighters, and those from the towns of Lithuania, Polesye, Volhynia, and the Ukraine, about twenty men and women, so that they could all sit together. It was a demonstration of the Hativa’s unity. As soon as they sat down, Kovner devoted only one sentence to the miracle of their survival and another one to the joyous encounter and then continued to the subject on his mind all the time: the second anniversary of Wittenberg’s death, which fell on the day after they had arrived in the Brigade camp. He said he felt Wittenberg ought to be there to open the meeting. “It is hard to tell you, from beyond that wall, what this day of remembrance means to us and to make you understand.”36 Kovner spoke about the Holocaust. He brought forth the message of the survivors, and he kept noting, in a kind of repeated apology, that they had survived by chance, much as Lidovski had. He already knew, he said, that rumors and emissaries had distorted the Hativa’s true image, and he requested his listeners to reconstruct their relationship to the survivors from scratch. In any case they would not understand the past, but they had to know it was their duty to struggle, and without delay, against the “hiss of the approaching knife, the knife lying in ambush in all corners of Europe.” Kovner was convinced that another war was just around the corner and that the Jews would again be sacrificed—that all Jews, including the Yishuv and its children, would be slaughtered as the Jews of Europe had been—and that once again millions of people from scores of nations would participate in the killing because they had seen how it was done at Maidanek, Ponar, and Treblinka, “how easy it was,

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how simple, with such tranquility,” how the killing of the Jews was both permitted and worthwhile. Therefore the Hativa was neither in favor of nor against any political party but rather against their disappointing ideologies. The bitter experiences of the Hativa members dictated the turning of their tragedy into strength, and on that basis they would arrive in Eretz Israel united and shake the very foundations of its routine existence. Kovner’s speech, which ended with an oath to succeed in the great endeavor, made a tremendous impression on the audience. For the first time they not only heard firsthand about atrocities but also witnessed the survivors’ terrible fear that, although the war might be over, the Holocaust was still gathering strength. The importance of the meeting was summarized by a member of the audience who noted that the entire surviving Jewish nation needed to be introduced to the Yishuv not only as rebels but also as human beings who needed pity and love. “With bated breath we listened for two hours . . . [and] a new world, of which we had known nothing, was revealed before our eyes,” he said. When the assembled gathering had finished singing “Hatikva,” the partisans suddenly rose to their feet and sang, in Yiddish, the partisan anthem, “Say Not This Is Your Last Journey,” again leaving the audience somewhat embarrassed and confused. Was it a kind of defiance, the Diaspora as opposed to Eretz Israel, Yiddish as opposed to Hebrew, the partisans as opposed to the Jewish Brigade, or was it a kind of mutual coming to terms: Here we are, you and we, together?37 The first meeting following the ceremony was held with the Jewish Brigade’s representatives. Afterward, said Lazar, the envoys of the various movements fell on “their” survivors and sat apart with them. Kovner was very much aware of the discrepancy between the warm reception he and his friends had received and the festive nature of the public meeting and of the anxiety accompanying the meetings attended by a restricted number of Hashomer Hatzair members. Massive correspondence began between Italy and Eretz Israel, between members of the Kibbutz Artzi in the Jewish Brigade and the leadership at Kibbutz Merhavia. The three sides of that particular triangle were Kovner, the soldiers, and the leadership in Eretz Israel, and each viewed the situation in its own way.

Escape from Europe

Kovner and Kless had complaints to lodge with the leadership in Eretz Israel. In the first place, why had no emissary been sent to them? Why could the people in Eretz Israel not be active and daring as the partisans and members of the underground had been, complained Kless to Yehuda Tubin (in an episode Tubin left out of the collection of letters later published in a book).38 In the second place, why had Kovner not received an answer to a cable he had sent to Ya’ari from Vilna just after the Liberation? In Eretz Israel they forgot his existence for months on end and then remembered him only when the possibility arose that he might damage the movement with his Hativa. For many years Kovner could not accept it as the outcome of faulty mail service during wartime.39 On the day he met Kovner, Tubin wrote to Ya’ari that at least a serious, friendly letter from him to Kovner, Kempner, and Kless, if not a short visit to Europe, would be in place. No such letter was received, no visit materialized, and Tubin’s criticism of the leadership was also edited out of the collection of his letters. Moreover, he was immediately taken to task and chastised in a series of letters sent by Ya’ari.40 Those were Kovner’s complaints. The second side of the triangle, the soldiers, wrote to Ya’ari immediately. “We received them with all the warmth in our hearts in complete comradeship and with no thought of settling accounts,” they wrote, while the leadership sitting in Kibbutz Merhavia was interested in politicking and did not understand what had happened to the Jewish people—a critical statement indeed. Tubin wrote how profoundly he had been impressed by Kovner, but he warned that “he lives in his own world of war” and was resolute regarding his principles. Kovner told them emphatically that he was responsible for everyone who had followed him regardless of movement affiliation, Communists included, and were he to leave them and return exclusively to Hashomer Hatzair, he would plunge them into deepest despair or drive them to terrorism, if not worse.41 The third side of the triangle was, indeed, Ya’ari, who was deeply worried because of the independent, lawbreaking nature of the partisans, as he understood it, and he used harsh terms in his letters, even “Fascist ideas” and worse. If they were to find a leader, wrote Ya’ari, referring to Kovner—then “there was already a charismatic personality with a glorious partisan past and strong powers of persuasion, a man

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who could stop a conversation with one word—who knew what might happen.” 42 Ya’ari considered Kovner a threat, because Kovner was profoundly disappointed with the Soviet Union, because he preached and led a human tidal wave of immigration to Eretz Israel, and because the Hativa survivors demanded a Jewish state, and its immediate establishment at that, and these three tenets of Kovner’s were in absolute contradiction to Ya’ari’s ideology. The Hativa was on its way to Eretz Israel to bring a message and perhaps to change political traditions. The idea of a group led by a charismatic personality who did not even bother to ask his advice and might undermine Eretz Israel’s authority was absolutely unacceptable to Ya’ari, an uncontested leader until then. One of the Jewish Brigade leaders entreated Kovner to make a pilgrimage to Ya’ari upon arrival in Eretz Israel and make peace with him—on Ya’ari’s terms. “And then he [Kovner] said, ‘What? Me?’ No one had any influence over him.”43 A week after Kovner’s group arrived in Tarvisio, a meeting of the exodus leaders took place. It was the Hativa’s last meeting, as though the divine afflatus had deserted them.44 The Hativa was finally disbanded in Tarvisio on July 23, 1945, that is, about three months after it had been established in Bucharest. Once it had been disbanded, nothing took its place, and it aroused no interest in Eretz Israel beyond putting local leaders on the alert, an apprehension that turned out to be exaggerated. It remained, according to Kovner, an intellectual episode. However, the genuine, profound unity among the survivors was continued in various ways, and a number of other organizations that united two or three movements each were all its offspring. Kovner left Italy at the end of July, writing finis to his activity in the exodus. Statistics show that by then about 3,000 Jews had left Poland by way of the exodus escape route, and thousands more joined them immediately or continued on their way to Italy afterward. It was reported that in August there were at least 7,000 survivors who came from Hungary, prompted by members of local youth movements and exodus activists like Roseman. Every month until the end of the year, about a thousand people came to Italy from various European countries, especially Romania, Hungary, and Poland. In one of his letters Yehuda Tubin mentioned 10,000 Jews.45 It was a major accomplishment, which

Escape from Europe

had begun in Lithuania and was realized in Italy, and although Kovner and the leadership he put together were no longer there, the movement continued, using routes and methods formulated by the exodus. The work was continued by the “Asians” and youth movement members who took care of the groups of refugees, especially the children. They integrated their work into that of the Jewish Brigade by receiving newcomers, searching for survivors, and preparing the foundation for immigration to Eretz Israel. True, without Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister, Czechoslovakia would not have become one of the principal way stations, and without the Joint Distribution Committee headed by Joe Schwartz, there would not have been much to eat, and without the Jewish soldiers in the Red Army and the American Army, there would have been far more arrests and unpleasant incidents. The beginning, however, and the momentum came from the forest in Lithuania about a year before the war was over.

209

Tw e l v e   Nakam: The Blood of Israel

Will Take Revenge

“To kill six million Germans” August 1945–December 1947

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The desire for nakam—expressed in last wills and testaments, in words written on walls in blood, in poems and conversations—burned within Jewish hearts. Those who were the only survivors of their families or towns viewed vengeance as the only justification for staying alive: to take revenge, to pay back the murderer and the torturer in his own coin. Within a short time it became clear that despite the strength of the desire, the overwhelming majority of the survivors had found other ways of wreaking vengeance. Those who actually tried to kill and torture immediately discovered that that revolted them rather than bringing peace of mind. Katzetnick, who at the Hativa’s founding meeting had called on all those who had returned from the crematoria chimneys to destroy entire German cities with tanks, wrote in his book Vengeance about a survivor who, in the middle of an act of revenge, feels alienated, orphaned, and useless.1 In Growing Pains, Hanoch Bartov’s Jewish Brigade soldier is torn between feeling like a failure for not being able to take vengeance and following the precepts of his Jewish upbringing. A Brigade officer later testified that he vomited after watching a German strangled to death.2 The overwhelming majority of survivors decided to live, in the humanitarian, Jewish sense, to found families and kibbutzim and yeshivas to replace those that had been destroyed, to fight on battlefields if needed, as previously they had been unable, to gain the right to live among Jews in Eretz Israel, and to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust, all of which would be their revenge.3 In Eretz Israel as well there was a loud call for revenge;4 however, none of the Yishuv’s institutions

Nakam

met to discuss revenge as a practical or moral possibility, and certainly not to authorize individuals to take steps on their own. However, Kovner and his comrades had different opinions. In Vilna, when the Jews were closed off in the ghetto, and then later, in the forest, they knew nothing of the extermination camps. After the Liberation, Kovner and his comrades went to see Ponar. They returned with clenched fists, stunned and horrified by the extent of the killing, which seemed so real next to the pits, at the crude brutality of shooting a living human being standing in front of you, the signs of which were still visible on the bodies strewn around; no less than 70,000 souls, most of them Jewish, had been killed there. When they were in Lublin, the group went to see the nearby forced labor and death camp in Majdanek and came back more shocked than they had from Ponar, appalled by the industrialization of killing, the cold planning that activated it, the process that turned a human being into ashes within a set time. They heard about Treblinka and Chelmno from Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin and their comrades and met the “Auschwitz group” in Romania and survivors from other camps on the way to Italy. Kovner was terribly agitated and could not find peace. He was overtaken by the idea of revenge; it took hold of him and his comrades until they could think of nothing else. It became the most important goal, dictating their actions: A group of survivors dedicated themselves to nakam (revenge), ready to pay the price, whatever it might be, and to give up everything else. They numbered about fifty men and women, mostly partisans, and there were also “Asians,” all of them from the circles created in Lublin and Bucharest, chosen for who they were and what they could do, not for where they had come from. Most of them were from Vilna, Rovno, Cze˛ stochowa, and Krakow.5 In Italy Kovner formulated the principles that the nakam would be based on and its objectives: 1. The danger that more and final destruction will be visited upon the Jewish people was not obviated by Hitler’s military loss. 2. Many different countries participated in murdering six million Jews, and many of them are prepared to continue, each in its own way. 3. [Here Kovner’s handwriting is unclear.]

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4. The idea that Jewish blood can be shed without reprisal must be erased from the memory of mankind. 5. Our bitter disappointment with the Free World is caused not only by our inability to find a correct answer and suitable recompense for the destruction. Appeasing the murderers, which today is the norm, means in effect fostering a new program to murder the Jewish people, which will lie in wait until a new military-political upheaval occurs in the world. [Here Kovner foresaw the American Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, including Germany and the cold war.] 6. [Kovner erased this point.] 7. Therefore, we have taken it upon ourselves not to let the world forget by performing the necessary act: retribution. It will be more than revenge, it must be the law of the murdered Jewish people! Its name will therefore be “DIN [the acronym for the Hebrew words dam Israel noter, “The blood of Israel is vengeful”; in Hebrew din means “judgment”] so that posterity may know that in this merciless, uncompassionate world there are both judge [dayan in Hebrew] and judgment.6

Kovner had been received in Italy with enthusiasm by the Jewish Brigade and the survivors, who had an enormous desire for a leader who would lead them out of exile and the graveyard of Europe. If he had not been intent upon the nakam, he might have continued with the Jewish Brigade in organizing the exodus. In that case, he would have then fought for the Hativa’s existence, even if it meant arguing with Meir Ya’ari, the leader of his own movement, and with the Yishuv in Eretz Israel and its emissaries and even if he had known it had no political future. That August, when Kovner went to Eretz Israel, had he gone instead to the Zionist convention in London, the first one held after the war, to join Zuckerman and Chaika Grossman to tell the partisans’ story as they told the ghetto fighters’ story and to tell the story of Vilna as they told the story of Warsaw and Bialystok in one of his usual brilliant speeches, he could have also presented the Hativa as a national symbol, not as a political faction: “If it hadn’t been for the nakam I would have stayed in Europe for one or two more years, representing most of the survivors.”7 Kovner would have then chosen the right moment to arrive in Eretz Israel as the author of the first manifesto calling for self-defense in the face

Nakam

of total destruction, one of the founders of the ghetto underground, the commander of a Jewish unit in the forest, the person responsible for the exodus southward toward Italy, the prophet bringing a vision of national Jewish unity, a message of Jewish Vilna and its heritage—a heritage he was bringing to Eretz Israel with the survivors to lay before the leadership of the Yishuv and of the movement. He might also have been able to exploit the enthusiasm in Italy and the deep impression made by his speech in Tarvisio, his image as a second Moses, standing at the head of “the Exodus from Europe” and bringing his flock with him.8 Had Kovner left the nakam as an open symbolic-moral question to be answered at the general national level, he would have been received in Eretz Israel as an outstanding leader, and the lesson to be learned from the Holocaust would have been brought to Eretz Israel with great force. However, by dedicating himself to the nakam, Kovner committed political suicide. It alienated him from close friends, who were insulted for not being chosen to participate. It alienated him from Lubetkin and Zuckerman, who strongly opposed the idea, and made him go in the opposite direction in August, leaving them the stage. It alienated him from the members of his own movement in the Jewish Brigade, from the Hativa, and from those who believed in and followed him. He later said quite openly that he and his group disappeared from the public eye.9 In the summer of 1945 Kovner’s plan for revenge put him in the middle of an argument in Eretz Israel between supporters and opponents, an argument that was conducted in secret and turned Kovner into a figure about whom activists whispered and were wary of, complicating his relations with some of the leadership in Eretz Israel from the outset. It was as though Kovner and his group were party to an awful secret— they kept silent for decades about what they did and where, the number of Germans they killed and how, if at all. He brought upon himself an extended period of imprisonment and separation from Kempner and his comrades, and he made them argue bitterly among themselves. He gave Ya’ari the perfect excuse to attack him and his judgment and to taunt him with the nakam every now and again, when expedient, for years. Kovner made a false move and paid for it dearly. In fact, the Jewish Brigade also entertained the idea of revenge. When the Brigade was called on to act as an army of occupation in Germany,

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the soldiers were equipped with an issue of their newsletter that included twelve commandments. Revenge was repeatedly mentioned, but not in the biblical sense of an eye for an eye. Seven of the twelve commandments were the following: 1. Remember the six million who were slaughtered. 2. Guard for generations hatred for those who murdered your people. . . . 5. Remember, our appearance as a Brigade with a flag and symbol, for the German people in its country to see, is revenge. 6. Remember, the blood feud is everyone’s, and every irresponsible act causes everyone to fail. . . . 10. They will be taboo forever, they and their women and children and property and everything they own—taboo for generations! 11. Remember: your mission is to rescue Jews, emigration to Eretz ­Israel, a free homeland. 12. Remember: your duty is dedication, loyalty and love for those who survived the sword and the camps.

And finally, “Cursed be he who will not remember what they did to us!”10 The commandments were written by the Jewish Brigade commanders in the knowledge that Brigade and British army soldiers from Eretz Israel, especially those whose families had been killed, independently killed Germans and Austrians as soon as the battles were over. It was a warning that acts of that sort would make everyone fail and that only a public body was entitled to avenge itself, and only according to its decisions. To stop such private acts of revenge, an internal command was formed, led by Haim Laskov (later chief of the IDF staff), Meir Zorea, Israel Carmi, Shaike Weinberg, and others. Together with a few dozen soldiers they used to leave the central camp at Tarvisio at night to execute those they deemed as having committed crimes against the Jewish people; the names came from lists compiled from informers. Some members of the group were fluent in German and some looked Aryan. They carried out their night missions from the time the war ended in May until the Jewish Brigade was moved at the end of July, a matter of three months. It is difficult to give an exact number, but it can be estimated that they

Nakam

killed a few hundred people. They performed the executions yet at the same time debated whether a human life could be taken, even that of a German war criminal, without a trial, and whether the information received was sufficient for positive identification. The Jewish Brigade’s commanders, Shlomo Rabinovitch (Shamir) and James Ben-Gal, were concerned about both the moral implications of their actions and the Brigade’s relations with the British.11 Indeed, the British found out what was happening and canceled the Jewish Brigade’s assignment as the army of occupation in Germany. “Like the Tartars, like the Ukrainians, like the Germans, just once, all of us, delicate souls, one and all . . . we will go into a city and burn it, house after house, German after German,” wrote Bartov in expectation.12 To their great disappointment, the Jewish Brigade soldiers were transferred to Belgium and Holland. They crossed Germany on their way there in trucks with signs painted on their sides reading “Die Juden kommen!”—the Jews are coming!—striking down anyone they found on the way. In encounters with the German population, they realized that the Germans expected a terrible Jewish vengeance to come, convinced that it had to come, but it did not. When Kovner arrived in the middle of July, he met with Carmi, who briefed him. However, Kovner, Eliezer Lidovski, Yitzhak (Pasha) Reich­man, and their fifty comrades had something entirely different in mind. They did not want secret isolated executions at night, and they did not want to use conventional methods, such as shooting or strangulation, or to go on killing Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Poles who had been identified as murderers and informers, whether by survivors or by the Soviet authorities. They aspired to “an organized, unique vengeance” to pay Germany back, a nation for a nation, Kovner recalled later, as “only those who survived such a terrible murder are capable of doing. It was an idea that any sensible person could see was mad. But people were almost mad in those days . . . and perhaps worse than mad. It was a terrible idea, born of despair, with something suicidal about it, . . . the idea of a kind of inferno: . . . an eye for an eye. That is, to kill six million Germans.” Kovner definitely uttered these words, “to kill six million Germans,” and yet it is hard to believe he meant it. That was why they had to find inhuman weapons, “an atrocity for an atrocity.” They wanted a sentence that would shock the world with its “ferocity

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and cruelty.”13 The nakam, a plan for revenge for the whole world to see and that would affect millions, was the only way to warn the world that no one could lightly shed Jewish blood again and that anyone who wanted to try his hand at murder would be endangering himself. With regard to internal Jewish affairs, the nakam would make it impossible to return to “business as usual” as if the worst catastrophe in the history of the Jewish people had never happened. Returning to life was egoism and an insult to everyone who had been lost, as if their torments and deaths had not been worth the effort, as if Jews were outside history. Perhaps the atmosphere of despair and total loss gave birth to the Vilna and Rovno groups’ desire for a comprehensive revenge, although it was common to most of the survivors.14 Perhaps most of the avengers were partisans and fighters because they had already seen what law and order were worth, and after the war and life in the forests they were unwilling to recognize any law save the one they determined themselves. “Until I reached Eretz Israel I recognized no authority,” said Kovner.15 The nakam was therefore a necessary stage in their rehabilitation, and once finished, they would be able to return to a life of society and laws. Kovner, engulfed by a sense of mission and responsibility for the future of the Jewish people, was also responsible for punishing those who had burned the Temple of Jerusalem, in Jerusalem of Lithuania and in all Europe, before he could turn to the task of building another in its place. Within two weeks after they reached Italy, Kovner and his comrades set their minds on a different course of action, different from their former contact with the Jewish Brigade and the Hativa, secure in the knowledge that the exodus would continue, and planned the nakam, forming groups whose number and composition would be suitable for their needs. The fifty comrades who were chosen were willing to live anonymously for an unknown period of time among Germans and were considered strong enough not to break down. They were to get into Germany as fast as possible, find the appropriate chemicals, get their own members employed at central urban water installations in three or four major cities, and poison the water supplies, all of them at once on the same day. They were to avoid individual acts of terrorism and had to find funding, as they had for the exodus. They received a large

Nakam

sum from a Hashomer Hatzair emissary into whose hands a fortune in German-forged British banknotes had fallen. The rest came from black marketers whom they convinced to contribute, from speculators whom they forced to contribute, and from their allies in the Jewish Brigade. When they arrived, they learned that large camps had been set up in Germany for members of the SS and Gestapo, and they formulated Plan B, which was the killing or at least wounding of those men; Plan A was the original “great, terrible nakam.”16 Brigade officers helped them leave Italy and reach Belgium and Paris, where the Haganah (the armed underground of the Yishuv) had its European headquarters, without knowing what their plans were; they thought Kovner and his group were carrying out Plan C, which was chasing specific Nazis, as the Brigade itself did until then. The issue of Kovner’s trip to Eretz Israel arose as soon as he met the Hashomer Hatzair members in the Jewish Brigade. They thought he would be able to relieve at least some of the fear in Eretz Israel over the Hativa, as an idea and as a practical possibility. The illegal immigration activists (those trying to bring immigrants to Eretz Israel despite British mandatory regulations forbidding it) in the Brigade pinned another hope on his trip: Kovner in Eretz Israel, and his fiery rhetoric heard by the Yishuv and its leaders, would make clear how urgent it was to solve the problems arising from the mass immigration that was about to engulf Eretz Israel.17 To those factors Kovner added his own desire to obtain moral and practical support for the nakam. Members of the Jewish Brigade who had already taken revenge, both as individuals and in groups, acted without authorization from the leaders of the Yishuv. Therefore the soldiers supported Kovner without knowing anything about Plan A, but they did not feel free to help him without first finding out what the Yishuv leadership would say; in addition, Shamir and Ben-Gal were quite frosty in their responses. 18 Kovner, surrounded by love and warmth, certainly from the Hashomer Hatzair members, knew he would be deceiving them and putting them in an embarrassing position if he acted without their knowledge. During his stay in the Brigade camp, he came to understand the high status of the Yishuv’s leaders and the trust the soldiers had in them. He also had to ask himself and the leadership in Eretz Israel if revenge would not adversely

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affect the survivors; the Yishuv was interested in having them come to Eretz Israel and in establishing a state, and in the meantime it was vital that the survivors receive practical aid from the Allies. Revenge taken on a population conquered by the Allies or held in camps established by them, were its source ever revealed, would put the Yishuv in a complicated and uncomfortable position in relation to the occupational rule, especially the British. Kovner, the most resounding experience of whose life had been the Holocaust, understood nothing of that until he reached Italy and became aware of the Yishuv’s problems. “The soil of Italy became, for us, the beginning of a homeland, of an Eretz Israel,” said Kempner.19 “We told Ben-Gurion what was happening and he immediately demanded we bring [Kovner] to Eretz Israel, and it was done.”20 David Ben-Gurion, later the state’s first prime minister, was unquestionably the highest political authority in the Yishuv. Toward the end of July 1945, Kovner made his way to Milan, where he had his mane of hair cut and was provided with documents and uniforms so that he could join a group of soldiers going to Eretz Israel on leave. Thus in early August, two weeks after his arrival in Italy, Kovner was already in the south, at the port in Sorrento, and from there he sent Kempner the first of a long series of letters, a correspondence that lasted until they met again almost a year later, in Eretz Israel in June 1946. Kovner set out with a heavy heart. “No mission or journey was ever as difficult for me as that one,” he wrote Kempner in a gloomy letter. “Sorrow and pain sit on my heart like a stone.” He was worried about the members of the disbanded Hativa and the nakam and asked her to make sure his men prepared the ground as soon as possible, regardless of the cost for the massive influx of immigrants wishing to leave Europe for Eretz Israel, and he was worried about being separated from her. Analyzing the situation, it was clear to him that he had to reach Eretz Israel, “although I know I won’t succeed, and the more I study the problem and learn about [the Yishuv’s] psychology, the more I despair. There is nothing for me to do there. I feel the journey will be a final blow and my heart tells me the meeting with Eretz Israel will cause me nothing but suffering.”21 When Kovner left, the nakam group felt they had been orphaned. Reichman replaced Kovner; even in Lublin he had been one of the

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nakam’s staunchest supporters. However, his political past as a Communist complicated relations with the Jewish Brigade and Haganah headquarters, and his strong personality was not much help either. At the beginning of August 1945 Kovner joined a group of soldiers going to Eretz Israel on leave. Their boat anchored at Alexandria, and they went to Eretz Israel by way of El-Arish. Kovner was registered on his arrival as Uri (his underground name in Vilna) Kovnai, a Hebrew version of Kovner.22 Upon his arrival, members of the Mossad for Aliyah B (the clandestine Haganah branch organizing illegal immigration, to circumvent British limitations, later the Israeli Mossad) were waiting for Kovner at the train station, and he was taken to an apartment where he stayed for three days, “under house arrest,” he said. Despite efforts to find him, no one from the Hashomer Hatzair leadership knew where he was. Mossad head Shaul Meirov interrogated him, and Israel Galilee, one of the Haganah chiefs, both close to Ben-Gurion, also arrived. The local leadership wanted to know what Kovner and his Hativa were up to and to convince him to accept what Meirov called “national authority.” Kovner’s introduction to Eretz Israel and its leaders, as a suspect and not a leader, left him with a “bitter taste in his mouth.”23 Perhaps he saw his house arrest and the great amount of time Meirov devoted to him as proof of the importance the Yishuv attached to him and his ideas. After the first, embarrassing meeting, Kovner spent four months in Eretz Israel, from August to December, in feverish activity. He knew his friends in Europe were on tenterhooks awaiting his return and that every passing day brought more Allied troops into Germany and more refugees, primarily Jewish, and that it was becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between the groups and punish accordingly. He wanted to gain trust and recognition as quickly as possible, both as a leader and commander during the Holocaust and as the person presenting to the movement and the Yishuv leadership the survivors’ three convictions: that the Holocaust was not yet over, that immigration was an absolute and immediate necessity, and that revenge was repayment for the past and a warning for the future.24 Kovner met many individuals and spoke before various groups, traveled around to become acquainted with the country, and eagerly read

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all the Hebrew literature that had been published during the years he had been trapped in the ghetto. He met with Palmach (the Haganah elite fighting unit) commander Yitzhak Sadeh to obtain support for the nakam and found him understanding. Sadeh had already met Ruzka Korczak and had been profoundly impressed, taking her to meetings and councils. “I too am a partisan,” he told her when they met, and he called her “the Palmachnik from the Diaspora.” Kovner went to Sadeh’s home, an austere attic in a Tel Aviv apartment building, where he found Sadeh silently thinking through a Palmach operation, without a map or other papers, and when he finally addressed Kovner and apologized for his silence, Kovner was green with envy of an individual who had such an intimate knowledge of the country. As far as the support Kovner asked for was concerned, Sadeh was “one of the few who understood that there was a vital truth in the madness” of revenge.25 One meeting led to another, and Sadeh took Kovner to meet Nathan Alterman, who asked him questions he had prepared previously, jotted down a little and listened a great deal, especially to the history of the ghetto, and said that “had I been in the ghetto, I would have been one of the Judenrat.” Kovner, astounded, answered, “but Nathan, I read ‘Simhat Ani’im’ [‘Poor Men’s Happiness,’ poetry praising rebellion], how could you—,” and Alterman answered sternly, “It’s here, you see, it’s here!”—meaning that Eretz Israel was the proper place for an uprising and that it should not have been demanded of the Jews in the Diaspora.26 Their short but intense exchange became the heart of a debate about the revolts during the Holocaust, a debate in which Alterman was almost the only one at that time to suggest that it was beyond the Jews’ ability to revolt against the Nazi yoke, especially when they were not in their own land. When the meeting was over, Kovner walked around Tel Aviv. “It was the middle of summer. The houses were white under the clear sky and in the streets people walked around like a river, secure, and women and men and young children waded and dunked themselves in Tel Aviv’s sea, babbling happily, and I stood among them and across from them like the death’s-head at the banquet.”27 On September 17, Yom Kippur of 1945, Kovner spoke with Meir Ya’ari for eleven hours without a break. It was their first personal meeting and the beginning of a relationship that lasted until their deaths in

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1987. From the first moment it was clear that two strong, uncompromising personalities were confronting one another but that they had a deep mutual regard, despite the arguments they had for forty years over almost every possible question of principle. “One thing is clear: we will go forward together,” wrote Kovner to a member of the Jewish Brigade after the meeting. “I listened carefully to what he had to say. He revealed himself as having the principles of a great leader and a preeminent Jew. However, Meir listened closely to what I had to say and learned from it (that is his strength!).”28 Korczak, who attended part of the meeting as well, thought that Ya’ari was still not able to incorporate what he had heard into his worldview; blaming the Soviets for anything in Eretz Israel at that time was blasphemy, and in Merhavia, Ya’ari’s kibbutz, it was high treason. Nevertheless, she wrote to Kempner that Kovner had found understanding and meaningful content within the movement.29 Korczak, who had been in Eretz Israel since December 1944, met Kovner again a short time after his arrival and presented him to her acquaintances. The friendship and respect they felt for her made the encounter easier for him, as did her trust and admiration for him. During the busy months Kovner spent in Eretz Israel, he and Korczak still found the time to edit the manuscript of Korczak’s book, Flames in the Ashes, and Kovner gave her the material he had carried with him since he left Vilna, which she included in it. Perhaps then their desire for revenge was strengthened, because through the book they relived their experiences, although in a new and different environment, surrounded by greenery and the affection of friends, in an atmosphere radically different from the Holocaust they were writing about. Feelings of friendship, “relations forged in blood . . . and a common fate” were renewed when Korczak and Kovner met in Eretz Israel.30 However, it was a different kind of relationship from the one Kovner had with Kempner, at least as far as he was concerned. He wrote to Kempner in Paris from Eretz Israel, begging her to write to him every few days, even if it were only a line. He questioned her every so often about what she was doing and the men around her. Despite the fact that his letters were transmitted through comrades in the Jewish Brigade and were meant to be read by Reichman and Bezalel Kek as well, Kovner addressed them to her using nicknames—Vitek, Vit—and ended them by holding both her

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hands in his or by sending kisses to all the members of the family of avengers, on the condition that she not partake of the kisses sent to all but rather wait for his. His desire was to meet her again soon, “and to walk together to the end.”31 She wrote less than he did and was more reserved, keeping to the matters at hand. Kovner spoke before the Kibbutz Artzi executive committee. He again feared, as he had on his way to Eretz Israel, that perhaps he might fail to accomplish his mission. Openly he told the executive committee that “in wanting to tell you what I have to say, I am helpless. What bothers me is the question of how to transmit what cannot be understood if it is only heard. You have to breathe it.” He proposed his plans “and no one opposed, no one said he didn’t understand, but I felt it was slipping through my fingers.” However, when he left the subject of the Holocaust and began speaking about the terrible anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union during and after the war and the Jews’ disappointment and their national renascence, which had to be exploited immediately, everyone listened closely. Kovner reproached them for not knowing that the survivors were on their way (“Who will rescue them? What plans have been made? Where will you find the strength to do it?”) and that there was no future for Jews in Europe. Soviet soldiers were raping women who had just come out of concentration camps, proof of abysmal morality. He blamed the leadership for having an antediluvian approach, for lacking the ability to unify, and for worrying only about who would be absorbed into the kibbutzim without giving a thought to the masses who were coming. “What is the connection between this table around which we sit and the souls of the people there, which are so different, so other, so despairing?”32 Kovner poured his heart out in a letter to Paris. Outwardly everything was as it should be; they listened to him with interest, but it was as though a stranger were speaking to them. “Everything is so different, so new. Close and strange, great and dear to my heart—and so gloomy.”33 While holding meetings with poets and movement leaders, Kovner also continued his meetings on the subject of the nakam. Both Moshe Sneh and Galilee, heads of the Haganah, expressed understanding but nothing more. Although Kovner did not tell them about Plan A, he requested a particularly effective poison, which in his opinion would

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be hard to obtain in Europe, men and vehicles, and an order from the Haganah not to interfere. In turn, the avengers would not involve any public Jewish body in Eretz Israel or in the Diaspora. They would be responsible for themselves in the event of arrest and imprisonment. Galilee promised Kovner Haganah liaison personnel in Europe and a safe return there on the condition that he, Kovner, be willing to accept the authority of the Haganah and that only Plan B, which dealt with the SS men held in certain camps, would be put into operation. It can therefore be assumed that Galilee indeed knew of Plan A, not from Kovner but from Jewish Brigade soldiers who had heard about it in Italy, opposed it, and was unwilling to procure poison for Kovner. Hazan and Ya’ari agreed as well that only Nazis whose past was well known would be targeted and that aid to the survivors would not be compromised.34 Kovner pretended to accept the conditions: “I openly confess that I was not completely honest with Galilee, Sneh and Shaul [Meirov, and in fact with Ya’ari as well] and was insincere in my agreement. I sent a coded message to my comrades in Europe not to mention Plan A to anyone until I returned.” Kovner wrote this confession three months before his death in a document that summarized the main events of the nakam and deposited it in an archive. His written words make it clear that he had had every intention of going ahead with Plan A despite his promises to the heads of the Haganah. He even prepared a rough working draft for the operation, which began, “Everyone must immediately try to get into the center of the water system.”35 Regarding the coded order, Kovner was referring to one of the letters sent to Kempner, which she read to the avengers, particularly Reich­man and Kek. The letters contained code words: The nakam was called “the educational program”; the detention camps in which the SS men were held were known as “children’s houses”; the prison was called “the hospital”; and the poison was called “the medicine.” Reichman was called “Izzy,” Kek was “Danny,” Kempner was “Judith,” and Kovner himself, either Yehuda or Uri. The nakam was “Hadassah,” the name of Kovner’s first girlfriend, and therefore he sometimes called himself “Hadas.” In September, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, 1946, Kovner sent Reichman an unequivocal order to spend his time on Plan B alone. “That is not to say that we are dropping the first

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plan. No!” However, he still had not found the means he needed to implement it. He instructed them in his following letters to act alone and not to make any new connections and to find Yitzhak Ratner at any cost—he was an FPO member who had been trained as a chemist—who could help them prepare or find the necessary poison.36 In the meantime, Kovner tried to find the poison in Eretz Israel. According to his own testimony, he met Chaim Weizmann, later first president of the state, in Rehovot that month. Weizmann listened to Kovner in silence and finally said that had he been younger and in their shoes, he would have done the same thing. Weizmann sent Kovner, according to Kovner’s testimony, to Prof. Ernst David Bergman, one of the pioneers in nuclear research in Eretz Israel. Bergman gave the job of manufacturing the required material to the Katzir brothers, Aharon and Ephraim, and they produced the poison within two months. The Katzir brothers and Bergman knew only about Plan B. That was Kovner’s version of the meeting.37 However, there is no independent evidence substantiating Kovner’s meeting with Weizmann on the given date, not in Weizmann’s datebook or in his archives. Moreover, Weizmann was not even in the country; he had left for London in March 1945 and was in the United States between August and December that same year, months during which Kovner was in Eretz Israel. The only authority for the existence of a meeting between Weizmann and Kovner, with the exception of Kovner’s claim, is a card in the Weizmann Institute Archives index that was made out in 1965, when Kovner’s testimony, given to historian Yehuda Bauer, was received to be deposited there because it mentioned Weizmann, and not close to the end of the war. It noted that Abba Kovner spoke with Dr. Weizmann in Rehovot on March 1, 1946, and in parentheses the number 6,000,000 appears, the subject of their conversation.38 It is possible that Kovner did not make the story up out of whole cloth and had actually met Weizmann in Rehovot after he returned from the United States by way of London at the end of February.39 The date of the meeting in which the two discussed the 6 million is vitally important regarding the procurement of the poison, as is the question of whether Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organization, was indeed involved in it. Prof. Ephraim Katzir, who

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eventually became Israel’s fourth president, has made it clear in a signed statement that in the summer of 1945 he and his brother Aharon were assistants in the organic and macromolecular chemistry laboratory at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. One day that summer one of ­Aharon’s students presented Korczak and Kovner to them as Holocaust fighters and survivors, and they were the first to give the Katzir brothers information about the Holocaust. Kovner told them about his plans concerning the captive SS officers in the detention camps and emphasized the fact that the operation had symbolic value only. “We were in complete agreement with him. We were Haganah members and had been brought up to believe Jews had to defend themselves actively. It was absolutely clear to us that the SS officers should not be treated with mercy, not even what ordinary decent Western justice might permit them. We both knew we would help Abba any way we could. Aharon and I appealed to the person responsible for the chemical stores at the University . . . who also belonged to the Haganah, and he also agreed without hesitation. We consulted him and made a list of the most effective poisons he could get his hands on and he gave them to us to give to Abba Kovner.” One milligram of the chemicals, said Katzir, would be lethal for many.40 Katzir was surprised to hear that anyone would have even entertained the idea that Weizmann was involved in supplying Kovner with the poisons. “Such a statement has no basis in fact,” he said, “not only because the poisons reached Abba Kovner exactly as described, but because such an approach was antithetical to Weizmann’s character and policies [favoring good relations with the British mandate authorities]. Putting it mildly, he could not be at all enthusiastic about that sort of operation. In any case, Aharon and I never spoke to him about the subject. Until the summer of 1945 we hadn’t even met him.” The Katzir brothers never received instructions, certainly not from Weizmann, who was not even in the country and therefore could not tell Bergman anything, were not connected to the institute in Rehovot, knew nothing of Plan A, and did not think for a moment that a matter as elementary as targeting SS officers would need authorization from anyone. Two or three days after the meeting, Kovner came and took the poison and that was the last they heard of him for years.41 In a letter to Kempner written at the beginning

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of October, Kovner told her he had found a “new doctor, a specialist,” who was willing to help him in any way possible, and that he was going to Jerusalem [not Rehovot] to see him the following day.42 Kovner also testified that he met with Ben-Gurion for a long discussion in which the nakam was not actually mentioned. Unfortunately, there is no reference to the meeting, not in Ben-Gurion’s diary and not in his archives, and he apparently wrote nothing of his position on revenge. Reichman had a short meeting with Ben-Gurion, who was visiting the displaced persons in Germany, apparently in early November 1945. He was impatient with Reichman and asked ironically if killing 6 million Germans would bring “his” 6 million Jews back to life, and if not—he was not interested. Shimon Avidan quoted Ben-Gurion as saying, “Who knows what the outcome of all this will be.”43 It can be assumed that if Ben-Gurion thought revenge was the best measure, he would have given the necessary orders and mobilized the appropriate sectors of the Yishuv for an operation the likes of which would still be talked about today. Two unequivocal conclusions can be drawn from the series of meetings. First, some of the leaders of the Yishuv and the upper echelons of the Haganah knew about Plan A. That was either because the members of the Jewish Brigade leaked the secret or because Kovner was looking for the poison and spoke about “the intellectual side of the matter,” according to him, at least, to three people, apparently Meirov, Galilee, and Weizmann.44 Second, none of the Yishuv leaders agreed with Kovner at any time in any way regarding Plan A. Quite the opposite was true; they did not speak about Plan A or do anything to implement it. Even Avidan, later commander of the Givati Brigade and active in the nakam in his own way, said straightforwardly that “the ideas of Abba’s friends who were in favor of indiscriminate revenge were unacceptable to me.” 45 Ben-Gurion had a clear list of priorities, and the first was fulfilling the human and Jewish duty of taking care of the Holocaust survivors and getting them to Eretz Israel to advance the establishment of the state, one dependent on the other. The position of the heads of the Yishuv was that “no act of revenge [could] erase the spilling of innocent blood on the soil of Europe, which [would] be the Mark of Cain on the forehead of the world. . . . The Haganah had the right to restrain

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such an action and to give the strong forces behind it a new direction and more fruitful outcome.” In the Book of the Haganah the avengers are described in no uncertain terms “full of the spirit of rebellion . . . stemming from deep-seating feelings of inferiority” and “desirous of unbridled acts of revenge.” As Grossman summed up later, shortly before her death in 1996, “Plan A was not carried out not because of technical failures, but rather because the leadership of the Haganah and the Palmach objected to it.”46 Kovner stayed in the country for four months, a long time for those in Europe who were waiting for him. He was delayed by several factors. The first was the problem of procuring the poison. The second was his participation in public gatherings he did not want to miss, because they were part of the struggle against the British, who were then fully in force. “I had public urges,” he confessed later, and was sensitive to his future status in the movement.47 The third, and apparently most important factor, was his desire to return to Europe after a letter or instructions had been sent by the upper echelons of the Haganah in Eretz Israel, most importantly by Galilee, to Haganah members in Europe, promising the avengers help and a free hand without their being subject to Haganah surveillance. There were differences of opinion as to just how much liberty the Haganah would be willing to allow them and about the idea of Plan B, which did not inspire much enthusiasm either, with or without surveillance. Kovner could leave only after the decision had been made, being dependent as he was on the Haganah for documents and escorts, and thus his return to Europe was delayed. Whether it was deliberately delayed to the detriment of the nakam or whether, in those stormy times in Eretz Israel, there was no time to deal with the issue is a moot point. In the meantime suspicions arose among the group remaining in Europe; they did not understand what was delaying Kovner. The avengers, in the meantime, became more and more intent upon the nakam, operating in small groups or individually with assumed names, passing among the Germans and living in awful conditions, making preparations and connections, waiting for the poison to arrive. “The men, in their great isolation, are desperate,” wrote Kempner to Kovner. “They have given themselves over to one thing alone and it leads directly to

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living with death. They . . . are practically not living in this world . . . [and] we are completely cut off from the social and political lives of the Jews here in the Diaspora, and more so from life in Eretz Israel, which every day seems to be drifting further and further away. The day is not far off when someone who wants to speak about a normal life in Eretz Israel will be considered a traitor.”48 Kempner was torn between Kovner and the comrades to whom she transmitted his messages and felt a gulf slowly opening up between him and them. The order to take care of matters relating to Plan B first led to fierce arguments and also raised suspicions that Kovner might be changing his position. The order to rely only on their own forces meant dissociating themselves from the Jewish Brigade, on whose aid they had always counted. She took him to task for not writing to the other comrades and did not understand why he kept mentioning the movement in his letters, as though revenge were dependent on it, “and I cannot agree with that at all.” She missed him, she said, and called him by his nicknames, worried about his health, and said she was waiting for the minute when they could sit close to each other and talk. “I am alone, so terribly alone,” she cried out to him from distant Paris.49 As if it were not enough for Kovner to receive her letters, to feel that all his friends’ suspicions and difficulties had been caused by his leaving, to miss Kempner who was in the middle of a storm of conflicting pressures, and to have difficulties obtaining what he needed in Eretz Israel, he suffered another blow: He sent Kempner a letter that was both furious and appeasing, asking her to wait just a little bit longer (“Were you the only one who waited? What about me?”). She had heard rumors that Kovner and Korczak had been seen a great deal together and had stayed in members’ rooms on kibbutzim, and her reaction was an immediate either/or: Kovner was to decide immediately or she did not want to correspond any longer, period. She wrote it on a small piece of paper and never forgot a word of it. Kovner threw it into the garbage in a fit of anger, threatening that in years to come he would always remind her of it, and how he would remind her! Apparently he never considered the possibility that in years to come they might not be together. Kempner was furious with both him and Korczak, her closest friend, for what their behavior was rumored to be, especially since Korczak

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knew that toward the end of the time in the forest and during the exodus, Kempner and Kovner had become more obviously a couple in the romantic sense. Korczak knew nothing of the rumors or of the pain she caused Kempner and continued, as before, sending her letters expressing her friendship and longings.50 Kovner’s return trip to Europe was arranged and canceled several times, and Korczak explained the situation in letters she sent to the comrades in Europe as if to protect him from their anger. The events, according to Kovner’s testimonies, unfolded as follows. Early in December 1945 he set out for Egypt carrying the papers of an Eretz Israeli soldier in the British army named Benjamin Beit-Halachmi, a demobilized vet who bore a striking physical resemblance to Kovner. On December 14, in the port of Alexandria, Kovner boarded the Champollion along with thousands of British troops returning from leave, among

Kovner (top right) on board the Champollion British Army ship, December 1945, on his way to Europe to take revenge on the Germans. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Kovner family.

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them twenty-seven soldiers from Eretz Israel—real soldiers—and five more “soldiers,” Kovner among them, who were in fact illegal immigration emissaries carrying forged documents; the other four emissaries had no idea about Kovner’s mission. Kovner was convinced, though, that one of them was his personal escort. His duffel bag carried toothpaste tubes full of gold and cans of poison labeled milk powder. The journey passed uneventfully, although Kovner was seasick and vomited over the side of the ship most of the time, never letting go of the duffel bag, spending the rest of the time lying in his hammock reading Stefan Zweig’s Magellan.51 Shortly before the ship arrived at the Toulon harbor, Kovner’s name (as it appeared on his documents) and three others were announced over the public address system. Kovner turned to Yitzik Rosenkranz from Kibbutz Yakum, who until that time had no idea what the bag concealed, and asked him, should anything happen to him, to take the bag to such-and-such an address, that is, to Kempner and Reichman in Paris. If that were impossible, Rosenkranz was to destroy the bag in any way he could. Kovner himself opened the duffel bag, took out half the cans, and threw them out a porthole. A military police launch took Kovner and three others with forged papers to an army detention camp in Toulon. He was not interrogated in Toulon or on the boat that returned him to Egypt at the end of December. In Egypt he spent three months in a cell by himself in a camp for German prisoners (in Kovner’s other versions, four and a half months or half a year), terribly anxious that cans of poison had remained on the boat and that one day they would put them down in front of him and his cover story would be blown. Kovner’s story was that he was a Holocaust survivor and had been told his mother was alive and that he bought the documents to return to Europe to look for her. The interrogation yielded no results, and he was relieved when no mention was made of the cans or the nakam. He was transferred to Jerusalem and released after the Haganah intervened. Such was the story as Kovner told and retold it, details sometimes changing, fully convinced he had been arrested because someone who knew about his plans for the nakam had turned him in.52 In fact, every aspect of Kovner’s trip was destined to fail. First, his arrest was the result of the forged papers. The British were always suspi-

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cious of the identity of passengers going from Eretz Israel to Europe, and after the assassination of Lord Moyne at the hands of the LEHI (Fighters for Israel’s Freedom), a rightist extremist organization, on November 6, 1944, they became even more suspicious.53 The trip had been hastily prepared in December, just when security was being tightened and examinations were becoming stricter. Kovner did not know a word of English or anything at all about the way a British soldier should behave, and he had left with a larger than usual group of “nonkosher” soldiers.54 Kovner and the four others were never brought to the camp in Rehovot for the usual few days of instruction but went directly to the train station there. At the camp in Egypt they had already aroused suspicion because of their advanced ages, their hesitation at performing duties, and their nonmilitary deportment. When their names were called onboard the ship, they raised even more suspicions by not answering the call immediately; they were not used to hearing their pseudonyms and did not know English. When they appealed to their Hebrew commander before being turned over to the MPs, he told them they were under arrest “because they were suspected of not being soldiers.” They spent five or six weeks in the British jail in Egypt under extremely close surveillance but were decently treated by their jailers.55 Because there was no proof that they belonged to a terrorist organization and no other reason to suspect them, they were transferred to Jerusalem and released a few days later—procedures that followed earlier agreements between the Haganah and the British authorities. An inquiry committee was appointed by the Haganah and was headed by Aryeh Eliav, well known in the country for his decency, to look into the reasons for the imprisonment. In April 1946, having interrogated the released prisoners, the committee concluded that it was implausible that a person affiliated with the Yishuv in any way had denounced them because under such circumstances they would have been arrested before they boarded the ship. They also concluded that an informant working for the British in Port Said and known to the Haganah had, as before, access to the lists, which had apparently been sloppily prepared.56 It would therefore seem that the episode of Kovner’s imprisonment had nothing to do with the poison he was carrying, as he suspected, but

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rather was the result of the circumstances of departure and especially the discrepancy in the list of soldiers. He was also wrong in assuming that the method used to get him out of the country had been devised specifically for him, for it was actually a recognized routine. Kovner spent close to two months in jail in Egypt and Eretz Israel. The British who interrogated him never mentioned the possibility of nakam. The poison was by then at the bottom of the Mediterranean, one half of it thrown by Kovner and the other by Rosenkrantz, and the lives of those imprisoned were not in danger. Had the British authorities been informed, no matter by whom, that a man on one of their boats was carrying an amount of poison sufficient to kill millions, Kovner would have spent many long years on trial and in prison. However, because there was nothing extraordinary about the arrest of Kovner and the others, the Haganah decided to continue the illegal immigration and to send envoys out as before but to be stricter and more careful.57 In his testimonies Kovner painted a more dramatic and personal picture, not only because of his retrospective tendency to put himself in the middle of major events but also apparently because of his emotional state, which made him see everything that happened as the result of informants and plots against him and letters written behind his back. He felt alone and beset from the moment he left Italy, the commander who left his troops behind and sailed off to an unknown country. How Kovner felt can be judged by a letter he sent to Paris after his arrest and imprisonment, afraid he would be jailed for years. On a personal note, he had left the country having decided to link his fate with Kempner’s forever, and now, when he was possibly going to be imprisoned for a long time, he wrote to her to suggest that, “if you like, if you have the patience, if you have the strength, wait for A [Abba].” 58 When her letter arrived, he answered with a personal love letter and demanded an answer to the proposal he had sent her to link their futures. When Kovner was released, he sent his comrades a dozen pages of closely written text in astounding Yiddish, a strange, poetic, emotional letter, more so than the others he had managed to send. He himself later called it “shocking.”59 He expressed his sorrow for the revenge they did not take, which was supposed to be their last chance to come alive again. He described his trials and tribulations in jail, his decision to

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commit suicide by hanging himself with a noose made from his shirt as long as he was still a human being, not broken by his jail experiences, defeated and humiliated. Then he described how he overcame the decision, as he had in the convent when he realized that the Jewish people were facing extinction, or when the Second Battalion was captured, or when he returned to Vilna from the forest, and when he felt the awful emptiness in Lublin. The change in jail, from despair to hope, was motivated by the writing of his first poem, which turned his suffering into art. “Despair is a luxury, do you hear me, a luxury,” he warned his comrades. He gave a long description of his father’s life, the death of his family, his unfinished studies at the Academy of Art, of his first pure love whose white body was cast into the pit, of the youngsters he fostered who were no more, of his love for the murdered Jewish people, for everything he had had and lost. Then he turned in his letter to the miracle of the encounter with Ya’ari, whose warmth and strength showed him in jail the way to the sun and to the movement, the home at the end of the road. Kovner’s surrealistic letter can be understood as poetic license, but the expressions he used and his call to his comrades—and to himself, actually—to muster all their strength on the brink of the abyss to escape the chaos and quicksand testify to his growing emotional distress. He had passed through an extremely stormy period of history whose events shook him deeply. “He almost went mad,” wrote Michael Elkins, the American journalist, in his simplistic manner. And Grossman said, “His experience sank deep down into his personal abyss—and generated extremist reactions.”60 The idea of total revenge was born of Kovner’s profound crisis in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It was more than a crisis; it was another form of attempted suicide, like Samson’s “Let me die with the Philistines” (Judges 16:30), stemming from the feeling that the world was ending. It also stemmed from Kovner’s inability to come to terms with the loss and return to life from a sorrow that almost tore him apart and left him in a morass of emotional quicksand. That is the only way to explain the source of the terrible idea of the nakam, for until the Holocaust— and after they recovered—Kovner and all his comrades led normal lives. They were men and women whose personal qualities and dedication were described by Haganah and Jewish Brigade members with great

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admiration, even with wonder. It was a miracle for Kovner, and not only for him, that he was arrested and that the poison, lethal even in milligram doses, according to Katzir, was thrown overboard. Had he and his duffel bag arrived in Europe and had the poison been introduced into the water systems of four large German cities as planned, and several million men, women, and children had died an awful death without having been interrogated, tried, and sentenced, without any connection to the question of who among them had or had not sinned against the Jewish people, how would Kovner and his comrades and the entire Jewish people have faced the world? “To me belongeth vengeance and recompense,” said the Lord (Deuteronomy 32:35), and only to Him. Perhaps Kovner changed his mind about Plan A while he was still in Eretz Israel because of the fierce objection he encountered from the heads of the Yishuv, because of the haunting deep blue of the skies (as author Amos Oz described them), and because the constantly changing conditions in Germany would have meant harming non-Germans as well. Perhaps he took the poison and intended to convince his comrades to put only Plan B into operation. Why did he not divide the poison into more than one package after having come to an agreement with reliable individuals on board, or at least say something to one of the soldiers sailing with him, anything that could have helped him preserve the poison, and not just the one sentence he managed to get out before he was taken to the police launch (“Had I known,” said Rosen­krantz in retrospect, “perhaps I would have risked it”).61 Why did Kovner throw half of the poison overboard even before he was arrested? In the summary Kovner wrote and deposited in an archive, he told his comrades that he had lied “with a clear conscience” to the leaders of the Yishuv with whom he had reached an agreement about Plan B, and, speaking in the present tense, meaning he was still certain, when writing in the 1980s, that “not for a minute do I have any doubts about the rightness and necessity of Plan A.” Kovner could permit himself to tell them that decades later because the poison had been lost and the plan aborted, and his comrades could permit themselves to say they were sorry about not having killed more of the SS officers in the detention camps. Without a doubt they, or some of them, still wished all Germans dead, but today the issue cannot be resolved. The avengers

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never betrayed or abandoned the nakam, but conditions were against them, and they can continue to be faithful to it. They were silent for decades and only during the 1980s did they hold a well-attended—but closed—meeting to refute newspaper articles and to clarify the questions and arguments among themselves, holding another meeting after Kovner’s death.62 Today pressure is being put on them to tell the story, and they consult each other before interviews, worried that the special glue that binds them together might be misunderstood. Despite their efforts, books and TV series have been produced, mostly outside Israel and mostly journalistic in nature, not based on the relevant Hebrew or Yiddish primary sources.63 Of the entire Jewish people in whose breasts the desire for revenge burned fiercely, only a few actually killed anyone. There were about fifty in the Jewish Brigade, fifty more in Kovner’s group, other small groups in eastern Europe, and a few individuals. Assuming that it is impossible to count the members of the Mossad who continued these activities after the establishment of the state of Israel or those who were active behind the iron curtain and were never documented by the West, or the individuals and groups that were never uncovered, there were, apparently, between 200 and 250 men and women for whom the idea of revenge was more than a matter of emotion and theory. Most of them harbored complaints against the Yishuv and the state of Israel because of missed opportunities, and they considered it a matter that formal Jewish and Israeli institutes should have dealt with. The unresolved distinction between metaphysical idea, as Kovner called it, and practical act was made by Kovner and Kempner during the 1980s: “Neither my comrades nor I ever preached hatred of the German people but rather its responsibility, and we never wanted to harm women and children. . . . I never stressed revenge, either in thought or action, but rather the duty to bring [the Germans] to justice. I realized, basically, that we would never get a fair trial from the world and that no normative court would do anything to show the nations of the world that Jewish blood could not be shed without reprisal. That was the obligation of those of the Jewish people who remained alive.” And Kempner: “The most important thing about the nakam was the idea. Like the uprisings in the ghetto. The effect was supposed to be symbolic.”64 Yet

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on another occasion Kovner admitted that “hatred was burning inside me which the years dulled somewhat, but is still there to this day, more abstract, for Germany and the Germans. . . . As far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as an innocent German. . . . The German people must, for at least one generation, pay for it, to deter the world in the future. . . . When I heard there was an atomic bomb I dreamed that if I could drop it on Germany, I would. . . . What I wanted to tell the world with the nakam was that those who survived Auschwitz could destroy the world. Let them know that! That if it ever happens again, the world will be destroyed.”65 The story of the groups of avengers in Europe, trying to operate according to their original ideas while Kovner was in prison, is still to be told. In June and July 1946, about thirty would-be avengers arrived in Eretz Israel and were received in Kovner’s kibbutz, Ein Hahoresh, with warmth, excitement, and apprehension. They were given the best care the kibbutz could afford in those austere times. Ya’ari, as Kovner had envisioned in jail, behaved like a father, caring and reproachful at the same time. However, their primary goal was to recover and return to Europe to continue the nakam, as promised by Kovner. They continued to argue among themselves and did not manage to found their own kibbutz, not even for the time being, because they had no clear collective political affiliation and because of the contradictions between everyday life and the future nakam. Gradually most of them left Ein Hahoresh. One group, led by Bolek Ben-Ya’akov, returned to Europe to continue where they had left off. Once again, a group that followed an idea fostered by Kovner had clung more tenaciously to it than had Kovner himself, who changed his mind when he realized that changing conditions dictated a different approach. In an ironic poem titled Healthy Recovery, Kovner describes the wonder felt by kibbutz members at the Holocaust survivors’ rapid recovery, as it were, which was in reality a kind of mask they wore over their suffering: When he and his friends returned from the hunger they gained weight

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effortlessly. Sometimes the color of the milk put before them in such plenty in the dining room turned red . . . and how quickly they recovered from the terror and the memory in conversations about friends who were lost one by one before their eyes and their eyes did not fill with tears . . . even for him everything returned to normal except for the tranquility that was beyond sleep Sloan Kettering, p. 88

Sleep, and tranquility beyond sleep, indeed did not return to normal. When Kempner and Kovner had guests, they let them have their beds and went to stay with their neighbors, the Orchans. “It was hard to sleep with him around,” said Esther Orchan, “because he would cry out [in his sleep] and groan and say things in Yiddish. They had guests quite often but we never said anything.” Guests who visited them in the 1960s and 1970s, when they had been given a house, continued listening to his cries at night, and only in the 1980s did the pauses between his cries become longer. In public Kovner referred to the situation openly: “For thirty years I had a recurring nightmare, the same one every night. My feet were running through dark alleys, from one to another with no exit, the faces of the people chasing me were invisible and I could only hear them yelling, ‘Raus, raus,’ and they were almost on top of me. . . . Then I would wake up, dripping with sweat and terrified.”66 The speech was given in 1980. For thirty years Kovner had been living on his kibbutz in his country, building, creating, and receiving awards, while those who had no faces—and who had never been punished—were still chasing him.

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Th i rt e e n   Information Officer of the

Givati Brigade During the War of Independence “Everything depends on your courage in battle, face-to-face” December 1947–December 1949

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Uri Avneri, one of the Samson’s Foxes unit of the Givati Brigade during the War of Independence, described the preparations made in May 1948, before “the first night on which a large Hebrew force was about to face the columns of Egyptian soldiers planning to attack Tel Aviv. Suddenly a voice was heard. . . . No one could see the speaker. The soldiers stopped what they were doing and listened. ‘You are about to be engaged in a terrible battle, hard and cruel. . . . The fate of Tel Aviv, of the whole country, is in your hands. . . . We have prepared for every possible contingency. Now everything depends on your courage when you storm the enemy face to face. We will meet tomorrow, my friends, in conquered Ishdud [Ashdod]!’ Afterwards, the soldiers went into battle not as soulless fighting machines but as men, each with his own spirit, proud and understanding. The anonymous voice in the dark made each of them feel he was individually, personally responsible for the fate of the Brigade,” of Tel Aviv, and of Eretz Israel.1 “One day in December 1947, a few days after Shimon [Avidan] was appointed the commander [of Givati] he said he needed me. I joined,”2 said Kovner of his immediate response to Avidan’s request that he join the Givati Brigade, which was then being formed. By that time Kovner’s post-Holocaust crisis was slightly less acute, the core of the avengers had disbanded, and the routines of daily life had taken over. Kovner worked in the Ein Hahoresh vineyard and tried his hand at writing his first poem about life in Eretz Israel, choosing the grape harvest as his theme. Kempner was pregnant with their first child, Michael.3 Avidan told Kovner that with his past history he could make a great contribu-

War of Independence

tion to raising morale and combat levels. Kovner had hoped he would be given a commanding role as a fighter, but he could not refuse Avidan, who had been a source of strength during his first difficult months in Eretz Israel in 1945. They had agreed on many issues, particularly on the need for a strong, humane Jewish military force. Until Kovner’s death they were in close contact, mostly because of personal affinity rather than politics.4 Kovner came to the Givati Brigade (named after the Haganah nom de guerre of its commander, Avidan) just after the stormy days of midMay 1948. The British Mandate had just come to an end, the establishment of the state of Israel was declared, and the armies of seven Arab countries immediately invaded. Appointed to the Givati Brigade as information officer on May 22, Kovner was promoted to the rank of captain in December and had to wear its insignia, an order that almost no officer obeyed at the time, because of the feeling of common effort.5 In its heyday the Givati Brigade was the largest brigade in the IDF, with 9,500 soldiers, 20% of whom were women.6 The area under the brigade’s jurisdiction grew, and responsibility for twenty-seven communities from Tel Aviv to the south was laid squarely on its shoulders. Before the state and the IDF had been established, both the Givati Brigade and the settlements relied on one another for equipment, supplies, and guard duty and for digging trenches around posts. Fathers dug by night so that their sons could rest before the next day’s battle, and during the actual fighting each regiment was responsible for an area and the settlements within it, sending troops to fight with the members or attacking Egyptians who were shelling their locations. Kovner was entranced by the troops, who for him were a metaphor for the ingathering of the exiles of the Diaspora, and by the spirit of self-organization based on volunteers and on a close relationship between the fighters and the local communities. The informal atmosphere impressed Kovner, as it did Avidan, who was more a leader and mentor than a commander, a man whose honesty and reserved, humane behavior won him the admiration of his subordinates.7 Kovner and the Givati Brigade were tailor-made for each other. Kovner’s Vilna ideas about Jews joining forces and cooperating, regardless of origin, language, or political opinions, were transformed into “the fighting collective,” a term he coined in the forest.

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After the painful nakam affair, the Givati Brigade was a refreshing experience. Kovner dissociated himself from everything else and devoted himself to his new task. Once again he had a public he could foster and write to, like the youth whose mentor he had been in Vilna, like the underground in the ghetto and the regiment in the forest, and later, like Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh. Kovner arrived at the Givati Brigade’s most difficult hour, after a series of defeats and many casualties, sometimes dozens of men killed and wounded in a single battle, a heavy blow for a state that numbered 600,000 citizens. Since the Egyptian invasion of May 15, all Givati regiments had been moved south; their mission was to stop the Egyptian forces advancing toward Tel Aviv. Close to 700 Givati fighters, both men and women, were killed, most of them immediately following the invasion, and about 2,000 were wounded. By June, in the wake of heavy losses, lost battles, and evacuated communities, the road to Tel Aviv lay open to the invading Egyptians. The brigade’s morale and confidence had been undermined, as had its ability to defend the twentyseven communities under its command, now including Tel Aviv. The fate of the entire campaign was in doubt. The first cease-fire, which began on June 11 and lasted for four weeks, was a breathing space for the exhausted brigade and gave it an opportunity to reorganize and re-equip itself. The Egyptians renewed their attacks before the cease-fire had formally ended and conquered a series of Israeli posts, but eventually the posts changed hands. In a three-day battle in the northern Negev sixty fighters were killed and a hundred wounded, but in retrospect it was the turning point, after which the Givati Brigade won most of its battles.8 On July 16 a second, unlimited cease-fire began, to last until an arrangement could be worked out. At the beginning of October a new series of battles began with a one-time unequivocal order: Win at any cost. Again there were terrible losses (a third of the soldiers in one regiment were killed), but Israeli superiority was clearly established. The Egyptian forces had been rent asunder, and there was great rejoicing in the Givati Brigade. “Abba Kovner even nicknamed us ‘The Cleavers,’” said one proud soldier, and Kovner dubbed a jeep unit “Samson’s Foxes,” a name that made the unit famous. By that time it was a mark

War of Independence

of honor to have a Kovner nickname.9 The Givati Brigade continued victorious in more regions, and fighting ended on the southern front in January 1949, when the Egyptians agreed to begin negotiations. Kovner worked day and night to raise morale and foster relations between command and soldiers. “Through Abba Kovner, the commander made each soldier feel that the fate of the entire Brigade rested on his shoulders,” wrote Givati veterans in retrospect.10 Avidan gave Kovner his full support and the modest means to realize his ideas. Kovner initiated the establishment of a troupe of entertainers headed by Yaffa Yarkoni, and their performances and her songs, expressing the soldiers’ emotions, became prebattle ceremonies. “The soldiers listened to Kovner and wept, listened to Yaffa and wept. It was like a prayer, a catharsis. We always knew many of them would shortly be killed.”11 Other brigades began asking that the troupe come to them for an evening. Besides the singers there was an orchestra conducted by violinist Shimon Mishori, who distributed lyrics to the audience. Other performers came to the Givati Brigade—including Leonard Bernstein, who was deeply moved— and Kovner made sure that during lulls in the fighting and when on leave, the soldiers attended theater and concert performances, seminars, and even trips, insofar as conditions permitted. He invested tremendous effort in inducting new immigrant soldiers, in teaching Hebrew at the command posts, translating the orders of the day into Yiddish by himself and having them translated into French, Hungarian, Czech, and English, and in having translators explain their contents. The success of his Yiddish translations made the IDF General Headquarters agree to buy books and daily newspapers in various languages for the new immigrants, especially for the thousands of Yiddish readers.12 Kovner found families to adopt the new immigrant soldiers, especially in the settlements, who would take them in when they were on leave. An expartisan unit in the Givati Brigade was kept intact, because it formed a kind of family for those who had lost their own. Kovner did his best to ensure that the immigrants were respected and treated as comrades, a task made easier by the fact that many of the senior officers and veterans had themselves been new immigrants in the not too distant past. During the second cease-fire, which began in the middle of July, about two months after Kovner had arrived on the scene, Kovner had

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another idea, which initially raised eyebrows: a parade with a military band, flags, and a display of captured weapons. It all seemed bombastic—some termed it Bolshevik and others Fascist—and in any case it was out of joint with the times, especially because so much blood had recently been spilled. Nevertheless, the parade, apparently the first of its kind in the country, took place on September 14 in Rehovot. BenGurion and the IDF commanders stood on a modest platform, and Kovner, megaphone in hand, proudly presented the various units. The Givati Brigade, which included regiments of men and women from Rehovot and the neighboring communities, marched along with jeeps, half-tracks, and men on horseback, and the crowd, many of whom were relatives, applauded wildly. Captured weapons decorated with the names of the fallen passed by, and for the moment the sense of togeth-

Kovner with David Ben-Gurion at the Givati Brigade parade in Rehovot, September 1948. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Kovner family.

War of Independence

erness and exaltation made everyone forget the hard times. The event was broadcast on the radio, and in the name of the Jewish people in Eretz Israel and in the Diaspora, Ben-Gurion sent his wishes for victory, for peace with the neighboring countries, and—as he always did— for building the Negev. After the parade the Givati Brigade gathered to hear the order of the day, written by Kovner, which ended with the words, “We swore by our fallen comrades that we have but one path and one goal: death to the invaders!”13 Kovner also accompanied the swearing-in ceremonies with a speech. In the newsletter of Givati’s 51st regiment the ceremonies were described as “a great event we will never forget, because we are now a nation like any other.”14 In the middle of May, one of the Givati Brigade’s best units, mostly Canadian volunteers, lost twenty men in the battle for Latrun, on the way to Jerusalem. Kovner hurried to meet the soldiers—carrying the bodies of the fallen and on the brink of exhaustion—and somehow managed to sweep them into singing an emotional rendition of one of the war’s spirit-raising hymns: “Believe Me, the Day Will Come.”15 On the eve of battles Kovner often went with the units to their departure points and stayed with them until the last minute, explaining how each individual battle was important to the war in general and trying to ease their anxiety. On the eve of the battle for Ashdod, when Egyptian tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery were about to pound their way north, Kovner explained the tanks’ limitations and described how, during World War II, the partisans had overcome them using simple weapons, making them seem less daunting.16 “I remember him,” said Uri Avneri forty-five years later, “standing on a crate in an open field at sunset, a small, very thin man wearing an enormous helmet, giving a ‘Soviet’ speech along the lines of Panfilov’s Men, the book about the Red Army’s heroism we had all read.” Ashdod fell only two months later, after much bitter fighting and bloodshed, but “the soldiers came back and went out the next night, and the third, and the tenth, and the hundredth. The force propelling them was . . . internal. It was the same force to which the voice appealed . . . because no one could speak as [Kovner] could.”17 Panfilov’s Men, a series of novels by Aleksander Bek about the defense of Moscow in 1941, was translated into Hebrew in

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1946; the books immediately won enormous popularity and were considered an exemplary work of literary and military art. Not every prebattle evening lent itself to a speech. Kovner therefore developed the “battle pages,” which became his most important information tool. They were written at night after Kovner returned to headquarters and were printed and distributed to the soldiers at dawn. Kovner wrote at night because circumstances necessitated it and because his cries would disturb those with whom he shared a room. The pages were considered official because they all came from headquarters and bore its heading. They were never carefully censored, because Avidan was clearly in agreement with Kovner and because they were written at night and had to be distributed quickly to widely separated units. On occasion Kovner would read them to members of headquarters and regiment commanders for their reactions. Usually they agreed with what he had written, and the pages were distributed as written.18 The pages included information about the war in other parts of the country and especially about Givati Brigade units, replacing radio and newspapers, which were almost impossible to obtain. They reported the battles, the achievements and the failures, the names of the settlements and posts in the area, the course of the fighting, and the weapons and prisoners captured—all to the distress of the field security commanders, who repeatedly warned Kovner about field security. The pages mentioned the names of the forces that carried out each mission, thus assuring the men that their efforts were receiving the attention they deserved at headquarters. Units and individuals praised in a page would pass it around. During the War of Independence soldiers were not decorated for valor, and the pages provided them with the commendations they deserved. The pages also preserved the names of the fallen, because Kovner renewed the ghetto and forest practice of naming every captured vehicle after a fallen soldier, which made a great impression, and not only on Givati fighters. The units were also named for the battles they won. Kovner called the name giving “milestones in the battle tradition.” The Givati Brigade was spread over a large area, and “Abba’s words were what connected foxhole to trench, to unit, to regiment, to battalion, to the Brigade, to the front, to the whole. . . . It was the only written word which came and announced, ‘We have a fighting collective!’” 19

War of Independence

Kovner wrote no less than thirty-one battle pages: the first on June 9, 1948, and the last on May 8, 1949. They followed the battles closely, written daily during hard combat and not appearing during cease-fires. Written in Hebrew, at least thirteen were translated into Yiddish by Kovner, and others were translated into other languages. Including translations, about 7,000 copies of each page were printed, none of them longer than a single page, hence their name. The pages were headed “Geva [Givati] Combat Headquarters,” with “Death to the invaders!” “Battle Page,” the date, and the page’s specific title following.20 The battle pages were dramatic and rhetorical. They exhorted and encouraged the soldiers to victory in battle, promised that devotion, patience, courage, and brotherhood in battle would, in the end, bear fruit, praised the commanders and fostered trust in their judgment despite the first defeats, and reminded them that the key to victory was not the official estimate of the relative strengths of the forces but rather the strength of the spirit of the individual fighter. The influence of the Bible and the poetry of both Haim Nahman Bialik and Nathan Alterman can be felt in the pages, as can the influence of Kovner’s World War II experiences. Kovner’s powerful descriptions are interlaced with expressions and images turning the Egyptians of 1948 into the biblical Egyptians whom Moses was forced to punish. Kovner also used the figure of King David, whose war against Goliath was the symbol of the victory of the weak over the strong, and the figure of Samson, because the Egyptians were the Philistines of the War of Independence and had to be fought to the bitter end. It therefore followed that the soldiers of the Givati Brigade were the descendants of David and Samson, which was why its jeep unit was called Samson’s Foxes. Kovner’s use of the Bible and World War II put the Givati Brigade into the perspective of Jewish history and created a continuum of greatness and heroism; they were part of a war between good and evil, a war in which both God and historical justice participated. The battle pages included, in the name of the 6 million, a frequent call for vengeance, although it was clear that the Egyptians of 1948 had had no hand in the Holocaust. The references to revenge raise the question of whether Kovner was still looking for the nakam, which had never been carried out in Germany, and whether he was still living

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through World War II despite the fact that the time, place, and atmosphere were completely different. Still, it is an oversimplification to say that World War II directly influenced Kovner, who from his youth was unwilling to accept anything before he examined it in his own way. The style and content of the battle pages were dictated by the worry and anxiety, ever present and gnawing at his entrails, about the continued existence of the post-Holocaust remnant of the Jewish people. Only two years had passed since Kovner’s release from the British prison in Jerusalem and the beginning of his life in Eretz Israel. The anxiety increased when the Egyptians invaded, and it became acute when he saw the string of southern settlements fall, and it was that anxiety that his writings sprang from. Kovner used every tool he possessed, the most cruel and not necessarily the most just, in full understanding of what he was doing: stopping a catastrophe he could under no circumstances countenance again, a catastrophe that would, in his opinion, bring about the complete end of the Jewish people.21 The combination of World War II and Kovner’s anxiety is well manifested by Kovner’s frequent references to Kibbutz Negba, calling it Negbagrad (July 13, 1948), hailing it as a symbol of stubborn attachment to one’s land, and likening the Egyptians to the Germans. The battle pages were warmly praised at the time, especially by members of the Givati Brigade. Avidan, speaking at the convention marking the fifteenth anniversary of the brigade’s founding, said that “a stranger could not understand their language . . . but [Kovner] captured our feelings exactly. For us the pages were like ammunition . . . [and] they encouraged us to make a superhuman effort.” They educated the soldiers in the principles of solidarity and in the use of weapons exclusively for self-defense.22 Officers and ordinary soldiers spoke and still speak and write in the same spirit, describing how soldiers waited for the pages “with the same impatience they waited for bullets and mortar shells. They were passed from hand to hand, read during bombardments and the fatal moments when we rushed the enemy, read until the soldiers knew them by heart. It was as if the man with the sad eyes had become the repository of the spirit of the entire Brigade, listening to its heartbeat and expressing its inexpressible feelings with the most wonderful, invigorating, reverberating words, which led to each soldier’s

War of Independence

making the only possible decision: the enemy shall not pass.”23 As soon as the pages appeared, copies were requested by the National Library, the IDF Archives, the IDF Headquarters magazine, and soldiers fighting on other fronts. Before the resumption of the fighting after the second cease-fire, the IDF Headquarters Cultural Department concluded its generally reserved, matter-of-fact analysis of the situation with the words “Death to the invaders!” as if it were already a matter of course.24 Yuval Ne’eman, the well-known physicist, who then shared a room with Kovner, said that Kovner made the whole country realize that the invading Arab armies had as their goal the unequivocal destruction of the state of Israel, and therefore there was no question of surrender and death to the invader was the only option.25 However, the battle pages caused many arguments, some of which have continued into the present, because of both Kovner’s personality and the pages’ contents. Kovner aroused mixed feelings, especially immediately after he arrived in the Givati Brigade. There was a great deal of reservation regarding his rhetorical style, reservations mixed with no small measure of sneers but also of forgiveness, especially from the Sabras. Afterward, but also at the time, there was respect for the special individual, somewhat eccentric, the poet with his unique history, and brigade members felt affection for his stories and his mane of hair and his too large helmet, and the way he could sweep them away with his words.26 Reservations and doubts had been especially voiced outside the Givati Brigade, ever since the first time a battle page appeared headed with the slogan “Death to the invaders.” Criticism centered around the harsh, inhumane terms Kovner used to depict the Egyptians, calling them vipers or packs of Nile dogs with dull stupid eyes, whose blood would fill the dry wadi, and whose bodies would serve as food for scavengers (July 12, 16, 17, 1948).27 Such expressions, if seriously considered, could result in literal “death to the invaders,” even the wounded and the captives, God forbid, said the critics. The most vehement opposition came from the Palmach, whose members, mostly Sabras, insisted that “such a culture is foreign to us, and so far we have managed to retain our own ideologies and values.” The Palmach educated their fighters to respect the enemy and to maintain what was then called “battle morality” (literally “the purity of one’s weapon”),

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which meant using weapons only when there was no other choice.28 A month later, in August 1948, Kovner got a strongly worded letter, this time from Meir Ya’ari, who reprimanded him for having spread “Fascist horror propaganda” laced with expressions that had become, unfortunately, popular in the language and, of course, for not having consulted him and the movement. Finally, Kovner had to face the music at a meeting attended by a long line of the country’s leaders, all of whom urged him to stop writing the pages because even a war of survival did not justify fostering hatred toward neighbors with whom they hoped to live in peace once the war was over. Moshe Dayan and Ben-Gurion, who were not present, were of the same opinion.29 Kovner, deeply insulted and feeling his point had been totally missed, did not accept party or any other authority and announced that he would stop writing the pages only if Avidan told him to. But Avidan, who supported Kovner and who was also hurt by the criticism, did not.30 It was Meir Davidson, Avidan’s second-in-command, who interpreted Kovner’s intentions in four comments made in the 1980s, proof that he and his comrades had been rethinking the issues during the intervening years. First, Davidson said that during the war, when the pages raised doubts, he asked the soldiers themselves, his brother Yitzhak among them, how they felt about them. His conclusion was that the soldiers viewed the pages as “Kovnerian expressions” stemming from Kovner’s days in the ghetto and with the Soviet partisans and that they should not be taken too literally. The soldiers liked the way they sounded and justified them by saying Kovner was a survivor who had already seen what evil really was. The Givati Brigade commanders, added Davidson, had the stature to create an atmosphere in which the soldiers could exploit the pages’ positive aspects.31 Second, Davidson quoted Avidan, who had said, “Don’t take the pages literally. You won’t understand them because you weren’t part of that terrible war in the south, when we stood alone, forgotten by those who directed the other fronts, carrying the entire country on our shoulders.”32 Third, Davidson noted that soldiers who came from other countries received a page saying that Israel was their homeland and they were all its citizens. That made the acclimatization easier and bolstered their desire to defend it. The Palmach had its own minimalist, restrained battle pages and a clear

War of Independence

ideology and was socially homogeneous, but the Givati Brigade began as an odd assortment, and the pages gave its members an ideology of their own, telling them to stand firm and defend their country.33 Fourth and perhaps most important was Davidson’s response to those who found the pages suspect; no one in the Givati Brigade actually thought Kovner was advocating inhuman treatment of the enemy, and in any case his words were never translated into that kind of action. “Givati never preached hatred of the enemy. Quite the opposite, they taught us that the force motivating our Brigade was love—love for the country and for one’s fellow man. Hatred was never one of our slogans,” wrote Uri Avneri. Tsvi Tsur, who later became chief of staff, noted that the leading group—that is, Avidan, Davidson, and Kovner—made it clear to the soldiers that they were to treat the Egyptian villagers and prisoners with respect and to bury their dead properly, as the enemy buried Jewish dead.34 Indeed, at no time did Kovner advocate physical attack except in battle, waged fiercely and with no holds barred, using teeth and pitchforks if necessary (July 19 and 20, 1948), but no one was to be harmed after the battle was over. “Take as many prisoners as possible, strike those who are armed and do not harm those who have surrendered. Gather up those who come in peace” (July 9, 1948), he wrote, following both the words of the Kazakh officer in Panfilov’s Men and the biblical distinction between fighting to the bitter end and preserving values once the battle was over. The problem of how to deal with the Arabs who lived in the country, and not just with the Egyptian invaders, appeared on the Givati agenda every day. Expulsion, looting, the destruction of villages, and the flight of villagers were discussed again and again. No Arabs remained in the territory under Givati control. They fled, and the brigade felt that that was the way it should be: no killing, no abuse, no systematic destruction of the villages. However, the areas populated by Jewish settlements had to be contiguous, and they would have to deal with scenes of the elderly left behind and permit the villagers to leave and sometimes even make them leave, because this was a war for the existence of the state of Israel and of all Jews. Kovner was not opposed to and did not preach against such a policy. He too felt that “they had their backs to the wall and that the water was up to their noses,” in the words of Davidson.

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The war hardened people and old hatreds were reawakened, both because of losses suffered and in reaction to some of the enemy’s actions, and certainly in the knowledge that, again in Davidson’s words, “Hannibal was at the gates of Tel Aviv. My Tel Aviv.”35 Therefore, without touching on his failure to understand that Kovner needed a particularly long umbilical cord if he were to remain attached to the movement, Ya’ari was right. The War of Independence only helped to distance Kovner from official Hashomer Hatzair leftist ideology. At the center of his worldview stood his unequivocal fear and unshakable concern for the continued existence of the Jewish people and the need to defend it. To his general fear, born during the Holocaust, was added the information, in 1948, that only a hair’s breadth separated victory from defeat during the War of Independence and that at the end of May and the beginning of June the state of Israel was very close to being a brief historical episode. Kovner did not speak about the Holocaust with his comrades in the Givati Brigade, and the topic never came up in conversation. It was Yitzhak Pundak, commander of the 53rd Company, who described how the noncombatants at headquarters waited eagerly for every scrap of news from the battles and how Kovner became so anxious and fearful they had to send him out of the room when bad news came. The absolute priority of the existence and security of the Jewish people became both Kovner’s political opinion and his own overwhelming personal feeling.36 The controversy concerning Kovner’s battle pages notwithstanding, no page generated a more bitter public controversy (which rages to this day) than the first battle page, dated June 9, 1948, titled “A Failure.” Written against the complex background of World War II, the Holocaust, and Kovner’s all-encompassing angst, this page became one of the central symbols of the war. It strongly condemned the fall and surrender of Kibbutz Nitzanim. The events of the War of Independence and the ideologies prevalent at the time were the medium in which the page was cultured: In the middle of October 1947, on the eve of the United Nations’ decision to partition Palestine, the Haganah sent out orders regarding the predictable attacks of the local Arabs. One order was that no Jewish settlement or any area held by Jews was to be evacuated even

War of Independence

if it meant fighting to the last man. The four words, “to the last man,” were underlined. Noncombatants (women, children, the aged, and infirm) would be evacuated only after authorization had been received. The History of the War of Independence notes that “headquarters was firm in its decision that no settlement be abandoned,” regardless of the difficulty of defending it. That was the ironclad rule on which the fighting was based, because the outlying settlements were viewed as fortresses defending the entire Yishuv.37 However, on May 14, 1948, after the fall of four kibbutzim south of Jerusalem and the Jewish quarter in the Old City, the chief of staff issued an order revoking the Haganah command and permitting commanders to evacuate settlements if necessitated by developments in the field. After the new order was issued, twenty-one settlements were evacuated or abandoned in various ways between the middle of May and the beginning of June.38 Nitzanim was one of the settlements that were expected to hold out and could not. The reasons for its fall were not significantly different from the reasons that led to the fall of other places in the surrounding area: They held topographically inferior positions, were insufficiently armed, were located on the Egyptian route to Tel Aviv, and were cut off from the Givati fighters by Egyptian units; in addition, a company of new recruits was sent to help them, not experienced Givati fighters. There is not one single piece of evidence indicating that the men and women of Nitzanim did not fight bravely or sacrifice themselves until they saw that they had no choice but to capitulate. Why, then, did Kovner label Nitzanim “a failure”? The members of Kibbutz Nitzanim claimed that the Givati Brigade itself was responsible and that to avoid taking the blame, its commanders simply passed the buck. They said that the brigade did not give them arms because of politics: Nitzanim had been founded by members of the Hano’ar Hazioni movement, and Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim, such as Negba, Gat, and Gal’on, were better armed (the Givati triumvirate, Avidan, Davidson, and Kovner all belonged to Hashomer Hatzair). They had been sent new recruits, they claimed. At critical moments radio communications were cut off, and no one bothered to bombard the Egyptians who were attacking them. Nearby Yad Mordechai—a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz—which was evacuated only a few

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days later, was turned into a symbol of the courage and never-say-die fighting spirit of the Jewish settlement. The feeling at Nitzanim was that they had been deserted both during and after the war. The Givati command was deeply offended and rejected their accusations out of hand as false, saying the claim that the distribution of weapons had been politically motivated was an extraordinarily serious charge by any standard, an “abominable libel.” The command was of the opinion that Hano’ar Hazioni, to which Kibbutz Nitzanim belonged, should have sold their cows—Negba sold five of them—and bought arms instead and should have fortified the kibbutz in accordance with the accepted policy at the time, encouraging a spirit of unity and sacrifice; neither, they said, had been done. The command also felt that there was not much the Givati commanders could have done in any case, because the kibbutz was so far removed. Pundak, under whose command Nitzanim fell, later admitted that every kibbutz had both weapons given by the army and those they had acquired themselves. “I did not exercise the authority required to provide Nitzanim [with weapons] as I should have,” he said.39 Nevertheless, both Avidan and Davidson, setting aside mutual accusations, although only in the 1980s, admitted that the battle page was extremely unjust and did a great disservice to the members of Kibbutz Nitzanim and that it was written not because of how they had fought but rather because of contemporary events in the country in general and in the Givati Brigade in particular. As noted, the weeks after the Egyptian invasion were extremely difficult; defeats came thick and fast, at a rate of almost five a week, and fear for the fate of the state grew from minute to minute. In the meantime, the well-equipped Egyptians kept advancing, and when they were stopped, they attacked Nitzanim, which was at their rear, on the night of June 6, 1948. It had been hoped that both Nitzanim and Hill 69, which were on opposite sides of the road, would delay the Egyptian advance and hold out for twenty-four critical hours. However, the following day the Egyptians attacked Nitzanim with tanks, mortars, and planes, and in the afternoon, after thirty-three fighters had been killed, the rest surrendered. There were more losses after the surrender, and 104 kibbutz members and Givati soldiers, including seven women fighters, were taken prisoner and led in a march

War of Independence

to mark the victory by the Egyptians at Majdal. Barely three days later, on June 10, Kibbutz Gezer and Hill 69 fell, with heavy losses.40 Kovner wrote the battle page during the night of June 8 before the fall of Gezer and Hill 69 and before the full information about the events at Nitzanim had reached Givati headquarters. Four of the fighters who had infiltrated north from an isolated position in Nitzanim reached the Givati Brigade and did not know that a fierce battle was raging elsewhere on the kibbutz. Their reports gave the false impression that ­Nitzanim had fallen before a last-ditch effort had been made. “We were led astray by the four surviving fighters,” Kovner later admitted to one of Nitzanim’s second generation. The length of the battle and the number of casualties, or the number of prisoners, were not known, as explicitly stated in the page.41 The battle page had been written hurriedly, not as a result of detailed information or because of the desire to denounce the kibbutz, but rather as the outcome of the brigade commanders’ anxiety, the fear that the southern front was crumbling and that the road to Tel Aviv was no longer defended. After Nitzanim and Gezer fell, the residents of more settlements began packing. “What could we do?” Avidan asked Ben-Gurion. “We sent them to fight tanks with rifles.”42 The atmosphere was such that Avidan decided to explain clearly to both the inhabitants of the south and the Givati Brigade what price would be paid for defending their homes. He felt an ideology of intransigence had to be created and asked Kovner to write forcefully; the brigade’s internal commanding staff was in complete agreement, including the regiment commanders, and they read and authorized the page. “We encouraged him to write it,” said Eliyahu Eshel, the brigade’s administration officer. No one said it was too extreme; no one said Nitzanim was being unfairly treated, not even Pundak, dozens of whose soldiers were stationed there, including the commander. The only disagreement at headquarters was over the title, whether it should be “A Failure” or “Treason.”43 As soon as the members of Kibbutz Nitzanim and the Givati fighters who had been taken prisoner returned, they appealed to the chief of staff, General Ya’akov Dori, to take Avidan, Pundak, and Kovner to task and explain why they had to be vilified (so they felt) to whitewash the mistakes made by the Givati Brigade.44 A committee was appointed,

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and it studied the situation for three weeks. In his testimony Kovner attempted to clarify the atmosphere in which the battle page had been written, particularly emphasizing that it had not been intended for the members of Nitzanim as such, who were either dead or had been taken prisoner, and that no one knew if and when they would return. At that time they had no knowledge of how the Egyptians treated prisoners, and the experience of World War II showed that being taken prisoner was virtually a death sentence. Rather, the battle page had been written for the fighters and settlements that still had to repel the Egyptians. In April 1949 the committee returned its recommendations: Those who had fought to defend Nitzanim, kibbutz members and Givati fighters, would be considered rehabilitated, having fought in isolation against all odds, and their absolution would be made known to the general public. In addition, attempts to accuse the brigade command of discriminating against Nitzanim for nonmilitary reasons would be strongly censured. In the committee’s opinion, the battle page was called for by the needs of the time and was a weapon against defeatism, surrender, and the psychological blow dealt to the entire south by the fall of Nitzanim.45 Thus Kovner was involved in creating two of the most significant yet diametrically opposed symbols of the war, and as is the nature of symbols, they did not necessarily represent the course of events but rather society’s need for them at the time: the resistance of Negba and the fall of Nitzanim—bravery and persistence as opposed to early desertion and captivity. The committee did not succeed in changing ­Nitzanim’s image, which took root, regardless. All the settlements that had been abandoned could not be censured, and Nitzanim became the symbol of desertion, which deserved censure, in principle, with no relation to the nature of the fighting, a kind of truth that no longer had to be examined. On the fortieth anniversary of Nitzanim’s founding, its many sons and daughters who had grown tired of hearing, especially during their military service, about the disgraceful behavior of their parents and grandparents, reopened the debate, thirty-five years after the event, both within the kibbutz and in the media. Avidan was invited to clear the air. In the meantime, dozens of letters were written to the editors of various newspapers, and there were articles and two TV programs as well.46

War of Independence

Avidan met with the members of Kibbutz Nitzanim, and the discussion was long and stormy, with the members interrupting and shouting their objections. Moshe Melamed, one of those taken prisoner, said an Egyptian officer had asked him why they had even bothered to stay in a place that had been steadily bombarded for ten days and was utterly destroyed, yet when they returned they were branded traitors. “I said we should go visit Abba Kovner and beat him to a pulp, and it’s a pity we never did. If we had, it wouldn’t have taken 35 years for the truth to come out.” Avidan, who apparently had no idea that such strong emotions had festered in silence for so long, said that in any case he would have published the same page again because circumstances had demanded it, but he would have changed the title to “A Failure for Givati.” He asked the kibbutz for forgiveness for having published the battle page with its original title, “A Failure,” and for the pain it caused them.47 Even if Avidan and the rest of headquarters had asked and even encouraged Kovner to write the page, it was Kovner, not they, who had written it, and a meeting with him as well was negotiated. Despite the fact that both sides were interested, neither could overcome the past and be the first to extend a hand. In retrospect, it was Kovner who had to take the initiative and show generosity and goodwill for reconciliation. He could have then publicly explained the historical background and made an enormous contribution to the younger generations’ understanding of their parents and grandparents. No one knew as well as he that Hano’ar Hatzioni, a flourishing youth movement before World War II, had emerged from the Holocaust suffering from shell shock, without surviving heroes like other movements had, such as Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, and Kovner and Chaika Grossman. Moreover, Hano’ar Hazioni belonged to the General Zionists, a center party, which was denied the status that a socialist country like Israel during the 1950s granted leftist parties.48 No one knew as well as Kovner what it meant to stand alone, isolated and besieged, as Kibbutz Nitzanim had stood, facing tanks with hand guns, young people torn between the desire to live and the oaths they had taken. Kovner certainly knew, after the Wittenberg affair, what it meant to lose a commander who went to bargain with the enemy when there was no one to take his place, as happened at Nitzanim. Perhaps Nitzanim was a

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necessary symbol for posterity as well, a symbol of the condemnation of desertion, and perhaps even Kovner wanted to keep it as such on the national agenda. Kovner never met with the members of Kibbutz Nitzanim, and the air was never cleared. Nitzanim never recanted in public and continued to blame the Givati command for politically based discrimination. Kovner became ill before the meeting, which had been finally set for the 1987 IDF Fallen Soldiers’ Memorial Day. In 1988, less than a year after Kovner’s death, Michael Kovner went to Nitzanim. He lit a memorial candle and spoke of “generosity, which my generation and the former one did not foster,” but which might be the province of the third generation to come.49 The war was over, and Kovner went home to Ein Hahoresh. In the summer of 1949 he wrote Farewell to the South, a poem about soldiers returning north, with whose complexities few critics managed to cope.50 It was in Face to Face that Kovner expressed his war experiences, which matured during the postwar years. He wrote a novel hundreds of pages long during a few weeks when he shut himself up at Avidan’s and Davidson’s kibbutzim, where he could consult with them and read some of the chapters in progress before enthralled audiences of kibbutz members. The first part of Face to Face describes Givati’s battles, and the second part is dedicated to Negba. The book went through ten printings; a special tenth edition was published to mark the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the state. Face to Face was Kovner’s only prose work, and the response in reviews, articles, and letters to the editor was enormous. Parts of the book were dramatized for radio and stage and were translated into English. Letters from readers piled up in the Kovner home—Ben-Gurion thanked him for sending him a copy—and the book was discussed in forums attended by the country’s most prominent individuals. Kovner received the Shlonsky Prize for the book in 1956. For a number of years Face to Face was the authoritative book on the War of Independence, and many of Kovner’s readers were amazed by the way he had shed the mantle of Vilna, Ponar, and the forest to become an Israeli author who had written about the most important local experience, the War of Independence.51

War of Independence

The novel’s composition aroused fierce criticism, because it had no central hero but rather a full complement of characters. However, most readers and critics understood the intent of Kovner’s mosaic, composed of partisans and Sabras and Yemenites and moshavot members and mothers and female couriers and clerks: All of Givati, the entire fighting collective, was the hero of the war. Kovner did not write the history of the war but of the individuals within it with all their sadness and pain, pity and cruelty.52 The Givati veterans wanted Kovner to write a third section because he had only gotten as far as the period of failure and heavy losses and the time had come to recount the victories. Davidson prophesied that Kovner would never write it, but “leave us [the Givati Brigade] with our pants down.”53 As a work of literature Face to Face did not receive rave reviews, said Kempner, and Kovner knew it and decided not to continue. It is still possible that Kovner later tried his hand at writing the much desired third part, but either he could not find the correct tone or he wrote parts and then destroyed them.54 Many evenings all over the country were devoted to Face to Face, and Kovner went from one place to another, book in hand. During one of those evenings, held in March 1954, Kovner was more inspired than usual. “Both poetry and prose,” he said, “are forms of prayer. Poetry is man’s prayer to God, and prose, his prayer to his fellow man. When man prays to God only one heart bleeds, but when man prays to man, both hearts bleed.” Kovner was not late in answering his critics: Every person is part of the whole, his heroism no less than anyone else’s. He had not written a novel in the usual sense, one with heroes and a plot, but had knowingly broken generally accepted rules to make the collective his hero. The style was fragmented and the structure uneven. By making an analogy between form and content, Kovner meant to prove that there was something above and beyond the accepted rule, something the soul, which laws did not govern, adhered to. “This is in fact poetry,” said poet Amir Gilboa when he met Kovner in Tel Aviv.55 Toward the end of May, two days before the Egyptians invaded, Kovner’s first son was born; he was named Michael after Kovner’s dead brother. Kovner wrote a note reading, “A nation rising from ashes. No more will Jews be led to the slaughter! Today was the 27th of May in

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the afternoon, and I saw the [handwriting unclear] in Strashun Street, and the battle pages, blown with the wind. The sun was high and that is perhaps the reason I had tears in my eyes. My shoulders are narrow and I cannot carry the pages from there to bring them here. I did not bring them with me. I brought a gun. I gave it to my son. And I reached Jerusalem.”

Part Four  A Life of Activity and Creativity

(1949–1987) “How, my friend, is my poetry different from yours?”

The lice in the ghetto got Under your skin. The story of the ghetto Did not get under your skin. When, my friend, was the last time you Visited . . . the Other inside you, Flesh of your battered flesh To ask him, black brother, and your morning Coffee smells like smoke, what does it taste like? Sloan Kettering, pp. 73–74

Fo u rt e e n   Serving the Party and at Odds with It “Has the time come to forgive Germany?”

When the War of Independence ended, Kovner returned to Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh. It marked the beginning of almost four decades, the rest of his life, of channeling his energy into various civilian projects. He was a member of Mapam and Hashomer Hatzair, dealing with its leadership and members, and he traveled widely outside Israel as an envoy of both the movement and later of the Diaspora Museum. He perpetuated Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust in plans he devised for founding museums and other institutions, and he integrated Jewish culture into the kibbutz’s daily life. He wrote literary works and was deeply involved in Israeli society; he had a family and friends, and he continued nonstop until he died, not yet 70. The years passed in the shadow of the decade that began in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II and ended in 1949 with the end of the War of Independence. What Kovner had experienced in those ten years influenced every day thereafter and every line he wrote, and at the same time he lived the Israeli experience intensely—its language, scenery, people, and development. He lived in the past and the present at the same time. Kovner had constant arguments with Hashomer Hatzair and its leadership, especially Meir Ya’ari. Ya’ari’s basic tenet was that what mattered in history was not nation but class. As far as he was concerned, the forces in every nation (including the Jewish people) had to be directed toward the success of tomorrow’s revolution, and therefore it followed that World War II and the Holocaust were part of the continuing struggle and did not require him to change his opinions. Kovner’s basic tenet, formed in Vilna at the beginning of the war, was that the nation was the decisive factor in history and that the Soviet invention of the brotherhood of nations was nothing more than empty rhetoric. Every nation

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The Kovners’ first brick apartment in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, 1954. Photographed by the late Ya’akov Lebed. Courtesy of the Kovner family.

was at the top of its own priority list, with no relation to class distinctions. Therefore preserving the existence and security of the Jewish people, especially after the Holocaust, had to be the principle that guided every Jew. The Holocaust committed Jews to completely changing their attitude toward the past and toward the future in their own country and among other nations and to uniting forces regardless of politics. According to Ya’ari, the forces of capitalism had caused World War II and the workers had suffered in every country, although they had fought bravely everywhere, particularly in the Soviet Union. Kovner was convinced that as a historical event the Holocaust was sui generis, and there was no way the suffering of the Jewish people could be compared to that of any other, because only for them had total annihilation been planned.

Serving the Party

These opposite starting points dictated all the other arguments between Kovner and Ya’ari. According to Ya’ari, the revolutionary struggle would continue, its ideology intact, and it would have to recognize Zion­ism and its contribution to the forces of the future, which would finally reach every place on the globe, the Land of Israel included. Kovner was terrified that this vision might come true, because he had seen that the Soviet regime was fundamentally anti-Semitic, brutal, and corrupt and had no respect for human life. Because for Ya’ari the Holocaust did not seem a sufficient reason to change his outlook, he continued with his former modus operandi and adhered to the political arguments that had always been part and parcel of Hashomer Hatzair, and he sought to restore its chapters, especially in Poland; only then would he be willing to deal with controlled immigration to Israel. Kovner had firsthand experience of the terrible catastrophe that had destroyed European Jewry, and he knew there was no one left to restore chapters in the graveyard. He felt that all survivors should flee the Soviets as soon as possible, and under no circumstances could Ya’ari come to terms with such an attitude. The only path of action left, said Kovner, was to unite, emigrate to Eretz Israel, and continue living a life of Jewish unity and culture, never forgetting the Holocaust and the lessons it taught. They argued about the nature of daily life on the kibbutzim when the partisans arrived in Eretz Israel, about Judaism in the kibbutzim and in the movement, about a binational country, about fostering the avant-garde as opposed to placing the Jewish individual at center stage, the individual who was the heart of both what was destroyed and what was built anew. The bitterest argument of all, however, was not over relations with the Soviet Union but about perpetuating the Holocaust and the history of Hashomer Hatzair under the Nazis and about relations with Germany.1 Kovner did not come to Eretz Israel with the intention of becoming a political leader. He knew that the Hativa had no political value and had left it to wreak vengeance on the Germans. Had his political aspirations weighed more than his principles, he would have remained to foster the Hativa and his position among the survivors and with the Jewish Brigade, and he would have come to Eretz Israel with great fanfare, leading thousands. Moreover, Kovner was a man of vision and

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reproach, a prophet of doom, and because of his special moral authority, he was far greater in stature than many others in the local political swamp. He was always aware of his uniqueness, and that feeling would have left him had he dealt with mundane affairs. He was a member of every party institution but attended few meetings. When he did attend, it was either before or after a tumultuous resignation or to give a speech deploring some issue or other. He was not a member of any opposition faction or group within Mapam or the Kibbutz Artzi; he was a faction of one, a born misnaged, the dissident who followed no path but his own, and he always took the road less traveled. “Although Abba Kovner always had a well-defined ideology, he never spoke of it. He was always beyond it, and deeper, and therefore free of it,” wrote philosopher Eliezer Schweid.2 Kovner was right-wing within the movement, always making the effort to prevent it from going too far to the left. He was terribly concerned about Israel’s security, which brought him closer to Ya’akov Hazan. His position carried weight: “How many people cast in the same mold as Abba Kovner does the Jewish people have, and how many such mortals still walk among us?” cried a member of the Mapam Central Committee after one of his resignations, which was received and consented to with a short, dryly worded letter. “Mapam Central Committee with Abba Kovner and without him are two different things entirely!”3 The movement heads offered Kovner all sorts of positions, and he rejected them; had he wanted one, he would have accepted it.4 Early in 1956 Ya’ari wrote Kovner a long letter apologizing for again appealing to his “willingness to help the movement” and asking him to visit a number of Western European countries to wage an intensive propaganda campaign. Sending Kovner to a foreign country meant he had received the movement’s official stamp of approval, that he had been accepted into the fold. Kovner agreed to go because it was not a permanent assignment, and he liked traveling because it meant meeting Jews living in other countries and because his trips were usually extremely successful. However, Kovner declined other offers, claiming he was not only a kibbutz member but an author as well. Between his daily work and many official kibbutz duties, he had to find a place of refuge and time to escape into it, both necessary for his continuing cre-

Serving the Party

ativity, and he was fighting a stubborn battle “for the right to be alone a bit, a kind of seclusion, without which I cannot exist.”5 Every now and then Ya’ari sent Kovner letters expressing high opinion and fondness for him.6 Kovner occasionally wrote of his regard for Ya’ari, although he was less enthusiastic than Ya’ari was about him, and he was careful to receive his best wishes before he left the country for abroad. Kovner must have never forgotten how Ya’ari’s image shone before him in the darkness of his postimprisonment crisis: Ya’ari at once father, grandfather, and leader, the figure of a man of faith who saw the light behind the clouds, although it must be noted that once the crisis had passed, Kovner never referred to that image again. Ya’ari’s letters remained in good shape in Kovner’s files at Ein Hahoresh. It was not rivalry with Ya’ari that prevented Kovner from becoming a political leader in Israel. Ya’ari had no rivals. He was admired and his leadership was firmly established; Ya’ari was 48 years old in 1945 when Kovner arrived in Eretz Israel, and Kovner himself was only 27 at the time. In Kovner’s opinion, those who had led the uprisings and fighting in Europe were, with the exception of one or two (probably referring to Chaika Grossman), apolitical, and “leadership is something you take,” he said. If you do not fight for it, no one will come and lay it at your feet. If you do not have the requisite drive, how and why should you fight for it? Kovner also knew that the political climate in Eretz Israel and later in the state of Israel rejected leadership that had sprung up on foreign soil, something he had apparently already learned during his first four months in the country in 1945, before he settled permanently.7 The worst argument Ya’ari and Kovner had was over contacts between Israel and Germany, and it led to a crisis in their relations. Kovner was driven by the issue from the beginning of the 1950s until he died, and it embittered him greatly; he and his remaining comrades quickly discovered they were fighting a losing battle. Kovner viewed the reparations agreement signed at the beginning of the 1950s as the “beginning of Israel’s sin, the worst moral failing of the post-Holocaust generation.” He ranted and raved wherever and whenever he had an audience, went on a hunger strike in front of the Knesset when it deliberated an arms deal with Germany, resigned again and again from the party, appealed

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to kibbutz members to reject personal reparations payments as he, Kempner, and Korczak had done, and in the end threw up his hands in despair. At the beginning of the 1960s Kovner shut himself off behind a self-imposed silence and no longer participated in the memorial services for Holocaust victims and the ghetto uprisings, because “I didn’t want to curse them and I couldn’t give them my blessing.” Added Kempner: “He sat at home and ate his heart out.”8 Kovner fought his war for decades. Indeed, during the first years of the state the atmosphere toward Germany was hostile: The language was not to be used, no German products were imported, anyone who went to live there would not be allowed back into the country, and there was to be no contact with Germans because they were all Nazis and Jewish hatred of them would be eternal. However, enormous numbers of immigrants arrived after the War of Independence, which had exhausted the country’s resources; the population doubled in two years, putting an even greater strain on the limited resources remaining, and raw materials, basic alimentation, and monetary reserves were nearly depleted. Feelers were put out between Israel and Germany in 1951, in part a continuation of the efforts begun during the war on the part of Jewish world organizations, led by Dr. Nachum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, to sue Germany for the return of stolen Jewish property. Ben-Gurion, who coined the expression “a different Germany” and who later met with Conrad Adenauer, Germany’s chancellor, brought all his weight to bear to conclude a reparations agreement.9 In the spring of 1951 deliberations about reparations began in Israel in the Knesset, the political party centers, and the newspapers, and the issue came to a head in January 1952. No one in the country was without a vociferous opinion. Even those who were in favor of reparations opposed all other contact with Germany. The editors of the various newspapers received a flood of letters. Al Hamishmar, Mapam’s daily, went so far as to describe German products that would arrive in Israel as made of human hair and bone and soap from the extermination camps, but its representatives in the political arena did not voice unequivocal objection. It was the beginning of the discrepancy between Mapam rhetoric and practice, a discrepancy that drove Kovner wild, that made

Serving the Party

him feel utterly isolated within the party. Kovner and his comrades, Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, Chaika Grossman and Ruzka ­Korczak, Shalom Holavski and Israel Gutman, and many others rallied to the call and organized protest demonstrations and mass meetings. They called for a public general oath against an agreement with Germany and most definitely would not support direct negotiations.10 The Knesset met to discuss the issue on January 7, 1952, and thousands of demonstrators gathered to protest in front of the building. As they began to advance, the police threw smoke grenades and tear gas bombs, and in the ensuing fracas at least a hundred people were injured. The tear gas filtered into the Knesset and the building was evacuated, an event unheard of before or after. Nevertheless, the Knesset authorized the negotiations with Germany regarding reparations, to begin in the middle of the same month. It was a terrible day for Kovner, and he found no consolation in the negotiations’ ups and downs and the turbulent demonstrations throughout the country. The reparations agreement between Israel and Germany was signed in Luxembourg on September 10, 1952, and it was ratified in the Knesset and the Bundestag in March 1953.11 In June 1957, as the next logical step after the agreement had been signed, the Kibbutz Artzi executive committee decided the following about personal reparations payments: The money would be paid in its entirety to each individual kibbutz’s treasury, and the members in whose names the money was paid would receive no personal benefit. The kibbutz would decide what to do with the funds and not the members who received them. The money would be used for special projects, among them a fund for the establishment of “a central movement project to perpetuate the memory of the Diaspora,” to which each kibbutz would contribute 7.5% of what they had received. Kovner and Grossman would be on the committee that handled the finances. In the end, no such project ever took shape, but the overwhelming majority of Kibbutz Artzi members handed over the reparations to their respective kibbutzim. Kovner kept fighting for the kibbutzim’s contribution to be allocated as decided on. “We didn’t know what to do with Abba Kovner,” said a member of the Kibbutz Artzi’s economic department.12

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Ya’ari, as always, had a different opinion. For how many generations, he asked, did we intend to keep up the embargo and ban on Germany? Would their grandchildren be included in it? Would they too have to prove they were anti-Nazi? In his opinion there was no “different Germany” but there were different Germans, and it was pointless to make decisions that could not be kept. “For the love of God,” wrote Avraham Ya’akov of Kibbutz Ein Hamifratz to Ya’ari, “why are you in such a hurry? Millions of murderers with blood on their hands are walking around the streets of Germany and the rest of the world . . . and you’re asking how many generations?”13 According to Ya’ari, the brotherhood of nations did not allow for the ostracizing of an entire people, and the desire to see a new tomorrow would have to absolve the second generation of Germans. In 1965 another blow fell: Israel and Germany instituted diplomatic relations. Kovner returned his 1948 Medal of Sovereignty to Zalman Shazar, the president of Israel. Something of “the flesh and sinews is torn from my insides and falls to my feet,” he wrote in a letter to Shazar, a copy of which went to all the daily papers. He could no longer wear the medal, Kovner wrote the day after Ambassador Rolf Paulus presented his credentials to the president, because he no longer felt sovereign but rather helpless when he saw Jerusalem receive a former officer of the army of murderers and when he knew that a covenant was being struck that, while theoretically only diplomatic, would become “a covenant of reconciliation with the abomination.” Shazar signed his reply to Kovner, the poet and commander, “Your friend and the President of your country,” and sent him back his medal. Poet Avot Yeshurun wrote a satirical poem called The Partisans, about “something that happened to a partisan not long ago”: He returned his medal. “All the Jewish partisans / are schlemiels, worthless,” the poem ended. That was exactly how they felt.14 In the summer of 1971 the issue of diplomatic relations with Germany caused a break in Kovner’s association with Ya’ari. Kovner saw a newspaper picture of Georg-Jesko von Puttkamer, the German ambassador, standing on the steps of the Mapam headquarters building in Tel Aviv after a meeting with Ya’ari and others. Kovner refused to believe his eyes. “That’s the end of my membership. . . . In my innocence

Serving the Party

I thought a vow had been taken, at least by members of Mordechai Anielewicz’s party, a vow significant beyond political maneuvering and ‘more important’ considerations. Another mistake, unfortunately,” he wrote, and concluded, “Take my name off the list of members of the United Workers’ Party [Mapam].”15 Harsh letters were exchanged back and forth between Merhavia and Ein Hahoresh every other day, brought by special messengers, with copies sent to the editorial board of Al Hamishmar. Ya’ari called Kovner’s letters “a slap in the face, throwing down the gauntlet and writing finis to our friendship.” Kovner replied that Ya’ari’s letters “astounded him with regard to [Ya’ari] as an intellectual,” and so on and so forth. In the end they compromised: Ya’ari proposed that in the future there would be no more meetings with Germans, despite the fact that he saw nothing wrong with them, and he agreed to meet Kovner alone. Kovner agreed not to use the word traitor, and Ya’ari tried to compromise, saying, “There was no reason to have Germany cause a break in our public and private relations.”16 After one or two more incidents the struggle expired. In 1973 Golda Meir wrote to Kovner that with the approach of the German prime minister Willy Brandt’s visit to Israel, she found herself thinking about him [Kovner] and promised that when she met the prime minister, Kovner and his comrades would be in her heart and thoughts. She did not invite him to any of the official receptions out of respect for his feelings and perhaps also to make life easier for herself.17 At the end of the 1970s the Kibbutz Artzi set up a committee to reexamine relations with Germany, and its conclusions were far different from those of 1965. Kovner, the voice crying in the wilderness, added his own one-sentence suggestion to those of the committee: Travel to Germany, both East and West, should be out of bounds for members of the movement. There were few reactions to his suggestion because, as usual, each kibbutz voted on the proposal within its own forum, and most of them did not adopt it.18 In April 1987, Haim Herzog, Israel’s president, went to Germany, and Kovner wrote to him that he knew he could not prevent the visit. The last letter he wrote before he died was to Yitzhak Rabin, at that time minister of defense, who went to visit Wehrmacht installations and Dachau, to remind him of the duty to remember.19

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Kovner never permitted any of his works to be translated into German, and Kempner has preserved his wishes to this day. She does not speak to Germans, regardless of their age, of what they did during the war, even if they come all the way specifically to interview her in order to understand the past. Kovner refused to believe there was “a different Germany” and that the next generation was free of its parents’ guilt. A young German woman journalist belonging to the Capara (Atonement) organization, whose motto is “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” asked for an interview with him. Kovner said he would agree if the organization were willing to change its motto to “Our parents were murderers,” and she fled in tears.20 Kovner did his best to aid the struggle against the neo-Nazis, and in his journeys abroad mapped their organizations, their leaders, and propaganda for the Mossad, becoming well versed in the subject. “Mission ‘N’ Reports,” he called the information he gathered—“N” for the nakam which had never materialized.21 As time elapsed, Kovner felt there was no longer any need for his recollections. “I am told that a new world has grown up and the generation of murderers is dead. I am told that a new generation is walking the streets of Germany, and maybe the people who tell me that are right. But you, my brothers, who were lucky enough never to see a baby with its head dashed against a wall, blood and brains dripping onto the cobblestones, have you the right to tell me the time has come to forgive? The time to forgive?”22

Fi f t e e n   The Holocaust and Jewish History “A poem in stone”

When I immigrated to Eretz Israel after the Second World War I would meet young people who had been born here, and I would listen to their songs and the way they spoke as though they were the first Jews, fully confident they were rewriting their family trees, beginning with themselves. And when I thought about the family trees burned in Europe I was doubly sad, both for what had been lost and for this wonderful new generation of young Israelis who, when they grew up and got old, might never even know what they should cry over.1

By designing plans for museums, Kovner tried to both preserve the past and bring it to life for the present and the future. His goal was to save the past for posterity, not to have it mummified in museums and regarded as an artifact but to have it function as an essential part of life here and now. The history of the Jewish people had been created over generations and had been and would be valid for generations. Kovner’s goal was not to leave the bare facts for posterity but to make the facts reflect the spirit and atmosphere in which Jews had lived and created, and he particularly wanted to show what had been lost, not how it had been lost. Kovner called his first museum plans “A Poem in Stone.” A museum, he felt, should be a book whose cover visitors opened, entered and read an entire story, then left and closed the volume after them, taking with them the visual assets the museum had to offer.2 Kovner’s perception was of continuity and flow. Visitors would begin on the top floor and work their way down in circles, or go up from the basement, a perception that gave birth to his concept of gates and circles, and everything would be open and interconnected. Visitors to the museum had to be active participants, absorbing everything around

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them, seeing, touching, listening, and building the experience themselves. That would create the entire story; its components would be words, pictures, sculptures, paintings, movies, lighting, music, and computer monitors. Each of the plans went through several versions, polished and repolished. Kovner had many arguments with the painters and designers, probably because not all of them could understand his perception and vision. Today such ideas are the bread and butter of museums, but in the 1960s and 1970s they were considered too innovative, revolutionary, and even suspicious. For Kovner, if there was to be a holistic perception, there was no room for compromise, certainly not when it came to size, for the museum had to be large enough to encompass the entire vision. On the first floor of an empty building on the Washington Mall there was an enormous space supported by rows of columns. Kovner had visited it and immediately planned to fill it with life-size statues of the Jews who had lived before the Holocaust, according to place and dress, 6,000 statues for the 6 million who had been killed.3 Kovner tinkered with ideas about museums throughout his life in Israel, from 1946, when he participated in the first meeting for the establishment of Yad Vashem, until his last days. He had a long list of plans for museums, some of which were eventually constructed and some not, all filed away with diagrams and drawings in his own hand. He was intimately involved with three museums. The first was the Moreshet House, whose objective was to be a museum illustrating Hashomer Hatzair’s contribution to Zionism, its part in the history of Israel in general, and its firm stance in the Holocaust in particular. Kovner proposed and planned in detail the Moreshet House again and again, beginning in the 1950s and continuing until his death. He fought for the museum for more than thirty years, resigning from his party’s institutions, changing his mind and returning, only to resign again. The Moreshet House was never built. The second museum Kovner was involved with was the From Holocaust to Resurrection Museum at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, named after Mordechai Anielewicz; it opened in 1968. The third project was the Diaspora Museum, which opened in 1978. Kovner had worked hard over every detail in the Diaspora Museum for eight years, wanting to show the life of the Jewish people and their culture

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during 2,000 years of exile; the museum’s ideas and designs had a direct impact on other museums in Israel and abroad. The plan on which Kovner concentrated and crystallized most of his ideas was his last. In March 1986 Kovner committed to writing a plan for a Holocaust museum in New York City.4 Kovner, never before having been invited from abroad for such a project, pondered the subject, asking himself how he, at the end of the 1980s, could make Jewish and non-Jewish New York remember the past without having the whole exhibition look like a history lesson. He wished to give New York a profound experience with a “poetic, descriptive quality” that would transcend dry facts. He disdained technological tricks and flashy designs, which he felt would come at the expense of or instead of genuine ideas. The result was a plan with three main components. The first was an exhibit that would give basic historical information about Jewish life between the two world wars, Nazism, World War II, and the Final Solution; these topics were the sine qua non for any such museum. The second component was a visual monograph that would show the life and death of an anonymous, not particularly large Jewish community. There would be a track from one institution to the next, library, school, graveyard, yeshiva, quarrelsome political party—all the facets of rich, variegated interpersonal relations. Then the community would be seen as a ghetto fighting for its existence, its cultural life and underground, providing an understanding of how the Jews lived and of what had been lost. Finally the end would come without actually appearing, saving the museum’s builders from having to deal with the unresolved problem of how to show death itself. Kovner’s solution was that the last exhibit would be an empty room, its walls and ceiling dazzling white, and projected onto one wall would be the images of the same community members visitors had met before, men, women, and children, “like one huge, silent family,” that would slowly fade away. The third component of the museum would be at Battery Park, facing the Statue of Liberty, where the following would be written: They could have arrived here. Thousands and millions could have been saved. But the ears of the Free World were sealed, the gates of America Were locked before them and the

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Jewish State which could have Taken in the fugitives and Protected them did not Yet exist In the world.

Kovner expressed himself in both words and form. He broke the word Free into two parts not because there was no room on the line but to show that the free world was not worthy of the title when the fate of Jews was the issue at stake; its values had shown themselves faulty. The lines gradually become shorter as the possibility of finding a haven became smaller and smaller. After years of sketching and drawing and sifting through ideas, Kovner presented a plan that was well thought out and clearly expressed, but it was eventually shelved permanently, probably for the same reasons some of his other plans were never implemented: Kovner’s creative imagination needed enormous financial backing and a generous measure of Judaism. His ideas demanded a great deal from visitors, who would have had to find the meaning behind the objects within themselves. Kovner immediately devised another plan, a museum ship that would sail the rivers of the United States, a complete Jewish town on its decks; it, too, came to naught. A decade later, a different Holocaust museum was built in New York, in fact facing the Statue of Liberty. In 1947 a meeting of the World Council for Holocaust and Contemporary Heroism Research was held in Jerusalem to discuss collecting research and commemorative materials for Yad Vashem, when it was finally constructed. In the name of the fighters, Kovner spoke before a large group from Eretz Israel and abroad, among them representatives of the central organizations and bodies that would participate in the project. It was Kovner’s first public local appearance before an audience not exclusively made up of Hashomer Hatzair members, and according to his listeners, the speech was extraordinarily impressive. The issue was the erection of two elements: a “memory mountain” for the Holocaust and a “heroism section.” Kovner was afraid that simply presenting acts of heroism with no commentary or analysis would lead to the assumption that the uprisings were natural, obvious events to be

The Holocaust and Jewish History

taken for granted. He also worried that a separation would mean that the ­rebels were alienated from the communities, which did not support them. He always believed the opposite was true—that the rebels were in fact completely integrated into their communities. It was suggested that the speech be the first Yad Vashem publication, and Kovner was elected to the National Council for Documentation, one of thirty well-respected members.5 Most of the other members of the council and of the Yad Vashem administration were Holocaust survivors, not fighters, and in their opinion (particularly that of historian and education minister Ben-Zion Dinur, then head of the Yad Vashem board), the uprisings had been small-scale acts carried out by a few individuals, whereas the Holocaust had been the daily struggle of entire populations to preserve themselves and their dignity and therefore was more representative of the entire Jewish people and its experiences.6 Kovner quickly understood that his position in the Yad Vashem councils notwithstanding, the institution would not allocate a central place to the rebels, with or without connecting them to the Jewish communities. Moreover, in 1949 Kibbutz Lohamei Hagettaot (Ghetto Fighters) was founded, and that same year one of their two shacks was designated as a library and archive, and a short while later a permanent exhibition was added, later turning into a Holocaust museum. It was a Dror-Hechalutz enterprise and was dedicated to that movement’s history during the Holocaust; as such, it barely mentioned Hashomer Hatzair, despite the covenant they signed in blood at the time. Thus in July 1956 the “remaining members of the ghetto and partisan fighters, including heads of the anti-Nazi undergrounds in Europe, living today in Kibbutz Artzi–Hashomer Hatzair settlements in Israel . . . supported by their comrades and sympathizers in Israel and abroad” presented a plan for establishing a museum, which would be called Moreshet—The Mordechai Anielewicz House of Testimony, named after the admired leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In English moreshet means “legacy” or “heritage.” The museum’s basic exhibits would be the material that underground fighters brought to Eretz Israel from underground organization archives, currently either in the possession of kibbutz members or located in the movement’s archive

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at Kibbutz Merhavia. The museum would be built at Givat Haviva, the center (both geographically and culturally) for many Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim; Givat Haviva was named after Haviva Reich, who had parachuted into Europe to rescue Jews from the Holocaust and never returned, symbolizing the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora. A museum whose visitors said, “Oh, how terrible all those horrors were,” would be insufficient, wrote Kovner. Far more important would be a museum that would encourage them to say, “How terrible, how unfortunate it is that all that is no more!”7 Among those nominated by the committee of former fighters to promote the plan were Kovner, Ruzka Korczak, Vitka Kempner, and Chaika Grossman. Kovner presented a detailed plan that translated his ideology and values into plastic conceptions. The entrance would be on the top floor, and visitors would have to descend from “life as it had been” (the beginning of what he later planned for New York), to the middle floor, where the exhibits would deal with the Nazi rise to power and the idea of the Final Solution, and down one floor to exhibits on struggle and rebellion, concentrating on the underground organizations, the uprisings, and the partisans. Kovner wanted to create a descent through various levels into an underground bunker. The Heroes’ Bunker would be the museum’s central experience and a “modest pantheon to fighting Jews.” The exit would be through a tunnel on whose walls the words of the partisan anthem would be written. The building would be a single architectural unit and have no less than a thousand square yards of exhibitions. Kovner thought the existing documentary exhibitions—the one at the shack in Kibbutz Lohamei Hagettaot before the museum moved to permanent quarters in 1959 and the one at Yad Vashem in the first office building—were just “a collection of horror pictures” set out schematically in various halls.8 Early in 1961, after a series of meetings, the plan was authorized by the movement’s committees on condition that it be modest and reasonably inexpensive.9 Nevertheless, in November 1961, at an Executive Committee meeting, Kovner again had to struggle to convince the participants of the memorial’s worth. In conflict with Ya’akov Hazan, who spoke before him, Kovner said, “The essence of what [Hazan] said was that there is no today without tomorrow, and the essence of what I say

The Holocaust and Jewish History

is that there will be no tomorrow without yesterday.” This was defiance of the movement’s ideology regarding the past (which was that it had to be destroyed to build a new world) and regarding his dead friends, who (twenty years after the writing of the manifesto and the decision to rebel) had still not been officially commemorated. Hashomer Hatzair was the first movement in Europe to choose the only option left to them by the Germans—to die for the honor of the Jewish people and its future—Kovner reminded his audience, and they were duty-bound to remember, and feel guilt for, members who had made the choice and died carrying it out.10 After the meeting there was a long series of confirmations and rejections, rethinking and refusals, committees appointed and dissolved; the process lasted for years, and Kovner resigned every few months. There was a strange inconsistency between the enthusiasm with which the Kibbutz Artzi leaders spoke about the fighting during the Holocaust and their continual shilly-shallying over the matter of preserving the memory of this fighting for posterity. Their inconsistency had several causes. First was the problem of the complex relationship between the leaders and the surviving fighters, led by Kovner. The fighters who promoted the Moreshet House were individually well respected and esteemed, and as a group they had moral authority and influence over all members who had had any link to the prewar movement. Because of their influence in wider circles, Meir Ya’ari and Hazan feared that a multifaceted memorial might be used to make connections and initiate activities that would not be under their control. Second, Kovner had presented his own vision and not the movement’s. He portrayed the rebels as continuing Jewish history, not as part of the anti-Fascist struggle and not even as part of Zionism. The movement leaders could not accept his Vilna-born and -bred perception of Jewish unity as more important than the movement during the Holocaust. They could not even openly ask what good a museum would be if it were to follow Kovner’s concepts and not the movement’s. Third, the possible cost of Kovner’s grand ideas was a source of continual worry. Yet despite the profound contradictions, Ya’ari was fully aware that during the Holocaust Hashomer Hatzair had lost its best people, members who should have been with them there and then. He had great respect for Kovner and the way he took the opposite side,

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and when Kovner mourned the Jewish people that had been lost, Ya’ari could not oppose him in public. The fighters received support for their aspirations from an unexpected source. On April 10, 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem. The testimonies of the survivors brought the events of the Holocaust to the attention of the Israeli public to an extent that had previously been undreamed of. The life of the Jews in Europe under the Nazis, their struggles and deaths, all were detailed. Everyone listened, fascinated, and the courtroom was packed every day. Kovner’s testimony received all the coverage possible, which in 1961 meant news­papers and radio, and he became a national personality. Ya’ari and Hazan wrote to him immediately saying that they were following his testimony with “shock and tension” and that his appearance was “a time of spiritual exaltation, not just for us, but for the entire movement. Once again you have shown your eminence as a fighter, a person and a lover of Israel.”11 In the general atmosphere during and after the Eichmann trial the idea of a Holocaust memorial could no longer be postponed, and at the next Executive Committee meeting the proposal for “Moreshet, a memorial named for Mordechai Anielewicz” was ratified. The kibbutzim were to finally turn the 7.5% of their reparations payments over to a special fund.12 The decision itself was encouraging. In addition to the funding from reparations, Kovner proposed asking for a personal, regular monthly contribution from all Hashomer Hatzair members in Israel and the Diaspora, not just from kibbutz members, organized in a framework of a Friends Society. Kovner brought out and refurbished his plan for a museum, adding modern elements concerning the relationship between visitors and exhibits that were far ahead of their time. He proposed models of places, audiovisual aids (such as using a telephone receiver to listen to a recording of one of Hitler’s speeches), small screening and work rooms, and three-dimensional panoramic pictures. He proposed, for the first time, engraving on bare walls 6 feet high the more than 2,000 names of Jewish communities destroyed (this was later done in Yad Vashem, in the Valley of the Communities), and walls densely covered with photos of the dead, an idea he later implemented at Yad Mordechai. In the Holocaust Museum in Washington,  D.C.,

The Holocaust and Jewish History

built later, visitors cross a kind of bridge to the left and right of which, covering the walls from top to bottom, are pictures of members of one community who were killed, as Kovner proposed, perhaps with no connection between the two places.13 Many other expensive ideas were almost impossible to realize. Yet Kovner announced in no uncertain terms that anyone who thought he could change the dimensions of the project might just as well not speak to him and that no painter or sculptor could express the Holocaust in any case. At the end of the plan Kovner noted that “the building described above is not to be built in stages,” and he underlined the words.14 Perhaps that was the main reason for the ongoing discrepancy between making speeches and putting decisions into practice. The mid1960s, until the Six Day War in 1967, were years of recession and unemployment in Israel, and the project proposed by Kovner was unrealistic at the time. Old comrades have said, off the record, that it was difficult to tell Kovner, full of his vision, that he and his plans were “too big for the movement.” It was obvious to them that they could not ask him for a more modest plan, and approaching someone else for an alternative was unthinkable. Kovner was a living symbol, the incarnation of the dead movement, and after the Eichmann trial it was impossible to think of offending him, a soldier, as it were, of a terrible war, still bearing as he was all its scars, still somewhat frightening. The impact of the Eichmann trial did not last long. Kovner fluctuated between hope, as he drew new plans that in his opinion were a compromise but that still had the initial momentum of his poem in stone, and anger at the kibbutzim that would not pay what he called the “tithe” and simply asked if the very existence of struggling Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim was not the best and most authentic memorial for the past, or for the future.15 The years passed, and his dream of a house or a large museum was never realized, although two other projects were executed: Moreshet as a research and documentation center and the museum at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. During deliberations over the museum, other Moreshet projects, aiming at commemorating Hashomer Hatzair during the Holocaust, began taking shape, and in 1963 the movement authorized them. As a result, that same year Moreshet’s first publication, a semi-annual

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c­ ollection of articles (Yalkut Moreshet) was published, edited by Kovner, Israel Gutman, Yehuda Bauer, and Shalom Holavski, later joined by Ruzka ­Korczak and Yehuda Tubin. The Yalkut Moreshet had only the most modest means at its disposal, and its publication was the product of its editors’ and supporters’ devotion and sense of purpose, and they did everything alone. Nevertheless, few of Israel’s research and documentation projects were lucky enough to have a core of such high­quality editorial participants, especially during its first decades. The editorial orientation was evident from the first issue: to hold a discussion of the Holocaust as a pan-­European phenomenon, including the widest possible variety of subjects using the greatest number of sources, and not to be merely the movement’s mouthpiece. Kovner was the moving spirit behind Yalkut Moreshet, pushing friends into writing articles and finding materials. There were many other activities. A series of books was published in conjunction with Sifriat Hapoalim, the Hashomer Hatzair publishing house, one of the best in the country. Kovner carefully dealt with the graphics and cover designs of books that were special or important. In addition, at least one person from each kibbutz was nominated as a Moreshet trustee to be responsible for Holocaust Memorial Day services, for recording testimonies and filling out questionnaires, and for collecting material and documents held by members. By the end of 1962 the trustees had received more than 1,700 such questionnaires. In 1963, the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the work was intense: The main events were preceded by memorial ceremonies, pamphlets for schools were written, and a medal engraved with the monument to Anielewicz at Yad Mordechai was prepared. Kovner wrote a special pamphlet for an assembly at the Jerusalem International Convention Center auditorium, called “This Day—the Scroll of Testimony,” which was read there and later distributed by the World Zionist Organization.16 That year Yad Vashem executive members met with representatives of both Kibbutz Lohamei Hagettaot and Moreshet to make peace. Lohamei Hagettaot congratulated Moreshet, and the two bodies pledged cooperation and coordination.17 Kovner was deeply involved in the Moreshet projects for many years, particularly during the 1960s. He edited articles, dealt with

The Holocaust and Jewish History

publishing books, gave speeches, and wrote for schools. For a year he lived in a rented room in Tel Aviv with Gutman. They did all the editorial work, going home only on weekends. According to Gutman, Kovner did not have an appointment calendar, did not answer letters, did not even think of keeping a diary or writing an autobiography. He had an artist’s temperament; for hours and days at a time he worked at fever pitch, and on other days he barely moved. They spent hours talking about the Holocaust and the way to approach it. “Abba had a unique sense of the history of the Holocaust. . . . He was not against the Jewish councils in the ghettos, as I was at the time. He also put the fighting [in the ghettos] into its proper perspective and saw it realistically, and understood, long before the fact, that there would be individuals and groups which would oppose it, who would try to minimize its importance, and that ‘pretty soon we will have to be ashamed for having fought,’ he said.”18 In the early 1960s another opportunity for preserving the memory of Hashomer Hatzair in the Holocaust presented itself at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai: a statue and a museum named for Anielewicz in a kibbutz named after him. In fact, in 1951, at the suggestion of the Kibbutz Artzi, Nathan Rappaport sculpted a massive statue of Anielewicz, placing it in front of the water tower damaged during the War of Independence. “Mordechai Anielewicz and his comrades fell on their way here,” said Kovner at the unveiling ceremony. There was no doubt, he continued, that “the spirit of the war in the ghetto helped fly the flags of the War of Independence. Liberated Israel was born in the last bunker in the ghetto. In that there is reparation and redemption.”19 At that point Kovner articulated the direction the museum (which was then but an idea) would take: The fighting in Europe led to the fighting in Eretz Israel, bridged by the exodus from Europe and the struggle to immigrate to Eretz Israel. Therefore the museum is called “From Holocaust to Resurrection.” In the late 1950s a public council was established, supported by the country’s most distinguished personalities, including the president, prime minister, speaker of the Knesset, and the chief of staff. Initiated by the kibbutz members, the council collected a substantial fund dedicated to “preserving the memory of Mordechai Anielewicz and the Yad

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Mordechai 1948 fighters” and built an impressive and original structure.20 Later, Kovner was called on to fill the museum with exhibits. “We didn’t have anything to put in the museum after it was built,” said the museum’s archivist. “Abba’s spirit and intellect designed the inside. We went along with whatever he said,” and what he said led to the compromise between the two sides: the members of the kibbutz, who were mainly interested in showing their contribution to the War of Independence and who were of the opinion that erecting a statue and naming the place for Anielewicz were sufficient reminders of the Holocaust; and the members of Moreshet, who wanted to build the museum that had not been built, despite the many discussions, to preserve the memory of the Hashomer Hatzair in the Holocaust. The compromise was made, and Shika Katzir, another decades-long museum activist, recounted the following probably apocryphal story: When the foundations were excavated, Kovner paid a visit and rejected the building’s position because it did not face the statue of Anielewicz, and despite the additional cost, the architects decided to redig them.21 Once opened, the Yad Mordechai museum offered a continuous historical narrative. It begins with a descent to the roots of Jewish history, to the seven pillars of Jewish existence: way of life, faith, education, the Hebrew alphabet, community, intellectuality, and the miracle of rebirth—all of which served as a basis for the themes later developed in the Diaspora Museum. The small Jewish town, the heart of Jewish existence and therefore the fixed center of Kovner’s creativity, reappears at the wing’s center and is accompanied by a text called “Towns of the Past.” A wall covered entirely by pictures of children provides a profound sense of what was lost. Above the town the Holocaust is presented in five sections, the same as those at Yad Vashem Museum, which opened in 1972: the rise of the Nazis to power and the Nuremberg laws, the invasion of Poland, the yellow star and ghetto life, Auschwitz-Birkenau (i.e., the destruction of European Jewry), rebellion and uprising, and finally the struggle to reach Eretz Israel. The From Holocaust to Resurrection Museum conveys the message that there were rebellions in the ghettos and concentration camps and partisan fighting in the forests. However, Kovner’s presentation was masterful in that it was completely apolitical; rebellion and fight-

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ing were independent of place or political orientation, and Jews of the entire political spectrum participated in them. He used the word rebellion, not revolt, to indicate resistance in all its forms and to honor every person who stood fast against the Nazis, regardless of how. Nothing in the museum, situated on a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz and named after Mordechai Anielewicz, emphasized the central part played by Hashomer Hatzair in the rebellions or mentioned it or any other movement. The only exceptions were a picture of Anielewicz and the flag from the Hashomer Hatzair chapter in Warsaw; no mention was made of Kovner himself, not in party or movement or personal terms.22 It is thus possible to say that Kovner himself introduced an additional inconsistency: He constantly urged the movement to build a museum dedicated to its struggle during the Holocaust, and when the opportunity to do so presented itself, he did not seize it. The museum was opened with great fanfare in 1968 to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Kovner got up on stage and read his poem My Little Sister, which had been published the previous year. There was silence as his words rang out, not entirely intelligible at first hearing but fascinating nevertheless. Visitors would come here to mourn the sister, symbolizing the entire nation passing through the smokestacks. Reading the poem meant that the roots did not begin with the pipeline to the Negev or with the battles waged during the War of Independence but rather with the crematoria, and without connections to those roots there was no existence. When the museum was dedicated in 1968, one year after the Six Day War, Yad Mordechai found itself on the main road south to the Sinai peninsula, and the number of visitors rose to more than 100,000 a year.23 Thus Kovner’s message has had an impact on hundreds of thousands of visitors. In 1971 Hano’ar Hatzioni erected Masua (“torch”) at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak, a museum and library with broad educational activities and widely attended annual gatherings, all of which profit from their location in the center of the country. The museum at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagettaot continued to grow as well. The 1970s were economically good years in Israel, and the kibbutzim enjoyed increased prosperity, reflected in both museums. However, Moreshet’s archive was moved

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from Merhavia to Givat Haviva in 1963, its secretariat and publishing house and the Yalkut Moreshet were in Tel Aviv, and the museum and the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies were at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. Kovner and his comrades had no place of their own and were always riding around the country on public transportation, always guests and never hosts. In the early 1970s meetings were held to discuss the deterioration of the museum at Yad Mordechai; the fund collected by the public council had dwindled, and the end of Moreshet was being considered, and “it was uncertain whether anyone really cared,” said Korczak bitterly. Indeed, the museum Kovner built at Yad Mordechai was not a tribute to the movement, and neither was the Yalkut Moreshet. Both reflected Kovner’s care for the unity of the Jewish people, and that was perhaps the reason both were not sufficiently fostered by the movement. Still, they were Hashomer Hatzair institutions, and Kovner and his comrades felt the lack of interest, finding it both painful and insulting.24 Following another series of crises, resignations, and disappointments, Kovner realized that the response he wanted was not forthcoming, and in the spring of 1984 he resigned from his party’s committees for the last time. He no longer had any desire to deal with the issue, and hurt and offended, he turned his back on it. Only in the last year of his life, sick and undergoing treatment, did he make one more effort and draw up many detailed plans for a modest Moreshet building at Givat Haviva (which he had previously strenuously opposed if the building was going to be modest) and only on condition that across from it a Hashomer Hatzair chapter would be built, a true life-size replica of one of those lost in Europe.25 After Ya’ari died in February 1987, Kovner, dying himself from esophageal cancer, proposed that the entire project be named after Ya’ari: “a fitting memorial for the figure that generated and led an entire national movement.” The last time they met, at a wedding at Kibbutz Eilon, Ya’ari asked him to deliver his eulogy. Kovner agreed on condition that he would also say the mourner’s Kaddish, the traditional prayer banned for decades by the secular socialist movements.26 By the time Ya’ari passed away, Kovner’s vocal cords had been operated on and he could not speak, and both their paths, sometimes trodden together and sometimes separately, ended that year.

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Immediately after Kovner’s death in September 1987, “a personal letter from Abba Kovner about Moreshet and beyond,” which he had not had the time to mail before he died, was sent to the members of the Kibbutz Artzi Executive Committee. The letter contained a summary of Kovner’s ideas about teaching Jewish heritage and dealt with his many ideas for constructing a building suitable for housing and strengthening the movement (even if it were the modest one at Givat Haviva) before the labor and pioneering movements went ideologically and spiritually bankrupt, which would be far more disastrous than all their financial debts.27 Three months after Kovner died, the Executive Committee held a meeting to mourn him, its atmosphere one of self-flagellation. “We broke his heart,” said some of the members, and the movement, whose main asset was the heritage of its courage, had forsaken him.28 Korczak, angry and offended, mourning the man she had loved and collaborated with for almost fifty years, and only three months away from her own death, rose and said angrily that “Abba Kovner does not need to worry about the preservation of his name in history,” nor did the other Hashomer Hatzair members who had given their lives in the ghetto and the forests, without asking for anything in return, and for years those who remained alive had performed every task the movement itself had to take on while no one in the Kibbutz Artzi cared at all. “It’s enough to drive you crazy. We’re the only movement without a memorial site. Hano’ar Hazioni can have one [Masua] and Hashomer Hatzair can’t?” Korczak, who almost never expressed criticism in public, then said, “The way this movement and its current leadership look, it is unworthy of the movement we had abroad,” a statement no one has forgotten to this day.29 Korczak died and was buried next to Kovner in the cemetery of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh. In the early 1990s Grossman, who was no longer a member of the Knesset, took it upon herself to continue the fight for the construction of a large-scale building for Moreshet. In 1993 she received a blow to the head, fell into a coma, and died three years later without ever regaining consciousness. Since the 1980s, Gutman and Bauer have devoted their time to academic work and Yad Vashem. The others, none of them young, all live on their respective kibbutzim. The younger generation, including Korczak’s daughter, Yonat Rotbein, has taken the task

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upon itself, and today Givat Haviva is a modest center of education, publication, and commemoration. In April 1998, after much deliberation and many changes of plans, the Mordechai Anielewicz Memorial Youth Movement Center was opened there. Kempner’s comment, short and to the point as always, was, “How many places have to be named after Anielewicz? Why not name it after Abba and Ruzka?!” 30 It was in the early 1970s that Kovner threw up his hands in despair over the way the Kibbutz Artzi leadership treated the memory of Hashomer Hatzair during the Holocaust, and he poured all his energy into founding the Diaspora Museum, which became his chef d’oeuvre—so much so that one of the two requests in his will was related to it. Kovner asked that his name be noted as author of three of the inscriptions on the walls of the Diaspora Museum, which stands on the campus of Tel Aviv University, although he had in fact written most of them. The three short inscriptions contain the essence of his conception for the museum and the history of the Jewish people, and they are his final statement. The first inscription is on the wall opposite the entrance and speaks of the people as dispersed among other nations, in various places for long periods of time, saying “and they are one family.” The unity of Israel for all time in all places is the first message, reinforced by constantly changing pictures of faces, all different but all belonging to the same nation, as Kovner believed. Beyond the entrance is the Gate of the Family, rich with depictions of holidays and customs, with the second inscription bearing Kovner’s name: “No Jew is alone on his Holy Days.” No Jew lives alone, creates alone; the individual belongs to the whole nation, and the nation’s creation is his or hers as well because of the contribution of everyone to it. Thus Kovner conceived the individual as part of the whole and defined Judaism as “the culture of a public,” not in the sense of a forced, strangling collective but as a warm, unified belonging, protecting the individual’s right to oppose and argue, as Kovner himself had done his whole life, believing that discussion would only enrich and make fruitful. Before the exit is the third inscription, which says, “To remember the past, to live in the present, to have faith in the future,” invoking the understanding that the history of the Jewish people, which is one entity,

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and the history of the many individual Jews within it, make an unbroken chain, the links of which no person or idea has the right to sever. For eight years, between 1971 and 1978, when the doors of the Diaspora Museum were opened to the public, Kovner spent most of his time reading, studying, analyzing, and writing. He examined materials and concepts and weighed them for “that project to which I am enslaved”31 and planned a way to present to coming generations the 2,000 years of Jewish history in exile. When the project was accomplished, Kovner recounted in retrospect the history of his idea for the Diaspora Museum. It was during his many travels throughout the Diaspora that Kovner’s idea of a visual project took shape, one that would represent the Jewish world that had been destroyed and the lights and shadows of its lost riches, lest the present intellectual Jewish world be so narrow as to be endangered.32 Kovner did not know that at the same time the same idea was being formulated in another place. In the early 1960s close friends of Nachum Goldmann had the idea of constructing a large building that would commemorate Goldmann’s longtime activity as president of the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization and his work as a principal figure in the German reparations negotiations. Their first thought was a building to house the Congress’s offices, but Goldmann, one of whose chief arguments with Ben-Gurion and the leaders of Israel was their attitude toward the Diaspora, wished to devote a site in Israel to presenting the Diaspora in a fashion worthy of it. George Wise, one of Goldmann’s close friends and then first president of the newly opened Tel Aviv University, decided to include such a site in the plans for the future development of the university and to involve the Tel Aviv municipality as well.33 In the mid-1960s work began on a large structure with funding from several sources, although no one actually knew what the building would house. In 1968 the building was ready, huge and empty, and countless meetings took place in Israel and abroad, attended by interior designers, writers, and historians, each with their own idea of what should be included. At the beginning of 1971 Kovner and Goldmann met, both worried about the relationship between Israel and the

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Diaspora and especially between Zionism and the Jewish people’s past, and made plans together. A Planning Committee started its work, and Kovner was appointed museum curator.34 Shlomo Simonsohn, then university rector and head of the Department of Jewish History, has asked to state for the record that “the concept of the Diaspora Museum was Kovner’s and his alone. I was extremely critical of his plans, including the ones which were accepted [by the Planning Committee]. We sat and argued for hours, and every now and then one of us slammed his hand on the table and said ‘It will never be like that!’ but we never really fought about anything, and everything was done in a spirit of mutual respect and admiration. The concept, I repeat, was his.”35 Indeed, most of the main ideas and details were Kovner’s alone, and afterward a team was chosen to process and implement them. The most important concepts were the same as those of Kovner’s previously planned museums, which developed like a long poem with no plot, only a thread of narration. The museum told the life of the Jews, flowing from the Gate of the Family to the Gate of the Community, stopping at the memorial area, proceeding to the Gates of Faith and Creativity, and then to the Gate Among the Nations, which shows the long history of the Jewish existential struggle, ending with the longings for Israel and the Gate of the Return to Zion. The gates, put in this order, tell a story: It is the story of the Jews, whose strength is rooted in their family and community. This strength enables them to endure suffering, represented in the memorial area, and come out strengthened in their faith. The sensitivity caused by suffering expresses itself in enormous creativity, and both strength and creativity sustain them in their struggle to exist in the Diaspora until they finally reach the shores of home. Kovner tried to narrate the story within a total Jewish concept of time. “Past = present = future,” he used to write to himself, separated only by equal signs to accentuate their unity and continuity, much as the last inscription on the museum walls.36 Kovner decided on seven themes for the gates and on thirteen stations for the Gate Among the Nations, the number of stations where the Jewish people stopped when coming out of Egypt—sacred numbers, key numbers, as if some higher power directed them in their path. As to how the themes and stations would be portrayed physically, it quickly

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became clear that because of its various tragedies, the Jewish people did not have a sufficient number of objects to illustrate the glory of its past, and in any case Jewish art was never rich in painting or sculpture. Therefore, and prodded by Karl Katz, the New York Metropolitan Museum computer and hologram expert, it was decided that the museum itself would both present and dramatize the story. It would become the open book Kovner wanted, totally separated from the outside in a windowless building, and within, a creation that would make a whole of its various parts. It would be one continuous tale, one that Zionist historiography had tried to erase. Simonsohn, a historian of medieval Jewish communities, immediately joined ranks with Kovner. They both thought that the leap “from the Bible to the Palmach” was nonsense, but it had managed nevertheless to become ingrained in a whole generation.37 The Israeli system of education in the 1950s and 1960s concentrated on teaching the history of the First and Second Temple periods, which lasted for the thousand years the people lived on its land, ignored 2,000 years of exile, and continued with modern Zionism. In the Diaspora Museum Kovner could break out of the confines of his kibbutz and movement and enjoy surges of creativity. When the plan had been accepted in principle, he spent eight years working toward its realization, until the museum was finally opened in 1978. He invested a tremendous amount of work in each theme, leaving behind him dozens of thick files, which are still in the museum’s archive and in his room at Ein Hahoresh. They reflect his broad, profound knowledge of Jewish sources, history, philosophy, and literature. The Sea of Halachah (Jewish Religious Law), a booklet Kovner wrote for the museum visitor to clarify the waves and tides of that particular sea, explains hundreds of names of individuals, places, and books. Simonsohn has said that “Kovner had a fantastic amount of knowledge, really unbelievable, but it was organized in his head, not according to what happened in history,” and they argued over it until the museum opened.38 Every inscription on every wall, every bit of film or diorama was drawn and redrawn, drafted and redrafted, and then examined, discussed, and argued over by members of a scientific committee who consulted outside experts. The final decision was made with Elie Ben-Gal, who had been invited in 1972 by Kovner and Shaike Weinberg to join

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Kovner (far right) and Elie Ben-Gal (far left) presenting the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv University to the Belz rabbis, 1978. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Kovner family.

them as chief historian. The daily work was divided, with Kovner in charge of ideas and directions, Ben-Gal preparing the historical material after consulting with professors from the nearby Tel Aviv University Department of Jewish History, Ida Huberman, who had taught art history, looking for illustrative materials, and interpreter Miriam Schlesinger taking care of translations. Huberman had been told she would not be able to work with Kovner for more than three weeks, and then she worked with him on a daily basis for six years. He knew how to listen and how to convince others, to accept other people’s ideas and get the best work out of them, she said. He used to make tea for himself and the secretaries and was open and warm, enjoying excellent relations with all the people he worked with.39 At the same time, Kovner was caught up in one more project related to the Diaspora Museum, the writing of The Scrolls of Fire: A Nation

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Fighting for Its Life, fifty-two chapters “of persecution and affliction, of standing firm,” as Kovner termed it, to be read one a week throughout the year, much as the weekly portions of the Torah are read. The scrolls are located at the foot of the Memorial Column that cuts through the three floors of the building. Though large in size, no chapter is more than half a page long, a few sentences, a short description of a situation, all of them concise, written in Kovner’s wonderful, multilevel Hebrew, all of them cutting the visitor to the quick and bringing tears to the eye. Kovner was asked what point there was in having a book of Jewish martyrs in a building in the heart of Tel Aviv? Who needed all those gloomy memories? Wouldn’t it be better to turn one’s gaze toward the blazing light of the sky, the light of Amos Oz’s Under This Blazing Light, which had come to signify Israel “here and now”? Kovner was accused of missing the main point of Judaism, which was to be a culture of life and not to indulge in mourning, to concentrate destruction and disaster memorial days on a few dates and not to mourn every week. Kovner said, “I did not begin the book . . . out of a love of suffering or a hatred of persecutors. I would dare to say that it was born of anxiety. A kind of fear of dying from thirst. . . . Every now and again the Jew finds himself alone in the heart of the desert. The worst desert is internal, when spiritual and intellectual desiccation threatens to bring a slow death. Because it is not death that is the worst but life’s insignificance.” 40 And there was no future significance as far as he was concerned without roots in the past. In 1978, when everything was ready, Ephraim Katzir, then president of Israel (whom Kovner had not seen since the nakam affair), inaugurated the building, and the museum opened its doors to the public and was an instant success. There were hordes of visitors and a wealth of educational and public activities. In 1981 Kovner stood, proud and surprised, before the museum’s international council, which listed an impressive number of Jewish leaders in its ranks, and said that the museum was the right thing at the right time. It was within the precinct of an academic institution and was nourished by scholars, as he had hoped the Moreshet House would be. He gave heart-felt thanks to Professor Haim Ben-Shachar, then president of Tel Aviv University, for giving the

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museum space, and to Professor Simonsohn for their fruitful discussions. It gave him satisfaction, he said, that within the short period of three years the museum had become one of the few places that every individual in the country had to visit, along with Masada, the Western Wall, and Yad Vashem, a museum suitable for everyone. Kovner had more plans for using the museum for social and cultural purposes, including Bar Mitzvah ceremonies, photodocumentaries, a humor corner, and education facilities for teaching youth from abroad.41 During its first years the Diaspora Museum indeed turned into an intellectual and spiritual center. Visitors came and expressed their ideas during tours of the museum. Contributions flowed in, especially from Jewish communities abroad, which suddenly found a house for themselves. Sam Bloch, who knew Kovner well during the war and was a determined supporter of the museum, was instrumental in raising the contributions, especially on Kovner’s visits abroad. Conferences and study groups were attended by intellectuals and academicians. Among them was Avraham Sutzkever, who used to come and sit with Kovner, twin souls. They invented new patterns of Yiddish to broaden its expressive capabilities, and Kovner would become transcendent, said the listeners, as though hovering above the earth.42 Nevertheless, criticism was quick in coming. Certain elements were strongly emphasized, others were omitted, and the religious tradition received too much attention, said the critics, forgetting that it was only natural because it was around religion that family, institutional, and community ceremonies had been held. The theme Among the Nations, which told the story of the Jewish people among other nations, beginning with the destruction of the Temple, ended, to all intents and purposes, in the eighteenth century. With the exception of a few parts of the Gates of Creativity and of Return, there was nothing after the eighteenth century, either because the museum ran out of space or because Kovner’s full creation could relate only to the centuries in which inner Jewish life was whole, and he could not cope with its fractionalization in later centuries. In fact, the basic element missing from the Diaspora Museum is the life of the Jewish people during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in its secular, leftist, socialist, Communist, Bundist, assimilative, non-Zionist aspects. Actually, wrote Kovner in his notes,

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a free, noncanonical, nonreligious system had a fundamental problem of how to transmit the public experience from generation to generation, and by doing so, he clearly defined the problem of making Israeli society into a unified national whole. It is possible that by refusing to add a new wing to the museum, Kovner was sending a message that he could not openly send in a predominantly secular society, namely, that the role of religion, or at least of tradition, as a unifying force, was not obsolete. Criticism of the emphasis on religion was harsh. According to Weinberg, when the museum was opened, Gershom Scholem, the great Jewish mysticism scholar, sent Fania, his wife, to see it before he himself decided to go. She returned home and said in derision, “Three Hashomer Hatzair members [Kovner, Weinberg, and Ben-Gal, all leftist atheists] built a synagogue,” and he decided he would never set foot in it, and he never did.43 The museum was also criticized as not being Zionist enough because it did not continue beyond the Gate of the Return to Zion, but according to Kovner, when visitors left the museum, they stood on the veranda facing the university, its lawns and buildings effervescent and creative, and across the street were the white buildings of the first Hebrew city on the shore of the Mediterranean—it had plenty of Zionism. On the other hand, the museum was criticized for being too Zionist and for sending an anti-Diaspora message, because it started and ended with the land of Israel as if there were no other solution. There were critics who wondered where the stories of the individual Jewish communities were, especially the Sephardim. There was too much, they said, of Eastern Europe, while the Jewish communities of the United States, of the New World, were barely represented. Modern anti-Semitism, the Holocaust as history, Zionism, building Eretz Israel, and founding the Jewish state were all represented either symbolically or merely hinted at. Kovner opposed building a new wing to house everything that the critics thought was missing. In his opinion the existing exhibition was successful and sufficient, proved by the fact that the museum attracted enormous crowds and was considered a great success. All that notwithstanding, the Board of Curators, of which Kovner was chairman, in accordance with Weinberg’s proposal and in direct contradiction to Kovner’s wishes, decided to build a new wing.44

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Kovner became ill and died. Weinberg, after many successful years of directing the museum, left for Washington, D.C., where he built the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has many elements in common with the Diaspora Museum, Moreshet activities, the museum at Yad Mordechai, and Kovner’s other plans. The new wing stood empty for years and now houses classrooms and workshops, exhibit halls, and a cafeteria. The permanent exhibition has remained unchanged since its inauguration. Kovner is mentioned little in the museum, and his name appears under the three inscriptions on the walls and on a small plaque at the end of the visitors’ route, among twenty others. However, according to Simonsohn, “Even if the museum closes its doors tomorrow, it will have performed its duty. Two or three visits to it, one in elementary school, one in high school and one during the army service, and you have a barrier against the black hole which is the Zionist negation of the Diaspora, and no one can take that away from Kovner.”

S i x t e e n   The Kibbutz Rebbe “I am alone in the fields”

For forty years, from the time he joined in 1946 until his death in 1987, Kovner lived on Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh. He considered it his home and extended family, its members as his companions and comrades treading the same path. He served as handyman and secretary, in charge of cultural activities and painting, gave out food in the dining hall, headed the local chapter of Hashomer Hatzair, taught the kibbutz children how to draw, and was preacher and rebbe, as a rabbi is fondly—and sometimes ironically—called. His impressive knowledge of Judaism flowed from him naturally. Indeed, Kovner did not always quite seem to belong to Ein Hahoresh, an atheist-leftist Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz, whose members, especially during the early years, ate nonkosher food, kept pigs, and did not bother with weddings.1 Determined neither to allow the Holocaust to erase East European Jewish culture nor to permit Zionism and the kibbutz to beget a lifestyle devoid of ceremony and Jewish content, Kovner tried to create a new kind of community at Ein Hahoresh, a Jewish community with all its joys and sorrows. Thus beginning in the early 1950s, in a community that in theory was supposed to distance itself from Jewish tradition and create a new lifestyle, Kovner forged his own synthesis between old and new. According to his good friend Rabbi Yitzhak (Itz) Greenberg of New York, part of Kovner’s greatness was to understand that Judaism’s internal significance was not limited to time or place and that there was a need to bridge the gap between what had been and what should be. “After the Holocaust he was ready to scrap the old ways and start anew. He created a combination of Jewish values and secular realism, of continuity and innovation.”2 Kovner considered Judaism as “a consensus within a difference of opinion” and difference of opinion as

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“the cornerstone of Jewish culture,” and he was prepared to continue building from within the disagreement.3 Kovner rejected the approach of the movement’s leaders, who had themselves come from religious or traditional homes but had adopted the movement’s motto that “the old world had to be razed to its foundations” and who loathed the idea of returning to the customs of the Diaspora. From the day of Kovner’s arrival in Eretz Israel, they were suspicious that he would try to put a skullcap on the movement’s head. However, year after year, holiday and festival after ceremony and anniversary, instead of confronting them, Kovner would suggest yet another idea, attempting to change habits from within until the kibbutz was a complete creation, a Jewish-kibbutz-collective whose existence would draw its inspiration from the Jewish foundation, which would in turn be renewed through the existence of the kibbutz. Replacing kibbutz ideology with Judaism would mean admitting that the kibbutz movement had failed to create a society of value and significance, unthinkable for the movement’s leaders in the 1950s; only a combination would be acceptable, if that. Kovner wanted to integrate the two to perpetuate not only the Jewish community that had been destroyed but also the lost youth movement, his European Hashomer Hatzair. When Kovner first became active in kibbutz life, he met with opposition only on isolated occasions, because he filled a vacuum and provided satisfaction for personal and collective needs that had previously gone unfulfilled. Stalin, “the light of nations,” was still alive, socialism was a local replacement for religion, and the movement’s leaders had rebelled against the Jewish homes from which they came. No one could tell Kovner to stop because he was a representative of the Jewish world that had been destroyed. The founders of Hashomer Hatzair who had come to Eretz Israel before World War II had also done their part to destroy that world, because their rebellion against religion and tradition was a prelude to the physical destruction.4 They had begun distancing themselves from Judaism in the 1920s, when no one had the faintest idea of the tragedy lying in wait, and after the Holocaust Kovner planted himself in front of them like a constant reminder of their transgressions. They could not continue denying their lost homes while he continued trying to resurrect them. Perhaps they were afraid that he would reveal

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their hidden longings for Yiddishkeit (familiar Jewish habits and folklore) and homesickness for their dead parents and home, and thus they agreed to grant him at least a certain amount of leeway. Kovner composed a new version of the traditional mourners’ Kaddish that was read at funerals, kept a record of every kibbutz member who died, and wrote long eulogies. He never accepted the kibbutz funeral service, the absolute silence kept at the interment and the fact that mourning lasted only one day instead of the traditional seven (shivah). “Something has to be said at funerals,” he would grumble, and on one occasion, after a long and particularly depressing silence at the kibbutz cemetery, he rose and broke the silence by reciting the Kaddish, his iconoclasm infuriating the older members.5 On the other hand, Kovner designed a wedding ceremony for Ein Hahoresh and presided over marriages for more than thirty years. He reworked poet Shaul Tcherni­ khovsky’s Elka’s Wedding, an idyll depicting countryside Jews, into a play that was produced many times, making the shtetl come alive again with scenery, costumes, and dances, with the kibbutz members gladly participating and enthusiastically dancing the shereleh, the traditional wedding dance. Kovner also designed the scenery and directed the show. In 1954, after the play’s premiere performance, with great satisfaction he wrote in Ein Hahoresh’s newsletter that the applause proved the younger generation had enjoyed itself the most, showing the skeptics that a people’s past is never far away or alien if they keep its treasures alive.6 Elka’s Wedding was not staged every year but only occasionally, when several couples wed on the same day. Poet Elisha Porat wrote that participating in it was “an uplifting experience, the kind that gave meaning to your life.”7 Kovner worked hard on the marriage ceremony and renewed it every few years. In 1967, immediately after the Six Day War, seven couples married on the same day. Kovner was not satisfied until he ordered the construction of a permanent bridal canopy made of embossed metallic palm fronds symbolizing an ancient roof, and he demanded that the general kibbutz assembly vote that weddings be held only once a year, on a prearranged date during the summer, at which time the entire kibbutz would gather for a festive al fresco meal that would also serve as a reception for the families’ guests. Toward the end of the 1960s, however,

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Kovner’s drawing of a shtetl prepared for a kibbutz wedding stage decoration, 1980. Courtesy of the Kovner family.

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individual aspirations began to erode the kibbutz’s sense of togetherness. Kovner was willing to compromise and accept individual weddings at dates convenient for the couples, but only on the condition that the whole kibbutz participate in the celebration.8 In 1984, after having been in charge of weddings for thirty years and although he enjoyed the role, Kovner asked to be replaced, especially because when he saw another Jewish family being born, he had “a sensation of Jewish revenge.”9 Years after his death the wedding ceremony at Ein Hahoresh has not changed; it is just as he fashioned it—the palm fronds, a goblet of wine, an enormous challah, and a page for each couple in the kibbutz wedding book that he started, with pictures and a few words about the bride and groom. However, since his death Elka’s Wedding has not been performed (although the members still dance the shereleh), either because the younger members consider it outmoded or because once Kovner died, there was no one who could launch it, or because financial reasons have limited the kibbutzim’s cultural life. Kovner had hoped that the kibbutz would adopt the Friday evening ceremony of Hashomer Hatzair in Europe, during which the Hebrew sources would be read, but it never did, and most of the sources he wanted to use remained in a drawer without the knowledge of Ein Hahoresh’s members.10 Kovner found another way to bring the legends and stories to the kibbutz by holding cultural evenings specifically devoted to them and by tacking them onto evenings intended for other purposes, including them in stories about his life and the last generations of his family in Vilna. Then he spoke as though possessed, setting the rhythm with his feet and transcending himself, enthralling the tribe with his voice until no one knew where the legend ended and history began.11 On Passover eve in 1965, after fifteen years of attempts to blend the new and the traditional, Kovner summed up for himself by saying, “We need tradition! . . . Today there is an ever-greater tendency to return to the traditional Haggadah [the story of the Exodus from Egypt, read on Passover eve] and celebration of the holiday.”12 In previous years each kibbutz movement had written its own version of the Haggadah, and Kovner hoped that eventually each generation and movement

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would make its own contribution, thus creating one old-new text for the whole country, much as the traditional Haggadah had been born, layer upon layer. The search for an appropriate version, by communities termed secular, was “one of the unconscious sacred works of this generation,” an act of creation performed in faith, because after all, the kibbutz is made up of the faithful. Kovner never forgot where he had come from and what had happened there. The new exodus of immigration to Israel took place without mother and father, he said, in a kind of severe, primal detachment, which was perhaps even a sin. For years there was no one at the seder table with gray hair, no children to ask the Four Questions. “Members were ageless, they had no children, no parents.” However, the story of the holiday committed them to remembering those who had left Egypt under Pharaoh, and those who had not escaped from the Holocaust in time, their fathers and mothers and the entire Jewish people, were lost. If a thousand members and guests on some kibbutzim rose to their feet after World War II to read in their Haggadah that they were commanded to remember the martyrs of the Holocaust, he said, and if ever since they had been rising to their feet every year, then even if the kibbutzim lacked the religious rituals associated with the holiday, they performed the most ritualistic act possible.13 Until the mid-1960s, on the night of the Passover seder the members of Ein Hahoresh would rise and declaim “Let Us Remember,” the Zachor, a biblical imperative commanding Jews to remember their history, that Kovner wrote for Holocaust Memorial Day, which was then incorporated into their version of the Haggadah. However, Kovner wanted a distinctive, particular event and proposed that on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day a siren would sound as a sign of mourning and the families would stand in silence for two minutes, after which the oldest child would pick six flowers from the family’s garden and place them in a vase. The idea was accepted because of its “shortness, delicacy and symbolism,” and it became a local tradition.14 On Yom Kippur eve in 1974, a year after the war that rocked the country to its foundations, Kovner was interviewed by the editor of Ein Hahoresh’s local newsletter. He proposed that a general assembly be held every year in the kibbutz dining hall on Yom Kippur eve for recon-

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ciliations, the reaffirmation of friendships, and a return to the Hassidic soul bonding that had characterized kibbutz fellowship in previous decades. During the years immediately following the war, the Israeli public was licking its wounds and he wanted the souls of the fallen to be “bound up in our lives as our only escape from the current situation.”15 An annual discussion and self-examination was instituted at Ein Hahoresh, begun by a reading of Kol Nidrei (the Yom Kippur prayer), despite the continued protests of some of the older members, who saw it as religious coercion. The custom continued until the late 1990s, and if it is no longer as strictly adhered to as it was, it is not, according to members of Ein Hahoresh, because, when Kovner died, the members shook off the customs he instituted but rather because of internal developments, such as the growing need for privacy within the collective. In the early years about a hundred members were taking part in each of the various study groups and activities Kovner organized as chairman of the cultural committee, including study of Hebrew, the Bible, the Jews in their own country, economics, and related issues. The singing group and drama circle gave performances for the members, and there was an oral literary newspaper that enjoyed great success. Most important, however, was that everything was based on their own efforts.16 During the 1950s Kovner wanted to found an artists’ commune at Ein Hahoresh, to attract independent intellectual and artistic elements to the kibbutz. The idea was never realized and was even considered an insult to the sacred position of manual labor, but in the meantime an intellectual elite had gathered on the kibbutz, and it was no wonder that writers and poets and other creative people worked there.17 Many, including poets from outside the kibbutz, gathered to hear the local complement of young poets on poetry reading evenings, which enjoyed great success as well. The effort invested by Kovner in every holiday and celebration created a kind of a common cultural language, and one abundant with symbols and specific terms that, according to kibbutz members, brought people together and gave them a sense of belonging. The language was multidimensional and consisted of music, dance, painting, sound, and words, and “Abba was the dramaturge of all of life’s milestones.”18 In fact, at Ein Hahoresh Kovner completed the Jewish cycle of remembrance, in which every year there is a repetition of ceremonies that the

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entire public participates in and partakes of with the command to “tell your children” to transmit traditional and spiritual treasures from generation to generation. The kibbutz, said Kovner’s son, Michael, had to provide a cultural alternative, and for individuals to be creative, they had to join in the collective, the kibbutz, in the movement and the national entities. The creation would spring from the individuals’ relationship with Jewish sources, a relationship in which the members would see the sources as integral to their lives, and they would participate in that life’s ongoing design. Such were Kovner’s philosophy and beliefs, opposed as he was to the idea that any creation could come from a lone individual without that person being joined to the public around him or her.19 Kovner, who always focused on the individual as part of society, could not have had any other opinion, and it is not difficult to imagine that today he would vehemently oppose postmodernism and post-Zionism. In 1980, as Ein Hahoresh’s fiftieth anniversary approached, Kovner’s creative energy reached new heights, some of them too extreme for the kibbutz. By 1980 Kovner did not belong to the rank and file but was the local rebbe and a national personality who had received many awards, a man who had brought great honor to the kibbutz and given them every reason to be satisfied. However, if they had tried to implement all his ideas, they would still be preparing for the celebrations. Kovner presented his suggestions more than a year in advance and headed the committee responsible for them. He had three pet ideas: the “kibbutz notebook,” the erection of a multipurpose cultural center, and the events of the holidays themselves. In addition, Kovner wanted a project to bring back children who had been born on the kibbutz and had left, a month per year for the study of Jewish sources, a daily hour of study before the workday began, cleaning of the kibbutz grounds, the hanging of informative signs and the placement of garbage cans in convenient locations, a “garden patrol,” and kibbutz member participation in various national volunteer activities (especially programs to support a community center, Arab villages, young kibbutzim, and youth in distress). He wanted the history of Ein Hahoresh written, and he wanted a prize-bearing “treasure hunt,” with clues about the kibbutz, held. He wanted to end the practice of hiring outside labor, to set

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up a special team to bring members financial and economic information about the kibbutz and to keep them up to date, to introduce five minutes of calisthenics in the workplace, to modernize the social services that kibbutz members were entitled to, and to renew the singing group, the orchestra, and the drama club. And there were many other issues Kovner brought up—too numerous to mention, all thoroughly detailed. As a start, in 1979 Kovner had the entire kibbutz population, 830 in all, photographed on the soccer field, and the picture appeared on Ein Hahoresh’s New Year’s card that year.20 The Ein Hahoresh notebook was Kovner’s effort to turn the kibbutz into an old-new community. It was handwritten on parchment, and its velvet bindings were run through with silver thread, making it look like a Jewish community notebook ( pinkas kehilah) preserved for hundreds of years. The notebook recreated, in several volumes using sources from Ein Hahoresh’s archives, the chronicle of the kibbutz from the day it was founded. It dealt with social life, the farm, culture, education, the formulation of ideas, and demographic changes. In the dry language of recorded history, “it recounts the events of 50 years of theory and practice in building kibbutz society.”21 By the middle of 1979, after a visit to the Pompidou Center in Paris, Kovner thought it would be a good idea for Ein Hahoresh to have “a center for leisure-time culture.” In his opinion the French had solved the universal problem of how to attract people, young and old, to cultural centers, first by bringing them to facilities for play, entertainment, and day-to-day matters, and once there, by introducing them to libraries and archives. Enthusiastic about what he had seen in Paris, Kovner drew up a plan, well detailed as usual, most of which was accepted by the kibbutz weekly meeting for the jubilee program. It is not certain that the members really knew what they were voting for, because the facility was supposed to provide, in one unit that would be built by the kibbutz members themselves (!), room for a wide scope of academic, artistic, sport, and documentary activities, a full human experience, and a meeting place for the members for the “regeneration of kibbutz togetherness.” The reparations money that the kibbutz members received from Germany had been earmarked for exclusively public purposes, and Kovner proposed they use it to finance the center and through a

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cooperative project mend any divisions the money might cause in the kibbutz between Holocaust survivors and the non-Holocaust population.22 However, Ein Hahoresh could not permit itself the luxuries Kovner proposed, and in any case the reparations would not have been enough. In the meantime the funds had been used to build a theater and to renovate and enlarge the dining hall, which was officially opened with an evening of poetry and poets. In 1980 the jubilee celebrations began with the first production in the new theater, a play written and produced by Kovner, The Eleventh Commandment, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of Ein Hahoresh’s founders on the shores of Eretz Israel. Scenery was erected in the seating area as well as on stage, turning the theater into a ship, and pictures and slides were projected onto an enormous screen and onto the walls. The story was about immigration to Eretz Israel and was based on interviews held with eleven members, each of whom had come from a different country. The theme was the same one around which much of Kovner’s work revolved: Jews immigrating to Eretz Israel did not have to deny their roots and start a new identity. Their old identity was no less respectable; moreover, no one can start anew without roots. Each ship of legal and illegal immigrants brought newcomers from different places and backgrounds, each with his or her own story, and together they formed an epic of faith in the future of Eretz Israel, the unity of the Jewish people and the ingathering of the exiles, which is the eleventh commandment for all Jews. About 150 members participated, including the singing group, the orchestra, and dance troupes dressed in the national costumes of the countries from which the founding members came. Kovner was in his finest hour, exploiting his talents and imagination, sweeping the entire kibbutz along with him. The excitement generated by the event was echoed in letters, newspaper articles, and radio programs, although some members expressed reservations, in private and not in writing; they felt that the play was old-fashioned and that Kovner should not have insisted on directing it himself because his style was not suited to the 1980s, but it would not have seemed right to tell him that and dampen his enthusiasm.23 For Kovner, a new dining room and small theater were by no means enough, even if they had already proved themselves during the festivi-

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ties, nor could he accept the fact that at the beginning of the 1980s the kibbutz’s resources were not inexhaustible. He refused to give up his vision of a society that both worked and studied, and in 1983, after he had pressured them for two years, in a general meeting the members of Ein Hahoresh authorized the erection of Kovner’s multifunctional community center, but not by 1984. Their date was 2000, which meant, in other words, some time around the Second Coming. Kovner was deeply hurt and profoundly worried about the future and the bonds holding the kibbutz together.24 “The dream . . . and its broken pieces walked together down the same road,” he wrote (To, p. 41). In 1964, after the death of one of the kibbutz’s founding members, when daily life had quickly returned to normal, Kovner wrote fairly prophetic words: “I don’t know if simple, modest living leads to true friendship, but it is entirely possible that one day we will wake up like accountants, pen in hand, and tote up our gains and losses only to discover that there is nothing that will cure our spiritual and intellectual vacuity, our heartfelt craving for amity and mutual respect that go beyond committees to nominate committees. For if we have lost that, what good is living together?”25 In 1971 Kovner even went so far as to write to a friend that “the Divine Presence has departed the precincts of the kibbutz. Period.” The letter was published, without consulting him, in Al Hamishmar, the movement’s daily newspaper, on the front page in 24-point type. Hashomer Hatzair and Ein Hahoresh writhed in fury and until Kovner’s death bore a grudge against him for what he had written. According to Kempner, “They never forgot and never let him think they had,” and by “they” she always meant the movement leadership and its old guard.26 Kovner’s worries encompassed the nation at large. He doubted whether the bond between the people and the country had been in fact renewed because self-hatred prospered, children born on kibbutz­im were leaving the country, youngsters were going to India to look for spiritual enlightenment or becoming ultra-Orthodox, and worst of all, faith in basic values had been lost. The founding generation’s belief that a new world could be created from the ruins was too facile, and the great failing of the pioneer generation had been in dissociating itself from the continuum. Perhaps, Kovner asked rhetorically, we

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were wrong all along, and he answered himself immediately, saying that what three generations of pioneers had built “as the most wonderful endeavor in the history of the Jewish people, for generations to come, could not all possibly be merely an episode.”27 A true prophet, he went on, does not end his rebuke without offering consolation. “I pray for renewal. I am certain it will come.” In the 1980s Kovner used to end his speeches on a note of hope and reassurance to balance his gloomy analysis, and one by one Kovner’s quotations made their way into the language, and sections of his speeches were reprinted more than once in the kibbutz media, both during his life and especially after he died.28 Determined not to back down on what he considered a matter of life and death, Kovner decided not to act through the movement establishment, and he looked for more appropriate venues. When Elie Ben-Gal approached him after the new year of 1984, Kovner enthusiastically accepted his invitation to join him in the founding of a havura (a Talmudic group study): the Circle for Kibbutz Judaism. The group would include individuals from all the kibbutz movements and, judging from the list of those invited, would represent the intellectual elite. The letterhead would bear the Kovnerism “The Divine Presence has departed the precincts of the kibbutz,” with the addition of “Has it?” The first meeting, held in the Diaspora Museum, where Kovner worked with Ben-Gal for years, convened under Kovner’s definition, “The Kibbutz, a trend within Judaism.” About 200 participants arrived, to the surprise of the organizers. The success led to more meetings. Still, the Havura struggled to find minimal funding, because the various movements showed no enthusiasm for it.29 Kovner fell ill and stopped answering letters. He had never been a good correspondent, never answering immediately and always with great difficulty. Even letters to intimate friends begin with apologies for the amount of time that had passed since the writer’s letter had been received, the original letter lost under piles of paper. Some of the Havura members were offended, because “we wanted to have him as a spiritual leader, and even from the beginning he was very uncommunicative.” When Kovner died, the Havura was named after him. In its heyday in the early 1990s it had 300 members from 120 kibbutzim. Their avowed purpose was “to foster a Jewish way of life within the

The Kibbutz Rebbe

kibbutz framework, using the extant sources and in the spirit of the Socialist-Zionist pioneering tradition.” This was actually a definition of Kovner’s views, and indeed the Havura used many of the sources and anthologies he prepared, many of which had been previously ignored. After several years, most of them spent in intellectual clarification, the group’s activities ground to a halt. The kibbutz movement’s leadership became increasingly composed of Sabras and offered less support, and consequently fewer meetings were held, and the hope that their voices would be heard waned considerably. In 1997, ten years after Kovner’s death, the Havura ceased functioning.30 On the personal level, Ein Hahoresh was Kovner’s home, a home of daily life, work, relationships with the people around him, a home that he loved wholeheartedly. Kibbutz-based creativity was important to Kovner, the warmth and communal spirit among the members, for better or for worse, a creativity steeped in lawns, flowers and scenery. The kibbutz appears in his poetry as the home waiting for him at the end of his wanderings. “I have a home, a wife and children, a citrus tree and cows which give more milk than any others in the whole world, and lawns, beautiful lawns . . . and I feel, I know absolutely that this is where I belong” (On the Narrow Bridge, p. 132). Kovner looked forward to the day when the kibbutz would also be the place his poetry belonged, natural and authentic like that of his fellow poets who had been born on the kibbutz; Kovner had been jealous of them for years. His first poem about the vineyard, whose grapes ran with blood instead of juice, asked the question, “How, my friend, is my poetry different from yours? / The place of its birth, the date of life / or the fact it tastes of ashes?” (To, p. 29). Slowly, however, from one book to the next, Kovner felt that something from the surrounding scenery flowed into his lines, mingling with the scenery of his childhood. Kovner was worried about alienation among people who lived shared lives in one place. One day he decided it was the duty of every member who met another to say hello, even if they had already met that day. That was why he insisted that every member attend every wedding; the glue keeping the kibbutz together had to be renewed daily to keep it from disintegrating. During the 1956 Sinai Campaign and the 1967 Six

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Day War Kovner divided the kibbutz into sections, allotted roles, set up a headquarters, and was himself nominated to serve as district commander. At kibbutz meetings where complicated social issues were discussed, even those dealing with financial matters, Kovner often solved the problem “and got the wagon out of the mud.” A word from Kovner was sometimes all it took, members used to say, and at the weekly meetings they listened to him with awe regardless of the topic. During his first years on the kibbutz, he wrote for the weekly newsletter fairly often. Later he wrote less but never stopped entirely, and when he became ill, he wrote a weekly column called “Alone with Everyone,” which expressed his feeling of being an individual living alone with his fear of approaching death yet still living among members. Throughout the years, he wrote poetry for the newsletter and philosophical ruminations. He sent letters to be published from his travels around the world; criticized events in the kibbutz, the country, the world, and the news media; and described the trials and tribulations of an aged member in the crowded dining room, where the girls showed themselves off on Friday evening. He made observations on a neighbor’s garden and experienced God descending into the vineyard and stroking a bunch of grapes. These short poems and articles, with all their humor, warmth, and direct appeal, especially to the younger members and children, were never anthologized, as though they were a separate category, a kind of continuation of the Hashomer Hatzair newsletter in Vilna, the underground bulletin, and the battle pages. They were the way the leader communicated with those he led, a private, intimate, exclusive relationship. Because Kovner was often on the road, both in the country and abroad, he worked only part-time on the kibbutz. Until the end of the 1950s he worked half-days in the vineyard and then sat down to write. Later he worked three days a week, either as a general handyman or in the kitchen or dining room, a jack-of-all-trades, at jobs where his absence would not have dire consequences. He paid great attention to detail, remembered what individual members liked to eat, waited for those who came late from work or from having gone somewhere, heated food and served it to them wearing a clean apron, and gave fancy French gourmet names to the ever-present meatloaf and meat balls. Working in the kitchen and the dining hall was, for all kibbutz intellectuals, a matter

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of noblesse oblige, said Yehuda Bauer, himself a decades-long member of a southern kibbutz. As handyman Kovner would unclog drains and paint walls, and he planned to paint each building a different color; the surprised members, however, vetoed the idea. He regarded doing such jobs, usually considered inferior, as showing respect for himself and for the other members. Every task he took upon himself became a mission, not to be despised and carrying with it personal responsibility. He served as kibbutz secretary several times, and according to general opinion, did an excellent job. It was Ein Hahoresh’s custom to appoint two secretaries, one young and one old, and once Kovner and Yishai Amrami worked together. According to Amrami (who later had a central position in Yad Vashem), Kovner was simply a rare phenomenon. His ability to communicate with people of all ages made him a bridge between the generations. He also served as head of the local Hashomer Hatzair chapter and went out with the children for long days of games and activities in the kibbutz fields, an experience none of them has forgotten. He cherished the three workdays a week he got from the kibbutz for writing and other activities, and he worked on the kibbutz itself for three days, enjoying the combination of writing and physical labor; actually, though, according to his daughter, Shlomit, there were no fixed hours for anything.31 Because Kovner worked half-time, when it came to physical work, he did not indulge himself and never invested less than all his strength and energy. After a convention of graduates of Vilna’s Hebrew Gymnasium, which was held in Tel Aviv on a stormy winter night during the early 1980s, Kovner stubbornly insisted on returning to Ein Hahoresh, which meant walking in the rain at night from the main road to the kibbutz because the last bus had already left and he had to work in the kitchen the following morning. When the member responsible for the work list arrived early one morning to get Kovner out of the car going to Tel Aviv, because he had forgotten he was supposed to work in the kitchen, Kovner collected the manuscript he had intended to bring to Sifriat Hapoalim and got out with perfectly good spirits, surprised with himself for having forgotten. He told a close friend that he felt completely free intellectually, and he also knew that his work as a poet had borne fruit, proved by the great success of the evenings of poetry

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reading; perhaps after all, he said, there was some educational value in his creativity. However, there was also some doubt as to the depth of Kovner’s relationship with his environment. Those around him were happy when a new book of poems was published, but how many of them read it and could comment on it? The most difficult thing for him, Kovner confided to a friend, was to accept that the exceptional person was always an exception, regardless of where he was.32 The truth of the matter was that with all the projects Kovner carried out on Ein Hahoresh, with all the respect and satisfaction his work engendered (and the fact that he always immediately transferred his prize money to the kibbutz), and despite knowing that they had an extraordinary person living among them, someone whose ideological, verbal, and creative richness was almost incomprehensible, the members never were on close terms with him, and he was not one of the gang. It might have been because he was not a hail-fellow-well-met, and it was hard to be close to or really like him, although it was certainly easy to respect and admire him. It might also have been because the nucleus that founded Ein Hahoresh in 1930 was Polish and resentful of those who came from Lithuania, the “Litvaks” as they were called, the two groups being very different in nature. To the core of his being, Kovner was a misnaged, a person in opposition, a lone wolf who was intellectually independent and terribly critical, and his tendency to be at the center of everything did nothing to make him any more likeable. The other members could not always cope with his enormous success, which “infuriated the old people,” according to some of the younger members. Elisha Porat, an author and poet in his own right, spent many hours speaking to and working with Kovner through the years, and he said that no one on the kibbutz or in the movement fully appreciated Kovner in a way worthy of Kovner’s special talent and greatness, quite possibly because no one ever understood the profundity of his ideas and the richness of his language.33 For more than a generation, during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, Kovner was a fixture in Ein Hahoresh’s daily life. When the Diaspora Museum was being built, he spent weekdays in an apartment in Tel Aviv, which took him out of the mainstream of the daily details of kibbutz life but not from the sum total of what was happening there. The years of his illness continued the separation. On his last Passover eve, as

The Kibbutz Rebbe

on almost every other Passover eve, Kovner gave a short speech, using the occasion to sum up his life as part of the kibbutz. That evening a young man who had been born on Ein Hahoresh was in charge of the ceremonies, and Kovner felt there was someone to carry on what he had begun. “With people like him we can change the world . . . and create something new to make sure the chain remains unbroken . . . which will only happen if it renews and is renewed.” The renewal would enrich “the wonderful legacy of Ein Hahoresh. One of a Jew’s genes, one of the genes of the founding fathers of the kibbutz movement, was restlessness, the intense search for a road for the man, the nation and the world.”34 However, about to die and knowing it and therefore using the word legacy, Kovner stood in front of the people with whom he had lived most of his life and gave them their inheritance: to continue what he had begun, to continue the never-ending search, knowing that wrath and consolation balance one another and that the dream and its broken pieces still tread a common path. At the end of his life, as one who was “alone with everyone,” an individual whose knowledge of himself as an exceptional being weighed on him and often made him wish he could be like everyone else, it was for the members of Ein Hahoresh and the movement that he was writing. Within Myself I thought: I would smile And sit among you. In my innocence I thought: I need only to raise a barrier and I will be Like one of you. I had such great need To speak openly, heart to heart With you .  .  . What would I not have given To possess a part of what is yours! Rosa, p. 86

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S ev e n t e e n   Family and Friends “And everything I have done should be corrected, / Except my life with you”

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Kovner loyally belonged to a number of sometimes overlapping circles: the Jewish people, Israel, his party (Mapam), the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement in which he grew up, the Ein Hahoresh kibbutz, an extraordinarily wide number of acquaintances. There are hundreds of people in Israel who each have their “own” Kovner. A small circle of very close friends, which included comrades from the ghetto, the exodus, and the nakam, centered around Kovner, Vitka Kempner, and Ruzka Korczak, the three of them called the “molecule” by Yonat, Korczak and Avi Marla’s daughter.1 There was also the tightest circle of all, Kovner and Kempner and their two children, Michael and Shlomit. Each circle had its own importance and constituted a value that had moral force. Kovner was uncompromisingly committed to each of the circles and invested himself in each entirely. Many public figures find their public and private lives contradictory and sacrifice one on the altar of the other. For Kovner his two worlds formed a continuum and were united by the commitment to his principles and circles. He lived as though he were watching himself from the outside, and he judged himself at every turn. “Every moment had to be full and significant. Everything had to be perfect, flawless, it was as though he owed something to someone or other,”2 said his daughter Shlomit. Wherever Kovner found himself, he tried to find time to be alone, to think, to write, his responsibility still not to himself but to the mission he was destined to fulfill. “When they came to visit us, friends from the partisans, they were like a secret order coming to the leader, and the atmosphere was completely different from what it was when other friends came,” said

Family and Friends

Kovner’s daughter. Throughout his life in Israel, Kovner was the uncontested leader of the partisans, especially those who had been active in the nakam, and he was their father, friend, confessor. They poured out their hearts, although he never reciprocated. Among his comrades Kovner was considered the supreme judge, and personal issues, even intimate issues of couples, were brought to him for arbitration. “The best times I ever had were sitting with him over a plate of pickled herring and a glass of something strong, his eyes closed, head thrown back, everything he said pure poetry,”3 said Yitzhak (Pasha) Reichman, who took the name Avidov in Israel. They spoke about every subject imaginable, not necessarily the Holocaust. Kovner often wrote to that circle of close friends, short rhymes and short funny notes, and was familiar with all the important events in their lives, never forgetting a birthday or anniversary. When he received an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University, Kovner addressed his speech to Kempner, his partner in life and struggle, and to “the remainder of my family from the Diaspora,” survivors who became members of kibbutzim close to his.4 Kovner also had close relations with the members of Moreshet—Shalom Holavski, Israel Gutman, Mordechai Roseman, Yehuda Bauer, and Yehuda Tubin, with whom he cooperated on projects and met as a group for years. “It is to those circles that I am tied by a triple harness,” more so than to the others, Kovner once said.5 Kovner always felt that interpersonal relationships should be fostered, not avoided lest they take time and effort, and when friends came to visit, especially on Saturdays, he spent the entire day hosting them. “In a wider sense, the precept of hospitality includes every area of interpersonal relations,” he said. There was always an “adopted” member of the family in the Kovner household, and always for long periods of time, whether it was a young person from a broken home or a new immigrant, and Kovner and Kempner’s house was as open to the newcomer as it was to the family. Kovner seemed to soften with the years and he became less self-conscious, and his relationships with people were warmer and more personal and less dependent on principle.6 Kovner and Kempner were neighbors and close friends of Yehudit and author Hanoch Bartov, who joined Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh in 1951. “I am a minor-key kind of person,” said Bartov, “without pathos

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Kovner delivering a lecture at Tel Aviv University, 1980, upon receiving the Doctor Honoris Causa title. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Kovner family.

or ­rhetoric.”7 Kovner was the kibbutz guru, and the members treated him—and he treated himself—as though he had special powers, and he never rejected the image, according to Bartov. (“Kovner would get up in the morning like everyone else, but then he would remember he was Abba Kovner,” said Gutman.) In retrospect, Bartov is sorry that because of the “strangled, closed style of behavior our generation developed in

Family and Friends

this hard, demanding country,” he had reservations, during many long years, about the intensity, drama, and fireworks that flowed from Kovner as from a cornucopia, from his writing, from his appearance. Kovner always dressed like a much younger person, his hair worn long and pulled back, and he wore beautiful sweaters that Kempner had knitted for him. Their friendship deepened after the Bartovs left the kibbutz in 1955, and particularly during the years when the Diaspora Museum was being built, because during most of that time Kovner lived near the Bartovs in Ramat Aviv. When Kempner was asked if Kovner had kept a diary during those years, she replied that if he had, Bartov would know.8 Kovner lived in Ramat Aviv for an extended period of time with Elie Ben-Gal, and they spent many hours talking with each other. When Ben-Gal was trying to decide whether or not to leave his own kibbutz and devote his time to academic work at the Diaspora Museum and to research, Kovner helped him decide. A person, he told Ben-Gal, should belong to some place, should put down roots. “If you stay, you will always be a man within society, and that is wholeness.” To this day BenGal is thankful for Kovner’s advice. He especially valued three aspects of Kovner’s character. One was Kovner’s fondness for the details of daily life, which he would wonder anew at every day as though they had just been created; another was Kovner’s fondness for a good meal with something strong to drink and a Jewish joke; and the third was Kovner’s indefatigable sense of humor, which always surprised his friends and was diametrically opposite to the sorrow etched on his face whenever he appeared in public.9 When Kovner first arrived in the country, there were already stories being told about him: “They say he’s like da Vinci, a real Renaissance man, a writer and thinker, a poet, artist, architect, that he can embroider and sew and is a first-class organizer . . . and when necessary, he can be the very Devil.”10 In the middle of 1946, after Kempner had arrived in Eretz Israel and Kovner had been released from the British jail in Jerusalem, they joined Korczak and their other comrades at Ein Hahoresh and decided to bind their lives together. It was a watershed for Kempner, always reserved and in complete control of herself: Kovner was the first and only man in her life. As was customary in those days, they never officially married.11 The three of them, Kovner, Kempner, and Korczak, continued spending

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a great deal of time together, and during the early years there was some gossip, both at Ein Hahoresh and in Givati, as there had been in the forest, about “Abba and his two women.”12 As time passed, however, it became clear that Kempner and Korczak trusted one another completely, and there was no way to accurately describe the relationship between them beyond saying that it was a profound, intimate friendship. It also became clear that despite the great love Korczak continued to feel for Kovner, each one managed to lead his or her own life, especially after 1949, when Korczak moved into a “family room” with Avi Marla, a handsome blonde young man who fled to Eretz Israel from Germany in 1938. The two families enjoyed excellent relations with one another, lived in the same area of the kibbutz, and visited each other nearly every day, each family remaining a distinct unit.13 Korczak was an important person in the Kibbutz Artzi movement in her own right and served in many sensitive capacities. On the kibbutz she was an educator and several times internal secretary, and her opinion and advice were listened to. She was modest and fair and had the happy facility of being able to express her opinion clearly without offending anyone, and her advice was often sought. She always knew what had to be done and always behaved well, said Kempner, “not like me.” According to members of Ein Hahoresh, between Kovner and Korczak there was “a kind of tension engendered by love, but it was pure,” and a kind of understanding that never needed more than a word. Korczak was the only kibbutz member whose opinion Kovner was willing to listen to in public—and to accept.14 When Yehuda, Korczak and Avi Marla’s son, married, Kovner was in charge of the ceremony and described the relations between the two families as “forged in tragedy . . . a friendship born in mourning, . . . the nuclear friendship from there is weighed against all others [new friendships] to this day.”15 “Nuclear friendship” was Kovner’s way of expressing what Korczak’s daughter called the “molecule.” In his role as husband, Kovner was faultless. He never exploited the admiration he inspired to form liaisons with other women, not inside the kibbutz and not beyond and not during his many trips abroad. When he proposed to Kempner and she accepted him, it was a binding commitment. That was the opinion of the members of Ein Hahoresh, from whose keen eyes and ears, which were tuned to everything that

Family and Friends

happened on the kibbutz every day, nothing ever escaped, and it was the opinion of the various Hashomer Hatzair activists spread in many a country, so it can be accepted as accurate.16 When Kempner contracted tuberculosis in 1951, she had to spend an entire year in Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba. Kovner cooked for her himself and brought her food twice a week, going back and forth by bus. Michael was then 3 years old, and for two years he was forbidden to approach his mother lest she infect him; during the year she spent in the hospital, Michael barely saw her. Kovner had to be mother and father, and certain routines were instituted in the house. Even when Kempner returned and slowly recovered, Kovner voluntarily continued cooking and serving, taking great care over details, particularly when it came to aesthetics. “He was in charge of the house far more than I,” said Kempner. According to Shlomit, “The little details were like musical notes and he turned them into an overture.”17 Despite the difficulties faced by Michael during his early years, Kovner demanded that he live up to high standards of behavior, but not of achievement. His demands were coupled with continuous giving, and according to Michael himself, “There was no one on the kibbutz who devoted himself to his son as much as my father.”18 Kovner took him for walks, told him stories, wrote stories for him, and read to him, from children’s literature to the Jewish sources. From the time he was small Michael would sit next to his father for hours and draw pictures, with Kovner giving him the tools and explaining what to do but never interfering with him or forcing him. It was not easy to be the son of a father who was always in demand and who always had something important to do, a father who was publicly admired. However, Kovner and his Holocaust comrades did their best to raise normal children, and during the hours set aside for the family in the kibbutzim, from 4 in the afternoon until 7 in the evening, and when the children were put to bed, he belonged entirely to Michael and later to Shlomit. She was born in 1956, although Kempner was not yet entirely well. “You . . . became pregnant in defiance of the doctors,” Kovner wrote in the next to last poem he published, in which he described Kempner’s vitality and love of life as “a well, a bubbling well, a fountainhead / one could trust, never failing” (Sloan Kettering, p. 131).

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“My father was my father and my mother and my friend,” Shlomit said, “and he was also Michael’s father, and Vitka’s and everyone else around.” Kovner was not dependent on any person and did not permit himself to ask anyone for help. His name, Abba, was appropriate, for he was everyone’s father. According to Michael, Kovner treated each of them in special ways, but the special ways were all different from one another. He indulged and coddled Shlomit to a great extent, and it was only when she grew up, she said, that she began to feel the demands that were never expressed in words but that Michael knew from his earliest years, for fulfilling norms and principles. Kovner never forced her to comply, even in the little matters that arose between them as father and child, and by not compelling her, he always made her feel that he respected her and her opinions. When she had a non-Jewish boyfriend, a volunteer who had come to work on the kibbutz, Kovner accepted him as a person, although it was hard for him and he could not hide his feelings. Kovner and Shlomit were very close, and the ups and downs in her life made him ecstatically happy or threw him into the deepest depression. When she was 16, she asked for a poem for her birthday, and he wrote one for her every year until his death, when she was 30. Shlomit kept everything he wrote to or for her, her own private treasure.19 Their closeness did not prevent Kovner from being Michael’s special friend. Michael, who served in an elite army combat unit, to his father’s infinite pride, and who became a well-known painter, as his father had wished, spoke and wrote a great deal to him in detail on an endless number of topics. The first wooden structure on Ein Hahoresh was eventually turned into the local post office. When a new one was built, closer to the center of the expanded kibbutz, Kovner refused to have the old one, which was near the cemetery, destroyed. To make sure, in the mid-1950s he moved in his books and papers, Michael’s drawings, and Shlomit’s writings. The building, really only a one-room shack, is today empty and neglected, but for thirty years it was Kovner’s workshop three days a week, the time the kibbutz allotted him for his writing, and it was there that his relationship with his children crystallized and grew. There was a mystical aura about the shack that was in part enhanced by its proximity to the cemetery, and more than once Kovner startled kibbutz mem-

Family and Friends

Kovner in front of the Ein Hahoresh shack in which he worked and created. Courtesy of photographer Hayim Goldgraber.

bers and couples who wanted to be alone by walking around deep in thought, sometimes late at night when he could not sleep, a monklike figure, ascetic, his long hair blowing around his face.20 In the early 1980s the Kovners’ living quarters were enlarged, and Kovner moved his things to a more spacious room. His desk still stands in its center and bookshelves line the walls, reference works behind his chair, close at hand. He stored his writings, correspondence, videos of his appearances, and photograph albums in metal filing cabinets, which he decorated with postcards. The largest number of files dealt with the preparations for Diaspora Museum exhibitions and the writing of The Scrolls of Testimony. Most of the books are in Hebrew—literature, poetry, and literary criticism. There are also two shelves on the Holocaust mixed with Greek tragedy and psychology, and it would appear that his library was often used, the books left where he last put them down. On

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the bookshelves in the living room the books are arranged by subject, and there are series relating to Hebrew and Judaism, and most prominent are the books of poetry and art. The walls are hung with original paintings, including some by Michael. There are no prizes or diplomas visible, and no one ever bothered or perhaps never even thought to photocopy the recommendation for the medal for his and Kempner’s activities as partisans. Waving her hand in dismissal Kempner said, “Oh, that isn’t important here. For them [the Soviets] it is, but not here.” The awards are in albums, along with letters of appreciation received from world leaders, artists, and writers. In the family albums Kempner and Kovner appear as proud parents and as proud grandparents of Nimrod and Amikam, the sons of Michael and Mimi Makover Kovner, and of Daniel and Noam, Shlomit and David Distheim’s sons. When Kovner died on the Jewish New Year in 1987, Korczak had also been ill with cancer for some time. However, according to her daughter

Kovner in Jerusalem with his eternal cigarette, 1980. Courtesy of photographer Hayim Goldgraber.

Family and Friends

Yonat, she refused to die before she and Tubin had finished editing a collection of Kovner’s essays and his friends’ eulogies, which was called His and About Him.21 Korczak died in March 1988, half a year after Kovner. On the walls of her home Kempner hung pictures of Kovner drawn by famous painters and photographs of his face, serious and troubled, reserved and introspective. Next to a large picture of Kovner she put a smaller one of Korczak; and she remained the last of the “molecule.” “I love Ruzka,” she said, using the present tense, as if years had not passed since her death. Kempner did not live in her husband’s shadow but chose her own path, and her work was highly regarded by her colleagues. She received a master’s degree in clinical psychology, writing her thesis on personal space, perhaps because she lived with a man who had a strong need for it.22 In addition, Kempner decided, not long after she arrived in Eretz Israel, “not to spend any more time thinking about the past,” cutting her ties and moving on. She had lost her entire family and never said a word about it. From the days in the ghetto and the forest to the present she has been admired by the partisans for her cool head, courage, selfcontrol, and vitality. Even staunch critics of Kovner said that “Vitka, ah, Vitka, she was something else entirely,” and praised her to the skies.23 Her brother, Israel Kempner, was killed on his way to Warsaw, sent by Beitar to inform their comrades of the murder of Vilna Jews, and she said nothing about that either. She has not been active in local politics, avoiding it and its internal dissension. Her decision to let the past go was in no way connected to her status in the memory of the past, which remains high and unchallenged to this day. Not wishing to draw attention to herself, Kempner left the stage to Kovner and Korczak when the three of them testified, and she was the one who spoke the least. “I don’t like to tell stories,” she said. Kovner traveled a great deal around the country and abroad, and during the 1950s and 1960s it was not accepted practice for Israeli emissaries to be accompanied by their spouses and children. She did not try to keep him from going to South America for four months or from living in Tel Aviv (except on weekends) during the founding of Moreshet and the museum at Yad Mordechai, or in Ramat Aviv during the long years it took to open the Diaspora Museum. She always gave him the personal

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space he needed for his writing, even when it included his shutting himself up on another kibbutz or in a friend’s home to give birth to a new poem, knowing it demanded his complete devotion and attention. Kovner took the book of Jeremiah 2:2, and wrote to her, “Remember thee the kindness of thy youth when I walked from you to the wilderness,” because their home was the oasis and everything outside it was the desert that he struggled to make bloom, and she always let him go (Of All Loves, p. 55). As far as the outside world was concerned, Kovner took center stage, but Kovner and Kempner’s home was a different matter. When he was away, he wrote her long, frequent letters (when she was in the hospital, he wrote to her every day), love letters, letters of longing and commiseration. He called himself “your husband” and her “my wife, my helpmate.” The letters were full of anxiety for her health, and he used the same pet names he had when he wrote to her from Eretz Israel in 1945, asking her to wait for him. He sent her daily reports of his activities, what time he went to sleep and when he could not sleep, and how he felt; he himself was often ill. He wanted to know every detail about life at Ein Hahoresh and consulted her during every stage of whatever he was writing at the time, eagerly awaiting her criticism. He told her about the books he was reading and asked her to read some of them so they could talk about them, although sometimes he took the tone of a teacher writing to a pupil.24 Kovner’s letters clearly reveal the dilemmas and personal conflicts arising from his need to isolate himself to be able to write and his longings for Kempner and Michael, who was “wonderful, a blessing, our joy at all times,” and his uneasiness at leaving her alone. The writing won out, however, but he still ran to check the mailbox every day, and sometimes he missed his family so much that he was unable to write. He wrote about his children with pride and asked what presents to bring them. Kempner encouraged him to enjoy himself, to go on trips and prolong his stay if he thought necessary. In her letters she never complained about having to stay alone for weeks and months at a time. His success as a speaker during his trips abroad and the respect and affection showered upon him contributed to his sense of uniqueness, which he shared with her. “I have been very successful,” he wrote from

Family and Friends

South America, “perhaps even too successful, and it scares me.” He was amazed to discover that had he wanted to, he could have spoken at any of the famous universities in the United States. In Australia Kovner was received “with honors even greater than what I am used to, enough to turn the head of any mortal.” He fought against getting carried away by his success and wrote, “Forgive me, Vit, for this vain pride.” He wrote to her about the blissful atmosphere in their home, saying he “blessed the happy day that brought you to me, my darling.” He admired her as a mother and her ability to criticize, clearly and simply, not only him and his writing but everything intimate between them. He felt immense pride when her name was mentioned to audiences of Holocaust survivors abroad, and they burst into loud, spontaneous applause, “a small reward for what you did.” With terrible longings, which “drove him out of [his] mind,” Kovner wrote Kempner intensely erotic love letters, saying she was “like a doe with its eyes closed, standing in the spring rain, giving herself entirely to the drops striking her and washing her body, and afterwards, she would shake herself and smile at the sun. . . . My love, how beautiful your face is. Out of my fingernails I cry out for you.” Kovner began his last book, the summing up of his life and work, with a dedication to Kempner and her courageous silence during his illness, and he ended it by describing her life as a victory parade through which her uplifting good humor flowed. Lucky are the women who have had such love letters and poems written to them, women whose lovers took the stars as their witnesses and as proof that “we were like an act performed at the beginning of Creation,” and upon whose arm their name was tattooed (Observations, p. 97) like a number, like an identity, an integral part of their being.

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E i g h t e e n   Finis “One should not summarize, for God’s sake, not summarize!”

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After the 1950s, years of struggle for acceptance, and after the affairs of the ghetto, the nakam, the battle pages, and German reparations had settled somewhat, Kovner’s place on the Israeli landscape became fixed. He was a poet, an intellectual, and a visionary with a rare sense of public and moral responsibility who would not sell his principles, regardless of what mess of pottage was offered. The list of prizes and honors he received for his literary and other works lengthened steadily, and he frequently appeared in and was quoted by the media. People he had never met or heard of wrote him long letters, often of confession, to say nothing of letters from those he did know, among them writers and poets who were impressed with his work. A steady stream of invitations to speak arrived from schools, kibbutzim, army units, ­Knesset committees, sessions of the Zionist Executive Committee, and university departments of literature. Kovner traveled abroad extensively, from Canada to Australia to South America and particularly to Europe and the United States to lecture, read from his works, raise funds, and meet figures whose opinions he was interested in hearing. Those who arranged his schedule usually exploited his time and strength to their utmost. The list of public functions he performed and of the committees he was requested to serve on was endless. There is a long series of drawings and photographs of his expressive countenance, and four streets were named after him when he passed away. His political opinions, which were formed after the Holocaust and the War of Independence, were a function of his belief in the absolute necessity of defending the existence and security of the Jewish people. For him it was not only a theoretical exercise but the realization of an existential need. Those issues arose often and were thoroughly thrashed

Finis

out between Kovner and Yuval Ne’eman during the year and a half they shared a room at Givati headquarters. Their friendship continued for many years and became particularly close when Ne’eman was president of Tel Aviv University, on whose grounds the Diaspora Museum was built. The axis on which the agreement between them turned was the existence of the state of Israel and its need for security, from permanent borders to a nuclear reactor, from a close relationship with Jews in the Diaspora and a close monitoring of neo-Nazi activities to Jewish values. According to Ne’eman, Kovner never adopted the viewpoint of any faction or party, because he thought only in general national terms.1 Indeed, after Palestinian terrorists murdered the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic games in 1972, Kovner wrote a note to himself to the effect that people in Israel said they couldn’t imagine it would happen, and Jews are only allowed to say that once a generation. Anyone who forgot to what depths those who hated the Jewish people might sink

Kovner in Boston, 1978. Courtesy of photographer Hayim Goldgraber.

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The Kovners in Boston, 1978. Courtesy of photographer Hayim Goldgraber.

Finis

had forgotten everything. “The sovereignty of Jewish life . . . is the border of our sovereignty, and one has to remember and fulfill that precept in all the seriousness it demands.”2 However, Kovner was absolutely unwilling to trade existence and security for values and compassion. As the War of Independence and its events faded into the past and as from year to year the state of Israel became more accepted as a fact of life, Kovner knew there was no point in the existence of a Jewish state if it ignored its values. In the words of philosopher Martin Buber, the accomplishment was how we lived, not whether we lived. Despite the fact that forcing the Arabs out of their villages was in his opinion a necessity and he did not condemn it during the War of Independence, in his poem Farewell to the South, which was first published in 1949, Kovner had already asked, “Who sent the fire to Karatia and Hata [two Arab villages] . . . is there still a man alive . . . who ordered the fire . . . and who walks behind?” It is clear guilt is walking behind them, scorching their footprints, and the abandoned huts built of clay bricks burn, “and the fire gapes / the fire punishes” those who light it and those who order it to be lit (Farewell to the South, p. 36). Kovner regarded the Six Day War as coming at an unprecedented opportune time in Israel’s history, “the hour of deliverance upon us.” Speaking before a group of writers immediately after the war, he said that for once the ancient Jewish people, so skilled in suffering, had been wise enough to prevent another Holocaust and to prevent it by itself and in time. The people—“here is my people, and I did not know them”—went to war prepared and calm, without fanfare and martial music. The time had come, he said, to go out to the Diaspora (never forgetting for an instant that there was a Diaspora) from one city to another, from door to door, and call the Jews to come.3 Nevertheless, after the Six Day War Kovner did not become a member of the Greater Israel movement. On Saturdays Ne’eman and writer Moshe Shamir, in favor of it, used to visit him, and messengers came in Nathan Alterman’s name to sign him up, and he refused. Over the years Kovner did not change most of his basic opinions, but his worry for the preservation of values increased. In 1972 Golda Meir invited authors and intellectuals to discuss the return of the inhabitants of Biram and Ikrit, two Arab villages in the Galilee, and Kovner

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exerted pressure, as did most of those present, to permit them to return to their lands.4 According to members of Ein Hahoresh, Kovner would often return to the painful topic of the Arabs who had been forced off the lands on which Ein Hahoresh stood, an action taken by the British in the early 1930s, without which the kibbutz would not have been founded. In the middle of March 1983, a month after Emil Greenzweig, a Peace Now activist (Peace Now is a movement that calls for immediate Israeli withdrawal from areas occupied by Israel since the Six Day War under the assumption that this will bring peace), was murdered by a right-wing extremist, Kovner, in the name of all Holocaust survivors and their various associations, called for a national convention against violence, committing everyone who signed the petition to prevent murder and civil war, eliminate incitement from public discourse, encourage legislation that would deter the use of firearms for political aims, and ensure the safety of the nation. The first person to sign the petition was the chairman of the Knesset, followed by its members and many public figures. Kovner expressed to the media his deep fear “that when the moment of truth comes regarding achieving peace and a compromise with our neighbors,” marginal extremists would take to the streets and use violence.5 He was referring to the extreme right, but he was equally worried about the influence of the left on the country’s ability to stand firm. “Tsavta [a leftist theater club] destroys our instinct to survive more than any war, it concocts poison and drips it into our ears,” Kovner said, referring to the play The Optimist, which was a hymn to Palestinian suffering and a condemnation of Zionism.6 At the same time Kovner’s well of creativity continued to flow. From his youth until his last days, in almost every situation, he wrote poetry, drama, children’s books, sound and light shows, articles, texts for ceremonies and holidays, and plans for museums. The files in his room called “Miscellaneous Projects” were bursting.7 All his proposals had one common theme: Jewish intellectual and cultural creativity, both religious and secular, uniting the Jewish people. Kovner never considered himself a Holocaust writer. “From the day my first book was published until now I have had the revolting tag of ‘Holocaust author’ pinned to me, despite the fact that the greatest part of my writing concerns Israeli, Jewish and human experience,” wrote Kovner to his daughter.

Finis

“And actually, why not? Why don’t I let go of the trauma of the past? . . . Because my real message is not some event that happened in the past, but rather the sorrow that is part of life, because that’s the way life is. And that sorrow manifested itself in its most profound form in the Holocaust experience. . . . I have never seen life not founded in sorrow.” 8 Kovner did not describe the Holocaust but rather used it as his starting point because it was the most extreme manifestation of world sorrow, which was for him the basis of all literature. Only two of his works (My Little Sister and The Key Sank) deal entirely with the Holocaust. Nevertheless, to his great discomfort he was always regarded as a Holocaust writer for whom, according to the poet Dalia Rabikovitch, the Holocaust was like a hand grenade that had exploded and left bits of shrapnel in each Jew and in every line of his writing.9 In two short passages in My Little Sister, which remained hidden and overshadowed by the great drama unfolding in the poem, Kovner swore he would never tell the story of the Holocaust. “In your name I swore this day / I would never say anything, good or evil / about the world that went up in flames. But in fear I tremble: / how will the story of our lives be told now?” (My Little Sister, p. 37). The extent of the destruction was beyond well-planned description, beyond the ability to judge between good and evil, and Kovner trembled in fear lest it not be told properly. His words were “would say” and “be told,” because the saying, the reciting aloud in a set ritual, traditionally transmits the central events in Jewish life from one generation to the next. And the second: “In advance we knew it was dangerous / to cross the soft earth  / covering the white-hot iron / and to say to a stranger / —once there was a world here” (My Little Sister, p. 40). Any individual who was a stranger to the Holocaust, who had no knowledge of the white-hot iron, would in any case never understand what the survivors had to say—again, to say, not to write. Nevertheless, Kovner’s fear led him to initiate his great work, The Scrolls of Testimony, in which he wanted the story told and retold until the Holocaust became part of the national experience. The Scrolls were written as a series of interlaced but separate stories, apparently to stress the fact that there was no point in writing an orderly, chronological story. Kovner wrote five scrolls—mirroring the five books of the ­Bible—and

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determined the format of the pages: text in the center surrounded by exegeses, the way the Mishna and the Talmud are written, to make the reader realize the book parallels the format of the ancient texts. Here Kovner set himself an almost impossibly difficult goal: the writing, by one man, of another Haggadah, the previous one being the product of generations. He wanted it to be the Holocaust Haggadah, a text to be read aloud every year, once and again as the other Jewish sacred texts were, a text he wrote despite his fear that the Holocaust could not be transmitted in writing, hoping, so it seems, that he would be able to overcome the obstacle by literary means.10 Therefore, in a few lines in the introduction to the Scrolls, written in the last years of his life, Kovner condensed his thoughts on the Holocaust. First, the fact that the part of the Jewish people who lived in the free world—and that included the Yishuv in Eretz Israel—had not saved European Jews from going to their death, because it could not. Kovner never reproached the Yishuv and American Jewry, as many others did, for having been able to save lives and not doing so. Second, the entire Jewish people had to hear the testimony of the survivors and try to understand the complex situation of the European Jews and their leaders and to remember that, as they stood alongside the crematoria, they were strengthened by thoughts of Eretz Israel, the only place they had a future in. Third, and perhaps most important, Kovner strongly objected to and protested the use in Israel of the derogative and accusatory phrase “like lambs to slaughter,” referring to the Jews of Europe. His manifesto said, “Let us not go,” we, the Jews of Lithuania, we who were first in line. He made no distinction between the young people and the rest of the community; he never wrote a “you,” as a fighter to nonfighters. He regarded the expression “lambs to the slaughter,” which was the title of his manifesto, as showing his defiance of heaven, of the Lord of the universe who watched His people going like lambs to the slaughter, and not in defiance of the Jewish people itself.11 The Jews killed were innocent of blame or guilt because they had not committed any crime or sin; it was rather their generations-long existential situation in the Diaspora that led to their destruction. Kovner decided not to write about his life and the part the Holocaust played in it, choosing literature instead, mainly poetry, as his chief

Finis

mode of expression. He always maintained that it was literature and not historiography that had the power to transmit an experience and build awareness. Moreover, poetry was an art form he could use to depict reality as he desired. However, a long time passed before he got beyond the initial stage of writing turgid, difficult to understand Hebrew and formed a clear, concise lyric style. Yet even during the second stage, which began in the 1960s, his writing remained difficult, complex, and modern on the one hand and reliant on Jewish sources on the other. The only possibility left, as Kovner said in a letter to his daughter, was writing for himself without giving the reader a key to his irony or to the forms he used to sculpt his words. The sensation of creating works that few could understand would seem to have gone hand in hand with the feeling he had from childhood of being unique. As a writer Kovner was never completely accepted by the Israeli public, was never a national poet, and never was widely quoted as were Haim Nahman Bialik and Nathan Alterman (whose heir he apparently wanted to be), despite the fact that he received almost every possible award and prize. These were bestowed on him as tokens of appreciation of and respect for his lifelong contribution as well. Kovner was often anxious that the magic would disappear and the fountain of his inspiration would run dry. When he wrote, he always watched himself from the outside, as though the process of creation were involuntary and independent of him, as though he were merely the medium through which the words flowed by themselves. The words were the force drawing him with their own meanings and sounds and not necessarily their content. He accepted the mysterious in the creative process and was fond of it. “You may think you are in charge, but you aren’t, the creation is.”12 Kovner amended and reworked his writing several times, sometimes starting from the beginning or copying it out again even if only one or two words had to be corrected. Only infrequently was he willing to publish immediately and then only what had been born in a flash of inspiration and quickly committed to writing, perhaps because he had tremendous respect for the written word and continually searched for the aesthetic. Kovner had a marked tendency toward the large format, his literary critics have written, and he was the only writer of his generation to write

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long poems. His writing was full of nonrhetorical pathos that sprang from his heroic facing of life, said one critic. Struggling against prevailing conditions, the necessity to decide, the need to take responsibility, and the impossibility of avoiding it are all part of Kovner’s life story, and to express it all, Kovner needed space, a broad canvas.13 Kovner himself tried to analyze his reasons for choosing that particular form of expression. First he used notes he wrote to himself to define the long poem’s history and types, and he categorized his own poems as modern, focusing on the essential, exposing man’s lyric element. “That is the long poem’s role, not just to tell a story but to speak,” again using the word speak, by which he meant “transmit.” Not to tell a story, but to relate the experience. Thus Kovner could be faithful to his opinion that it was not the events that were most important but their implications and the problems they raised, and he had to draw them with sweeping gestures, like a singer of tales, a tribal shaman. That was how the members of Ein Hahoresh felt when they sat around Kovner as he read his poems aloud and enchanted them with his deep voice and ringing words.14 Kovner and his place in Israeli society aroused deep admiration as well as fierce opposition, and many serious accusations and criticism were repeatedly leveled against him, during his life and even after his death, concerning his role in affairs and events that took place during the ten stormy years of 1939–1949. Besides the question of how Kovner lived with such a painful situation, one should ask why he was attacked in such a manner and why he drew so much fire. He kept silent for years, and perhaps it was his silence that infuriated his accusers all the more because he ignored them, implying they were not worth rebutting. Perhaps his arrogance left those who had suffered from it eager to return the favor. Perhaps it was because, as the years passed, he became a national figure and prizewinner whose voice was often heard, and others, who had been with him during those awful years and who felt they had unjustly been left behind, ground their teeth and longed for their day in court. Perhaps it was because he set himself goals and then strove to meet them, at the same time asking himself if he might be wrong and what would be the implications of his decisions regarding the lives of the people around him. Sometimes Kovner’s deliberations resulted in his preventing an action from being taken. Despite his dualism, he made

Finis

a series of difficult decisions, and those who were not included in them were often offended. Perhaps he was attacked because he set goals and surrounded himself with groups who had faith in him, were willing to work with him and follow his lead, and raised up the society he fostered (in the Hashomer Hatzair chapter in Vilna, in the underground in the ghetto, in the unit in the forest, in the survivors’ Hativa, in the Givati Brigade, at home at Ein Hahoresh) to hitherto unknown heights of vision and expectation. When some of the goals were not reached, the disappointment was profound, and great achievements are sometimes overlooked in times of disappointment. More than once Kovner said that the only real uprising had been in Warsaw, and in other places there was resistance, rebellion, or self-defense. However, he never corrected anyone who called him the commander of the Vilna ghetto uprising, an uprising that had never occurred and that he had never commanded, and underground members remembered and resented it. It is entirely possible that in the first decades of the state of Israel, which was thirsty for stories of revolt, he could not have corrected the title in any case, and afterward the legend took root, and he was a preacher of legends, not a destroyer. Not everyone could rise above pettiness or understand a whole complex picture and see Kovner, in the words of Yitzhak Greenberg, as a messiah who had failed and not as a false messiah.15 Perhaps the complaints and accusations point to a great personality from whom salvation was expected and on whom they relied to control forces and events over which there could be no control, because there was no salvation. If Wittenberg had not died but had continued leading the underground, if Scheinbaum had not fired and the Germans had been successfully ambushed and suffered many casualties, if the ghetto had then joined the underground en masse and Gens had brought out the weapons he promised, if all of them, underground and nonunderground ghetto, had then gone into the same forest and established a united Jewish regiment and afterward emigrated to Eretz Israel, taking on the way a terrible, swift, but token revenge on the Germans, if the Egyptians had been stopped earlier and the settlements held fast in all cases and the first battle page had not been written, then it would have been possible and easier to live with the memory of the Holocaust and of the 1948 war, at least with what happened in Vilna, the Jerusalem

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of Lithuania, and in the Negev, and to forgive Kovner for his mane of hair and his posing and his recognition of his own matchless talent and for his always letting the other person know he was better and smarter. But that was not the way it was during the Holocaust or the way it is in wars, and what really happened, happened with no relation to Kovner and his decisions; it happened because first and foremost, a human being wants to live and a state wants to survive. Kovner spent forty years in Israel, from the end of the War of Independence until he died. He never had an official political role, and it is doubtful whether, despite his constant efforts, he influenced the events or the processes that took place in Israel in any way, as opposed to the influence he had during both World War II and the War of Independence. However, the role he took upon himself was that of prophet, and it placed him like a kind of stop sign squarely in front of such topics as belief in the Soviet Union and relations with Germany. He wanted the citizens of Israel to have reasonable national values, and he refused to see society dragged after the extreme left or right or the ultra-­Orthodox. He warned that one must always strive to live a nonmaterialistic life, to stop emigration and the deterioration of togetherness in the kibbutz movement and in Israel, to create a worthwhile native culture and not to search for it in foreign climes, to remember where the Jewish people came from and to make sure it knew where it was going. He indeed did not prevent anything from happening and could not change processes; he was there to alert people to them. According to Kovner’s own testimony, he considered committing suicide at least five times. Many who had experienced the Holocaust or had just been touched by it did so, such as Primo Levi (some claim, though, that his death was an accident) and a long line of others, mainly poets and writers. Their reasons were many and varied: loss of loved ones and their own suffering, and witnessing the nadir of man and society and asking themselves whether that nadir was reality. Perhaps they committed suicide because in the wake of the Holocaust they, human beings of high sensitivity, lived with the oppressive feeling that during the war they were forced to have feelings and perform actions that did not permit them to live with themselves afterward.

Finis

One of the interpretations of Levi’s suicide was that he chose the ending that Dante chose for Odysseus (and not that chosen by Homer) and was sentenced to tell the story of the inferno and to burn in hell when he finished writing his description.16 Kovner chose Homer’s ending: Odysseus returned to Ithaca. In his Ithaca, luckier than Odysseus, Kovner rejoined his Penelope and his sailors, his partners for the long sail, who accompanied him until his death as he told and retold his story and theirs. There is no evidence that once Kovner returned to Ein Hahoresh after the War of Independence and recovered, he ever considered taking his own life again. At home Kovner had to tell the story of the inferno, to tell it orally, for that was the Jewish tradition, testimony and lecture, speaking to the public, and not just writing for himself. His role as a teller, not a writer, was to bring to his listeners a story that had significance, because arriving in Israel, he had come to a society that had reconstructed itself and therefore required those who joined it to find significance and a lesson even in the story of the inferno. Society in Israel in the 1950s needed the transition from Dante to Homer, the coming home to green-lawned Ein Hahoresh from Auschwitz. “Blood and poetry did not flow in the same vein” (To, p. 41), Kovner wrote, as if saying to Levi that one might carry a heavy load of memories and at the same time be a hopeful, creative human being. As opposed to Levi, Kovner drew his mission from his sensation of being a unique messenger but also from his society, which did not permit a person to be an individual. Here and now there had to be faith that there and then the people had stood the test; otherwise the here and now could not be built. Kovner felt it was his responsibility to transmit that significance between generations and cultures, to join the past to the future, to be the builder who warned the building was unsafe, because he headed those who were first to stand the test. He was the sad-eyed angel who guarded the hidden tear until its time had come, and he knew there was no one answer, no conclusion, that blood and poetry did not flow in the same vein but still nourished one another, and that the dream and its broken pieces trod the same path. Abba Kovner passed away on the day after Rosh Hashanah, the first day of 5748 according to the Jewish calendar—September 25, 1987—at

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dawn, mute and barely 70 years old. Always a heavy smoker, his death was caused by cancer of the vocal cords that spread to his lungs and defeated his stubborn struggle to overcome it. He left no will beyond a few lines asking that his tombstone be the same as any other member of his kibbutz and that the three inscriptions on the Diaspora Museum walls summarizing his idea of Jewish existence bear his name. At the funeral Avraham Sutzkever, struck with grief, convinced that it was impossible to explain who or what Abba Kovner had been, agreed to say merely that he was a person in whose presence one felt the eternity of the Jewish people.

Reference Matter

Notes

Preface 1.  “Order of the Day,” in Battle Page: The Givati Brigade (1963), no page numbers or place of publication given. 2.  Abba Kovner, Scrolls of Fire: A Nation Fighting for Its Life—Fifty-two Chapters of Jewish Martyrology (Jerusalem, 1981). 3.  “The Scroll of Fire,” from “The Legends of Destruction,” in The Complete Poems of H. N. Bialik (Tel Aviv, 1960), 395. 4.  Kovner’s letter to his son Michael, June 4, 1987, courtesy of Michael Kovner. 5.  Azriel Uchmany, “A New Concept of Abba Kovner’s Poetry,” in his Human Voices (Ramat Gan, 1967), 76–77. Uchmany was an editor and literary critic who corresponded with Kovner. On literary work as biography, also see Kovner’s letter in the Uchmany archive in Genazim, Nissan 25, 1956; Eliezer Schweid, “Abba Kovner’s Heritage: Poetry as Testimony,” Bitzaron 11: 151–158 (1992); and Dan Miron, “Second Conversation,” in his A Butterfly from the Worm: The Young Alterman’s Poetry (Tel Aviv, 2001), 34–56. 6.  Abba Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony (English ed.) (Philadelphia, 2001), 84. 7.  Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, xv. 8.  Interviews with Shalom Lurie. 9.  Kovner to Shlomo Kless, December 17, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), parts A and B. 10.  See Kovner’s speech at the President’s House, GHA, D.2.598, and his introduction to The Scrolls of Testimony: “More than ever, the future of the Jewish people depends on the way Jews relate to themselves and to their past” (p. xxxiii). The introduction is a translation of the lecture Kovner gave in Yiddish at the Plenum of Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in Geneva, June 11, 1981, GHKC, 6195 (9). Recently, parts of the private archive of Kovner were transferred to Givat Haviva and catalogued, hence GHKC, Givat Haviva Kovner Collection. 11.  From the speech Kovner gave at Tel Aviv University when he was awarded an Honoris Causa, The University News, Nissan 18, 1980; reprinted in Abba Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge: Essays, ed. Shalom Lurie (Tel Aviv, 1981), 10.

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Notes to Preface and Chapter 1 12.  See Kovner to Shlomo Kless, December 17, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), parts A and B.

Chapter 1 1.  Details written by Kovner on a Genazim form in 1968 and on a form written in Russian, October 4, 1967, courtesy of the Vilna Gaon Museum in Vilna, no file number. 2.  Interviews with Misha and Eliezer Kovner and Clara Bar, children of Kovner’s father’s brother Shalom; and with Meir Vilner. 3.  See the introduction to Mordechai-Eliezer Kovner’s Ram’s Horns (Vilna, 1864; reprinted Bnei Brak, 1986). My thanks to Haim Kovner and Semion Kovner for the material they sent to me. See Rabbi Nathan Neta Hanover, The Dark Abyss: The 1648–1649 Pogroms [Yeven Metzula] (reprinted Tel Aviv, 1964 [1653]), 47–48; interviews with Haim Kovner and his relative Shmuel Halevi. 4.  See Rabbi Yitzhak Aizik Halevi Rabinovitch, First Generations, a monumental six-volume enterprise (vols. 1 and 2, Presburg, 1897; vol. 3, Frankfurt, 1901; vol. 4, Frankfurt, 1918; vol. 5, Jerusalem, 1939; vol. 6, Bnei Brak, 1964) that is a historical survey of the Oral Jewish Law and that claims the continuity of Judaism and its history; interviews with Semion, Leon, Victor, and Misha Kovner and Clara Bar. Kovner told Shalom Lurie (mistakenly) that Rabbi Abba (Abali) Pasobler, Vilna’s chief rabbi between 1804 and 1836, was one of his ancestors. 5.  Interviews with the cousins who also lived in Sevastopol, especially Clara Bar, who for a few years lived with Abba and his family. For his great-grandfather the jeweler, see Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 114. 6.  Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, 47; Kovner’s letter to Shalom Lurie, June 18, 1979, quoted in Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 127 and 227. 7.  Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, 47; Kovner’s letter to Shalom Lurie, June 18, 1979, quoted in Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 127 and 227. Yitzhak Bezalel, Everything Is Written in the Book: Conversations with Authors Living in Israel Today (Tel Aviv, 1969), 55. 8.  Citations from the Gaon and Rabbi Israel Salanter; see Medurot [Bonfires]: Hashomer Hatzair Youth Movement in Vilna and Its Region, eds. Zippora Efrat, Shalom Lurie, and Shlomo Frank (Givat Haviva, 1991), 13–14; and Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 129–132 and 200–202. The same text is in both; Kovner’s lecture was given in New York in January 1972, when he was awarded the Yizkor Prize by the World Association of Bergen-Belsen Survivors. 9.  “In Memoriam,” Kovner thanking his teacher, Dr. Zelinger, Al Hamishmar, May 9, 1976. See also Efrat et al., Medurot, 149. 10.  Interview with Avraham Versas; the letter from Vilna to Miriam Zimnavoda is in Kovner’s files in Genazim, 1179/18. 11.  My thanks to Shalom Lurie for sending me a copy of the letter. I found

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2 one more in Genazim, 168/18. For the bottle that the 12-year-old Kovner sent, see Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 138. 12.  Interview with Shalom Holavski. 13.  Interview with Abraham Versas. 14.  Shalom Lurie, “Our Vilna, City and Mother,” in Efrat et al., Medurot, 27 and 62. “‘Otherness,’ in a questionnaire for testimonies on the history of Hashomer Hatzair,” sent by Kovner to Hashomer Hatzair members on October 27, 1981, GHA, 9.8.3-95. 15.  Kovner to Shalom Lurie, March 30, 1978, Kovner’s files in Genazim; and Efrat et al., Medurot, 50. 16.  Shalom Lurie, in Efrat et al., Medurot, 62; others, in Efrat et al., Medurot, 107, 231–232. Letter from Shalom Lurie to Vitka Kempner, September 29, 1987, following Kovner’s death, published in Abba Kovner, His and About Him (Tel Aviv, 1988), 95; interview with Zippora Efrat. 17.  Shlomo Frank, in Medurot, 107; Yitzhak Ziv, in Efrat et al., Medurot, 225–226. 18.  Interview with Yitzhak Ziv (Yitzhak Zalmanson). 19.  Interview with Meir Vilner; and Efrat et al., Medurot, 147 and 195. 20.  Interview with Vitka Kempner, Meir Vilner, and the Kovner cousins. 21.  For example, Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 113, 127, and 227. Kovner at the receipt of his Honoris Causa from Tel Aviv University, The University News (1980), and Scrolls of Testimony, 47. Also an interview with Kovner about transmitting values, “Abba Kovner: Author and Fighter,” in Bemachaneh Gadna [In the Youth Units Camp] (June 1958). 22.  See Efrat et al., Medurot, 13; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 129 and 200; and Mima’amakim (De Profundis), the Hashomer Hatzair literary journal of Vilna, January 1940, preserved in GHA, D.5.54. 23.  Kovner, “Dispute: A Cornerstone in Jewish Culture,” in See This and Renew: The Secular Jew and His Heritage, ed. Yehoshua Rash (Tel Aviv, 1986), 279–284. 24.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 206.

Chapter 2 1.  Mima’amakim (De Profundis), January 1940, GHA, D.5.54; and Yosef Shamir, ed., Hashomer Hatzair in Poland, 1913–1950: Essays and Documentation (Tel Aviv, 1991), 195. 2.  Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part B; see the minutes of a Moreshet conference about the Hashomer Hatzair refugee center in Vilna, November 28, 1976, GHA, A.642; and Adam Rand, “Hashomer Hatzair Leadership in Poland at the Beginning of the War,” Yalkut Moreshet 40: 131–132 (December 1985). 3.  “A. L.” [Lipsker], On Destroyed Poland (Merhavia, 1940), 10 and 18; “L.”

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Notes to Chapter 2 [Levite], In the Days of Destruction (Ein Harod, 1940), 50; Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part A; Chaika Grossman, Underground Members (Merhavia, 1965; first published in 1950), 9. About a letter from the leadership in Vilna, dated November 9, 1939, see The Book of Hashomer Hatzair, eds. Meir Ya’ari, Ya’akov Hazan,et al. (Merhavia, 1956), v. 1, 453–455. 4.  Laizer Ran, Ashes of the Jerusalem of Lithuania (New York, 1959), 289–290 (in Yiddish); Shmuel Breslav, “Humiliation,” in The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw, ed. Josef Kermish (Jerusalem, 1980), v. 1, 320. The author of the manifesto is unknown. 5.  Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 442; Ran, Ashes, 289–295; Yehoshua A. Gilboa, To Be Kept Forever (Tel Aviv, 1963), 21. 6.  Benzion Benshalom, In a Tempest on a Stormy Day (Poland Chapters) (Tel Aviv, 1944), 151–153; Zussman Segalovitch, Burnt Steps (Buenos Aires, 1947), 101 (in Yiddish); Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 441; Lipsker, On Destroyed Poland, 153. 7.  The Hechalutz Center had been the umbrella organization of the Zionist pioneering youth movements founded initially by the Dror-Hechalutz, Hashomer Hatzair, Gordonia, and Hano’ar Hatzioni movements; on its way to Vilna, the Akiva youth movement joined the Center as well. On going to Vilna, see Dina ­Porat, “Circumstances and Reasons for Allocating Soviet Passage Visas to the Jewish Refugees from Poland in Vilna, 1940–1941,” Shvut 6: 54–76 (1978); and Yehuda Bauer, “Rescue Activities Through Vilna,” Yad Vashem Studies 9: 177–183 (1973). About the net, see interview with Mordechai Roseman, one of its initiators; and Dov Levin, The Jews of the Soviet-Annexed Territories, 1939–1941 (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1989), 216–217, according to registration of the Vilna Jewish community’s refugee board and of the Joint. For other numbers and the names of public figures, see Dina Porat, The Concentration of Jewish Refugees in Vilna, 1939–1941 (Tel Aviv, 1973), 10–17, based on the Vilna-Eretz-Israel Committee report to the Jewish Agency Department in Jerusalem, April 1940, preserved in the Histadrut archives, file 372/1; for cooperation among the youth movements, see Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 441, and a contradictory approach in Yitzhak Zuckerman, Those Seven Years, 1939–1946 (Tel Aviv, 1990), 39–40. 8.  Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part A. 9.  The piece, “Vilnius,” the Lithuanian name for Vilna, was published in Mima’amakim (De Profundis), January 1940, GHA, D.5.54. 10.  Zuckerman, Those Seven Years, 36–41; Aya Shacham on Arieh Vilner, in Third Person Singular: Biographies of Youth Movement Activists During the Holocaust, v. 2, ed. Avihu Ronen and Yehoyakim Cochavi (Tel Aviv, 1995), 171–173; Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 440–441; Ziv, “Hashomer Hatzair Under Soviet Rule.” 11.  A letter from H. Milstein, January 1940, published in Ha’oved Hatzioni [The Zionist Laborer], April 1940; for more about Hanoar Hatzioni, see Nissan Reznik, “The Movement in the Vilna Ghetto and in the Forest of Lithuania,”

Notes to Chapter 2 Masuah 1: 50 (1973); and Gilboa, To Be Kept Forever, 27. For Dror-Hechalutz, see Levite, In the Days of Destruction, 224; Aya Shacham, in Ronen and Cochavi, Third Person Singular, 13; Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 445; L. Schpizman, Pioneers in Underground and Battle (Jerusalem, 1964); Yosef Shamir, Shmuel Breslav: The Struggle and the Hope—The Warsaw Ghetto, 1940–1943 (Tel Aviv, 1994), ch. 3; Ziva Shalev, Tossia (Tel Aviv, 1992), ch. 2. For more about leaders who returned to their disciples, see Abba Kovner, “An Encounter Beyond Darkness,” Yalkut Moreshet 17: 14–16 (February 1974) (original text in GHA, D.2.325). 12.  Schpizman, Pioneers, 30; Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, Pages from Fire (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1984 [1947]), 123. 13.  Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part B; interviews with Yosef Shamir and Yitzhak Ziv. 14.  Porat, Concentration of Jewish Refugees, 14; Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 444, 451, and 462; Levin, Jews of the Soviet-Annexed Territories, 216; Vitka Kempner’s testimony to Avraham Atzili, recorded, no date noted; interviews with Cesia (later Zila) Rosenberg-Amit and Yosef Shamir; Shacham on ­A rieh Vilner, in Ronen and Cochavi, Third Person Singular, 172–176; Shmuel Breslav, “In Vilna . . . ,” in Underground Press in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. Yoseph Kermish (Warsaw, January 1941), v. 1, 318–322; for details about life in the refugee center, see Adam Rand, “When the Storm Came,” in Rand, “Hashomer Hatzair Leadership,” 195–196. 15.  Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part B; for “refugeeness,” see Abba Kovner, “Our Best Years,” Lamerhav [“Into the Open Space,” a daily], October 10, 1958; Yitzhak Ziv, in Medurot, 225. 16.  Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part A. 17.  Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili. 18.  Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili; Kempner’s testimony to Dina Porat; Ruzka Korczak, Flames in the Ashes (1st ed., Merhavia, 1946; 3rd ed., Merhavia, 1956) (all references are to the third edition unless otherwise specified), 49; letter from Adam Rand to Eretz-Israel, in Lipsker, On Destroyed Poland, 164. 19.  Interview with Cesia Rosenberg-Amit; Korczak, Flames, 55; Vitka Kempner’s testimony to Dina Porat; Grossman, Underground Members, 33. 20.  About the Vilna cell’s council, see Mima’amakim, January 1940, 13; Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 444–446. 21.  Discussions first took place in each of the kibbutzim in the Vilna refugee center. See Moshe Tcizik, “Ideological Discussions in the Vilna Refugee Center,” Yalkut Moreshet 24: 143–171 (October 1977); Eli Zur, “Shmuel Breslav,” Yalkut More­shet 53: 17–33 (November 1992); Yosef Shamir in answer to Zur, “On Shmuel Breslav’s Ideological Path,” Yalkut Moreshet 54: 63–85 (April 1993). 22.  Shamir, “Shmuel Breslav’s Ideological Path,” 68. Interviews with Yitzhak Ziv and Yosef Shamir. The minutes are in GHA, E3.28.2; see Ziv, “Hashomer Hatzair Movement Under Soviet Rule,” 117; Ziv’s essay in Shamir, Hashomer ­Hatzair in Poland, 201; and Ziv’s letter to Dina Porat, August 9, 1997.

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Notes to Chapters 2 and 3 23.  Correspondence with Meir Ya’ari, January 10 and May 28, 1940, in Tcizik, “Ideological Discussions,” 164–169; and Lipsker, On Destroyed Poland, 177. 24.  Lipsker, On Destroyed Poland, 177; Shamir, Shmuel Breslav, 55. 25.  Quotation from Cesia Rosenberg-Amit, Not to Lose a Human Face (Tel Aviv, 1990), 16. For the council, see Lipsker, On Destroyed Poland, 160–162. 26.  Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part B; for leaving, see the references given in note 7; for sending the material, see interview with Yosef Shamir and Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 443. 27.  Korczak, Flames, 54; Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 15. 28.  Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part B; Kovner, “Encounter Beyond Darkness,” 7–20, esp. 18–19; Grossman, “Almost a Confession,” 106. 29.  Kovner, “Encounter Beyond Darkness,” 21. 30.  Akiva Ernest Simon, The Dividing Line (Givat Haviva, 1973), 29.

Chapter 3 1.  The Dispersing Council, GHA, C.78/3.54; Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 200; Levin, Jews of the Soviet-Annexed Territories, 220; for a report on such a meeting of Jewish local Communists with Hashomer Hatzair members, see Adam Rand, “The Vilna Days,” Hakibbutz Ha’artzi Bulletin 40 (March 31, 1942), 5–6. 2.  Kovner, His and About Him, 65. Kovner’s testimony to Yitzhak Arad, June 9, 1971, YVA, File 3176. 3.  Kovner, His and About Him, 65; and Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 451. 4.  Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 451; Kovner, His and About Him, 65; Yitzhak Ziv, “Hashomer Hatzair Under Soviet Rule in Eastern Poland, 9.1939– 6.1941,” Yalkut Moreshet 45: 118 (June 1988); interview with Roseman; on a gradual dispersion, see Hillel Zeidel, A Human Being Tested (Holocaust Chapters) (Tel Aviv, 1971), 20. 5.  Interview with Yitzhak Ziv; Kovner, His and About Him, 64. 6.  Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part B. Shlomo Kless, Borders, Underground, and Flight: Zionist Pioneering Activity in the Soviet Union and Contacts with the Yishuv, 1941–1945 (Tel Aviv, 1989), 26. 7.  See Kovner, His and About Him, 65; Kovner’s testimony to Yitzhak Arad, June 9, 1971, YVA, File 3176. 8.  Kovner, His and About Him, 60; Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part A. 9.  Porat, Concentration of Jewish Refugees, 57–65; and Levin, Jews in the SovietAnnexed Territories, 200–220. 10.  Porat, Concentration of Refugees, 57–65; Shamir, Shmuel Breslav, 55, based

Notes to Chapter 3 on the report by Levi Dror, a Kibbutz Artzi delegate in Lithuania; Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 1, 451; according to Rand, “The Hashomer Hatzair Leadership in Poland at the Beginning of the War,” Yalkut Moreshet 40: 131–132 (December 1985), 320 shomrim left Lithuania for Eretz Israel, although all other sources mention 120–150, a more reasonable estimate compared to the overall shomrim number; Levin, in Jews of the Soviet-Annexed Territories, cites numbers that contradict his own conclusions. 11.  Interview with Yosef Shamir and Yosef Shamir, “On Shmuel Breslav’s Ideological Path,” Yalkut Moreshet 54: 63–85 (April 1993). Report of the leadership in the refugee center in Vilna, GJA, C.78/3.54, E.3.28.2, and D.1.331. 12.  Shalev, Tossia, 60–61; interviews with Yosef Shamir, Mordechai Roseman, Yitzhak Ziv, and Moshe Gal; regarding the Hashomer Hatzair refugee center’s decisions of March 22, 1940, see Lipsker, On Destroyed Poland, 179; and Chaika Grossman, “Almost a Confession,” Yalkut Moreshet 69: 113 (May 2000). Zelig Geiyer, the most senior of the leaders, had left during the Lithuanian period, going by way of Western Europe. During the Soviet occupation, principally between January and March 1941, the following members gradually left the country: Haim Holtz, who had waited a long time before he was permitted to go; Shaike Weiner, whose emigration had been decided on by the leadership in Vilna and who, after the war, returned to Europe to aid in organizing the escape of Jews to Eretz Israel; and Yitzhak Ziv (Yitzhak Zalmanson, who had been working in eastern Poland and was in constant danger of arrest and concerning whom the decision had been made well in advance). By the end of March, Adam Rand, Haim Gelbard, and Yosef Shamir had also left. 13.  Interviews with Vitka Kempner, Mordechai Roseman, Adam Rand, Yitzhak Ziv, and Clara Bar. 14.  Chaika Grossman, A Life Story (Nahariyah, 1997), 3; Bezalel, Everything Is Written, 52; Kovner to Shalom Lurie, March 30, 1978, Genazim. 15.  Kovner, “Encounter Beyond Darkness,” 18. 16.  Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 2, 844–845, and v. 1, 451. Hazan’s letter, no date, GHA, 2.5.30.95. 17.  Rand, “Hashomer Hatzair Leadership in Poland,” 131; interview with Yosef Shamir. 18.  “A Letter of the Hashomer Hatzair Leadership in Vilna to Merhavia, December 7, 1939,” in Lipsker, On Destroyed Poland, 10; and Yosef Shamir, “The Supreme Decree,” in Lipsker, On Destroyed Poland, 168–169; see also Mishmar (April 30, 1944) and interviews with Dina Porat. 19.  Grossman, Underground Members, 15. 20.  Pioneering research based on recently opened Eastern bloc archives, presented by Valentinas Brandisowskas in September 1997 in a Kleipeda University conference about history and the Holocaust in Lithuania, mentions half these numbers: 17,500 deportees and 2,000 Jews; Alfonsas Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians,

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Notes to Chapters 3 and 4 and the Holocaust (Vilna, 2003), 158–163 (in English), has other, more detailed numbers. 21.  For more unification processes in Vilna at the time, see Levin, Jews of the Soviet-Annexed Territories, 282–283; Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 2, 203; Kovner, “Encounter Beyond Darkness,” 17–18; Kovner’s testimony to Yitzhak Arad in 1971, YVA, 3176; and Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part B. 22.  See Dina Porat, “The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects,” in The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, ed. David Cesarani (London and New York, 1994), 159–175 (in English).

Chapter 4 1.  For enlisting in the Red Army, see Grossman, Underground Members, 16; Ruzka Korczak, Flames, 9; interview with Mordechai Roseman. 2.  Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 2, 202, fits with the numbers of those who stayed. See also Korczak, Flames, 9–10; Grossman, Underground Members, 19–21. 3.  Interview with Mordechai Roseman; Grossman, Underground Members, 16. 4.  Grossman, Underground Members, 16; Korczak, Flames, 9; interview with Mordechai Roseman. 5.  For the cruel treatment, see Korczak, Flames, 10; about the peasants, see Sara Nishmit, “‘Righteous of the Nations’ in Occupied Lithuania,” Pages for the Study of the Holocaust and the Uprising, second series A (1970), 319. 6.  Yitzhak Arad, Jewish Vilna in Struggle and Destruction (Tel Aviv, 1976), 44–47. The references given here are for the original Hebrew version. The En­ glish version is Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the ­Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1980). Sara Nishmit, “Between Collaboration and Resistance: On the German Occupation of Lithuania,” in Pages for the Study of the Holocaust and the Uprising, second series A (1970), 152–177. 7.  Arad, Jewish Vilna, 54–56; Yosef Gar, “Ostland and Generalbezirk Lithuania,” in Lithuanian Jewry, v. 4, The Holocaust, 1941–1945, ed. Leib Garfunkel et al. (Tel Aviv, 1984), 27–29; Yosef Gar, “Details of the Destruction of Lithuania in the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen,” in Garfunkel et al., Lithuanian Jewry, v. 4, 21–26. 8.  Zeidel, A Human Being Tested; Grossman, Underground Members, 20; Mark Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania in Battle and Destruction (Paris, 1948), 41–45 (in Yiddish); Herman Kruk, Diary from the Vilna Ghetto (New York, 1961), 10–16 (in Yiddish). The English version of Kruk’s diary is The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. Benjamin Harshav (New Haven and London, 2002). 9.  For kidnapping during the first stage, see Arad, Jewish Vilna, 68–74.

Notes to Chapter 4 Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 20, is the only source mentioning Poles kidnapping as well; the calendar is in GHA, D.2.102. 10.  Kovner wrote a response to Hanoch Bartov, titled “Nine Little Sisters Look at My Sister As If She Were a Talking Ash,” Ma’ariv (August 3, 1984); Grossman, Underground Members, 18–19. 11.  For details about the killing system in the Einsatzgruppen reports, see Gar, “Details of the Destruction.” For similar details provided by Lithuanians, see Dina Porat, “The Legend of the Struggle of Jews from the Reich in the Ninth Fort near Kovna, 1941–1942,” Masua 20: 72–95 (April 1992). 12.  Grossman, Underground Members, 21. 13.  Vitka Kempner’s testimony to Avraham Atzili; interview with Vitka Kempner. 14.  Irena Adamovitch in Mosty (in Polish), the postwar Hashomer Hatzair in Warsaw Bulletin, April 19, 1948. For Jadwiga Duziec, see Wladislaw Bartoczewski, Ten Jest z Ojcyzny mojej (Krakow, 1996), 512–513 (in Polish); Grossman, Underground Members, 19–20; and Korczak, Flames, 15–16. 15.  For the number of members, see Korczak, Flames, 15; and Grossman, Underground Members, 19–21. 16.  The mother superior in Mosty, April 19, 1948; and Bartoczewski, Ten Jest z Ojcyzny mojej, 513–517; testimony of Nehama (Huma) Gadot, YVA, 03/9885; Zippora and Yosef Ritter, A Beam of Light in the Darkness, no date or place of publication mentioned, p. 35; letter from Kovner to Shalom Lurie, March 30, 1978, Genazim; Kovner to Hanoch Bartov, Ma’ariv (August 3, 1984); Grossman, Underground Members, 17–22; Avraham Sutzkever, The Vilna Ghetto (Tel Aviv, 1947) (written in Moscow, summer 1944), 138; interview with Vitka Kempner. 17.  The mother superior in Mosty, April 19, 1948; testimony of Nehama ­Gadot, YVA, 03/9885; for Arieh Vilner, see Shacham, in Third Person Singular, v. 2, 178– 185; Korczak, Flames, 16; and Grossman, Underground Members, 36–37. 18.  Testimony of Zippora and Yosef Ritter, who opposed Kovner’s opinion, YVA, 03/4292, their brochure Beam of Light in the Darkness, and the interview with Zippora; for the list of those who hid in the convent, see Kovner, “Ima,” Yalkut Moreshet 38: 12 (December 1984). Zippora never forgot how Kempner had later freed her husband from a Soviet prison, but Kempner had completely forgotten the incident. 19.  Correspondence between Kovner and Hadassah Kamianitski, “Letters” file, KEHA; letters to Aharon Zeitlin, September and October 1971, “Correspondence with Authors” file, KEHA; Aharon Zeitlin, The Other Reality (Tel Aviv, 1967), 272–273. Zeitlin cites an interview that Yitzhak Bezalel held with Kovner, published in Lamerhav, Adar B 29 (usually March), 1965. 20.  Grossman, Underground Members, 33; interview with Cesia RosenbergAmit. 21.  The mother superior in Mosty, April 19, 1948.

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Notes to Chapters 4 and 5 22.  Interview that Dov Levin held with Kovner, Vitka Kempner, and Ruzka Korczak, February 17, 1965, GHA, A.340/39. 23.  Kovner’s letter to Mordechai Paldiel, February 9, 1984, YVA, Righteous of the Nations Department, File 2862. 24.  Kempner’s testimony to Avraham Atzili and interview with her; the mother superior’s pleading with Kovner in “The Trial, the Mask, and Human Images,” Al Hamishmar (April 26, 1987); and the mother superior in Mosty, April 19, 1948. 25.  See Grossman, Underground Members, 37, for weapons that did not arrive. Korczak does not mention the issue in her book. 26.  Kovner, “Ima,” 11; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 19; Kovner to Bartov, Ma’ariv (August 3, 1984); Kovner, in “The Trial, the Mask, and Human Images”; interview with Vitka Kempner; Sutzkever, Vilna Ghetto, 138; testimony of Nehama Gadot, YVA, 03/9885; the mother superior in Mosty, April 19, 1948. 27.  Kovner to Hanoch Bartov, Ma’ariv (August 3, 1984); minutes of the Righteous of Nations Subcommittee, March 29, 1984, YVA, File 2862; “Arieh Vilner’s Letter to the Dominican Sisters’ Mother Superior,” Yalkut Moreshet 38: 7–10 (December 1984); Shacham, Third Person Singular. 28.  The mother superior’s correspondence with Zippora Ritter and Nehama Gadot; awards to the other nuns; Kovner to Mordechai Paldiel, December 10, 1984, TVA, File 1862. 29.  Kovner, My Little Sister, 2nd ed. (Tel Aviv, 1970), 20, 62, 53, 27, 38, 50, 44, 24 (according to the order of quotations). 30.  Kovner in an interview with Hanoch Bartov, Ma’ariv (August 3, 1984). 31.  Hana Yaoz, “Kovner’s Poems as Mythical Structure,” Iton 77: 29–30 (January 1984); Moshe Ben-Shaul, “Poetry as a Magic Reality,” Al Hamishmar (January 25, 1968); Menachem Brown, “My Little Sister,” Lamerchav (December 1, 1967); Avraham Blat, “Between Poetry and Lamentation,” Hatzofeh (December 29, 1967); Eli Pfefercorn, “The Word and Silence in My Little Sister,” in Abba Kovner: A Selection of Critical Essays on His Writings, ed. Shalom Lurie (Tel Aviv, 1988), 113–123. 32.  Arad, Jewish Vilna, 81–85; Gar, “Ostland,” 27–29. 33.  Nishmit, “Righteous of the Nations,” 152–177; Arad, Jewish Vilna, 86; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 320–321. 34.  Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 40; Arad, Jewish Vilna, 95; Alexander (Senia) Rindjiunski, The Destruction of Vilna (Tel Aviv, 1987), ch. “The Ghetto.” 35.  Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna; Zeidel, “The Ghetto Is Established,” in his A Human Being Tested. 36.  Korczak, Flames, 19, 23.

Chapter 5 1. Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 42–43; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 69–71; Mendel Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron (Tel Aviv, 1967), 253–254 (in Yiddish).

Notes to Chapter 5 2.  Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, 159–160; Nissan Reznik, in Aviva Kempner’s 1986 documentary film The Partisans of Vilna, directed by Yosh Valecki. 3.  Arad, Jewish Vilna, 123–126; regarding a German document about the history of Vilna and the ghetto, see Korczak, Flames; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 101–110. 4.  Interview with Vitka Kempner; Grossman, Underground Members, 23, 35, 41; Korczak, Flames, 32–33. 5.  Korczak, Flames, 16; Zvi Mersik and Andzei Liebedz, who were also representatives of their movements in the Coordination, left Vilna. 6.  See the Stahlecker report (General SS Franz Walter Stahlecker, Commander of Einsatzgruppe A, which operated in the Baltic states), in Zvi Shner, ed., The Final Solution: Documents Relating to the Murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany (Tel Aviv, 1960), 22. 7.  Ruzka Korchak-Marle, The Personality and Philosophy of Life of a Fighter, ed. Y. Tubin, L. Dror, and Y. Rab (Tel Aviv, 1998), 160; Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, Pages from Fire, 101–102. 8.  Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, Pages from Fire, 101–102; Korchak-Marle, Personality, 28, 198–199. 9.  Zeidel, A Human Being Tested, 39; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 36–37, does not mention such an occurrence. 10.  Arad, Jewish Vilna, 158–167; the quotation is from Kovner’s testimony at the Eichmann trial, Testimonies A (Jerusalem, 1974); see also Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 45; and Korczak, Flames, 17–18. 11.  Kovner, “Flames in Ashes,” his speech delivered in the synagogue in liberated Vilna, August 1944, first printed in Achdut Ha’avoda 175 (1946); Yitzhak Zuckerman and Moshe Basok, eds., The Ghetto Battles Book (Tel Aviv, 1956), 411. 12.  Testimonies A, 338; see Israel Gutman, “The Uniqueness of the Lodz Ghetto,” introduction to The Lodz Ghetto Chronicles (Jerusalem, 1987), v. 1, 62. 13.  Grossman, Underground Members, 18, 25, 29, 35; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 57; interview with Grossman; Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, 80; Abraham Weinrib, “Memoirs of a Vilna Ghetto Physician,” Yalkut Moreshet 27: 7–60 (April 1979), quotation on p. 32. 14.  Korchak-Marle, Personality, 56–60; Testimonies A, 342; Korczak, Flames, 41; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 18; Weinrib, “Memoirs,” 32–36. 15.  Kovner to Vitka Kempner, end of April 1946, KEHA, “Revenge” file. 16.  Grossman, Underground Members, 38–45; Korczak, Flames (1st ed.), 28; interview with Chaika Grossman. 17.  Korczak, Flames, 28. 18.  A joint interview held at Tel Aviv University on August 3, 1992, by Dina ­Porat with Sima Kaganovitch, Leibke Distel, Mira Verbin, Yitzhak Roglin, Littman Moravtchik (Mor), Mussia Lipman, and Vitka Kempner. 19.  Grossman, Underground Members, 39; Korczak, Flames, 32–33.

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Notes to Chapter 5 20.  Grossman, Underground Members, 29; Kovner, in Korczak, Flames, 28–29, and a joint interview with Dina Porat. 21.  Korczak, Flames, 41; joint interview with Dina Porat; Reznik’s testimony to Dov Levin, May 17, 1978, ICJ, Files 3176 and 3404; Reznik, “Movement,” 53–55; Beitar, Gordonia, Akiva, and Hapoel Hamizrahi also had representatives in these meetings. 22.  Korczak, Flames, 39; Korchak-Marle, Personality, 56; interview with Vitka Kempner; Kovner’s testimony to Oded Tira, YVA, 03/3883. 23.  Zuckerman and Basok, Ghetto Battles, 411; Grossman, Underground Members, 35; Chaika Grossman, “Those Seven Years—Not Exactly,” Dvar Hashavua (March 4, 1991). 24.  Avraham Sutzkever, “From the Vilna Ghetto,” in The Black Book, ed. Va­ sily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg (Jerusalem, 1991), 291–293 (based on the first version of Sutzkever’s Vilna Ghetto, written in Moscow in 1944); Nissan Reznik’s testimony to Dov Levin, in Reznik, “Movement,” 50 and 57; and Reznik’s memoirs, Buds from the Ashes: The Story of Hano’ar Hatzioni Youth in the Vilna Ghetto (Jerusalem, 2003), ch. 6. 25.  Korczak, Flames, 42–43; Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, xxxvii–xxxviii. 26.  Reznik, “Movement,” 54; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 341–342. 27.  For an analysis of today’s dispute regarding the writing of the manifesto, see Dina Porat, “The Vilna 1.1.42 Manifesto,” Yad Vashem Studies 25: 93 (1996). 28.  Ziva Shalev, Tossia Altman, master’s thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1989, p. 201; Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto Underground Uprising (Tel Aviv, 1977), 194–195; Korczak, Flames, 44, 46, 52–53; Grossman, Underground Members, 35; joint testimony with Dina Porat. 29.  The original manifesto in Yiddish, handwritten by Kovner, GHA, D.1.4630; according to Arad, Jewish Vilna, 196, the manifesto was written by Kovner in the ghetto, and according to Israel Gutman, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1990), v. 5, 1074, Kovner heard about the murders once he returned to the ghetto; but neither Arad nor Gutman has a reference, nor are their statements supported by any other source. For writing in the convent, see Reznik, “Movement,” 54; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 341–342; and Nathan Cantarowitch, The Jewish Resistance Movement in Poland (New York, 1967), 9 (in Yiddish); interview with Vitka Kempner; Grossman, “Almost a Confession.” 30.  Kovner, in Testimonies A, 343; Shmerke Katcherginski, The Destruction of Vilna (New York, 1947), 17 (in Yiddish); joint testimony of Vitka Kempner and Ruzka Korczak given to Yitzhak Arad, June 17, 1974, YVA, 03/3882. 31.  Joint testimony with Dina Porat; interview with Haim Marom (Morocco) and with Littman Moravtchik (Mor); Korczak, Flames, 53; the poem was written in Yiddish by Nahum Yod, according to Shalom Lurie, who translated it into Hebrew. 32.  “A Somber Imagination,” in Zuckerman and Moshe Basok, Ghetto Battles, 411; “A Feeling,” Kovner’s testimony to Dov Levin, 1965, in Kovner, His and About

Notes to Chapters 5 and 6 Him, 52; Dina Porat, “‘With Grace and Forgiveness’: Ruzka Korczak’s Encounter with the Yishuv and Its Leadership, 1944–1946,” Yalkut Moreshet 52: 21 (April 1992). 33.  Testimonies A, 344; joint testimony with Yitzhak Arad, 1974; Gutman, Lodz Ghetto Chronicles, 62. 34.  Mira Verbim and Littman Moravtchik (Mor) in the joint testimony with Dina Porat; Korchak-Marle, Personality, 29. 35.  Grossman, Underground Members, 48, and an interview with her; Shalev, Tossia Altman, 202; Reznik, Buds from the Ashes, ch. 6; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 342; Cantarowitch, Jewish Resistance Movement, 7; Testimonies A, 344; Rachel Manbar, “Hashomer Hatzair in Warsaw, 1940–1942,” Yalkut Moreshet 23: 128–129 (April 1977). 36.  Gutman, Lodz Ghetto Chronicles, 62; Kovner’s letter to Bronka Klibanski, January 20, 1983, YVA, File 6187. 37.  Korczak, Flames, 368; Korchak-Marle, Personality, 29; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 45, 47. 38.  Kovner’s testimony to Dov Levin, 1965; Kovner, “A First Attempt to Tell,” Yalkut Moreshet 16: 7–23 (April 1973). 39.  Chaika Grossman, “The Uprising Originated in the Certainty of Annihilation,” Yalkut Moreshet 47: 100 (November 1989); Israel Gutman on Abba Kovner, in Gutman, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, v. 5, 1074. 40.  Kovner, Of All Loves (Merhavia, 1970 [1965]), 147, 149.

Chapter 6 1.  Kempner’s testimony to Avraham Atzili; Kovner to Dov Levin, February 17, 1965, GHA, A.340.39. 2.  Kovner to Dov Levin, October 10, 1957, GHA, A.357. 3.  Kovner to Dov Levin, February 17, 1965, GHA, A.340.39. 4.  Kovner to Dov Levin, February 17, 1965, GHA, A.340.39. It is unclear who else participated. 5.  For the instructions that Tenenbaum-Tamaroff left, see “Mark Dworzecki” (pp. 78–90) and “Pessia Bernstein” (pp. 37–57) in The Second Struggle Group: Witnesses from the Vilna Ghetto, ed. Zvika Dror (Tel Aviv, 1987), 16; and Arieh Levi Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance: The Pioneer Movements in Poland Throughout the Holocaust and During Its Aftermath, 1939–1949 (Tel Aviv, 1997), v. 1, 110; for the reactions of elderly leaders, see Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, chs. 20–21 (in Yiddish). 6.  Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, 108; interview with Dov Levin; Kovner’s testimony to Dov Levin, 1965. 7.  Kovner’s testimony to Dov Levin, 1965; interviews with Nissan Reznik and Alexander Rindjiunski; Yosef Harmatz’s interviews with Chiena Borowska; Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, Pages from Fire, 101–102; Sutzkever, “From the Vilna Ghetto,” 219.

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Notes to Chapter 6 8.  Grossman, “Uprising,” 97; Kempner’s testimony to Avraham Atzili; testimony of Yosef Harmatz, ICJ, 12/42. 9.  Korczak, Flames, 62; Kovner to Levin, 1965; Haim Lazar, Destruction and Resistance (Tel Aviv, 1988 [1950]), 46; Nisan Reznik, “Matters as They Were,” Masua 23: 218–224 (April 1995). 10.  Nissan Reznik to Dov Levin, May 17, 1978, ICJ, 3404, 3176; Korczak, Flames, 62–63 and esp. 44; see Chaika Grossman, “The Youth’s Road to Uprising,” Yalkut Moreshet 43–44: 149–158 (August 1987), where she writes about all the movements; M. Gefen, C. Grossman, and A. Kovner, eds., The Jewish Partisans’ Book (Merhavia, 1958), 16; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 68; Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 47; calendar, GHA, D.2.102. 11.  Yosef Harmatz’s interview with Chiena Borowska, April 1994; Korczak, Flames, 62; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 17. 12.  Korczak, Flames, 50–64; Kovner to Dov Levin, 1965; Grossman, Underground Members, 47, 57. 13.  Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 51; Korczak, Flames, 98; Kruk, Diary, 168– 169; Kovner to Dov Levin, 1965; Nahum Cantarowitch, Resistance and Uprising in the Vilna Ghetto and the Region 1941–1944 (New York, 1975), 10–13 (in Yiddish), gives a detailed list of each of the movements’ and parties’ activists; joint testimony in Dror, Second Struggle Group, 15–25; for terrible accusations and insults against Kovner, see Yehezkel Kremerman, From Vilna, Jerusalem of Lithuania, to Haifa (private publication, 1995), 115–164, esp. 148 and 163. 14.  Testimony of Shlomo Brand, Leo Bernstein, and Marc Dworzecki in Dror, Second Struggle Group, 23–25. 15.  For an analysis of the Karl Jaeger and Stahlecker reports about the murder of Lithuanian Jews, see Yosef Gar, “Details of the Destruction,” 21–26. 16.  Korczak, Flames, 72; Kovner’s calendar, September 16, 1941. 17.  Interview with Fania Barantzowska; for daily life and cultural activities in the ghetto, see the Sutzkever Boxes, National Library, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 215-2.0 and 215.3; many documents are given in Korczak, Flames, 330–363; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, but the Yiddish edition is far richer in documentation than the Hebrew edition ( Jerusalem of Lithuania in the Uprising and the Holocaust, Tel Aviv, 1951); Avraham Noverstern, Avraham Sutzkever on His Seventieth Birthday (a catalog of an exhibition) (Jerusalem, 1984), 32–49; Kovner gives the books to Kruk, March 13, 1943, GHA, D.1.406; Kruk, Diary, 245–255, 284–285, and about education and culture, see 342–343, 470–471, and the parallel material in the English edition. 18.  Korczak, Flames, 31, 330; Noverstern, Avraham Sutzkever, 41–44. 19.  Weinrib, “Memoirs.” 20.  Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, 82 and 102; Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary (Cambridge, 1990), entries of February 4 and March 4, 1943 (in English).

Notes to Chapter 6 21.  Kovner’s testimony to Dina Yellin, October 2, 1982, GHA, A.1021; Kovner, His and About Him, 43. 22.  Noverstern, Avraham Sutzkever, 42–43, 47; Korczak, Flames, 94–96. 23.  Kovner, His and About Him, 67–68; Kovner to Dov Levin, 1965. 24.  Interviews with Vitka Kempner, Haim Lazar, Fania Barantzowska, Ma­ russia Gutkin, Chiena Borowska, and Shmuel Kaplinski; a joint testimony to Dina Porat. 25.  Korczak, Flames, 63; Hasia Taubes, Notes to Giora (Ramat Gan, 1978), 33; interview with Cesia (Zila) Rosenberg-Amit; Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part B; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 59. 26.  Grossman, Underground Members, 40; Vitka Kempner, in Personality, 63; interviews with Vitka Kempner, Neuta Kovner, and Cesia Rosenberg-Amit; see Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face; Korczak, Flames, 65–66, 130–134. 27.  Korczak, Flames, 86; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 21; notes that Kovner scribbled about underground activity and called “daily activity,” GHA, D.1.6028, no date. 28.  The Sutzkever Boxes, 277-1, no date noted; Arad, Jewish Vilna, 219. 29.  Korczak, Flames, 86–87; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 20–21; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 102; the bulletin is in the Sutzkever Boxes, 276-1, dated June 30, 1943. Kovner explained the bulletin to Shalom Segal of the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, July 5, 1984, in GHA, D.1.5536. 30.  Manifestos in GHA, D.1.378.81, and in the Sutzkever Boxes, 4.1703/5; for preparations for later writing about the ghetto, see Kovner’s small notes, GHA, D.1.6028. 31.  “Daily activity,” Kovner’s small notes, GHA, D.1.6028; instructions for the treatment of weapons and announcements of changes in the underground’s structure, April 7 and 29, 1943, GHA, D.1.384; Kovner to Dov Levin, 1965. 32.  Korczak, Flames, 138–139; Yitzhak Rogalin, “The United Vilna Youth and Its Fighting Organization,” in Pages on Vilna: A Collection (Lodz, 1947), 25–28 (in Yiddish); Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 21–23; Kovner, His and About Him, 68. 33.  For the attitude toward weapons, see Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 59; Taubes, Notes to Giora, 35; questionnaires in the Sutzkever Boxes, 326/7/8 (in Russian), and in Vitka Kempner’s papers, Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 245-1, written in Yiddish by Zelda Treger Nissanelevich, a Hashomer Hatzair member and a renowned partisan. 34.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 26; the “daily activity”; Grossman, Underground Members, 40; interview with Littman Moravtchik (Mor), in whose room the food tickets were forged. 35.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 18; Sutzkever Boxes, 251-3 and B.1.384; for the series of brochures, see Korczak, Flames, 96. 36.  Korczak, Flames, 96; Leibke Distel, Days of Life, 1941–1945 (Yakum, 1982); for sabotage instructions, see the Sutzkever Boxes, 65-1, and the drawing of a mine

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Notes to Chapter 6 (“the bomb” [die bombe in Yiddish]), 4.1703/13; for preparing the mine, see Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 23. 37.  Vitka Kempner’s testimony to Avraham Atzili; Korczak, Flames, 90–92; Hirsch Glick, “The Stay-Quiet Night,” Songs and Poems (New York, 1953), 59 (in Yiddish). I thank Shoshana Rabinovitch and Leibke Distel for their help in finding the text. 38.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 23–25; Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, 98. 39.  Zelik Kalmanovitch, A Diary in the Vilna Ghetto (Tel Aviv, 1977), 18, 34–36; Korczak, Flames, 116. I thank Shalom Lurie for the letters concerning his father. 40.  Zelik Kalmanovitch, “Pages Torn from an Essay,” Huliot [Links] 3: 297– 301 (Spring 1996), a text discovered in Vilna after the publication of the diary; Kalmanovitch, Diary, 46. 41.  Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, 126–127; Kovner’s explanations to Shalom ­Lurie regarding the Scrolls and their writing, according to an interview with ­Lurie. 42.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 205; a piece by Zelik Kalmanovitch in Nathan Alterman, Between Two Roads: Selections from a Diary, ed. Dan Laor (Tel Aviv, 1989), 21; David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse (Cambridge, 1984), 4–5. 43.  Kalmanovitch, Diary, 116–118; interview with Shalom Lurie. 44.  Interviews with Israel Gutman and Shalom Lurie, whose lecture “With the Scrolls of Testimony” (in the August 1989 Tenth Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem) serves as the introduction to the Hebrew version of the Scrolls; Shalom Lurie, “To the Scrolls of Testimony,” Alei Siah (Summer 1994), 152–156; Yehuda Bauer read the original text and provided his comments in accordance with a request of Kovner’s before he passed away. 45.  Abba Kovner, “Facing the Monument,” On the Wall, May 13, 1995. On the Wall was a newspaper. 46.  Arad, Jewish Vilna, 212–219; detailed lists by Kovner, GHA, D.1.6028. 47.  Rindjiunski accompanied Wittenberg. See Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 96–97. A 1,000-page manuscript written by Rindjiunski in Yiddish about the ghetto and forest is stored in the Ghetto Fighters’ House; parts of the manuscript are in Kovner’s files in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh; Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 33; Kovner to Dov Levin, 1965; Korczak, Flames, 116–117. 48.  Korczak, Flames, 116–117, 119; Kovner to Dina Yellin, October 21, 1982, GHA, A.1021; about informing on the paratroops, see Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 34–35. 49.  Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 34–35, and an interview with Cesia Rosenberg-Amit; Korczak, Flames, 118. 50.  Korczak, Flames, 118. 51.  It was Rindjiunski who wrote the martyrology, and it facilitated writing in Israel later. From Dina Porat’s interview with him. 52.  Korczak, Flames, 103; Kovner in detail, in GHA, D.1.6028, and in the rec-

Notes to Chapters 6 and 7 ommendation to award him a Soviet medal, in the Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 328 (in Russian). 53.  For Grossman’s departure and Kovner’s objection, see Grossman, Underground Members, 90–93; and Sara Bender, Facing Death: The Jews in Bialystok, 1939–1943 (Tel Aviv, 1997), 171–174; for five various manifestos, see the Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 4.1703/5; about writing and distributing the manifestos, see Korczak, Flames, 137. 54.  Reznik’s testimony to Dov Levin, March 27, 1958, ICJ, F/419; and Nissan Reznik’s testimony to Shmerke Katcherginski, December 3, 1944, in the Katcherginski-Sutzkever collection, YIVO; for an introduction to Reznik’s testimony, September 10, 1944, see the Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 158-1; Tory, Ghetto Every Day, 95–98, gives Irena Adamowicz’s detailed report, written in Kovno on July 8, 1942; and for Shavli, see Eliezer Yerushalmi, Pinkas Shavli [The Shavli Chronicles] (Jerusalem, 1958), 94–96. 55.  Kovner in an interview with Uzi Ben-Roni, “We Did Not Have an Intellectual Leadership,” Pi Ha’aton [The Donkey’s Mouth], May 2, 1965. 56.  Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 205; Cantarowitch, Resistance and Uprising, 13; Moshe Kalchheim, “On the Underground in the Ghetto,” Masua 25: 147–150 (April 1997); and in Dror, Second Struggle Group, 71–77; in their testimony to Dov Levin, Vitka Kempner and Ruzka Korczak insisted that there was a core of only thirty-five members. 57.  Weinrib, “Memoirs,” esp. 35–36. 58.  The Oshmyany affair has been widely discussed. See particularly Korczak, Flames, 212–127, including the statements by Salk Dessler, Meir Lev, and Jacob Gens in its wake; also see Kalmanovitch, Diary, 85–87.

Chapter 7 1.  Kovner to Uzi Ben-Roni, Pi Ha’aton, May 2, 1965. 2.  For a detailed description, see Arad, Jewish Vilna, 289–290. 3.  Kovner’s pocket calendar. 4.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 16; about the ghetto being happy to receive the belongings, see Kruk, Diary, 489–500; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 420–428; Arad, Jewish Vilna, 292–296. 5.  Kovner’s pocket calendar, on Yom Kippur of 1943; Tory, Ghetto Every Day, 235–237, written on April 8, 1943. 6.  For all eighty-six clauses of the regulations, see the Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 06-462, and GHA, D.1360; in Korczak, Flames (1st ed.), 165–169, some of the clauses are missing. 7.  For an explanation of the regulations, see Korczak, Flames (3rd ed.), 146– 147; and the Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 06-462.

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Notes to Chapter 7 8.  About the child, see Korczak, Flames, 50; for Kovner about Passover, see Korczak, Flames, 68. 9.  Kovner’s pocket calendar, April 30, 1943; Reznik, “Movement,” 58; Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 155. 10.  Moshe Kalchheim, in Second Struggle Group, ed. Dror, 74–76; Leo Bernstein, quoted in Arad, Jewish Vilna, 225, no source given. 11.  Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 1, 114; interview with Yosef Harmatz; for the structure and goals of the Second Struggle Group, see Dror, Second Struggle Group, 64–70, and for the agreement, see esp. p. 70. 12.  Kalchheim, “On the Underground”; Moshe Shutan, Ghetto and Woods: A Story (Tel Aviv, 1985), 94–96; Kovner to Dov Levin, 1965, and Kovner to Oded Tira, September 1977. 13.  Shutan, Ghetto and Woods, 139–141; for Gens’s position, see Weinrib, “Memoirs,” 18–20, 40–41 (April 1979); Gens was referring to General Erwin Rommel, commander of the German forces in North Africa. 14.  Weinrib, “Memoirs,” 40–41; for the ghetto’s encouraging the underground after the Glazman affair, see Distel, Days of Life, 8. 15.  Korczak, Flames (1st ed.), 179; Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 63–66. 16.  Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 63–66. 17.  First, at the Eichmann trial; second, in 1962 to Yigal Lossin, recorded in Kovner’s Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh Archive (EHA); third, to Arad, with Vitka Kempner and Ruzka Korczak, 1974; fourth, a collective testimony to Yehoshua Sobol, January and February 1982, recorded in EHA; fifth, to Sarid, 1984; and again to Sobol, February 1986. 18.  Collective testimony to Yitzhak Arad, 1974; in the collective 1982 testimony to Yehoshua Sobol, Ruzka Korczak explicitly states that Wittenberg, Kovner, and Borowska must have known that Kozlowski had been arrested; also see Arad, Jewish Vilna, 304. 19.  For Bruno Keitel’s entrance to the ghetto, see Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 122; Korczak, Flames (1st ed.), 182; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 440, quoting Nissan Reznik; Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 47; Isaac Kowalsky, A Secret Press in Nazi Europe: The Story of a Jewish United Partisans Organization (New York, 1969), 138; Kovner to Yitzhak Arad, 1974, collective testimony. 20.  Collective testimony to Yitzhak Arad, 1974; Rindjiunski, The Destruction of Vilna, 120; Kruk, Diary, 596; collective testimony to Yehoshua Sobol, 1982. 21.  Avraham Krizowski, ICJ, 12/175, on May 21, 1970, and “Avraham (Abrasha) Krizowski on the Events in the Vilna Ghetto,” a testimony given to Dov Levin, in Fighters and Partisans Museum 82: 23–79, esp. 47–48 (April 1997); for negotiations before the meeting, see Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 121. 22.  For rumors about a forthcoming Aktion, see Korczak, Flames (1st ed.), 182, and Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 120–121. 23.  While the meeting was being held in Gens’s room, the Beitar members

Notes to Chapter 7 were celebrating Glazman’s return to the ghetto. They were among those who had rescued Wittenberg but were not the only ones, as Haim Lazar and Niusia Dlugi Lubotzki wrote in “Vilna Ghetto Testimonies,” Fighters and Partisans Museum 7: 6–7 (1989). The paper is a translation of Niusia Dlugi’s testimony in YIVO Bleter [YIVO Pages] 30(2): 188–199 (Winter 1947) (in Yiddish); Shmuel Kaplinski’s letter to Yosef Harmatz, July 28, 1996: “Only Yoshke Raf, you and I liberated him” (I thank Harmatz for this letter); see Korczak, Flames (3rd ed.), 162–163; for the spitting, see “Abrasha Krizowski” testimony to Dov Levin, 45; Kovner’s threat in The Partisans of Vilna, Aviva Kempner’s 1986 documentary. 24.  For details, see Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 117–119; Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 44–45; Dlugi, “Vilna Ghetto Testimonies,” 5–6; see Korczak, Flames (1st ed.), 144–148 for Glazman’s first arrest and 176–179 for Glazman and Kovner. Korczak is the only source who mentions Gens’s intention to send Kovner outside the ghetto. Kovner himself never mentioned the matter. For the responsibility question, see Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, 459. 25.  Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, 459; Katcherginski, The Destruction of Vilna, 299; Masha Rolnik, I Have to Tell (Jerusalem, 1965), 90; Kovner in his testimonies, 1982 and 1984. 26.  In most of Kovner’s testimonies, but especially that of 1984 to Arieh Levi Sarid, Kovner said he handled the negotiations with Gens, and to a lesser degree with Yitzhak Auerbuch, the liberated policeman, through Dr. Milkonovicki. 27.  Rolnik, I Have to Tell, 89–91; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 442; ­Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, 460–462. 28.  Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 46–48; Testimonies A (Jerusalem, 1974), 351; about delegations from both sides, see Korczak, Flames (1st ed.), 186–187; Katcherginski, Destruction of Vilna, 30; Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984. 29.  Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, 463; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 128; Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 126; Dlugi, “Vilna Ghetto Testimonies,” 8; Brayne As, “Memoirs,” YIVO Bleter 30(2): 200–201, said that when Wittenberg faced Gens, it was felt that Wittenberg, and not Gens, the formal leader, held “the ghetto strings” in his hands. 30.  Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 49. 31.  For the threat of bombardment, see Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 125; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 441; Sutzkever, Vilna Ghetto, 302; Kremerman, From Vilna, 124. The other sources speak about liquidating the ghetto by shooting its inhabitants: Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 103. 32.  Interview with Chiena Borowska in the documentary The Partisans of Vilna (transcribed from Yiddish by Dina Porat), KEHA; Kovner’s 1982 and 1986 testimonies; Dlugi, “Vilna Ghetto Testimonies,” 13; Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, 464; Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 125, and in an interview with Neri Livneh, News, August 25, 1989. Haim Lazar is the only source claiming that Wittenberg requested and got an answer from the Vilna Central Committee, but it

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Notes to Chapter 7 is illogical to assume that on such a night in the ghetto members of the Communist Party managed to sneak out, gathered the Vilna committee, which hardly existed at that time, got an answer, and sneaked back in. See Sonia Madeysker in S. Mille, “To the Sacrifice,” in Ghetto Battles, ed. Zuckerman and Basok, 431–445, esp. 438, who said that the ghetto was isolated and the Vilna committee could not be reached. 33.  Reznik, “Movement,” 58; in an interview with Dina Porat, Nissan Reznik explained that only in the forests, when they rethought the situation, did they realize that Krizowski had betrayed them; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 443, quoting Reznik; Reznik’s testimonies vary regarding contact with Wittenberg being cut off; Kovner to Yehoshua Sobol, 1982: “Krizowski was Dessler’s good friend”; also see Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 126–127, and Dlugi, “Vilna Ghetto Testimonies,” 13. 34.  Kovner in his 1982 testimony; Korczak, Flames (1st ed.), 187; for Sonia Madeysker’s coming to Wittenberg, see Dlugi, “Vilna Ghetto Testimonies,” 13; Chiena Borowska’s testimony in The Partisans of Vilna. Yehoshua Sobol used Zenia Berkon’s testimony, published in YIVO Bleter, and that of Dlugi and Brayne As, despite the fact that it contradicted all the others, and he quoted only her opinion that the underground turned Wittenberg in by force and that he was weak and scared and had lost control. However, in a letter to my student, Guy Gavra, May 6, 1988, Berkon (later Malecki) wrote from the United States that she had not participated in the underground’s staff meetings; about Krizowski leading the search for Wittenberg, see Kremerman, From Vilna, 124; and for Krizowski in his own testimony to Dov Levin, see Fighters and Partisans Museum (April 1997), 50. 35.  Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 125; Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 1, 118; Kovner to Sarid, 1984; Chiena Borowska in interviews with Dina Porat and Yosef Harmatz; Nissan Reznik in all his testimonies and in an interview with Dina Porat. 36.  See Sonia Madeysker to Alexander Bogen in Kalchheim, “On the Underground,” 184. 37.  Kovner to Yitzhak Arad, 1974. 38.  Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 49; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 127; Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 122; Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 445; ­K almanovitch, Diary, 116; Korczak, Flames (1st ed.), 188. Wittenberg was born into a working-class family in Vilna in 1907, graduated from a Yiddish elementary school, and learned leather working at night. He read a great deal and was always intellectually and culturally active. He joined the Polish Communist Party at an early age and in 1936 was elected chairman of the underground Leatherworkers Union in Vilna. 39.  Korczak, Flames (1st ed.), 189; Kovner to Yehoshua Sobol, 1986; Vitka Kempner in an interview with Neri Livneh, News, August 25, 1989; Dlugi, “Vilna

Notes to Chapters 7 and 8 Ghetto Testimonies,” 14; Reznik, “Movement,” 59; Abrasha Krizowski, in his testimony to Dov Levin, 53. They all write with certainty that Gens poisoned Wittenberg, and only a slight doubt remains that Wittenberg asked Gens for poison before they parted, received it, and committed suicide. 40.  Korczak, Flames (3rd ed.), 169. 41.  Shutan, Ghetto and Woods, 140–141. 42.  See Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984, and a long “Missive to Hashomer Hatzair Partisans in the Forests,” which Kovner wrote in Yiddish in March 1944 in the forest, GHA, D.2.15 (published in 2002 in Tel Aviv by Moreshet in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English under the title A Missive to the Hashomer Hatzair Partisans, introduction by Dina Porat). 43.  Interview with Vitka Kempner. 44.  Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 127. 45.  Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 226; Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984; interviews with Avraham Sutzkever and Alexander Rindjiunski. 46.  Arad, Jewish Vilna; however, Kovner had reservations about Arad’s book, as he told Arieh Levi Sarid in 1984. See Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, and Sarid, “Abba Kovner’s Answer to His Defamers,” Yalkut Moreshet 47 (November 1989), where Sarid accepts Kovner’s version in full. 47.  Yona Kobo, “The Wittenberg Affair as Represented in Memoirs, Historiography, and Drama,” master’s thesis, Tel Aviv, 1998. 48.  Vitka Kempner to Neri Livneh in “Lies Told About Abba,” News, August 25, 1989. 49.  Kempner, “Lies Told About Abba”; Chaika Grossman, “Where Did That Determination Come From?” Al Hamishmar, August 18, 1984; and Hasia Taubes, a reader’s letter to the editor in Al Hamishmar, September 29, 1989. Again see the three testimonies in YIVO Bleter 30(2) and Zenia Berkon (Malecki)’s letter to Guy Gavra, May 6, 1998, and to Yehoshua Sobol, December 12, 1989, courtesy of Guy Gavra. See Yehoshua Sobol, “Listen, We Are Turning You In,” Yediot Aharonot, September 15, 1989; the theater reviews were unanimously negative. It should be emphasized that Sobol built much of his arguments in the play around two testimonies, one of a woman no one remembers as being present in the final meeting and one that is both secondary and contradictory. 50.  Siegfried Lenz, Talk of the Town (Tel Aviv, 1975), 68, 75, 95, 186.

Chapter 8 1.  Nissan Reznik, in Moshe Kalchheim, ed., With Proud Bearing, 1939–1945: Chapters in the History of Jewish Fighting in the Narocz Forests (Tel Aviv, 1991), 260; Sarid, “Abba Kovner’s Answer to His Defamers,” 36. 2.  Kovner to Dina Yellin, 1982; Arad, Jewish Vilna, 317, according to Kovner’s testimony.

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Notes to Chapter 8 3.  For the order of the day, see Korczak, Flames, 168–169; Nissan Reznik, in Kalchheim, Proud Bearing, 260; Baruch Shuv, Beyond the Leaden Clouds (Tel Aviv, 1995), 89; Shlomo Kennet (Cantarowitch), “With Partisans in the Narocz Forests,” Testimony 1: 95–96 (June 1987). 4.  Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 129; Korczak, Flames, 170–172; Arad, Jewish Vilna, 319. The quotation is from Taubes, Notes to Giora, 36. 5.  Korczak, Flames, 178–181; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 129–130; Rolnik, I Have to Tell, 191. 6.  Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 248-1; and Sutzkever, “From the Vilna Ghetto,” 303; collective testimony to Yitzhak Arad, 1974, and Kovner to Dov Levin, 1965. 7.  Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 131; Zeidel, A Human Being Tested, 58; Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 1, 122. 8.  Korczak, Flames, 57; Kovner to Dina Yellin, 1982. 9.  Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili, and an interview with her and with Yosef Harmatz. 10.  Kovner, His and About Him, 57; Kovner, The Key Sank, in Kovner, Of All Loves (Merhavia, 1965), 167; a handwritten note in KEHA. 11.  On the defense point, see the testimony of the only submachine gunner stationed at 7 Strashun Street by Kovner, and of Kovner in the documentary, The Partisans of Vilna; see the gunner’s testimony in the Anthology on Armed Resistance, 1939–1945, ed. Isaac Kowalski (New York, 1984), 401–402; for the manifesto, see two different printings in the Sutzkever Boxes (no document number given) and in Kovner’s handwriting in GHA, D.1.382, all in Yiddish, and in Korczak, Flames, 181–182, in Hebrew. 12.  Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili, and an interview with her; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 132; Rolnik, I Have to Tell, 164; for Gens’s messages, see Kor­ czak, Flames, 186–190. 13.  Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 1, 124, based on Pessia Bernstein’s testimony, no. 2878 in the Ghetto Fighters’ House archive and in Second Struggle Group, ed. Dror, 54–55. 14.  Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 1, 150; and Sarid, “Abba Kovner’s Answer,” 44. 15.  About the submachine gunner, see Kowalski, Anthology, 401–402; Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili and in an interview with Dina Porat; Korczak, Flames, 184–186; and Kovner to Dina Yellin, 1982, and to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984; Littman Moravtchik’s letter to Dina Porat, March 8, 2001. 16.  Zelda the Partisan, ed. R. Korczak, Y. Tubin, and Y. Rab (Tel Aviv, 1989), 24; Arad, Jewish Vilna, 330–331; Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili and to Dina Porat. 17.  Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984; Vitka Kempner to Dina Porat. 18.  For Scheinbaum’s funeral, see Kowalski, Anthology, 589, and Dworzecki, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 459–465; for the events in the courtyard, see Korczak et

Notes to Chapter 8 al., Zelda, 24, and Shuv, Leaden Clouds, 96; Baruch Shuv and Nissan Reznik in an interview with Dina Porat, and Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984. For a completely different description by Haim Lazar, who left for the forests a few weeks before the event, see Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 119–130. 19.  Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 133; Taubes, Notes to Giora, 64; Shuv, Leaden Clouds, 96; for Kovner’s statement, see Korczak, Flames, 193–195. 20.  Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili; according to Haim Lazar, a key to a side gate was given when it pleased Gens: see Lazar, Destruction and Resistance (1950 ed.), 177–179. For the opposite, see the testimony of Michael Spokojni, YVA, 03/7910, and interview with Shmuel Kaplinski, who together secretly made a copy of the key; Sima Kaganowitch, in Korczak et al., Zelda, 45, and Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984; Alexander Bogen, in Kalchheim, Proud Bearing, 188, and Nissan Reznik, in Kalchheim, Proud Bearing, 260; Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 1, 126; see Kovner’s letter to Fyodor Markov and Jurgis, September 10, 1943, on sending thirty-nine underground members to join the revenge unit, GHA, D.1.995. 21.  Arad, Jewish Vilna, 338; and Korczak, Flames, 193. About opinions in the forests, see interviews with Vitka Kempner, Yosef Harmatz, and Fania Yocheles­Baranowska. For the 1975 conference, see Yaffa Eliah, “The Poet and Partisan Abba Kovner in the ‘Holocaust, a Generation After’ Conference,” Hado’ar 21 (April 11, 1975). 22.  Interview with Neuta Kovner, whose daughter Sala was killed with the grandmother, and Clara Bar, who quoted Kovner; Yitzhak Bezalel, “All His Days,” Lamerhav (Adar B 29, 1965). 23.  Interview with Yosef Harmatz; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 140–141; Taubes, Notes to Giora, 37, and an interview with Dina Porat. 24.  Michael Spokojni’s testimony; see Shmuel Kaplinski, The Old Vilna Water System (Vilna, 1976) (in Yiddish, English, and Lithuanian), and an interview with him in Vilna. Kaplinski was a sewage engineer. 25.  Korczak et al., Zelda, 25; Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili and Dina ­Porat; interviews with Cesia Rosenberg-Amit and Fania Yocheles-Baranzowska, who left with Hayale Shapira (later Lazar); Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984; see Haya Lazar, “Vilna,” in Fighters and Partisans Museum 12(1)(86): 14–37 (February 2004). 26.  The issue was emphasized in all the testimonies and memoirs. 27.  Interview with Vitka Kempner and Shmuel Kaplinski. Kailis, a fur factory turned into a camp, was located in houses outside the ghetto (kailis is Lithuanian for “fur”). 28.  Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, in Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 1, 127. Interview with Vitka Kempner. 29.  Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili and to Dina Porat; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 150–151; Korczak, Flames, 199–202.

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Notes to Chapter 9

Chapter 9 1.  Ha’aretz, September 1, 1944, and May 5, 1961. 2.  Interview with Dov Levin in Kovner, His and About Him, 112; Korczak et al., Zelda, 39; Kempner to Naftali Sagi, December 21, 1988, Efal Center for the History of the Defense Forces, File 157. 3.  Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 1, 136; Arad, Jewish Vilna, 360. 4.  Shimon Luski’s testimony, November 20, 1955, YVA, 03/9524; Korczak, 210. 5.  Interview with Hasia Taubes. 6.  Senka Nisanelewicz to Dina Porat; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 152, 175; Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, 137. 7.  Vitka Kempner to Dina Porat; Korczak, Flames, 253; Gefen et al., Jewish Partisans, 107–108; Vitka Kempner about the forest, GHA, A.74, no date mentioned but seems to be a draft for Jewish Partisans written in the early 1950s. 8.  Gefen et al., Jewish Partisans, 108; Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili; Kor­ czak, Flames, 255. 9.  Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 181–182; Korczak, Flames, 251. 10.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 39. 11.  Shimon Luski’s testimony; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 153; Korczak, Flames, 257–258; Gefen et al., Jewish Partisans, 110–111. 12.  From the operation diary of the revenge group’s headquarters, Yalkut Moreshet 2 (May 1964), GHA, D.1.254; for recommendations to present awards to Abba Kovner, Vitka Kempner, and Haim Lazar, see the Sutzkever Boxes, docs. 326, 328, and 338; for recommendations seen by Alexander Rindjiunski to give Zelda Treger and Vitka Kempner the Lenin Award, see Korczak et al., Zelda, 96. 13.  Interview with Issar Schmidt; Ruzka Korczak’s and Zelda Treger’s memoirs, Kempner’s testimonies, and the testimonies about Vitka Kempner and Hayale Shapira prove his words many times over. 14.  Interview with Senka Nisanelewicz. 15.  Arad, Jewish Vilna, 365; Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 154; Vitka and Abba Kovner, GHA, A. 74; Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili. 16.  Interviews with Senka Nisanelewicz and Hasia Taubes; Korczak, Flames, 258. 17.  Korczak, Flames, 216–217, 273; interview with Fania Yocheles-Baranzowska. 18.  Korczak et al., Zelda, 142; Gabi Sedlis claimed that Rachel Markowicz was closest to Kovner at the time, and his claim is proof of the vague rumors; interview with Yosef Harmatz and Vitka Kempner. 19.  Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 175; Vitka Kempner to Naftali Sagi; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 156; Dov Levin, “Routine and Constant Alertness: Jewish Fighters in a Soviet Partisan Brigade,” Dapim L’heker Hasho’a [Holocaust Studies] 10: 245–256 (1993). 20.  A note from Joseph Glazman copied by Kovner, GHA, D.1.4948.7; the Narocz affair was first published in Gefen et al., Jewish Partisans, 73–105.

Notes to Chapters 9 and 10 21.  Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 54; Kovner, Missive; interviews with Yitzhak Arad and Yosef Harmatz. 22.  Vitka Kempner to Naftali Sagi; Kovner, Missive. 23.  Kovner, “The Pain, the Rage, the Astonishment,” his speech launching Ezra Rivlis’s Iron Beyond the Curtain (Tel Aviv, 1982), a book about Motek Reichman, a prisoner in Soviet gulags for decades. 24.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 41. 25.  Kovner’s testimony to Oded Tira, 1977; the Second Struggle Group, in Kovner’s testimony to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984; see Kovner’s speech in Eretz-Israel to the Kibbutz Artzi Secretariat, August 16, 1945, and August 23, 1945, GHA, (6)4.5. 26.  Interview with Issar Schmidt; Kovner, Missive. 27.  Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, 144; Korczak, Flames, 255; interviews with Yosef Harmatz and Senka Nisanelewicz. 28.  Kovner’s letter to Shalom Lurie, Tishrei 25 (September 16), 1979, admitting that his instructions to take the bags were at least “half true.” 29.  Vitka Kempner to Naftali Sagi, to Avraham Atzili, and to Dina Porat; Kempner and Abba Kovner, GHA, A.74; Korczak, Flames, 284, 293; and Taubes, Notes to Giora, 89. 30.  Interviews with Issar Schmidt, Yosef Harmatz, and Michael Kovner. 31.  Korczak, Flames, 276; interviews with Shlomo Yashuner, Vitka Kempner, and Issar Schmidt. 32.  Interview with Senka Nisanelewicz; Kovner’s letter to Shalom Lurie, Tishrei 25 (September 16), 1979. 33.  Kovner’s Missive was copied a number of times by Zelda Treger, whose handwriting was exceptional. Korczak et al., Zelda, 40. The only copy known to have survived is in GHA, D.15, and it served as a basis for the 2002 publication; Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, 143. 34.  Dov Levin in Korchak-Marle, Personality, 241; Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili and to Dina Porat. 35.  Korczak et al., Zelda, 66; Alexander Rindjiunski, “In Jewish Vilna After the War, 1944–1959,” Yalkut Moreshet 39: 57 (May 1985), and in Rindjiunski, Destruction of Vilna, 174; Arad, Jewish Vilna, 352. 36.  About Ilya Ehrenburg, see Shimon Redlich, “The Jewish Aspect of Ilya Ehrenburg According to the New Material About the War and the Holocaust,” Yalkut Moreshet 53: 187–198 (November 1992); and Ehrenburg’s autobiography, Men, Years, Life, v. 5, The War, 1941–1945 (London, 1964), 142 (in English). 37.  Interview with Yonah Degen.

Chapter 10 1.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 87; Korczak, Flames, 302. 2.  Korczak, Flames, 302; Vitka Kempner to Avraham Atzili and to Dina Porat.

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Notes to Chapter 10 3.  Vitka Kempner to Naftali Sagi, 1988; Rindjiunski, The Destruction of Vilna, 174; Korczak, Flames, 301–302. 4.  Korczak, Flames, 303. See Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 111, for his meeting with Nathan Alterman. The counselor’s question at the trial seemed at first a strange one; see Kovner’s testimony to poet Haim Guri, February 1, 1978, Ha’apala Archive, 70/3/33. 5.  Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 219-1. 6.  Kovner’s diary, August 23, 1944, GHA, D.2.262. 7.  Kovner’s diary, August 23, 1944, GHA, D.2.262; and Alexander Rindjiunski, “In Post-War Vilna,” Yalkut Moreshet 39: 6 (May 1985). Kovner in his postwar diary, KEHA, 23.8.1944. 8.  Kovner to Haim Guri, February 1, 1978; Korczak, Flames, 302, 304–305; for the percentage of victims in a document presented to the Lithuanian government, August 1944, see Korczak, Flames, 387; and letter of August 14, 1944, signed by Benjamin Baliudzas, Kovner, and Avraham Sutzkever, GHA, D.1.432; about Kovner see also Yaffa Eliach, “‘The Holocaust, a Generation After’ Conference,” Hado’ar 21 (April 11, 1975). 9.  Kovner to Haim Guri, 1978. 10.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, April 10 and June 16, 1964, GHA, A.350.3; and tapes 408 and 413 in the Ha’apala Archive. 11.  Zeidel, A Human Being Tested, 82–86; Distel, Days of Life, 54–78. Kovner to Avraham Sutzkever in Moscow, Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 215-2, no date. 12.  Kovner to Haim Guri, 1978; Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1962; Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part B; Kovner to Levi Dror, December 12, 1983, GHA, A.1046. 13.  Korczak et al., Zelda, 42; Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 2, 27; Korczak, Flames, 304; and Dov Levin, in Korchak-Marle, Personality, 212; interview with Nissan Reznik about traveling to Pinsk and Rowno. 14.  Interviews with Shlomo Kless, Mordechai Roseman, and Cesia RosenbergAmit; for a description of the journey, see also Rosenberg-Amit, Human Face, 71–78; and Ya’ari et al., The Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 2, 249; “The Beginnings of the Bricha as a Mass Movement in Kovner’s Testimonies,” Yalkut Moreshet 37: 7–32 (June 1984). 15.  Interview with Dov Levin. 16.  Noverstern, Avraham Sutzkever, 49, 56, 58; the questionnaire is in the Sutzkever Boxes, docs. 312-4 and 215-1; Korczak, Flames, 311; Kovner’s diary, August 25, 1944. 17.  The letter of August 14, 1944, signed by Benjamin Baliudzas, Kovner, and Avraham Sutzkever, GHA, D.1.432; for Jews who served, see Kovner in Merhavia, August 16, 1945, GHA, (6)4.5. 18.  Kovner’s diary, September 25, 1944; and Kovner’s letters to Avraham Sutzkever dated September 25 and 29, 1944, and October 8 and 27, 1944, GHA, D.1.432.

Notes to Chapters 10 and 11 19.  Kovner to Avraham Sutzkever, November 4, 1944; Avraham Sutzkever to the Commissar, November 16, 1944, Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 258-1; Rindjiunski, “Post-War Vilna,” 58–59; memorandum signed by Kovner and Shmuel Amarant, November 5, 1944, GHA, D.1.433, translated into Hebrew in Korczak, Flames, 389; Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1962; Kovner, as was his wont, did not add his name to the Katcherginski-Sutzkever collection. 20.  For Ilya Ehrenburg and the museum, see Rindjiunski, “Post-War Vilna,” 69–70. 21.  Interview in Vilna with Rachel Kastanian, the archivist of the Vilna Jewish Museum; for the whereabouts of the material, see Yitzhak Arad, “The Vilna Ghetto Underground Archive,” in From Hidden Treasures to Historical Landmarks: Jewish Archives from the Holocaust Period, ed. Israel Gutman (Jerusalem, 1997), 151–160. 22.  Korczak, Flames, 311; Vitka Kempner, in Korchak-Marle, Personality, 64; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 13. 23.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 14, 27–29. 24.  For Herman Kruk’s diary, see Israel Gutman, “The Contribution of the Original Jewish Documentation to Holocaust Research,” in Gutman, Hidden Treasures, 184, and Arad, “Vilna Ghetto Underground Archive,” 160; Shmerke Kaczerginski writing to Avraham Sutzkever from Lodz to Moscow, “The Kruk material is hidden under the stairs of the Jewish Museum,” November 28, 1945, Sutzkever Boxes, doc. 203-1; interviews with Vitka Kempner and Senka Nisanelewicz; Korczak et al., Zelda, esp. 8; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 93. 25.  Kovner’s answer to David Roskies, August 1943, from Kibbutz Ein ­Hahoresh to New York; see Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 252. 26.  Kovner to Haim Guri, 1978; and Rindjiunski, “Post-War Vilna,” 57. 27.  Kempner to Haim Guri, 1978; and Kovner’s diary, September 1944; interview with Yosef Harmatz, who kept material about the trials of Bernstein and Borka Mishtanski. 28.  Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 252; Yitzhak Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto (Tel Aviv, 1968). 29.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, May 10, 1964; Kovner’s diary, September 15, 1944. 30.  Kempner to Naftali Sagi, 1988. 31.  Ruzka Korczak to Vitka Kempner in Korchak-Marle, Personality, 130, Letter B; about Korczak’s journey to Romania and Eretz-Israel, see Dina Porat, “‘With Grace and Forgiveness’: Ruzka Korczak’s Encounter with the Yishuv and Its Leadership, 1944–1946,” Yalkut Moreshet 52: 11–13 (April 1992). 32.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, May 10, 1964.

Chapter 11 1.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964.

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Notes to Chapter 11 2.  Interviews with Alexander Rindjiunski in Beersheba, Israel, with Gabi ­Sedlis in New York, and with Chiena Borowska and Shmuel Kaplinski in Vilna. 3.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1962. 4.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1962; Shlomo Kless, On an Unpaved Path: The History of the Bricha, 1944–1948 (Dalia, 1994), 38; Korczak et al., Zelda, 66–67; interview with Senka Nisanelewicz. 5.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964; interviews with Yosef Harmatz, Mordechai Roseman, and Vitka Kempner; see Kovner’s two lectures in Anita Shapira’s seminar at Tel Aviv University, November 22, 1982, ICJ (170)36 (Shapira Seminar A) and on June 25, 1985, GHA, A.1262/1 (Shapira Seminar B). 6.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964; Shapira Seminar B. 7.  Shapira Seminar A; Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 2, 37. 8.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964; Eliezer Lidovski, The Spark Hasn’t Been Extinguished (Tel Aviv, 1986), 192; interview with Pasha Avidov; Yohanan Cohen, Operation “Bricha”: Poland 1945–1946 (Tel Aviv, 1995), 194–195. 9.  Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Parts A and B; Shapira Seminars A and B. 10.  Zuckerman, Those Seven Years, 479, and Zuckerman’s testimony to Aharon Keidar, December 6, 1974, ICJ, 4(53); Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 2, 50. 11.  Shapira Seminar B; Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part A; Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 2, 49; Zuckerman, Those Seven Years, 488. 12.  Shapira Seminar A; Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part A; and Kovner to Zvika Dror, 1983; interview with Shlomo Kless. 13.  Cohen, Operation Bricha, 195; Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 2, 63–65; Pnina Greenspan-Frimer, The Nights Had Been Our Days (Tel Aviv, 1984), 139; Mordechai Roseman to Yehuda Bauer, June 23, 1964, ICJ, 4(38); for an excellent summary of the bricha, the stations, and number of escapees, see Yehuda Weiss, “When the Survivors Left Poland,” in Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 2, 425–431. 14.  Shapira Seminar A. 15.  Shapira Seminar A; and Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964. 16.  Greenspan-Frimer, Nights, 140. I thank Dorit Sharir for the details of her conversation with Yehiel Dinur. 17.  Kovner in Merhavia, August 16 and 23, 1945, in a Kibbutz Artzi meeting, GHA, 6 (4.5). 18.  Cohen, Operation Bricha, 141. 19.  Kless, Unpaved Path, 50; I thank Shlomo Kless for forwarding the original Yiddish Brigade protocols, now in GHA, D.1.4948.6. See the protocol from May 4, 1945. 20.  Protocol from May 6, 1945, GHA, D.1.4948.6. 21.  Protocol from May 6, 1945, GHA, D.1.4948.6; and David Engel, Between Liberation and “Bricha”: The Survivors in Poland and Their Leadership, 1944–1946 (Tel Aviv, 1966), 43, 188; Cohen, Operation Bricha, 65.

Notes to Chapter 11 22.  “Order of the day,” April 30, 1945, GHA, D.5394; and Lidovski, Spark, 209–211, with the text of the oath. 23.  Kovner kept a copy of the “ideological platform of the East-European survivors’ brigade” (with his remarks) in his “Revenge” file, KEHA; see further in GHA, D.1.4948.3, and Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 2, 449n23. 24.  Jewish Brigade meeting, June 4, 1945, GHA, D.1.4948.3; see Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 2, 427, about the emissaries being one reason the Jewish Brigade fell apart. 25.  Shapira Seminar A; Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 2, 71. 26.  Greenspan-Frimer, Nights, 146; Kless, Unpaved Path, 57. 27.  Weiss, “Survivors,” 423–424; and an interview with Mordechai Roseman. 28.  Shapira Seminar B; interview with Yosef Harmatz; Aviva Kempner, “At a Junction of Roads and Lives,” Yalkut Moreshet 43–44: 173 (August 1987). 29.  Hanoch Bartov, Growing Pains (Tel Aviv, 1965), 128–129. 30.  Kovner, Lamerhav, October 10, 1958. 31.  Yehuda Tubin, On the Senio, to the Bunker in 18 Mila Street (Tel Aviv, 1987), 143. 32.  Interview with Haim Lazar; Kempner, “Junction,” 174; Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964. 33.  Meir Davidson, “We, the Eretz-Israeli Survivors,” Yalkut Moreshet 43–44: 165–169 (August 1987), and his testimonies to Ezra Gruenbaum in 1986 and 1987, Yad Tabenkin Archive, 5/4; for the role of the Jewish Brigade, see Kless, Unpaved Path, 59. 34.  Meir Davidson, Villa Fezana (Tel Aviv, 1969), 92, 97, 101; Meir Davidson, Portrait of a Disputed General (Tel Aviv, 1990), the chapter about Abba Kovner, 143–144. 35.  Interview with Yehuda Tubin. 36.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 30; formerly in Yalkut Moreshet 16: 35–42 (April 1973); for the full protocol of the event and Kovner’s speech, 57 pages, see GHA, A.388. 37.  Tubin, On the Senio, 148, and in his original letter, July 18, 1945, GHA, (3)1.4.795. The following day, Kovner again spoke to a smaller forum of Jewish Brigade activists. For the singing of the partisan hymn, see interview with Vitka Kempner. 38.  In Yehuda Tubin’s original letter, July 16, 1945, GHA, (3)1.4.7-95. 39.  Kovner to Neri Livneh, December 20, 1985, GHA, D.1.5675, angrily describing the correspondence. 40.  Yehuda Tubin to Meir Ya’ari, September 15, 1945, GHA, (4)2.7-95; Moshe Zilbertal’s letters, undated, and Ya’ari’s answers, summer and autumn, 1945, GHA, (4)2.7-95; see Meir Ya’ari to Yehuda Tubin, December 10, 1945, and Tubin’s answer, December 25, 1945, in Tubin, On the Senio, 258–260; and in Anita Shapira, “The ­Yishuv’s Encounter with the Survivors,” in her Visions in Conflict (Tel Aviv, 1988), 300. 41.  See all sources in note 40 and Tubin, On the Senio, 144.

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Notes to Chapters 11 and 12 42.  Kovner blamed a letter that Zuckerman sent to Eretz Israel for Ya’ari’s attitude. See Zuckerman, Those Seven Years, 495; and for the full letter, written in Krakow on June 20, 1945 (preserved in the Kibbutz Meuchad Archives, 23/A4), see Zuckerman, Those Seven Years, 494–498; Meir Ya’ari’s letter, July 24, 1945, GHA, 7.95.B5(2). 43.  Unsigned letter from Kibbutz Merhavia, July 27, 1945, possibly written by Adam Rand to a friend in the Jewish Brigade; I thank Yehoshua Bichler for finding the correspondence between the Brigade and Eretz Israel in the GHA. See also Porat, “Grace and Forgiveness,” 25. It was Mordechai Surkis who tried to persuade Kovner. See his testimony to Naftali Sagi, December 19, 1988, Efal, 157/23. 44.  Kless, Unpaved Path, 69; for the last meeting, July 23, 1945, see GHA, D.1.4948-1. 45.  See Engel, Between Liberation and Bricha, 47, and in detail on p. 188; Weiss, “Survivors,” 424–425; Yehuda Tubin, “The Encounter of the Brigade Soldiers with the First Survivors,” Yalkut Moreshet 30: 15–54 (May 1985), and Tubin, On the Senio, 145.

Chapter 12 1.  K. Tzetnik, Revenge (Tel Aviv, 1981), 10–11, 13–16. 2.  Bartov, Growing Pains, 213; an interview with Shaike Weinberg. 3.  S. Robinson, M. Rapaport-Bar-Sever, and S. Metzer, “The Feelings of Holocaust Survivors Towards Their Persecutors,” Echoes of the Holocaust 3: 9–20 (1994) (in English). 4.  Neima Barzel, “The Demand in the Yishuv to Punish Germany, 1944–1947,” Kathedra 73: 158–181 (September 1994). 5.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964. 6.  Handwritten page in the “Revenge” files, KEHA, translation by Dina Porat. 7.  Kovner’s lecture in Anita Shapira’s seminar at Tel Aviv University on June 25, 1985, GHA, A.1262/1 (Shapira Seminar B). 8.  Shapira Seminar B; Kovner’s testimony to Shlomo Kless, October 27, 1982, ICJ, 36 (170), Part B. 9.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1962. 10.  Struggling, the Jewish Brigade’s bulletin, published the thirteen commandments, quoted in full in Bartov, Growing Pains, 55–56. 11.  See Kovner’s unaddressed letter about Ben-Gal and Shamir, May 29, 1987, GHA, C.61, hereafter referred to as “Kovner about Israel Carmi,” because it is Kovner’s immediate reaction to an interview that Yitzhak Ben-Horin had with Israel Carmi in Ma’ariv, May 29, 1987, titled “The Avengers.” The letter was Kovner’s statement about the issue of revenge, intended for preservation in GHA; Mordechai Na’or, Laskov (Tel Aviv, 1988), ch. 11; Meir Zorea, as told to Michal Kapra, “I Killed, Strangled and Shot and Have No Regrets,” Ma’ariv, March 26,

Notes to Chapter 12 1993; interview with Shaike Weinberg; Shaike Weinberg to Aharon Keidar, November 14, 1967, ICJ, 4(106); Ben-Gal to Aharon Keidar and Nana Noissinov, December 13, 1967, ICJ, 4(98); Israel Carmi, On the Fighters’ Path (Tel Aviv, 1960), 158–160, 166. 12.  Bartov, Growing Pains, 47. 13.  Kovner about Israel Carmi, GHA, C.61; Kovner’s lecture in Anita Shapira’s seminar at Tel Aviv University, November 22, 1982, ICJ 36 (170), Part A (Shapira Seminar A); and Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1962 and 1964. 14.  See, for example, Zuckerman, Those Seven Years, 521, 526. 15.  Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984. 16.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964, and Shapira Seminar A; for details, see Arieh Levi Sarid, “The Revenge Organization: Its History, Image, and Deeds,” Yalkut Moreshet 52: 35–106 (April 1992). 17.  Tubin, On the Senio, 144; Yehiel Duvdevani’s letter to Shaul Meirov, August 13, 1945, in Yo’av Gelber, Jewish Palestinian Volunteering in the British Army During the Second World War, v. 3, The Standard Bearers: Rescue Mission of the Jewish People (Jerusalem, 1983), 448–449. 18.  Kovner about Israel Carmi, GHA, C.61. 19.  Interviews with Shaike Weinberg, Yehuda Tubin, and Meir Davidson; about the close relations with the Jewish Brigade soldiers, see also Vitka Kovner, “Junctions of Roads and Lives,” Yalkut Moreshet 43–44: 174 (August 1984). 20.  Mordechai Surkis to Naftali Sagi, December 19, 1988, Efal, 157/23. 21.  Kovner to Vitka Kempner, August 7, 1945, “Revenge” file, KEHA. Kovner prepared a list of the material in the file for the meetings of the avengers, which took place in February and March 1985. 22.  Davidson, Portrait of a Disputed General, 143; for the ID with Uri Kovnai’s name, see GHA, D.1.5546.2. 23.  Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984; and Sarid, Ruin and Deliverance, v. 2, 142. 24.  Kovner to Mula Ben-Haim, August 22, 1984, GHA, C.12.3.33. 25.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 110; Yitzhak Sadeh and Ruzka Korczak, in Porat, “Grace and Forgiveness,” 16. 26.  See Alterman, Between Two Roads, 21, and Davar, The Seventh Column, ­October 19, 1945; Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, iii. 27.  At Our Place (the Ein Hahoresh newsletter), November 29, 1957. 28.  Kovner to Pinhas Gruner, September 17, 1945, GHA, C.61.40. 29.  Korchak-Marle, Personality, 130, Letter B; and Porat, “Grace and Forgiveness,” 26. 30.  Korchak-Marle, Personality, 130, Letter B; and Porat, “Grace and Forgiveness,” 26. 31.  Kovner to Vitka Kempner, Rosh Hashana 1946, Letter 6 in the “Revenge” file, KEHA. 32.  Kovner, September 22, 1945, GHA, A.980.

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Notes to Chapter 12 33.  Kovner to Vitka Kempner, Rosh Hashana 1946, Letter 6 in the “Revenge” file, KEHA. 34.  See Meir Ya’ari (who encouraged Plan C only), February 1945, “Be the Core of the Avengers,” in Ya’ari et al., Book of Hashomer Hatzair, v. 2, 146. Yehuda Briger Ben-Horin, My Life (Tel Aviv, 1975), 22, 42, 70; Ben-Horin was later appointed liaison between Kovner and the Haganah. 35.  Kovner about Israel Carmi, GHA, C.61; and the instructions written in Yiddish in the “Avenger” file to the various groups, no date, KEHA. 36.  Letters 6–9 in the “Revenge” file, KEHA: August 28, 1945, end of September 1945, and October 1 and 9, 1945. 37.  Sarid, “Revenge Organization,” 59–60, has Kovner’s story in later years to close friends as his only source. 38.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964; Yehuda Bauer to Boris Guriel, then at the Weizmann Institute archive, April 13, 1965, no file number given. The file card is attached to an envelope that Merav Segal, director of the Weizmann Archive, calls “strange, unsigned and unstamped,” with “Top Secret” written in two different inks and hands, with the date 1.III.1946 written twice. According to the archive catalogue, on that day Weizmann sent greetings for the “sacred enterprise” under construction at Yad Vashem and did not mention Kovner. I thank Merav Segal for locating the material. 39.  For Weizmann’s departure and return, see Chaim Weizmann, Chapters of My Life (Jerusalem, 1964), 320, 323; Kovner wrote on the minutes of the winter 1985 Avengers’ meeting, “around March 15”; I wish to thank Arieh Levi Sarid for being given permission to read the minutes of the meeting, hereafter referred to as “the Avengers’ minutes.” 40.  The interview was recorded in Ephraim Katzir’s office at Tel Aviv University on June 3, 1998, and the contents were confirmed in a letter from Katzir to Dina Porat, dated August 19, 1998. 41.  Interview in Ephraim Katzir’s office, June 3, 1998; letter from Ephraim Katzir to Dina Porat, August 19, 1998; Michael Elkins, Forged in Fury (New York, 1971), 236, does not mention any other source for chapter 7, the description of Weizmann’s meeting with Kovner, but only Kovner’s interview with him. 42.  Letters 7 and 8, end of September and October 1, 1945, “Revenge” file, KEHA. 43.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964. I wish to thank Shabbtai Tevet for checking Ben-Gurion’s extensive writings; interview with Yitzhak Reichman; Shaul Dagan and Eliyahu Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati (Givat Haviva, 1995), 103; Sarid, “Revenge Organization,” 78–79. 44.  Yehuda Bauer to Kovner, 1964. 45.  Kovner about Israel Carmi, GHA, C.61; Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 100.

Notes to Chapter 12 46.  Grossman, “Almost a Confession,” 146, 149; Yehuda Slutzki, History of the Haganah, v. 3, pt. 2, From Struggle to War (Tel Aviv, 1973), 1068–1074. 47.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964. 48.  Vitka Kempner to Kovner, Letter 10 (written in Hebrew), October 19, 1945, “Revenge” file, KEHA. 49.  Vitka Kempner to Kovner, Letter 11, written the following day, October 20, 1945, “Revenge” file, KEHA. 50.  Kovner to Vitka Kempner, Letter 13, written on December 12, 1945, “Revenge” file, KEHA; Ruzka Korczak to Kovner, Letter F, in Korchak-Marle, Personality, 135–137; Porat, “Grace and Forgiveness,” 27; Kovner’s little note was, in fact, not found; Korczak’s letters, written in Polish, were preserved by Vitka Kempner. 51.  Interview with Benjamin Beit-Halachmi; Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964, and to Zili Brendstater, September 18, 1983, Efal, 25M/159/30; and Jacquo Yaron, With Anxiety and Fear, with Abba Kovner and a Palmach Unit on the Way to Europe (Hatzor, September 1995), 13. 52.  Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964; Kovner to Zili Brendstater, 1983; and Kovner to Arieh Levi Sarid, 1984. Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 111–112. 53.  Gelber, Standard Bearers, 567–568, 640. 54.  For the debate in Israel regarding even the details of Kovner’s conspicuous attire on the ship, see Meir Merdor, A Secret Mission (Tel Aviv, 1957), 146; Yigal Vilpand, “An Incomplete Revenge,” Bemahane Nahal [In the Nahal Camp], December 1990, shows a photograph of six Eretz Israeli soldiers, including Kovner, dressed like the rest; Tom Segev, who in his “The Revenge of the Last Jews,” Ha’aretz, September 13, 1991, followed Merdor, corrected his version after having seen Vilpand’s photo in Ha’aretz on September 20 and October 4, 1991; see Vilpand, reprinted in Hadaf Hayarok (the Kibbutzim weekly), March 3, 1992; the five nonsoldiers were Yedidia Zafriri, Moshe Rabinovitch (later Carmel), Hagai Avriel, Rico Lupesko, and Kovner. See Ze’ev Grudjinski’s testimony, July 12, 1951, in the Haganah Archives, 193.9. Grudjinski was responsible for turning refugees and envoys into soldiers; Yaron, Anxiety, 17. 55.  Grudjinski’s testimony, 1951; Shalom Singer (Ron), December 11, 1953, Haganah Archives, 126.2; and Moshe Rabinovitch, March 16, 1963, Haganah Archives, 124.3; Kovner to Zili Brendstater, 1983. 56.  Grudjinski’s testimony, 1951; the inquiry committee, appointed by the Haganah and headed by Arieh (Luba) Eliav, concluded its work in April 1946. I would like to thank Neri Arieli, director of the Haganah Archives, for locating the minutes of the committee’s meeting, April 9, 1946, Haganah Archives, File 8/80. 57.  Ben-Horin, My Life, 93–95; Merdor, Secret Mission, 146–150; Gelber, Standard Bearers, 567–568. 58.  Yaron, Anxiety, 14; Tubin, On the Senio, 267 (especially, for Meir Ya’ari, worried about Kovner’s arrest, to Yehuda Tubin, January 15, 1946), 279–286; Kovner’s

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Notes to Chapters 12 and 13 letter 16 from the detention cell, December 19, 1945, and a small note the same day in the “Revenge” file, KEHA. See also Letter 14, GHA, C.61.42. 59.  Kovner’s letter, no date, most probably from February 1946, “Revenge” file, KEHA; Kovner to Yehuda Bauer, 1964. 60.  Elkins, Forged in Fury, 241; Grossman, “Almost a Confession,” 142, 148. 61.  Yaron, Anxiety, 25–26, and in an interview with Dina Porat. 62.  The Avengers’ minutes, February–March 1985. 63.  See, for example, Rich Cohen, The Avengers: A Jewish War Story (New York, 2000) (in English), or Jim G. Tobias and Peter Zinke, Nakam: Jüdische Rache an TS-Tätern (Hamburg, 2000) (in German). 64.  “A metaphysical idea,” Kovner’s words according to Michael Bar-Zohar, A Day of Revenge (Tel Aviv, 1991) (based on The Avengers, Tel Aviv, 1969), 43; Vitka Kempner to Naftali Sagi, 1988. 65.  Sarid, “Revenge Organization,” 52. 66.  University News, June 1980.

Chapter 13 1.  Ha’olam Hazeh, September 3, 1953. Uri Avneri was editor-in-chief of this weekly for many years. 2.  Kovner to a Bemachaneh Gadna reporter, interview for Independence Day, 1963; see also Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 117, and Avidan’s eulogy of Kovner in Kovner, His and About Him, 118–119. 3.  Interview with Vitka Kempner. 4.  Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 109; Kovner, His and About Him, 118; interviews with Vitka Kempner and Zipporah Efrat, like Shimon Avidan, a member of Kibbutz Ein Hashofet. 5.  Details in the Givati “Culture and Education (Documents)” file, IFD Archive, 922/75, no. 905. 6.  Interviews with Yitzhak Pundak, Shlomo Lahat, Eliyahu Eshel, Yehuda Wallach, Yoske Geva, and Uri Avneri; Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 12–16; Avraham Eilon, The Givati Brigade in the War of Independence (Tel Aviv, 1960), and Avraham Eilon, Givati Facing the Egyptian Invasion (Tel Aviv, 1963); Uri Avneri, In the Fields of the Philistines: A Battle Diary (Tel Aviv, 1949). Citations here according to the 8th edition, 1951. For a literary description of the Givati Brigade’s composition, see Kovner, Face to Face: A Novel (pt. 1, The Crossroads, Merhavia, 1953; pt. 2, Zero Hour, Merhavia, 1955); Meir Davidson’s testimonies to Ezra Gruenbaum, 1986, Efal Archive, 15, File 2/153, and in an interview with Dina Porat. 7.  Meir Davidson in an interview with Dina Porat; Avneri, “Fighter Abba Kovner: A Givati Man Did Not Run Away,” Ha’olam Hazeh, September 3, 1953; Avneri, “The Three Towers,” Ma’ariv, October 18, 1991; Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 205–213.

Notes to Chapter 13 8.  See Eilon, Egyptian Invasion, 219–242, 293–332. 9.  The Givati Brigade, 1948, a documentary film (The Givati Heritage Association, no date), describes the battle and how Samson’s Foxes got their name. 10.  Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 22; Avneri, “Fighter Abba Kovner,” Ha’olam Hazeh, September 3, 1953. 11.  Interview with Eliyahu Eshel, the Givati Brigade’s administration officer. 12.  See, for example, Baruch Rabinow to the chief of staff about “a daily Yiddish bulletin,” September 9, 1948; or Shimon Avidan to the battalion commanders, December 31, 1948, and February 14, 1949, about ordering books in six languages, IDF Archive, 49/6127, File 101. 13.  Bamachaneh, September 17, 1948, and on The Voice of Israel radio station the same day, September 14, 1948. 14.  Interview with Yehuda Wallach, and see the 51st Battalion’s bulletin, front page, July 1948, and No. 6, August 20, 1948. 15.  Eli Barkai to Dina Porat, January 2004. Barkai fought in the battle for Latrun in 1948. 16.  Mordechai Bar-On, “In Ashdod, Facing the Tanks,” Etmol, May 1998, 3–4. 17.  Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 23; Avneri, “The Three Towers,” Ma’ariv, October 18, 1991; Aleksander Bek, Panfilov’s Men, trans. Shlomo EvenShoshan (first Hebrew edition, Tel Aviv, 1946, followed by twelve more editions). 18.  Interview with Meir Davidson, Eliyahu Eshel, and Yuval Ne’eman; Meir Davidson, It All Happened So Quickly (Tel Aviv, 1975), 78–80; handwritten drafts by Kovner in the IDF archives, 6127/49, File 80. 19.  Interview with Yehuda Wallach; Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 23; for Meir Davidson’s remarks, see Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 250, interview with Uri Avneri, and Avneri, “Fighter Abba Kovner”; and for a request to send them all the battle pages because they included a lot of material about fallen soldiers, see the IDF archive for Kovner, June 1, 1949; the letter is in KEHA. 20.  Battle Page, a collection of most of the pages published by the Givati Brigade veterans on May 12, 1963, in commemoration of the brigade’s fifteenth anniversary; reprinted in 1995. I counted more pages found in other archives, not included in the 1963 and 1995 publications. 21.  Kovner, His and About Him, 52; and Shimon Avidan’s eulogy, in Kovner, His and About Him, 117. 22.  Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 24; My Givati: Stories of the Brigade’s Soldiers, issued by the IDF Command of the Central Region, no date, p. 9. The brochure was sent to Kovner in 1977 as “the spiritual father of historical Givati”; Avneri, “Three Towers”; and interviews with Yitzhak Pundak, Shlomo Lahat, Eliyahu Eshel, Yehuda Wallach, Yoske Geva, and Uri Avneri. 23.  Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 24; Avneri, Philistines’ Fields, 151– 152; Davidson, It All Happened So Quickly, 79. 24.  The IDF archive and the IDF monthly to Kovner, March 28 and June 1,

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Notes to Chapter 13 1949; letters from other information officers in other brigades, such as Ephraim Kaduri, March 1, 1949, and the National Library, May 15, 1949, all in the IDF archive, 6217/49, File 86; analysis, October 16, 1948, IDF archive, 6217/49, File 86. 25.  Interview with Yuval Ne’eman. 26.  Davidson, It All Happened So Quickly, 41–42; interview with Uri Avneri, and Avneri, “Three Towers.” 27.  Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 24, 245; Meir Davidson’s letters to his wife, Ruth, no date, Kibbutzim Archive, 25/M, Series 15, Box 153/2; Davidson, It All Happened So Quickly, 136–137, 192–194; Meir Davidson’s testimony to Ezra Gruenbaum, 1986, and his speech at the Diaspora Museum, November 14, 1994. 28.  Interview with Avraham Azaryahu, from the Palmach First Company, then personnel officer of the southern front, commanded by Yigal Alon; Yigal Alon, Contriving Warfare (Tel Aviv, 1990), 116–117. 29.  Yitzhak Ben-Aharon to Kovner, December 22, 1948, and Kuba Riftin to all those invited to the meeting held on November 1, 1949, GHA, (6)31.90; interview with Yitzhak Ben-Aharon; for Dayan’s and Ben-Gurion’s opposition to the pages, see the interviews with Arnan (Sini) Azaryahu and Nathan Shacham. 30.  For a literary description of Avidan’s support, see Davidson, It All Happened So Quickly, 79, 100, 127. 31.  Interview with Meir Davidson and Davidson’s testimony to Ezra Gruenbaum, 1986, Efal Archive, 15, File 2/153, p. 108. 32.  Meir Davidson in the Kibbutz Eilon bulletin Now, November 24, 1994, quoted in Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 250. 33.  Meir Davidson, in The Book of Hashomer Hatzair, ed. Ya’ari et al., v. 3, 100, and Davidson’s testimony to Ezra Gruenbaum in 1986, Efal Archive, 15, File 2/153, p. 108. 34.  Avneri, Philistines’ Fields, 325, and Avneri’s introduction to the 1990 edition; see also Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 131. 35.  Interview with Yoske Geva and Meir Davidson, and Davidson’s testimony to Ezra Gruenbaum, 1986, Efal Archive, 15, File 2/153, p. 109; Dagan and Yakiri, Shimon Avidan Givati, 7 and 131. 36.  Interviews with Yitzhak Pundak, Eliyahu Eshel, and Shlomo Lahat. 37.  For Command No. 7, see Slutzki, History of the Hagganah, v. 3, pt. 3, 1948; and History of the War of Independence, prepared by IDF History Department (Tel Aviv, 1959), 90; Meir Davidson to Ezra Gruenbaum, 1986, Efal Archive, 15, File 2/153, p. 88. 38.  For the cancellation of the order, see Zvika Dror, Nitzanim: A Kibbutz Built Twice (Tel Aviv, 1990), 184; for the evacuated settlements, see Ben-Zion Michaeli, Settlements Abandoned by Three Regimes (Tel Aviv, 1980); for the most detailed account, see David Ben-Gurion, War Diary, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1982), esp. 413–535. 39.  Dror, Nitzanim, esp. 92; Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 144–148; Meir Davidson to Ezra Gruenbaum, 1986, Efal Archive, 15, File 2/153, pp. 104–106;

Notes to Chapter 13 interviews with Kuba Vilan, commander of Negba, Yitzhak Pundak, and Shlomo Lahat, later Tel Aviv’s mayor, who called the accusation “an abominable libel.” 40.  See the description of the battle in Dror, Nitzanim, esp. 95–115, and in Eilon, Egyptian Invasion, esp. 151–165; see also Moshe Gershovitch, The Battle for Nitzanim in the War of Independence, Office of the IDF Chief Education Officer, Kibbutzim Archive, 25/11, Box 11/C, File 16, no date. Gershovitch’s analysis was authorized following corrections by both the Givati Brigade and Nitzanim and today is considered the reliable version. 41.  The battle page, titled “A Failure,” printed on June 9, 1948, was not included in the Givati publications of 1963 and 1995; I thank Tal Chomsky, the first member of Nitzanim to contact Kovner after the war, for sending her short interview with him in May 1983; see also Eilon, Egyptian Invasion, 163. 42.  Ben-Gurion, War Diary, June 18, 1948, v. 1, 143; see also Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 143; Davidson, It All Happened So Quickly, 61, and Meir Davidson’s testimony to Ezra Gruenbaum, 1986, Efal Archive, 15, File 2/153, p. 106. 43.  Eshel, in Dror, Nitzanim, 183; Meir Davidson to Ezra Gruenbaum, 1986, Efal Archive, 15, File 2/153, pp. 105, 108–109; for Shimon Avidan’s instructions to write the battle page, see Dror, Nitzanim, 160. 44.  The secretariat of Nitzanim to the minister of defense, at that time, BenGurion, June 15, 1948; and the secretariat of Nitzanim to the chief of staff, Ya’akov Dori, after returning from nine months in captivity, March 13, 1949, both in Kibbutzim Archive, 25/M, Series 7, Box 11/C, File 15. 45.  Secretariat of Nitzanim to the minister of defense (Ben-Gurion), June 15, 1948; and secretariat of Nitzanim to Ya’akov Dori, March 13, 1949, both in Kibbutzim Archive, 25/M, Series 7, Box 11/C, File 15; chief of staff to Nitzanim secretariat regarding the committee’s conclusions, May 26, 1949; Eilon, Egyptian Invasion, 164–165; for Kovner to the committee, see Dror, Nitzanim, 160–162. 46.  The Nitzanim secretariat wrote to the Ministry of Defense on September 5, 1950, claiming Nitzanim was still being defamed; hence the committee’s conclusions had no effect: Kibbutzim Archive, 25M, Series 7, Box 11/C, File 1; Tal Chomsky’s interview with Kovner, May 1983; Nitzanim members collected most of the letters and publications in a brochure titled Nitzanim Pages, January 1984. 47.  Nitzanim Pages; Dagan and Yakir, Shimon Avidan Givati, 147–148; Dror, Nitzanim, 177–180; Davar, December 10, 1983; Ma’ariv, December 29, 1983; Al Hamishmar, December 16, 1983; interviews with Yehuda Wallach, Eliyahu Eshel, and Shlomo Lahat. 48.  Moshe Kol, leader of the General Zionists Party to which Hano’ar Hazioni belonged, noted that point in “Kibbutz Nitzanim’s Heroic War,” Masua 12: 195–203 (1984). 49.  Interviews with Vitka Kempner and with James Ben-Gal, who arranged the meeting; Ben-Gal’s letter thanking all the members of Nitzanim, May 1988, courtesy of Ben-Gal.

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Notes to Chapters 13 and 14 50.  One of them is Elisha Porat, Essays (Tel Aviv, 2008), esp. 45–51. See also ­ euven Shoham, The Sight and the Sounds (Tel Aviv, 1994), and Hagai Rogani, R Facing the Destroyed Village (Haifa, 2006). 51.  Kovner’s archive in Genazim. 52.  Kovner’s letter to Vitka Kempner on Face to Face, no date, KEHA. 53.  Yehuda Wallach, about Meir Davidson’s statement, in an interview with Dina Porat. 54.  Interview with Daniel Yam; see Elisha Porat, “The Burnt Volume,” Iton 77: 22–26 (1999), and Porat, Essays, 25–28, based on an interview Kovner had with journalist Ami Shamir (Lamerhav, May 1970), in which Kovner said: “I burnt it.” 55.  About Gilboa, see Kovner to Vitka Kempner, no date, “Letters” file, KEHA.

Chapter 14 1.  For Meir Ya’ari’s relations with Kovner, see Dina Porat, “Meir Ya’ari and Abba Kovner: Contradicting Notions of Nationality and Judaism Following the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust in Jewish History, ed. Dan Michman (Jerusalem, 2005), 329–356. On Ya’ari’s leadership, see Ya’akov Hurvitz, Meir Ya’ari: A Long Road of Activity (Tel Aviv, 1994); and Ester Sadan, Meir Ya’ari at 80 (Givat Haviva, 1977). 2.  Schweid, “Abba Kovner’s Heritage.” 3.  Shlomo Tilman, Mapam Supervising Committee chairman, April 15, 1984, GHA, (3)13.7-95. 4.  Interview with Tzippora Efrat. 5.  Meir Ya’ari to Kovner, February 2, 1956, GHA, (6)15.7-95; Kovner to Meir Ya’ari, December 21, 1958, GHA, (6)15.7-95. 6.  Meir Ya’ari to Kovner, August 2, 1961, October 14, 1977, and December 17, 1978, EHA. 7.  Kovner’s lecture in Anita Shapira’s seminar at Tel Aviv University, November 22, 1982, ICJ 36 (170). 8.  Kovner to Shlomo Tilman, December 6, 1964, preserved in Genazim 1173/18; the quote from Vitka Kempner comes from an interview with her. 9.  For the economic situation and the impact of the reparations, see The Reparations and Their Impact on Israeli Economy, ed. Bank of Israel (Jerusalem, 1965); Yitzhak Gilad, Public Opinion in Israel Regarding Israel–West Germany Relations, 1949– 1965 (Tel Aviv, 1984); Ne’ima Barzel, “Honor, Hate, and Memory in Debates on Reparations and Compensations from Germany in the 1950s,” Yad Vashem Studies 24: 203–225 (1995); for the political negotiations, see Frohn Axel and Anne Hope, eds., Holocaust and Shilumim (Washington, D.C., 1991) (in English); Nana Sagi, German Reparations (Jerusalem, 1990); and Gunther Gillessen, Konrad Adenaur and Israel (Oxford, 1986) (in English). See also Ronald W. Zweig, German Reparations and the Jewish World: A History of the Claims Conference (Routledge, 2001).

Notes to Chapters 14 and 15 10.  Al Hamishmar, January 1 and 6, 1952. 11.  Knesset minutes from Sessions 38–40, doc. 19-7/1, pp. 905–960; for Kovner on the two Germanys in 1965, see Hashavua (the Hakibbutz Hameuchad’s weekly bulletin) 689, April 2, 1965; Davar, April 19, 1953; Kovner to Meir Ya’ari, March 19, 1954, GHA, (8)12.7-95. 12.  The June 10, 1957, decisions are in GHA, (9)6.10.5; and for Gavriel Sheleg from Kibbutz Ma’abarot and Arieh Zamir from Kibbutz Hazorea on Kovner, see Hadaf Hayarok, April 22, 1987. 13.  Meir Ya’ari in Hashavua, February 19, 1965; and Avraham Ya’akov to Meir Ya’ari, February 20, 1965, GHA, (5)19.7-95. 14.  Kovner to Zalman Shazar, quoted on August 20, 1965, in all the major newspapers; Avot Yeshurun, That Is the Title of the Book (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1970), 41; and a conversation with Bronka Kliwanska. 15.  Kovner to Naftali Feder and to Al Hamishmar, August 31, 1971. 16.  Meir Ya’ari to Kovner, October 14, 1971; Kovner to Meir Ya’ari, October 16, 1971; Meir Ya’ari to Kovner, October 18, 1971; and Kovner to Meir Ya’ari, October 20, 1971, all in GHA, (1)22.7-95. 17.  Addressed to Kovner, June 7, 1973, KEHA. 18.  Kovner to the Histadrut Secretariat, October 16, 1969, GHA, (3)60.5; for the debates and the kibbutzim’s answers and the debates of the committee between June 1978 and July 1980, see GHA, 4.12.10-5. 19.  Letters in KEHA. 20.  Interview with Elie Ben-Gal, who witnessed the incident in Paris in August 1955. 21.  See GHA, D.2.202-2. 22.  Al Hamishmar, April 21, 1958.

Chapter 15 1.  A handwritten note in KEHA. 2.  For the “vision” and the “poem in stone,” see Kovner’s first Diaspora Museum plan, April 1971, in the “Plan” file, Diaspora Museum Archive (DMA), and Kovner’s Moreshet Hill program, October 1963, KEHA. “A book” and “a story” are mentioned in almost every one of Kovner’s plans and programs. 3.  Interviews with Yoske Geva and with Rabbi Irving (Yitzhak) Greenberg in New York. 4.  For the March 1986 plans, titled “New York Memorial (NYM),” and an ­essay about “the character of the NYM,” see KEHA; and see Kovner’s July 3, 1980, correspondence (in KEHA) with Yitzhak Greenberg about an Ohel Yiskor (hall of commemoration), as it is called in Yad Vashem. 5.  The speech, delivered during the July 13–14 conference in Jerusalem, was published as “The Mountain of Memory—Mountain of Warning,” Mishmar, July 25, 1947.

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Notes to Chapter 15 6.  Yad Vashem Directors’ Archive, D-672, YVA. 7.  July 1956, GHA, 1.30.5. 8.  The 1956 plan and the July 1959 proposals, GHA, 2.30.5. 9.  The 1961 plan, GHA, 3.10.7-40, p. 2; Sholomo Rosen to the secretariats of the kibbutzim, February 5, 1961, GHA, 6.30.5. 10.  Kovner at Kfar Menachem, November 26, 1961, GHA, 6.30.5. 11.  Meir Ya’ari and Ya’akov Hazan to Kovner, May 11, 1961, GHA, 3.10.7-40; the press, same date, about the award; for Kovner’s testimony at the trial, see most newspapers, May 5, 1961, for details and headlines. 12.  Letter to the kibbutzim, July 1956, GHA, 1.30.5; Meir Ya’ari to Kovner, August 2, 1961, “Letters” file, KEHA. 13.  A variation of the 1961 plan, in KEHA. Lipa Yahalom, who worked with Kovner in Ein Hahoresh, later designed the Valley of the Communities. 14.  In the 1961 plan as well as in its variations. For a detailed list of executive members from July 24, 1961, see GHA, 9.8.3-95. 15.  Kovner to the executive members, July 1, 1964, GHA, 9.8.3-95; Shaul Slomnitzki from Kibbutz Beit Alfa, Hashavua [This Week], June 12, 1964. 16.  Report for the Moreshet executive members, February 15, 1962, and minutes of their meeting, May 7, 1963, GHA, 4.60.5. 17.  For the executive members meeting and letter from Kovner to Antek Zuckerman, June 19, 1962, see KEHA. 18.  Interviews with Israel Gutman and Yehuda Bauer; Bauer’s letters to Kovner, KEHA. 19.  Kovner’s speech, “Facing the Monument,” was published in At Our Place, May 4, 1951, and in Hedim, an intellectual Hashomer Hatzair journal, in May 1951. 20.  See correspondence regarding the public council in GHA, 9.8.95. 21.  Interviews with Shika Katzir and Munio Brindwein. 22.  Interview with Israel Gutman and the Yad Mordechai report to Moreshet, December 19, 1983, GHA, 3.51.5. 23.  Interviews with Israel Gutman, Shika Katzir, Munio Brindwein, and Shula Artzi of the Yad Mordechai secretariat; Yad Mordechai kibbutz report, December 19, 1983, GHA, 3.51.5. 24.  Interviews with Mordechai Roseman, Israel Gutman, and Ruzka Korczak. 25.  Kovner’s letter of resignation written on April 4, 1983, to Hakibbutz Ha’artzi secretariat, and Aliza Amir and Ezra Rabin’s refusal to accept it, April 7, 1983, GHA, 4.60.5; the plans are in GHA, 5.15.7-40 and 6.30.5; for the decision to open a center in Givat Haviva, see GHA, 4.10.7-40. 26.  Letter to Shalom Lurie, June 17, 1987, from the Sheba Hospital; interview with Yosef Harmatz on the issue of the Kaddish. 27.  The letter is in GHA, D.1.5738. 28.  Hadaf Hayarok, January 12, 1988; “The Abba House Heritage” was the title for the minutes of the meeting.

Notes to Chapters 15 and 16 29.  Interview with Yonat Rotbein of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, daughter of ­Ruzka Korczak. 30.  Interview with Vitka Kempner. 31.  Kovner’s letter to his daughter, Shlomit, February 29, 1975, courtesy of Shlomit Kovner. 32.  Shalom Lurie’s description of Kovner’s account of the meeting at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh during Passover 1979; see Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 291–294. 33.  Interview with Shlomo Simonsohn, then rector of Tel Aviv University. 34.  The plan was submitted on May 17, 1972, “Plans” file, unnumbered, DMA. 35.  Interview with Shlomo Simonsohn. 36.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 292. 37.  Interviews with Ida Huberman, Shaike Weinberg, and Shlomo Simonsohn. 38.  Interviews with Ida Huberman, Shaike Weinberg, and Shlomo Simonsohn; Abba Kovner, Guide to the Halacha Ocean Map, Concepts, Personalities, Plans: Idea and Writing, published by the Diaspora Museum, no date. 39.  Interviews with Shaike Weinberg, Elie Ben-Gal, Ida Huberman, and Miriam Schlesinger. 40.  Kovner, His and About Him, 46–47; and a draft of the Diaspora Museum file, KEHA. 41.  Kovner at the Diaspora Museum International Council meeting, December 22, 1984. 42.  Interviews with Vitka Kempner, Ida Huberman, Miriam Schlesinger, Elie Ben-Gal, and Sam Bloch, who told me about Kovner’s arrival in New York with Paul Keidar and about collecting $20 million. Interview with Israel Rudnicki about Avraham Sutzkever. 43.  Interviews with Shaike Weinberg and Shlomo Simonsohn. 44.  Interviews with Ela Bar-Ilan, Elie Ben-Gal, and Shaike Weinberg. Angry letters from Jews in the United States, KEHA.

Chapter 16 1.  Interviews with Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh archivists (EHA, as distinguished from the archive in Kovner’s home, KEHA), especially Ofra Kuzitz. 2.  Interview with Rabbi Yitzhak Greenberg in New York. 3.  “Judaism is a consensus,” said Kovner in a one-day seminar devoted to “The kibbutz and the origins of Israel and its tradition,” October 4, 1978, Haifa University; for his lecture, see Shdemot (Winter–Spring 1979), 40–41; and Kovner, “Dispute: A Cornerstone in Jewish Culture,” in See This and Renew, 279–284. 4.  Interview with Hanoch Bartov. 5.  “The Book of the Deceased,” KEHA; Kovner’s eulogy for Micha Vardimon, Al Hamishmar, May 29, 1973; Kovner’s eulogy for Zvi Hurwitz, At Our Place,

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Notes to Chapter 16 ­ ugust 9, 1964; and Kovner’s eulogy for Eliyahu Porat and about the surprising A Kaddish with his son, Elisha, At Our Place, November 23, 1966. 6.  About Elka’s Wedding, see At Our Place, May 21, 1954; the dramatized text and stage sketches and directions are housed in KEHA. 7.  Interview with Elisha Porat and his letter to Arieh Ben-Gurion, Kibbutz Beit Hashita, Succoth 1988, courtesy of Elisha Porat; Shaul Tchernichowski, Elka’s Wedding, in his Poems, 3rd ed. (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, 1948), 61–108. 8.  Instructions for the wedding ceremonies with Kovner’s corrections, end of August 1967, following the Six Day War, KEHA. 9.  “A Final Sermon,” At Our Place, September 9, 1984. 10.  Photocopy of the anthology courtesy of Vitka Kempner. 11.  Interview with Elisha Porat. 12.  “We failed to create a new Haggadah,” Kovner to Ma’ariv, April 16, 1965. It is one of Kovner’s most often quoted interviews. 13.  Kovner, Ma’ariv, April 16, 1965; and quoted in At Our Place, April 4, 1990; interview with Arieh Ben-Gurion, founder of the Kibbutzim Holiday Archive, on the evolution of the Kibbutz Haggadah; I thank Arieh Ben-Gurion for the material he graciously sent. 14.  Kovner to the kibbutz secretariat on the eve of Independence Day, KEHA, file 1955; and Newsletter 12 of the Hakibbutz Hameuchad culture committee, April 1962, written by Arieh Ben-Gurion. 15.  Interview with the editors of At Our Place, no date, most probably on the eve of Yom Kippur, 1975. 16.  At Our Place, January 1953. 17.  Interview with Hanoch Bartov, then a member of Ein Hahoresh. 18.  Ehud Rabin, “A Language of Our Own,” May 9, 1988, at the party for the publication of a collection of Kovner’s essays, in Beyond Mourning: Essays, ed. Muki Zur (Tel Aviv, 1998), EHA. 19.  Interview with Michael Kovner, and Kovner speaking at the Bialik House, February 20, 1978, EHA. 20.  See especially a brochure Kovner wrote for the Ein Hahoresh Jubilee, the program for the kibbutz’s fiftieth anniversary, January 5, 1979, parts of which were published in At Our Place, June 29 and July 20, 1979. 21.  “The Ein Hahoresh Book” is preserved in EHA. About ten kibbutz members designed and wrote it. 22.  For Kovner’s improved program, see his letters to the kibbutz members, September and October 1983, and in even more detail to the kibbutz secretariat in March 1984 and February 1985. 23.  The script, with exact sketches and staging directions, is housed in KEHA; reactions can be found in Al Hamishmar, January 1 and 9, 1980; Arieh Ben-Gurion to At Our Place, January 11, 1980; and see Kovner, “The Infantile Myth,” in his On the Narrow Bridge, 86.

Notes to Chapters 16 and 17 24.  Interview with Vitka Kempner. 25.  At Our Place, August 6, 1964. 26.  Kovner’s letter was published in Al Hamishmar, April 30, 1971; Kovner’s reaction and an apology can be found in Al Hamishmar, May 10, 1971. Kovner’s original letter was published in every major newspaper in the country; see, for example, Yediot Aharonot, August 11, 1971; interview with Vitka Kempner. 27.  “A Truthful Reproach,” a speech for the Yom Kippur War memorial day, October 19, 1979, at Kibbutz Beit Hashita, published in Shdemot 74: 7–12 (March 1980). 28.  “A Truthful Reproach,” for example, was printed in Hotam (Al Hamishmar’s Saturday supplement), January 17, 1982, and in other kibbutzim publications. 29.  The “Group” file, and interviews with Elie Ben-Gal and Hannah Katzir; concerning points prepared for the first reunion, a month before Kovner’s death, defining the identity of the members, see the “Group” files kept by Elie Ben-Gal in Kibbutz Bar’am. 30.  “Group” files, Kibbutz Bar-am; interviews with Elie Ben-Gal and Hannah Katzir; and Avraham Aderet’s letters to Elie Ben-Gal in February and April 1988, and Ben-Gal’s letters in May, answering that he is following Kovner’s testament; Iddo Katz summarized the Shdemot meeting, July 28, 1992, and sent it to the participants, August 12, 1992, “Group” files, Kibbutz Bar-am. 31.  Interviews with Ehud Rabin, Shlomit Kovner, and Yehuda Bauer. 32.  Interview with poet Moshe Dor, Ma’ariv, December 8, 1967; and Kovner’s letter to Vitka Kempner about Face to Face, KEHA. 33.  Interview with Elisha Porat. 34.  Kovner’s last Purim and Passover sermons, published in At Our Place, February 27 and April 17, 1987, might be considered his spiritual testament.

Chapter 17 1.  Interview with Yonat Rotbein, daughter of Ruzka and Avi Marla. 2.  Interview with Shlomit Kovner. 3.  Interview with Yitzhak (Pasha) Avidov. 4.  The University News, June and July 1980, quoted Kovner’s June 1980 lecture in full; a file Hassia Taubes showed Dina Porat; interview with Rachel and Mordechai Roseman. 5.  Interview with Israel Gutman; the quotation is from Kovner’s letter to his daughter, September 2, 1984, courtesy of Shlomit Kovner. 6.  Interviews with Yosef Harmatz, Cesia Rosenberg-Amit, Mariassa Katzenelson Bat-Miriam, Israel Gutman, Graciella Ben-Dror, and Ida Zurit, author of Avot Yeshurun’s biography, The Song of the Noble Savage (Tel Aviv, 1995). 7.  Interview with Hanoch Bartov. 8.  See Hanoch Bartov, I Am Not the Mythological Sabra (Tel Aviv, 1995), 131–138,

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Notes to Chapters 17 and 18 about Bartov’s acquaintance with Kovner (the quotation is on p. 138); interviews with Vitka Kempner and Israel Gutman. 9.  Interview with Elie Ben-Gal. 10.  Yaron, Anxiety, 30. 11.  A conversation initiated by Vitka Kempner. 12.  Interview with Eliyahu Eshel. 13.  Interview with Cesia Rosenberg-Amit, a close friend of Ruzka Korczak. 14.  Interview with Elisha Porat. 15.  For Kovner’s speech at the wedding of Yehuda, Ruzka and Avi Marla’s son, see At Our Place, May 6, 1977. Interview with Yonat Rotbein, Yehuda Marla, Senka Nisanelewicz, and Yosef Harmatz. 16.  Interviews with Ofra Kuzitz, the Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh archivist, Elisha Porat, Talma Sadeh, Ester Orchan, and Mariassa Katzenelson Bat-Miriam, who said, “There was nothing about Abba and Ruzka’s behavior that could be a hint.” 17.  Interview with Shlomit Kovner and Vitka Kempner. 18.  Interview with Michael Kovner; and see “Abba’s Son,” Yigal Mosko’s interview with Michael Kovner in Kol Ha’ir [Voice of the City], May 7, 1993. 19.  Interviews with Shlomit and Michael Kovner. 20.  Interviews with Ofra Kuzitz, Elisha Porat, Talma Sadeh, Ester Orchan, and Mariassa Katzenelson Bat-Miriam. 21.  Interview with Yonat Rotbein; the first volume was Kovner’s On the Narrow Bridge. 22.  Interview with Ofra Ivri, a colleague of Kempner’s. 23.  Interviews with Haim Lazar and Vitka Kempner. 24.  Kovner’s letters to Vitka Kempner, KEHA.

Chapter 18 1.  Interview with Yuval Ne’eman. 2.  Interviews with Michael Kovner and Yosef Harmatz; and a note in Kovner’s file, KEHA. 3.  “Following Those Things,” in Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 189. 4.  “A Heart-to-Heart Conversation Between Golda and the Authors,” Yediot Aharonot, August 3, 1972; Kovner to Zevulun Hammer, then minister of education and culture; Kovner to Avner Shalev, then chairperson of the National Council for Culture and the Arts; Kovner to Shamai Golan, chairperson of the Authors’ Association, November 12, 1982, Genazim, 1175/18. 5.  National Convention Against Violence, Ma’ariv, March 15, 1983, and all the major newspapers on that date; for drafts of forms to sign, see KEHA and Kovner, His and About Him, 62–63. 6.  At Our Place, March 27, 1987, in agreement with Aharon Megged in Ha’aretz, February 27, 1987, about the play, The Optimist; Kovner, in an interview

Notes to Chapter 18 to Sefi ­R ahelevski, “This Time Should Not Be One of Destroying Myths,” Yediot Aharonot, October 14, 1987, published after his death. 7.  “Projects” file, KEHA: cable university, August 10, 1984; educational laboratory, March 24, 1986; democracy, March 5, 1986; youth writing poetry, May 1970; Detroit, April 1985, following a request from Rabbi Charles Rosenzweig. 8.  Kovner’s letter to his daughter, Shlomit, September 2, 1984. Courtesy of Shlomit Kovner. 9.  Dalia Rabikovitch in the Ma’ariv panel, September 25, 1974. 10.  See Shalom Lurie’s introduction to Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony; and Lurie, “Notes on the Abba Kovner Scrolls of Testimony,” Alei Siah (Summer 1994), 153– 156; about Talmud pages with a central column, see Kovner’s letter to Shalom Lurie, Hanukkah 1987; I believe that Zvia Ben-Yosef Ginor’s view (“From the Murdered Jewish People to the Living One,” Ha’aretz, September 3, 1995) that the scrolls are a parody of the rabbinical responsa and an ironic expression of Kovner’s loss of faith that the Jewish people carry collective cultural baggage cannot be reconciled with the writing of the Scrolls. It also cannot be reconciled with Kovner’s letter to Lurie, who edited the text for publication after Kovner’s death, or with the testimony of Rabbi Yitzhak Greenberg, who spoke at length with Kovner about the scrolls while he was writing them. See Irving (Yitzhak) Greenberg, The Jewish Way (New York, 1988), 347–356 (in English); I would like to note that Jewish sources and texts were too close to Kovner’s heart for him to parody them and that the Diaspora Museum the way he conceived it and his conduct in his kibbutz are but two examples of Kovner’s constant belief in the Jewish collective cultural baggage. 11.  “On the Witness Stand,” in Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 96; for Kovner’s lecture at Yad Vashem, see Kovner, His and About Him, 51, and an interview with Vitka Kempner. 12.  Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, 135, 137; for Kovner’s analysis of how the poem leads the poet, see Kovner, The Creative Process: 45 Contemporary Poems, trans. Shirley Kaufman (New York, 1985), 112–114 (in English). 13.  Azriel Uchmany, “A New Concept of Abba Kovner’s Poetry,” in his Human Voices, 76; Benyamin Hroshovski (later Harshav), “Abba Kovner and the Modern Poem,” in Abba Kovner, ed. Lurie, 48–82. 14.  Undated notes that Kovner wrote for himself in the early 1950s, following the publications of Farewell to the South and The Key Sank, KEHA; interview with Elisha Porat about Kovner’s poetry readings at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh. 15.  Interview with Yitzhak Greenberg in New York. 16.  Uri S. Cohen, “Primo Levi’s Look,” Ha’aretz, July 26, 1996; and Zvi Jegendorf, “Primo Levi Goes to Fetch Soup and Is Reminded of Dante,” Hadarim 11: 47–58 (Summer 1994).

383

Writings of Abba Kovner

Reference is made to Kovner’s works in Hebrew, in order of publication, unless otherwise noted.

Poems and Poetry While Still There Is Night, A Partisan Poem (Merhavia, 1947). Farewell to the South, A Poem (Merhavia, 1949). The Key Sank, in Yevul [Harvest] (Tel Aviv, 1950), dedicated to Avraham Shlonski. Sandy Ground, A Poem (Merhavia, 1961). Of All Loves (Merhavia, 1965) (includes a version of The Key Sank and a second version in 1971, pp. 127–178). My Little Sister, A Poem (Merhavia, 1967). A Canopy in the Desert (Tel Aviv, 1970). Reprinted in A Canopy in the Desert: Selected Poems, translated into English by Shirley Kaufman, with Ruth Adler and Nurit Orchan (Pittsburgh, 1973). Selected Poems, Abba Kovner and Nelly Sachs (Harmondsworth, 1971) (in En­ glish). The Rhythm Band Show on Mount Grizim, A Poem (Tel Aviv, 1972). The Small Book (Tel Aviv, 1973). Observations (Tel Aviv, 1977). To (Tel Aviv, 1980). My Little Sister and Selected Poems, 1965–1985, selected and translated into English by Shirley Kaufman (Oberlin, Ohio, 1986). Sloan Kettering: Poems (Tel Aviv, 1987). Translated into English by Eddie Levenston (New York, 2002). Rosa’s Poetry (Tel Aviv, 1987). Abba Kovner: Collected Poems, 5 vols., edited by Dan Miron (Jerusalem, 1996– 2003).

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Writings of Abba Kovner

Prose Face to Face, A Novel, pt. 1, Zero Hour (Merhavia, 1953); pt. 2, The Crossroads (Merhavia, 1955). A special tenth edition was published in 1988, marking the fortieth anniversary of the state of Israel. Translated into Spanish as Cara a Cara by David M. Pecheny (Buenos Aires, 1956).

Scrolls This Day, A Scroll of Testimony (Jerusalem, 1963), marking the twentieth anniversary of the ghettos’ uprising. A translation into Yiddish was initiated by the World Zionist Organization (New York, 1963). The Tree of Life, A Scroll of Testimony, marking the fifteenth anniversary of the state of Israel (Jerusalem, 1963) (in Yiddish). Scrolls of Fire: A Nation Fighting for Its Life—Fifty-two Chapters of Jewish Martyrology, translated into English by Shirley Kaufman with Dan Laor, illustrated by Dan Reisinger (Jerusalem, 1981). Scrolls of Testimony (Jerusalem, 1993). Published in Russian as Kniga svidetel’stv: Abba Kovner, translated by M. Ulanovskaya (Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliya, 1989). Translated into English as Scrolls of Testimony by Eddie Levenston and illustrated by Samuel Bak (Philadelphia, 2001).

Children’s Books A Journey to the Land of Words (Tel Aviv, 1981). The Little Angel, Michael (Tel Aviv, 1989). Something About Whales (Tel Aviv, 1989). Mother and Child (play) (New York, 1989) (in English).

Essays On the Narrow Bridge: Essays, collected, edited, and with an essay by Shalom Lurie (Tel Aviv, 1981). The Sea of the Halacha: The Oral Torah Map (Tel Aviv, 1985). His and About Him: Abba Kovner—Seventy Years, edited by Ruzka Korczak-Marla and Yehuda Tubin (Tel Aviv, 1988). Beyond Mourning: Essays, collected and edited by Muki Zur (Tel Aviv, 1998). A Missive to Hashomer Hatzair Partisans (Tel Aviv, 2002) (in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English). Originally written in Yiddish in March 1944 in the Rudniki forest.

Writings of Abba Kovner

Editing Painters in the Kibbutz (Merhavia, 1961). There Are No Butterflies Here: Drawings and Poems by the Theresienstadt Ghetto Children (Tel Aviv, 1963). Translated into Hebrew by Leah Goldberg. Requiem for Theresienstadt (Tel Aviv, 1965). Translated into Hebrew by Ruth Bondi. Childhood Under Fire: Stories, Poems, and Drawings by Children During the Six Day War (Merhavia, 1968). Translated into English under the same title by Dov Vardi (Tel Aviv, 1968). Anthology of Jewish Folk Songs, 6 vols., edited by Aharon Winkowetzki, Abba Kovner, and Sinai Leichter (Jerusalem, 1983–2004) (in Yiddish). In addition, hundreds of articles, essays, and interviews, mostly written by Kovner and others about his poetry, public role, and intellectual impact, are to be found in the Ein Hahoresh Archives, with their list prepared by Talma Sadeh. Also see Catalogue, A Personal Archive, Abba Kovner, compiled by Yophefa Pecher (Yad Ya’ari, Givat Haviva, September 2004). This catalogue lists the materials formerly kept in Yad Ya’ari and materials entrusted by the Kovner family in 2001.

387

Unpublished Sources

Archives Diaspora Museum Archive, Tel Aviv University (DMA) Genazim—The Asher Barash Authors Archive, Tel Aviv Givat Haviva Yad Ya’ari Archive—The Hashomer Hatzair general archive and the Hashomer Hatzair in the Holocaust Moreshet Archive (GHA) Givati Brigade Archive in Yad Tabenkin, Efal Ha’apalah [“illegal” immigration to Israel] Study Project and Information Center, Tel Aviv University Haganah Archive, Tel Aviv Hebrew University Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Oral History Section, ­Jerusalem (ICJ) Histadrut [General Workers Union] Archive, Tel Aviv IDF [Israel Defense Forces] Archive, Tel Aviv Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh Archive (EHA) Kovner’s private archive, Ein Hahoresh (KEHA) Sutzkever Boxes, National Library, Hebrew University, Jerusalem TAKAM [United Kibbutzim Movement] Archive, Kibbutz Hulda Vilna Gaon State Museum and Archive, Vilna, Lithuania Yad Vashem Archive (YVA), Jerusalem YIVO (Yiddisher Wissenschaftlecher Institute), New York, Sutzkever­Katchergiski Collection, and its copy in Yad Vashem

Material in Private Hands Entrusted to Dina Porat Yitzhak Avidov (Pasha Reichman), Ramat Hasharon, on revenge Yossi Avner, Diaspora Museum, on the Diaspora Museum Elie Ben-Gal, Kibbutz Bar’am, on the Havura Arieh Ben-Gurion, Kibbutz Beit Hashita, on holidays in the kibbutzim Tal Chomsky, Kibbutz Nitzanim, on the Nitzanim affair

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Unpublished Sources Gidi Eilat, Kibbutz Beit Alfa, on the 1948 war Rachel Gliksman, Holon, on the avengers Yosef Harmatz, Tel Aviv, interview with Chiena Borowska Ariel Hurwitz, Kibbutz Gal’on, reviews of The Partisans of Vilna Shirley Kaufman, Jerusalem, on translating Kovner Shlomo Kless, Kibbutz Nir David, the protocols of the exodus Haim Kovner, B’nei Brak, on the Kovner family tree Michael Kovner, Jerusalem, letters from Kovner Semion Kovner, Ashdod, on the Kovner family tree Shlomit Kovner, Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, letters from Kovner Shalom Lurie, Kibbutz Merhavia, letters from Kovner Ehud Rabin, Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, material for an evening dedicated to Kovner Arieh Levi Sarid, Bat Galim, on revenge Aya Shacham, Yokne’am, on the mother superior memoirs Yosef Shamir, Kibbutz Ruhama, material on unifying the kibbutz movements Shin Shifra, Tel Aviv, interviews with Kovner Hannah Shimoni, Kfar Saba, material on the Diaspora Museum Hasia Taubes, Givataim, partisan letters protesting Sobol’s play

Testimonies and Interviews with Dina Porat Aliza Amir, telephone interview, April 5, 1996, about the Moreshet building Yishai Amrami, interview at Yad Vashem, July 15, 1998, about Ein Hahoresh Yitzhak (Pasha) Avidov (Reichman), interview at Ramat Hasharon, July 1997, about revenge and exodus Uri Avneri, telephone interview, June 5, 1997, about the Givati Brigade Arnan (Sini) Azaryahu, interview in Efal, August 15, 1998, about the battle pages Yehezkel Baharav (Rabinovitch), telephone interview, August 1, 1996, about revenge Clara Bar (Kovner), interview in Tel Aviv, November 13, 1995, about the Kovner family Ella Bar-Ilan, interview at the Diaspora Museum, May 3, 1995, about the Diaspora Museum Eli Barkai, correspondence, June 2004, about the Givati Brigade Hanoch Bartov, interview in Tel Aviv, April 26, 1996, about Kovner in Ein Hahoresh Yehuda Bauer, interview in Jerusalem, November 10, 1995, about Kovner’s worldview Benjamin Beit-Halachmi, telephone interview, August 5, 1996, about Haganah documents Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, interview at Kibbutz Givat Haim Ichud, June 10, 1997, on battle pages

Unpublished Sources Elie Ben-Gal, interview in Tel Aviv, October 4, 1992, about the Diaspora Museum and the Havura Yehoshua Bichler, interview at Givat Haviva, June 3, 1996, about the Moreshet archive Sam Bloch, interview in New York, January 1996, about the Diaspora Museum Chiena Borowska, interviews in Vilna, September 1991 and August 1997, about the Wittenberg affair, partisans, and the forest Israel Carmi, telephone interview, August 10, 1996, about revenge Daniel Carpi, interview at Tel Aviv University, March 16, 1997, about the Diaspora Museum Meir Davidson, interview at Kibbutz Eilon, February 10, 1995, about the Givati Brigade Yonah Degen, telephone interview, March 17, 1996, about the liberation of Vilna Zippora Efrat, interview at Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, March 28, 1993, about the Hashomer Hatzair in Vilna Eliyahu Eshel, interview at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, August 3, 1997, about the Givati Brigade Yeshayahu Friedman, telephone interviews, April 2001 and August 2004, about the Givati Brigade and Leonard Rubinstein Zvi Fuchs, interview in New York, January 1996, about Kovner’s illness Moshe Gal, telephone interview, July 1, 1997, about immigration from Vilna Yoske Geva, interview in Tel Aviv, July 7, 1997, about the Givati Brigade Yitzhak Greenberg, interview in New York, January 24, 1996, about Kovner and Judaism Chaika Grossman, interview in Tel Aviv, August 15, 1992, about the origins of the uprising Israel Gutman, several interviews in Jerusalem, 1998–2000, about lessons of the Holocaust. Shmuel Halevi, interview in B’nei Brak, April 3, 1995, about the Kovner family Yosef Harmatz, several interviews in Tel Aviv, 1995–2008, about the ghetto, the forest, and revenge Shalom Holavski, interview at Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, April 2, 1993, about the Vilna Hashomer Hatzair cell Ida Huberman, interview in Tel Aviv, April 13, 1996, about the Diaspora Museum Ariel Hurwitz, correspondence, August 15, 1992, about the Moreshet Museum Ofra Ivri, interview in Ramat Hasharon, May 16, 1998, about Vitka Kempner’s studies and career Shmuel Kaplinski, interviews in Vilna, September 1991 and August 1997, about leaving the ghetto Rachel Kastanian, interview in Vilna, September 1991, about Vilna ghetto materials in archives

391

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Unpublished Sources Mariasa Katzenelson (Bat Miriam), interview at Tel Aviv University, April 13, 1998, about Kovner and her mother, poet Bat Miriam Ephraim Katzir, interview at Tel Aviv University, June 3, 1998, about revenge Hannah Katzir, telephone interview, June 16, 1998, about the Havura Shirley Kaufman, interview in Jerusalem, February 1996, about translating Kovner Bronka Klibanski, interview at Yad Vashem, November 27, 1991, about Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff Ruzka Korczak, interview in Tel Aviv, October 1986, about the ghetto, the forest, and settling in Israel Eliezer Kovner, telephone interview, May 1996, about the Kovner family Haim Kovner, telephone interview, October 11, 1994, about the Kovner family Leon Kovner, telephone interview, January 14, 1996, about the Kovner family Misha Kovner, interview in Tel Aviv, November 13, 1992, about the Kovner family Neuta Kovner, interview in Tel Aviv, May 14, 1997, about the Kovner family and the ghetto Semion Kovner, interview in Tel Aviv, February 15, 1996, about the Kovner family tree Victor Kovner, interview in New York, January 1996, about the Kovner family Shlomo (Tchitch) Lahat, interview in Afeka, May 2, 1997, about the 1948 war Haim Lazar, interview in Tel Aviv, July 16, 1996, about the ghetto and the forest Dov Levin, interview in Jerusalem, March 12, 1997, about the forest Israel Levin, interview in Afeka, September 5, 1998, about Kovner’s literary works Shalom Lurie, interview in Tel Aviv and telephone interviews, 1995–1997, about childhood in Vilna and intellectuals in the ghetto Haim Marom (Morocco), interview at Tel Aviv University, March 17, 2007, about the ghetto and manifesto Meir Mindel, correspondence, January 2004, about the Givati Brigade and Kibbutz Negba Littman Mor (Moravtchik), interview at Tel Aviv University, October 20, 1997, about the ghetto underground Yuval Ne’eman, interview at Tel Aviv University, June 11, 1995, about the 1948 war Senka Nisanelewicz, interview in Tel Aviv, June 20, 1996, about the forest and exodus Esther Orchan, interview at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, August 10, 1993, about life in the kibbutz Dov Peleg, telephone interview, September 8, 1995, about the Moreshet building Yurek Plonski, interview at Givat Haviva, May 3, 1996, about relations with Kovner Elisha Porat, several interviews at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, 1995–2008, about life and poetry in Ein Hahoresh

Unpublished Sources Yitzhak Pundak, interview in Kfar Yonah, February 13, 1997, about the Givati Brigade and Nitzanim Ehud Rabin, interview at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, May 30, 1998, about Kovner at Ein Hahoresh Adam Rand, interview at Kibbutz Evron, June 1, 1994, about immigration from Vilna Nisan Reznik, interview at Tel Aviv University, March 17, 1997, about the Vilna ghetto and Kibbutz Nitzanim Alexander Rindjiunski, interview in Tel Aviv, January 26, 1993, about Communists in the forest and ghetto Zippora Ritter, interview in Ramat Gan, September 9, 1996, about the convent Mordechai and Rachel Roseman, interview at Kibbutz Ha’ogen, June 24, 1997, about the exodus Cesia (Zila) Rosenberg-Amit, telephone interviews and correspondence, April 20, 1997, about the ghetto and the underground Yonat Rotbein, several interviews in Givat Haviva, 1996–2008, about Ruzka Korczak and Moreshet Simha (Kazik) Rotem, interview in Jerusalem, January 26, 1993, about revenge Israel Rudnicki, interview at Tel Aviv University, September 24, 1997, about Kovner and Avraham Sutzkever Talma Sadeh, interview at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, March 12, 1995, about the list of Kovner’s works. Arieh Levi Sarid, interview in Bat Galim, August 6, 1996, about revenge Issar Schmidt, interview in Jerusalem, February 7, 1996, about the forest Gabi Sedlis, interview in New York, January 1996, about the forest and the exodus Tami Servadio, interview in Tel Aviv, June 3, 1997, about the Diaspora Museum Natan Shacham, interview in Ramat Hasharon, July 6, 1995, about the battle pages and his play on the Wittenberg affair Moshe Shamir, interview in Tel Baruch, August 3, 1998, about Kovner’s political views Yosef Shamir, interview at Kibbutz Ruhama, July 25, 1997, about Soviets in Lithuania Miriam Schlesinger, interview in Tel Aviv, March 6, 1993, about the Diaspora Museum Baruch Shuv, interview in Tel Aviv, April 6, 1997, about the last days of the Vilna ghetto and the forest Shlomo Simonsohn, interview in Hertzliya, July 10, 1998, about the Diaspora Museum Tania Sternel, telephone interview, June 7, 1996, about joining the underground Avraham Sutzkever, interview in Tel Aviv, May 3, 1994, about relations with Kovner Yehuda Tarmu, interview in Tel Aviv, May 22, 1998, about Kovner’s literary works

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Unpublished Sources Natan Treinin, interview in Rehovot, February 21, 1995, about Ein Hahoresh and Kovner’s illness Yehuda Tubin, interview in Tel Aviv, April 3, 1994, about the Jewish Brigade Ze’ev Tzahor, telephone interview, February 4, 1997, about Kovner’s Honoris Causa Avraham Versas, interview in Jerusalem, April 3, 1995, about childhood in Vilna Ya’akov (Kuba) Vilan, telephone interview, May 10, 1995, about Kibbutz Negba and the Givati Brigade Meir Vilner, several interviews in Tel Aviv, 1996–1998, about the Kovner family and youth in Vilna Shulamit Volkov, interview at Tel Aviv University, June 28, 1998, about the new wing of the Diaspora Museum Yehuda Wallach, telephone interview, June 3, 1998, about the 1948 war Shaike Weinberg, interview in Tel Aviv, October 17, 1992, about revenge and the Diaspora Museum Geoffrey Wigoder, correspondence, November 10, 1997, about the Diaspora Museum Daniel Yam, interview in Tel Aviv and correspondence, July 5, 1998, about Kovner’s third prose volume Shlomo Yashuner, interview in Tel Aviv and correspondence, August 7, 1996, about joining the underground Fania Yocheles-Barantzowska, interview in Vilna, August 1997, about the ghetto and forest Hillel Zeidel, telephone interview, April 4, 1995, about leaving the Vilna ghetto Yitzhak Ziv (Zalmanson), telephone interview, July 7, 1997, about the Vilna Hashomer Hatzair cell In addition to the many hours we spent together, Vitka Kempner agreed to a more formal testimony, given to me at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh on July 10 and 17, 2001, now in Yad Vashem, File 1213, 103 pp. Group discussion at Tel Aviv University, December 23, 1994, chaired by Dina Porat; participants: Yitzhak Arad, Arieh Levi Sarid, Vitka Kempner, and Yosef Harmatz Joint testimony at Tel Aviv University, August 3, 1992, chaired by Dina Porat; participants: Yitzhak Rogalin, Mira Verbin, Littman Mor-Moravtchik, Vitka Kempner, Mussia Lipman, Sima Kaganovitch, and Leibke Distel

Selected Bibliography

The items referred to are in Hebrew unless otherwise noted.

Biography Korchak-Marle, Ruzka. The Personality and Philosophy of Life of a Fighter, eds. L. Dror, Y. Rab, and Y. Tubin (Tel Aviv, 1998). Porat, Dina. Beyond the Reaches of Our Souls (Hamlet, I, IV, 55–56): The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, 2000). Sarid, Arieh Levi. “Abba Kovner’s Response to His Defilers.” Yalkut Moreshet 47: 9–96 (November 1989).

Encyclopedia Entries “Kovner, Abba (1918–1987).” In The Modern Hebrew Literature Lexicon Online, ed. Yosef Galron-Goldschlager. http://library.osu.edu/sites/users/galron.1 /00045.php, accessed May 7, 2009. Porat, Dina. “Kovner, Abba.” In Jewish Writers in the Twentieth Century, ed. Sorrel Kerbel (London, 2003), 302–303 (in English). Porat, Dina. “Kovner, Abba.” In The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven and London, 2008), 932–933 (in English). Porat, Elisha. “Kovner, Abba.” Wikipedia, http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90 %D7%91%D7%90_%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A0%D7%A8, accessed May 7, 2009.

Literary Criticism Ginor, Ben-Yosef Zvia. To the End of Illusion: Studies in Abba Kovner’s Poetry (Tel Aviv, 1995). Lurie, Shalom, ed. Abba Kovner: A Selection of Critical Essays on His Writings (Tel Aviv, 1988). Porat, Elisha. Essays (Tel Aviv, 2008) (in English).

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Selected Bibliography

Collections Dror, Zvika, ed. The Second Struggle Group: Witnesses from the Vilna Ghetto (Tel Aviv, 1987). Gefen, M., C. Grossman, and A. Kovner, eds. The Jewish Partisans’ Book (Merhavia, 1958). Kalchheim, Moshe, ed. With Proud Bearing, 1939–1945: Chapters in the History of Jewish Fighting in the Narocz Forests (Tel Aviv, 1991). Zuckerman, Yitzhak, and Moshe Basok, eds. The Ghetto Battles’ Book (Tel Aviv, 1956).

About Hashomer Hatzair The Book of Hashomer Hatzair, 3 vols. (Merhavia, 1956–1964). Vol. 1, The Movement from Its Inception to the Ghettos Uprising, 1913–1945 (1956); vol. 2, From World War II to the War of Independence, 1939–1947 (1961); vol. 3, Hashomer Hatzair Movement in Israel and the Diaspora, 1948–1949 (1964). The editorial board was headed by Meir Ya’ari and Ya’akov Hazan. Efrat, Zippora, Shalom Lurie, and Shlomo Frank, eds. Medurot: Hashomer Hatzair In and Around Vilna (Givat Haviva, 1991). Shamir, Yosef, ed. Hashomer Hatzair in Poland, 1913–1950: Essays and Documentation (Tel Aviv, 1991).

Diaries Avneri, Uri. In the Fields of the Philistines: A Battle Diary, 8th ed. (Tel Aviv, 1951). Kalmanovitch, Zelik. A Diary in the Vilna Ghetto (Tel Aviv, 1977). Kruk, Herman. Diary from the Vilna Ghetto (New York, 1961) (in Yiddish). Published in English as The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. Benjamin Harshav (New Haven and London, 2002). Rudaszewski, Yitzhak. The Diary of a Youth in Vilna, June 1941–April 1943 (Tel Aviv, 1986). Sakowicz, Kazimiez. Ponar Diary, 1941–1943: A Bystander Account of a Mass Murder, ed. Yitzhak Arad (New Haven and London, 2005) (in English).

Memoirs Distel, Leibke. Days of Life, 1941–1945 (Yakum, 1982). Dworzecki, Mark. Jerusalem of Lithuania in Battle and Destruction (Paris, 1948) (in Yiddish). Grossman, Chaika. Underground Members (Merhavia, 1965) (first published in 1950).

Selected Bibliography Harmatz, Joseph. From the Wings, A Long Journey: 1940–1960 (Lewes, Sussex, 1998). Katcherginski, Shmerke. The Destruction of Vilna (New York, 1947) (in Yiddish). Korczak, Ruzka. Flames in the Ashes, 3rd ed. (Merhavia, 1956) (first published in 1946). Korczak, R., Y. Tubin, and Y. Rab, eds. Zelda the Partisan (Tel Aviv, 1989). Kowalsky, Isaac. A Secret Press in Nazi Europe: The Story of a Jewish United Partisans Organization (New York, 1969) (in English). Lazar, Haim. Destruction and Resistance (Tel Aviv, 1988) (first published in 1950). Lidovski, Eliezer. The Spark Hasn’t Been Extinguished (Tel Aviv, 1986). Mor [Moravtchik], Littman. A Struggle for Life (Tel Aviv, 2005). Reznik, Nisan. Buds from the Ashes: The Story of Hano’ar Hatzioni Youth in the Vilna Ghetto, 1941–1944 (Jerusalem, 2003). Rindjiunski, Alexander [Senia]. The Destruction of Vilna (Tel Aviv, 1987). Rolnik, Masha. I Have to Tell (Jerusalem, 1965). Rosenberg-Amit, Cesia [Zila]. Not to Lose the Human Face (Tel Aviv, 1990). Shutan, Moshe. Ghetto and Woods: A Story (Tel Aviv, 1985). Shuv, Baruch [Borka]. Beyond the Leaden Clouds (Tel Aviv, 1995). Sutzkever, Avraham. “From the Vilna Ghetto.” In The Black Book, ed. Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg (Jerusalem, 1991), 247–315. Based on the first version of Sutzkever’s Vilna Ghetto, written in Moscow in 1944 (later published as The Vilna Ghetto [Tel Aviv, 1947]). Tubin, Yehuda. On the Senio, to the Bunker in 18 Mila Street (Tel Aviv, 1987). Weinrib, Abraham [Abrashka]. “Memoirs of a Vilna Ghetto Physician.” Yalkut Moreshet 27: 7–60 (April 1979). Zeidel, Hillel. A Human Being Tested (Holocaust Chapters) (Tel Aviv, 1971). Zuckerman, Yitzhak [Antek]. Those Seven Years, 1939–1946 (Tel Aviv, 1990).

Research Arad, Yitzhak. Jewish Vilna in Struggle and Destruction (Tel Aviv, 1976). Published in English as Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1980). ———. “The Vilna Ghetto Underground Archive.” In From Hidden Treasures to Historical Landmarks: Jewish Archives from the Holocaust Period, ed. Israel Gutman (Jerusalem, 1997), 151–160. Dagan, Shaul, and Eliyahu Yakir. Shimon Avidan Givati (Givat Haviva, 1995). Dror, Zvika. Nitzanim: A Kibbutz Built Twice (Tel Aviv, 1990). Eidintas, Alfonsas. Jews, Lithuanians, and the Holocaust (Vilna, 2003) (in English). Eilon, Avraham [Lentcher]. The Givati Brigade in the War of Independence (Tel Aviv, 1960). ———. Givati Facing the Egyptian Invasion (Tel Aviv, 1963).

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Selected Bibliography Fishman, David E. “Embers Plucked from Fire”: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna (New York, 1996) (in English). Kastanian-Danzig, Rachel. Spiritual Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto (Vilna, 2004) (in English). Kless, Shlomo. Borders, Underground, and Flight: Zionist Pioneering Activity in the Soviet Union and Contacts with the Yishuv, 1941–1945 (Tel Aviv, 1989). ———. On an Unpaved Path: The History of the Bricha, 1944–1948 (Dalia, 1994). Levin, Dov. The Jews of the Soviet-Annexed Territories, 1939–1941 (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1989). Oren, Ram. The Target: Tel Aviv (Tel Aviv, 2004). Porat, Dina. “The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects.” In The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, ed. David Cesarani (London and New York, 1994), 159–175 (in English). ———. “Meir Ya’ari and Abba Kovner: Contradicting Notions of Nationality and Judaism Following the Holocaust.” In The Holocaust in Jewish History, ed. Dan Michman (Jerusalem, 2005), 329–356. ———. “‘With Grace and Forgiveness’: Ruzka Korczak’s Encounter with the Yishuv and Its Leadership, 1944–1946.” Yalkut Moreshet 52: 9–34 (April 1992). Sarid, Arieh Levi. Ruin and Deliverance: The Pioneer Movements in Poland Throughout the Holocaust and During Its Aftermath, 1939–1949, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1997). Shapira, Anita. “The Yishuv’s Encounter with the Survivors.” In her Visions in Conflict (Tel Aviv, 1988), 325–354.

About Revenge Bartov, Hanoch. Growing Pains (Tel Aviv, 1965). Bar-Zohar, Michael. The Avengers (Tel Aviv, 1969) (2nd rev. ed. titled A Day of Revenge [Tel Aviv, 1991]). Cohen, Rich. The Avengers: A Jewish War Story (New York, 2000) (in English). Published in German as Nachtmarsch: Eine wahre Geschichte von Liebe und Vergeltung (Frankfurt, 2000). Elkins, Michael. Forged in Fury (New York, 1971) (in English). Sarid, Arieh Levi. “The Revenge Organization: Its History, Image, and Deeds.” Yalkut Moreshet 52: 35–106 (April 1992). Tobias, Jim G., and Zinke Peter. Nakam: Judische Rache an NS-Tätern (Hamburg, 2000) (in German).

Documentary Kempner, Aviva. The Partisans of Vilna, directed by Yosh Valecki (1986).

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations. Adamowicz, Irena, 45–46, 50, 59, 60, 102 Adenauer, Conrad, 266 Aharonowicz, Aharon, 153 Aharonowicz, Pessia, 60 Akiva, 68, 103 Aktionen (raids), 44, 46, 57, 60, 65, 82, 104–8, 116, 121, 125, 135–40, 142–43 Alterman, Nathan, 97, 179, 220, 245, 327, 331 Altman, Tossia, 35, 68 Amarant, Shmuel, 183–84, 188, 189 American Army, 209 American Jewry, 330 Amrami, Yishai, 309 Anielewicz, Mordechai, 18, 26, 35, 269, 272, 280–83 Anti-Semitism, non-German: after Liberation, 178–81, 184, 191; of Lithuanians, 28, 36, 38, 56, 60; partisans subjected to, 151, 155–56, 159, 164–69; Soviet, 185–87, 202, 222, 263 Arabs, 239, 249, 250, 327–28 Arad, Yitzhak, 55, 144 Armia Krajowa (AK), 98 Arms. See Weapons As, Braine, 358n34 Ashdod, 238, 243 “Asians,” 194, 195, 209, 211 Atheism, 293, 295 Auerbach, Moshe, 198 Auerbuch, Yitzhak, 115, 126 Auschwitz survivors, 197–99, 211

Austria, 201 The Avenger (partisan regiment), 153, 157–58 Avengers, 211, 215–16, 223–24, 227–28, 232–36, 313 Avidan, Shimon, 226, 238–39, 241, 244, 246, 248–49, 251–56 Avidov, Yitzhak. See Reichman, Yitzhak (Pasha) Avneri, Uri, 238, 243, 249 Awards and prizes, 4, 52, 179, 256, 268, 302, 310, 320, 324, 331 Balaban, Meir, 22 Balberyszki, Mendel, 118 Bar, Clara (cousin), 3, 4 Bartov, Hanoch, 52, 215, 313–15; Growing Pains, 202–3, 210 Bartov, Yehudit, 313 Battle morality, 247–48 Battle pages, xvi, 17, 244–55 Bauer, Yehuda, 191, 224, 280, 285, 309, 313, 354n44 Be˛ dzin, 135 Beitar, 57, 77, 79, 81, 113, 133, 321, 356n23 Beit-Halachmi, Benjamin, 229 Bek, Aleksander, Panfilov’s Men, 243–44, 249 Belanda (flour and water mixture), 158 Belgium, 217 “Believe Me, the Day Will Come” (song), 243

399

400

Index Ben-Gal, Elie, 289–90, 290, 293, 306, 315 Ben-Gal, James, 215, 217 Ben-Gurion, David, 218, 219, 226, 242–43, 242, 248, 253, 256, 266, 287 Ben-Haim, Mula, 197, 204 Ben-Shachar, Haim, 291 Ben-Ya’akov, Bolek, 236 Bergman, Ernst David, 224–25 Berkon, Zenia. See Malecki, Zenia Berkon Berman, Adolph, 193, 195 Bernstein, Leonard, 241 Betrayals, 139, 198–200. See also Collaborators; Informers Bialik, Haim Nahman, 26, 204, 245, 331; Scroll of Fire, xiv–xv, 16 Bialystok, 60, 102, 135, 181, 191 Bick, Asia, 81 Biram, 327 The Black Book (Ehrenburg), 185 Bloch, Sam, 292 Book of the Haganah, 227 Boraks, Edek, 50, 59, 61–63, 66, 88, 102 Borkowska, Anna (mother superior), 45–52, 59 Borowska, Chiena, 78, 79, 80, 88, 89, 103, 105, 116, 123–25, 143, 153, 169, 191 Bozikowski, Tuvia, 195 Brand, Shlomo, 152, 154 Brandt, Willy, 269 Brenner Prize, 52 Breslav, Shmuel, 18, 35 Bricha (exodus from Europe), 190–209; debate over, 195; defining, 194; financing, 192; impetus for, 191–92; logistics of, 196–97; organization of, 192; Yishuv emissaries and, 196–97 Britain, 188, 204, 215, 218, 219, 227, 230–32, 239, 328 Buber, Martin, 327 Bucharest, 197–98, 200, 201, 211 Budapest, 201 Bulletins, of Vilna underground, 91 Bund, 57, 77, 81, 110 Capara, 270 Carmi, Israel, 214, 215

Champollion (ship), 229, 229 Chelmno, 211 Christianity, 45, 52–53 Chwojnik, Avraham, 81, 90, 124 Circuits (Kovner), 175, 177 Class, 261–62 Collaborators, 186. See also Betrayals; Informers Communication: among Jews, 58–60, 64; in the underground, 90–92, 98–103 Communists: and Jewish resistance, 65, 77–80, 99, 110; Jewish youth movements and, 12; and the Wittenberg affair, 114–16, 123–25, 128–29, 357n32 Community formation: in the Givati Brigade, 240–41; in the Hashomer Hatzair branch in Vilna, 11–12; on Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, 295–311; in the partisans’ forests, 157–58, 160–63; in Vilna ghetto, 83–86, 89–90 Convent. See Dominican Convent of the Little Sisters Coordination (coalition of movements), 21, 26, 37, 59, 66, 187–88, 191, 194, 201 Crime, in the ghettos, 85 Culture, on the kibbutz, 301–3 Czechoslovakia, 192, 209 Cze˛ stochowa, 211 Dante Alighieri, 335 David (king), 245 Davidson, Meir, 204, 248–52, 256–57 Davidson, Yitzhak, 248 Dayan, Moshe, 248 Death to Fascism (partisan regiment), 153 “Death to the invaders,” xix, 92, 243, 245, 247 Declaration of Independence, Israeli, 3 Degen, Yonah, 172–73 De Profundis (newspaper), 15, 19 Dessler, Salk, 57, 87, 106, 118, 120, 122, 126 Diary. See Pocket diary Diaspora, 243, 278; Eretz Israel and, 194, 199, 206, 276, 287–88; existential situation of, 330; gathering of exiles from, 239, 304; Hativa and, 200; memorialization of, 267, 294 (see also Diaspora

Index Museum); and uprisings, 220; Yishuv and, 204 Diaspora Museum, xiv, xvii, 261, 272–73, 282, 286–94, 306, 310, 315, 319, 321, 325, 336 Dinur, Ben-Zion, 275 Distheim, Daniel (grandson), 320 Distheim, David (son-in-law), 320 Distheim, Noam (grandson), 320 Dlugi, Niusia, 358n34 Dominican Convent of the Little Sisters, 45–53, 61–63, 65 Dori, Ya’akov, 253 Dror-Hechalutz, 19, 46, 59, 66, 68, 74, 77, 81, 195, 275 Duziec, Jadwiga, 45–47, 59 Dworzecki, Mark, 61, 83, 126 Education, 7–11, 33 Egypt, 229–31, 238, 240–41, 243, 245, 247–49, 251–54 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 171–72, 185 Eichmann, Adolf, 278 Eichmann trial, 8, 61, 120, 122, 173, 179, 197, 278–79 Einsatzgruppen, 43 Einsatzkommando 3, 53, 82 Einsatzkommando 9, 43–45 Eišiškes, 18 The Eleventh Commandment (Kovner), 304 Eliahu, Rabbi (Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman), 6–7, 13 Eliav, Aryeh, 231 Elka’s Wedding (Tchernikhovsky), 297, 299 Elkins, Michael, 233 Emissaries, from Eretz Israel, 196–97, 201–2, 207 Entin, Shlomo, 66, 102 Eretz Israel: emigration to, 17, 29, 31, 35, 188–89, 217–18, 304 (see also Hativa of East European Survivors); Hashomer Hatzair and, 10; and the Holocaust, 330; Kovner and, 8, 9, 188, 218–29, 261–70; leadership in, 207; postwar, xvi; refugees and, 24–25; revenge as subject of debate in, 213; underground not concerned with, 109–10

Eshel, Eliyahu, 253 Estonia and Estonians, 134–37, 139, 141, 144–45, 181 Exodus. See Bricha Exodus (ship), 182 Face to Face (Kovner), 256–57 “Failure, A” (Kovner), 250–56 Family, 3–5, 12–13, 312–23, 340n4 Fareinikteh Partizaner Organizatzieh (FPO) (United Partisan Organization), 80–81, 87–105, 108–52, 163–64 Farewell to the South (Kovner), 256, 327 Fighters. See Partisans; Self-defense; Underground, in German-occupied Vilna Fighters for Israel’s Freedom (LEHI), 231 First Ghetto, Vilna, 57 Fives, in the underground, 89–90, 108 Food: in the ghetto, 84–85, 88, 107–8; of partisans, 158–59 Forced labor camps. See Labor camps Forests: as resistance site, 80, 99, 103, 109, 111–12, 132; retaliations in, 139; Vilna underground in, 133, 135, 143–44, 148–73 For Victory (partisan regiment), 153 FPO. See Fareinikteh Partizaner Organizatzieh Frener, Jacob, 153 Friedman, Borka, 81, 129 From Holocaust to Resurrection Museum, 272, 281–83 Frucht, Isidore, 79 Funeral services, 297 Gabris. See Micheyka, Marianas Gadimin, Prince, 13 Galilee, Israel, 219, 222–23, 226, 227 Geiyer, Zelig, 25, 345n12 Gelbard, Haim, 345n12 General Zionists, 255 Gens, Jacob, 57, 86–87, 103–8, 112–23, 126– 28, 132–35, 139–44, 156, 333, 357n29, 358n39 Germany: Israeli relations with, 265–70; Lithuania occupied by, 41–149; Soviet nonaggression pact with, 15–16. See also Nazism

401

402

Index Gestapo, 54, 106, 126–27, 217 Ghettos: destruction of, 113, 135; uprisings in, 50. See also Vilna ghetto; Warsaw ghetto Gilboa, Amir, 257 Ginor, Zvia Ben-Yosef, 383n10 Givat Haviva, 276, 284–86 Givati Brigade, 204, 226, 238–58; description of, 239; Face to Face and, 256–57; and Kibbutz Nitzanim, 251–56; Kovner’s battle pages for, xvi, 17, 244–55; Kovner’s morale-raising activities for, 241–43; naming practices in, 239–41, 244; parade of, 242–43, 242 Glazman, Joseph, 79, 87, 89–91, 105, 113–14, 116–18, 124–25, 132–33, 135, 143, 147, 163–65 Glezer, “Albina” (Gessia), 135 Glik, Hirsh (Hirshke), 96, 156 Goldmann, Nachum, 266, 287–88 Goldstein, Baruch, 92, 94 Grajek, Stephen, 195 Greater Israel movement, 327 Greece, 197, 201 Greenberg, Yitzhak (Itz), 295, 333, 383n10 Greenzweig, Emil, 328 Grodno, 60, 103, 107, 181 Grossman, Chaika, 33, 35, 42, 45, 49, 50, 58, 61–66, 78, 88, 90, 94, 102, 181, 212, 227, 233, 255, 265, 267, 276, 285 Guri, Haim, 180, 187 Gutman, Israel, 61, 98, 267, 280, 281, 285, 313, 314 Ha’aretz (newspaper), 150 Haganah, 217, 219, 220, 222–23, 225–27, 230–32, 250–51 Haggadah, 299–300, 330 Al Hamishmar (newspaper), 266, 269, 305 Hano’ar Hazioni, 59, 65, 66, 68, 74, 77, 81, 251–52, 255, 283, 285 Harmatz, Yosef, 145, 147, 168, 169, 187, 191 Hartglass, Apollinari, 37 Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard), xv, xvi; absence of, 194; administration of, 200; archives of, 185–86; character of,

10; Dror-Hechalutz and, 77, 195, 275; emigration of members of, 32–37, 345n12; and Eretz Israel, 217, 219; Friday evening ceremony of, 299; during German occupation, 41–42, 45–46, 59, 66, 68; in Holocaust history, 272, 275–84, 286; in independent Lithuania, 15–26; and Judaism, 296–97; Kovner and, 9–12, 190, 250, 261, 264, 295, 305; leadership of, 32–37; after Liberation, 177, 180–82; publisher identified with, 98; and Soviet Union, 29–30; survivors from, 177; and War of Independence, 251; Ya’ari and, 263 “Hatikva” (national anthem), 200, 206 Hativa of East European Survivors, 194–209; activists in, 202; disbanding of, 208, 212; diversity of, 198; establishment of, 199–200; ideological and educational principles of, 200; and Israeli politics, 197; Jewish Brigade and, 201–4, 206; Kovner’s speech on, 205–6; leadership of, 201; numbers associated with, 208–9; oath of, 200; opposition to, 199; origins of, 194; political principles of, 200; principles underlying, 194; unity of, 205; value of, 200–201 Havura (originally a Talmudic study group), 306–7 Hazan, Ya’akov, 34, 203, 223, 264, 276–78 Healthy Recovery (Kovner), 236 Hebrew language, 9, 68 Hechalutz Center, 18, 20–21, 41, 342n7 Herzl, Theodor, 185, 189 Herzog, Haim, 269 Heymann (brigadier), 136 Hiding, Jews in, 45–53, 181. See also Melinas Hill 69, 252–53 Himmler, Heinrich, 113 Hingst, Hans Christian, 54 His and About Him, 321 History and historiography: of Hashomer Hatzair, 185–86; Kovner on, xviii–xix, 286–88; of the underground, 185; of Vilna ghetto, 180–81, 183–86. See also Holocaust: Kovner’s memorialization efforts concerning History of the War of Independence, 251

Index Hitler, Adolf, xv, 25–27, 68. See also Nazism Holavski, Shalom, 267, 280, 313 Holocaust: aftermath of, 177–80; debate over revolts during, 220; deliberations on action in response to, 65–69, 73, 97– 98; Eichmann trial and publicity of, 278– 79; Eretz Israel and, 330; Jewish leadership during, 33–37; knowledge of, 26–27, 34, 59–75; Kovner family deaths in, 4; Kovner’s exposure of, 61–75; Kovner’s fear of another, 205–6, 211, 246; Kovner’s memorialization efforts concerning, xvi–xvii, 212, 222, 270–86, 300, 328–30; meeting of Jews after, 198–99; reactions to sites of, 211; singularity of, 262–63, 329; in Soviet Union, 185; testimonies about, 189. See also Anti-Semitism, nonGerman; Survivors Holocaust Memorial Day, 300 Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., 278–79, 294 Holocaust museum project, New York City, 273–74 Holtz, Haim, 345n12 Homer, 335 Hours at Dawn (Kovner), 1 Huberman, Ida, 290 Hungary, 201, 208 IDF. See Israel Defense Forces Ikrit, 327 Informers, 139, 142–43, 189, 214. See also Betrayals; Collaborators Israel: establishment of, xiii–xiv, 239; and Germany, 265–70. See also Eretz Israel Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 242, 247. See also Givati Brigade Israeli Communist Party, 3 Israel Prize, 52 Italy, 190, 195, 197, 201, 208–9, 212, 217, 218 Jaeger, Karl, 53 Jeremiah, book of, 322 Jewish Brigade, 197, 201–4, 206, 209, 212–15, 217, 219, 223, 226 Jewish cycle of remembrance, 301–2

Jewish sources, 12, 289, 299, 302, 317, 331, 383n10 Jews: German killing of Vilna, 57–75, 107– 8; Lithuanian antipathy for, 28, 36, 38, 56, 60; Lithuanian murder of, 42–45, 54–55, 59–60, 107; Nazi program for, 16, 54, 59– 60, 63–64, 68–69, 72, 102; Soviet Union and, 28–38; unity of, 14, 26, 77, 110, 194, 199, 201, 205, 239, 284, 286. See also AntiSemitism, non-German; Survivors Joint Distribution Committee, 21, 198, 209 Judenrat, 44, 54–55, 57–58, 60, 79, 81–82, 84–86, 103 Judges, book of, 67–68 Kaczerginski, Shmerke, 88, 120, 129, 183, 185 Kaddish, 284, 297 Kailis camp, 146–48, 361n27 Kalchheim, Moshe, 103 Kalish, 22 Kalmanovitch, Zelik, 85–86, 96–98, 105, 110, 185 Kamianitski, Hadassah, 23, 49, 53, 64, 145 Kaplan, Yoseph, 35 Kaplinski, Shmuel, 81, 89, 146–47, 153, 169, 191 Katz, Karl, 289 Katz, Tema, 62 Katzetnick. See Tsitinski, Yechiel Katzir, Aharon, 224–25 Katzir, Ephraim, 224–25, 291 Katzir, Shika, 282 Kazian forests, 168 Keitel, Bruno, 115, 122 Kek, Bezalel, 193, 203, 221, 223 Kempner, Israel, 66, 321 Kempner, Vitka, xvi; and bricha, 191–92, 196, 203–4; education of, 22; and Eretz Israel, 188, 218, 321; and family life, xiii, 22, 238, 312–13, 315–17, 320–23; during German occupation, 55, 58; and relations with Germany, 266, 270; in hiding, 45; and Holocaust history, 276, 286; illness of, 317; Korczak’s friendship with, 22, 189, 228–29, 321; Kovner’s relationship with, 21–23, 162, 189, 221–22, 228–29, 232, 321–23;

403

404

Index Kempner, Vitka (continued) in liberated Vilna, 178–79, 181, 187; and nakam, 213, 225–28, 235; with the partisans, 152, 154–55, 157–58, 162, 168–71, 320; photographs of, 172, 262, 326; as refugee, 21–23; and resistance, 50; testimonies of, xviii; and the underground, 76, 79, 80, 89–90, 95–96, 128, 136, 139–43, 146–48; in Vilna, 25–26 The Key Sank (Kovner), 74, 81, 137, 329 Kibbutz Artzi, 9, 24, 206, 222, 264, 267, 269, 277, 281, 285, 286, 316 Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, xvi, 236, 295–311; on Arab lands, 328; cemetery of, 285; community center for, 303–5; community formation on, 295–311; creativity on, 302, 307; culture on, 297, 299, 301–4; funeral services on, 297; holidays on, 299–301, 310–11; as Kovner’s home, 307–11, 315, 318–20, 319; Kovner’s poetry and, 307–10, 332; notebook for history of, 303, 380n21; Polish-Lithuanian tensions on, 310; projects and plans for, 302–5; theater on, 297, 304; and values, 305–6; weddings on, 297, 298, 299 Kibbutz Evron, 35 Kibbutz Gal’on, 251 Kibbutz Gat, 251 Kibbutz Gezer, 253 Kibbutz Ha’ogen, 33 Kibbutz Lohamei Hagettaot, 275, 276, 280, 283 Kibbutz Merhavia, 206–7, 221, 276 Kibbutz movement, 296, 306–7 Kibbutz Negba, 246, 251, 252 Kibbutz Nitzanim, xvi, 250–56 Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak, 283 Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, xvii, 251–52, 272, 278, 281–84, 321 Kidnappings, 43–45, 54 Kielce pogrom, 191 Kirghizes, 178 Klarman, Joseph, 198 Kless, Shlomo, 182, 196, 203, 207 Knesset, 265–67, 328 Kol Nidrei, 301

Komsomol, 31, 169–70 Konyuchi, 159 Korczak, Ruzka (Reizl), xvi, 172, 267; and bricha, 196; death of, 285, 320–21; and Eretz Israel, 188–89, 220–21, 225, 228–29; and family life, 312, 316; Flames in the Ashes, 186, 221; during German occupation, 55–56, 60, 63–64, 66; and relations with Germany, 266–67; in hiding, 45; and Holocaust history, 276, 280, 284, 285; Kempner’s friendship with, 22, 189, 228– 29, 321; and Kibbutz Artzi movement, 316; and Kovner’s manifesto, 69, 72–73; Kovner’s relationship with, 228–29, 312, 315–16; and Kovner’s writings, 185–86; in liberated Vilna, 178–79, 181, 183, 188; with the partisans, 153, 157, 161–62, 170; testimonies of, xviii; and the underground, 88, 90, 95, 98, 110, 117, 138, 140–41, 144 Kovner, Abba: appearance of, 11–12, 23, 151, 203, 315; arrests and imprisonment of, 168, 229–34; autobiographical elements in writings of, xvii, 67, 69; birth of, 3, 5; character and personality of, 4–5, 7, 11, 100, 205, 315, 333–34; critics of, xvii, 207–8, 213, 247–57, 291–93, 332–33; death of 285, 294, 306, 320–21, 335–36; conception of death of, 49; conception of Judaism of, xix, 286–88, 291–93, 295–96; death sentence for, 168; employment, 33; friends, 312–16; mission of, xiv–xv, xx, 12, 69, 205, 216, 312; nightmares of, 237, 244; overview of life of, xv–xvi, 324; photographs of, 111, 171, 172, 229, 242, 262, 290, 314, 319, 320, 325, 326; pocket diary, 44, 55, 62, 80, 82, 105, 110; public statements of, 24–25; testimony of, xviii, 187, 189; will of, 286, 336. See also titles of individual works and subentries for other topics Kovner, Abrasha (cousin), 33 Kovner, Amikam (grandson), 320 Kovner, Berl (second cousin). See Vilner, Meir Kovner, Eliezer (cousin), 3 Kovner, Gedalia (Genia) (brother), 3–5, 46, 90, 165

Index Kovner, Haim, 3–4 Kovner, Israel (father), xiii, 3–6, 8–9, 12 Kovner, Israel (great-grandfather), 3 Kovner, Leon, 4 Kovner, Michael (brother), xiii, 3, 11, 30, 46–47, 80, 88, 90, 165, 317–18, 320 Kovner, Michael (grandfather), 3 Kovner, Michael (son), xiii, 169, 238, 256– 58, 302, 312, 322 Kovner, Mimi Makover (daughter-in-law), 320 Kovner, Misha (cousin), 3 Kovner, Neuta (sister-in-law), 3, 4, 46, 90, 165 Kovner, Nimrod (grandson), 320 Kovner, Rabbi Mordechai-Eliezer, 3–4 Kovner, Rachel (grandmother), 3 Kovner, Rachel (Rosa) (mother), xiii, 3, 5–6, 8–9, 46, 86, 90, 137, 145 Kovner, Rivka (aunt), 4 Kovner, Sala (Shulamit) (niece), 46, 165 Kovner, Semion (Simon), 3 Kovner, Shalom (uncle), 4, 33 Kovner, Shlomit (daughter), 309, 312, 317–18, 320 Kovner, Shlomo-Zalman, 4 Kovner, Zalman (uncle), 4 Kovno, 3, 19, 43, 56, 60, 102, 107–9, 154, 181 Kowalski, Yitzhak, 191, 192 Kowel, 19 Kozlowski, Waclaw, 114, 119, 123 Krakow, 211 Krizowski, Abrasha, 116, 123–24, 126, 358n33 Krosno, 192 Kruk, Herman, 85, 97, 185 Labor camps, 113, 133, 170–71, 181. See also Work, by Jews during German occupation “Lambs to slaughter,” xix, 34, 67–68, 71, 150, 156, 199, 330 Laskov, Haim, 214 Latvia, 145 Lazar, Haim, 113, 120, 133, 203, 206, 357n32 Leadership: Avidan’s, 239; in Eretz Israel, 207; in the ghetto, 55, 57, 87; of the

Hativa, 201; during the Holocaust, 33– 37; Kovner’s, 11–12, 75, 125, 128, 132–70, 181–83, 191–92, 204–5, 207–8, 212–13, 263–65, 295–311, 312–14, 334; Kovner’s disappointment with Jewish, 193, 207–8, 222; Ya’ari’s, 265 LEHI (Fighters for Israel’s Freedom), 231 Lenz, Siegfried, The Topic of the City, 130–31 Leon Group, 133–34 Levi, Primo, 334–35 Levin, Dov, 151, 183 Library, in the ghetto, 85–86 Lida, 18 Lidovski, Avraham, 193 Lidovski, Eliezer, 193–94, 196, 198–99, 201, 205, 215 Lidovski, Rachel, 196 Liebedz, Andzei, 349n5 Lileikis, Alexandras, 54 Literature. See Poetry Lithuania: emigration from, 32–37, 345n12; German occupation of, 41–149, 159; independent, 17–27; Jewish education in, 4; post-Communist independence of, 185; Soviet rule of, 15–17, 28–38 Lithuanian Self-Defense, 43 Lubetkin, Zivia, 195, 196, 198–201, 211, 213, 255, 267 Lublin, 189, 190–96, 211 Lukishko prison, 45 Lurie, Shalom, 96, 98, 383n10 Lvov, 181, 191 Mackewitcz, Izia, 133 Madeysker, Sonia, 78, 89, 99–100, 123–25, 146–48, 154, 157, 171 Maggid, Elhanan, 152, 154, 157 Magun, Liza, 92, 105 Majdanek, 145, 211 Malecki, Zenia Berkon, 124, 358n34 Mamma, May I Cry Now? (Alterman), 179 A Man at Night (Kovner), 15 Manifesto (Kovner), 63, 68–74, 70, 80, 91–92, 102, 138, 350n29 Mapam (United Workers Party), xvi, 9, 261, 264, 266–69

405

406

Index Mari, Kazakhstan, 181–82 Markish, Peretz, 129 Markov, Fyodor, 112, 132–33, 135, 163–64 Markowicz, Bluma, 145 Markowicz, Rachel (Rashka), 91, 96, 145, 162, 362n18 Marla, Avi, 312, 316 Marla, Yehuda, 316 Marom, Haim. See Morocco (later Marom), Haim Marshall Plan, 212 Marx, Karl, 26 Marxism, 47 Masaryk, Jan, 209 Masua (torch), 283 Medal of Sovereignty, 268 Medals. See Awards and prizes Mein Kampf (Hitler), 26–27, 34 Meir, Golda, 269, 327 Meirov, Shaul, 219, 223, 226 Melamed, Moshe, 255 Melinas (hiding places), 44, 46, 65, 86, 108, 109, 119, 136, 139, 140, 144, 181, 187 Mersik, Zvi, 349n5 Micheyka, Marianas (pseudonym: Gabris), 156–57, 168, 178, 179 Milkonovicki, Shabtai (doctor), 119, 357n26 Mines, 94–95, 95, 157 Minsk, 181 Mishna, 330 Mishori, Shimon, 241 Misnaged (person in opposition), 7, 24, 264, 310 “The Mission of the Last Survivors” (Kovner), 190, 205–6 Molotov, Stanislaw, 101 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 15–16 Mor, Littman. See Moravtchik (later Mor), Littman Morality. See Battle morality; Responsibility, collective Jewish; Values; Vilna ghetto: responsibility for Moravtchik (later Mor), Littman, 69 Mordechai Anielewicz Memorial Youth Movement Center, 286 Moreshet House, 98, 272, 275–85, 313, 321

Morocco (later Marom), Haim, 68–69 Mossad for Aliyah B, 219, 235, 270 Mother superior. See Borkowska, Anna Moyne, Walter Guinness, Lord, 231 Munich Olympic games (1972), 325 Murder, in the ghettos, 85 Murer, Franz, 54, 57, 60, 86 Museums, 271–84, 286–94 Museum ship project, 274 Music: in the ghetto, 86; for the Givati Brigade, 241 My Little Sister (Kovner), 52, 137, 149, 178, 283, 329 Nakam (revenge on the Germans), 210–37; avoidance of killing and torture and, 210; comrades in plotting, 211, 215–16, 223–24, 227–28, 232–36, 313; critics of, 213–14; dangers of, for survivors, 217–18; Eretz Israel and, 210–11, 222–27; financing, 216– 17; goal of, 215–16; Jewish Brigade and, 213–15; Kovner’s abandonment of, 218–22; Kovner’s desire for, 193, 211–18, 222–37, 245–46; means of, 210; participants in, 235; plans for, 216–17, 222–28, 234; principles underlying, 211–12. See also Revenge and retaliation Narocz forests, 135, 143–44, 165, 168 Nation, as priority, 261–62 National Council for Documentation, 275 National Library, Israel, 247 Nazism: Jewish ignorance of, 26–27; antiJewish program of, 16, 54, 59–60, 63–64, 68–69, 72, 102 Ne’eman, Yuval, 247, 325, 327 Neo-Nazis, 270 Neugebauer, Rolf, 144 Nisanelewicz, Senka, 154, 158–61, 168, 169, 187, 191, 196 NKVD (Narodny Kommisariat Vnutrennikh Del), 32 “No, No, No” (Kovner), xiii Novick, Esther, 12 On the Narrow Bridge (Kovner), 307 The Optimist (play), 328

Index Orchan, Esther, 237 Oshmyany, 104–5 Oz, Amos, 234, 291 Paleckis, Justas, 184 Palestine, 250, 328 Palmach, 220, 227, 247–49 Panfilov’s Men (Bek), 243–44, 249 Paper Brigade, 88, 94, 185 Parents, leaving of, 145 Paris, 217 Partisans: consequences of experiences of, 195; discipline and punishment among, 162, 166–68; fighters and nonfighters among, 155, 161; food of, 158–59; in the forests, 150–73; harm to peasants and villages caused by, 159; Holocaust history and the role of, 275–76; Jews’ place among, 151–73, 177–79; Kovner’s joining the, 53, 150–53; living conditions of, 154, 158–63, 160; and nakam, 216; organization of, 153–54; relationships among, 161–62, 169; Soviet, 99–101, 111–12, 162–64, 179; Soviet-Lithuanian, 150, 152; weapons of, 157, 164, 167–68; women among, 157–58, 161–62. See also Self-defense; Underground, in German-occupied Vilna Passover, 299–300, 310–11 A Path (Kovner), 17 Paulus, Rolf, 268 Peace Now, 328 Pinsk, 181 Pioneer youth movements. See Youth movements Poetry: in adolescence, 9, 15; death as theme in, 49; disappearance of, 15; father as inspiration for, 8; and the kibbutz, 307–10, 332; Kovner’s, 331–32; mother as inspiration for, 5, 137; role and power of, 330–31 Pogroms: in Kielce, 191; in Vilna, 18 Poison, for nakam, 217, 222–27, 230, 232, 234 Poland, 6, 15–16, 25, 98–99, 107, 195, 202, 208. See also White Poles Police, ghetto: community activities of, 83–85; execution of, by partisans, 166–67;

Germans aided by, 58, 87, 104–5, 107–8, 119, 139; mistreatment by, 87; political leanings of, 57, 79 Polish Scout Movement, 45 Politics, Kovner and, 263–65, 324–25, 334 Ponar, xiii, 44–45, 49, 54–55, 59–60, 62, 68–69, 107, 133, 145, 177, 179–80, 211 Porat, Elisha, 297, 310 Pravda (newspaper), 182 Prizes. See Awards and prizes Pundak, Yitzhak, 250, 252–53 Puttkamer, Georg-Jesko von, 268 Rabikovitch, Dalia, 329 Rabin, Yitzhak, 269 Rabinovitch (Shamir), Shlomo, 215, 217 Ramat Aviv, 315, 321 Rand, Adam, 34–37, 345n12 Rappaport, Nathan, 281 Rassel, Abrashka, 153 Ratner, Yitzhak, 224 Red Army, 17–18, 41–42, 80, 107, 135, 144, 167, 170, 177, 209 Red Star (newspaper), 171 Refugees: to independent Lithuania, 18–26; in Soviet-governed Lithuania, 31–32 Reich, Haviva, 276 Reichman, Dorka, 193, 196, 203 Reichman, Yitzhak (Pasha), 193, 196, 203, 204, 215, 218–19, 221, 223, 226, 313 Religion, 292–93, 295–302 Reparations, 265–67, 278, 303–4 Resistance. See Self-defense; Underground, in German-occupied Vilna Responsibility, collective Jewish, 20, 33–36, 54, 67, 94, 102–3, 121, 151, 194 Revenge and retaliation: Auschwitz survivors and, 199; against betrayers, 139; Jewish partisans and, 159–60, 186–87. See also Nakam Revenge (partisan regiment), 164 Reznik, Nissan, 57, 59, 65, 66, 74, 79, 81, 90, 124–25, 130, 143, 147, 181, 203, 358n33 Rindjiunski, Alexander, 123, 128–29, 135, 143, 145, 154, 191 Ring, Nathan, 152

407

408

Index Robinov, David, 182 Rolnik, Masha, 118 Romania, 188–89, 190, 192, 195–202, 208 Rosa Square, Vilna, 144–45 Roseman, Mordechai, 182, 192, 196, 201, 208, 313 Rosenberg, Cesia, 23, 26, 45, 99–100, 121, 164, 182, 190, 191 Rosenfarb, Hava, The Ghetto Bird, 129 Rosenkranz, Yitzik, 230, 232, 234 Rotbein, Yonat, 285, 312, 321 Rovno, 19, 181, 211 Rudaszewski, Yitzhak, 187 Rudniki forests, 135, 144, 152, 165, 167–68 Sabotage, 94–96, 157 Sabras, 247, 307 Sadeh, Yitzhak, 220; The Warriors, 129 Samson, 245 Samson’s Foxes, 238, 240, 245 “Say Not This Is Your Last Journey” (partisans’ anthem), 206 Scheinbaum, Pessia, 140, 158 Scheinbaum, Yechiel, 77, 81, 103, 112, 113, 138–40, 142, 333 Schlesinger, Miriam, 290 Schmidt, Issar, 158, 166–69 Schmitz, Heinrich, 53 Schwartz, Joe, 209 Schweid, Eliezer, 264 Schweinberger, Horst, 54, 60 The Scrolls of Fire (Kovner), xiv, 290–91 The Scrolls of Testimony (Kovner), xvii, 39, 67, 69, 319, 329–30, 354n44, 383n10 SD (Sicherheitsdienst), 53 The Sea of Halachah (Kovner), 289 Second Ghetto, Vilna, 57–58 Second Struggle Group, 81–82, 103, 111–12, 135, 144, 152–54 Second Temple, xiv Sedlis, Gabi, 191, 192, 196 Self-defense, 65–69, 72–73, 78, 80, 103, 136– 43. See also Underground, in Germanoccupied Vilna Senkiewicz, Vitold (pseudonym: Margis), 156

Settlements, 239, 241, 249–51 Sevastopol, 3 Sewer system in Vilna, 146–47 Shacham, Nathan, Wing to Wing, 129 Shamir. See Rabinovitch (Shamir), Shlomo Shamir, Moshe, 327 Shamir, Yosef, 34–35, 345n12; “To a Friend Who Is No Longer With Us,” 35 Shapira, Hayaleh, 154, 157, 203 Shavli, 56, 102 Shazar, Zalman, 268 Shituf (commune), 89–90 Shlonsky (Avraham) Prize, 256 Sholem, Fania, 293 Sholem, Gershom, 293 Shor, Moshe, 22 Shotan, Moshe, 112–13, 127–28 Sidlauskas, Junas, 54 Sifriat Hapoalim, 280, 309 Simaite, Ona, 88 Simon, Akiva Ernest, 27 Simonsohn, Shlomo, 288, 289, 292, 294 Sinai Campaign, 307 Six Day War, 279, 283, 297, 307–8, 327, 328 Sloan Kettering (Kovner), 259 Sneh, Moshe, 222 Sobol, Yehoshua, Adam, 129–30, 358n34, 359n49 Socialism, 10, 15, 31, 109, 170, 255, 284, 296 Sosnowiec, 135 Sources. See Jewish sources “The Soviet Commander” (pamphlet), 94 Soviet Union: anti-Semitism of, 185–87, 202, 222, 263; emigration from, 192; Eretz Israel and, 208, 221; German nonaggression pact with, 15–16; and Jews, 28–38; Kovner’s family in, 5–6; Kovner’s view of, 202, 208, 222, 261, 263; and Lithuania, 15–17, 28–38; partisans from, 99–101, 111–12, 150, 152, 162–64, 179; and Zionism, 19, 24, 27, 29 SS (Schutzstaffel), 43, 53, 113, 135, 217, 223, 225 Stalin, Joseph, 29, 91, 101, 296 Stankewicz, “Think!” (Soviet partisan), 166, 168, 169

Index Starkeh (underworld thugs), 117 Strashun Library, Vilna, 7 Struggle Group. See Second Struggle Group The Struggle (partisan regiment), 153 Suicide, 63, 85, 180, 233, 334 Survivors: aid for, 217–18; Auschwitz survivors, 197–99, 211; experiences of, 178–80, 183, 193, 334; gathering of, 181; “recovery” of, 236–37. See also Hativa of East European Survivors Sutzkever, Avraham, 86, 88, 97, 129, 135, 180, 183, 185, 187, 292, 336 Swie˛ ciany, 105, 107 Szerszenjevski, Berl, 78, 114, 123–25, 129, 132 Szerszenjevski, Rosa, 123 Talmud, 9, 14, 19, 306, 330 Tarbut Hebrew Gymnasium, xv, 6, 7–9 Tarbut teachers’ seminary, 11 Tarvisio, 203, 208, 213, 214 Taubes, Hasia, 89, 145, 153 Tchernikhovsky, Shaul, Elka’s Wedding, 297 Tel Aviv, 238, 240, 250 Tel Aviv University, 286, 287, 293, 313, 325 Tenenbaum (later Tenenbaum-Tamaroff), Mordechai, 20, 59, 60, 66, 74, 77 Theater: in the ghetto, 86; on Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, 297, 304 “This Day, the 16th of July” (Kovner), 106 Tito, Josip, 73 To (Kovner), 307 Torture, 92–93 Treblinka death camp, 135, 211 Treger, Zelda, 143, 146–48, 151–52, 154, 158, 161–62, 169, 171, 181, 191, 192, 196 Trojak, Yehudit, 62 Tsavta (theatre), 328 Tsitinski, Yechiel (pen name: Katzetnick), 197–98; Vengeance, 210 Tsur, Tsvi, 249 Tubin, Shlomit, 203 Tubin, Yehuda, 203, 205, 207, 208, 280, 313, 321 Ukrainians, 145

Underground, in German-occupied Vilna: and daily life, 87–88; documents of, 185; in the forests, 133, 135, 143–44, 148–73; formation of second, 81–82, 103; the ghetto’s relations with, 96–98, 103–5, 109–10, 114, 117–21, 125, 132–33, 141–42; ghetto vs. forest as site for, 80, 99, 103, 109, 111–12, 132–33; goals of, 80, 108; growth of, 90, 92; guidelines for, 108–11; information and communication in, 90–92, 98–103; leaving the ghetto, 146–48; membership of, 76–77, 81, 88, 103; organization of, 76–81, 89–90, 108; sabotage by, 94–96; secrecy of, 87, 90, 110; and Soviet Union, 99–101; training of, 91; weapons in, 51, 92–94, 103, 134, 136, 138; and Wittenberg affair, 114–31. See also Self-defense; Underground, in Soviet-occupied Vilna Underground, in Soviet-occupied Vilna: cells in, 31; core of, 36–37; Hashomer Hatzair and origins of, 30–31. See also Underground, in German-occupied Vilna Underground City Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party, 114, 152, 154, 157 United Nations, 250 United Workers Party. See Mapam (United Workers Party) Values, 5, 10, 13, 151, 247, 249, 274, 295, 305, 327, 334 Vengeance. See Nakam; Revenge and retaliation Vilna: Communists in German-occupied, 78–79; departure from, 188–89; description of, 6; emigration from, 191; German occupation of, 41–149; Hashomer Hatzair in, 10; in independent Lithuania, 17–27; Jewish community in, 6–7, 14, 15, 18–38, 41–56, 184; Kovner and, 6, 13, 33, 42; after Liberation, xvi, 170–73, 177–89; mother’s death near, xiii, 145; refugees in, 18–26 Vilna Colony, 45

409

410

Index Vilna ghetto: Aktionen in, 58, 64–65, 135–40; attitudes in, 76, 120–21, 139; community formation in, 83–86, 89–90; ­establishment of, 55–57; governance of, 54, 57, 86–87, 112–14; killings of Jews from, 58–60, 63–65; knowledge of Holocaust in, 59–72; Kovner’s return to, 48– 50; last days of, 132–49; leadership in, 55, 57, 87; after Liberation, 170–73, 178, 180; library in, 86; music in, 86; peaceful period in, 82; plan of, 48; preserving the history of, 180–81, 183–86; resistance in, 136–43; responsibility for, 67, 94, 121, 132–33, 142, 187; sanitation in, 83–84; smuggling into, 84–85; survivors from, 211; theater in, 86; the underground’s relations with, 96–98, 103–5, 109–10, 114, 117–21, 125, 132–33, 141–42; and Wittenberg affair, 114–31; work groups from, 82–83. See also Underground, in German-occupied Vilna Vilna University, xv, 33 Vilner, Meir (Berl Kovner), 3, 12 A Voice De Profundis (newspaper), 17 War of Independence, 238–58, 327 Warsaw, 102, 191, 194–95 Warsaw ghetto, 60, 72, 91 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 33–34, 51, 110–11, 194, 197, 283 Water supply, poisoning of. See Poison, for nakam Weapons: of the partisans, 157, 164, 167–68; in the underground, 51, 92–94, 103, 134, 136, 138 Weddings, 297, 298, 299 Wehrmacht, 28, 36, 41, 43 Weinberg, Shaike, 213–14, 289, 293–94 Weiner, Shaike, 345n12 Weinrib, Abrasha, 62, 104 Weiss, Martin, 54, 60 Weizmann, Chaim, 224–26 White Poles, 159, 167, 168, 178 Wilner, Arieh, 46, 50, 62–63 Wise, George, 287 Wittenberg, Yitzhak, 78–80, 87, 89, 90, 95,

100, 102, 103, 105–6, 112–31, 134, 185, 205, 333, 357n29, 357n32, 358n38, 358n39 Wittenberg affair, 106–31, 114–32 Women: among the partisans, 157–58, 161–62; in Givati Brigade, 239; postLiberation activities of, 181–83 Work, by Jews during German occupation, 44–45, 54–55, 58, 61, 82–83, 134. See also Labor camps World Council for Holocaust and Contemporary Heroism Research, 274–75 World Jewish Congress, 287 World Zionist Organization, 224, 280, 287 Writings, postwar, 187 Wygodzki, Jacob, 29, 55 Ya’akov, Avraham, 268 Ya’ari, Meir, xvi, 24, 26, 34, 203, 207–8, 212–13, 220–21, 223, 233, 236, 248, 250, 261–65, 268–69, 277–78, 284, 368n42 Yad Vashem, 51–52, 272, 274–75, 278, 280, 282, 285 Yalkut Moreshet (publication), 280, 284 Yarkoni, Yaffa, 241 Yellow certificates, 64–65 Yeshurun, Avot, The Partisans, 268 Yiddish language, 9, 68 Yishuv, 188, 190, 196–97, 204, 206, 210–12, 217–19, 226, 231, 234, 251, 330 YIVO, 86, 88, 94, 95, 97, 185 Yocheles, Fania, 161 Yom Kippur, 300–301 Your Heart Will Be a Lyre (Kovner), 150 Youth movements, 18–21, 74 Yugoslavia, 197, 201 Yurgis. See Zimanas, Henrik Zachor, 300 Zalmanson (later Ziv), Yitzhak, 11, 345n12 Zaltzwasser, Lotek, 139 Zawecki (priest), 46, 47, 62 Zeitag, Pinie, 197, 204 Zeitlin, Aharon, 48, 53 Zeitlin, Hillel, 48 Zilber, Rushka, 102

Index Zilber, Sara, 102 Zimand, David, 198 Zimanas, Henrik (pseudonym: Yurgis), 155–56, 162, 164–67 Zimliankehs (partisans’ quarters), 160, 160 Zimnavoda, Miriam, 7–8 Zionism: as crime, 5; and the Diaspora, 294; Diaspora Museum and, 293; and Jewish history and tradition, 288, 295; Kovner and, 12–13, 15; leftist criticism of,

328; Soviet Union and, 19, 24, 27, 29; youth movement and, 18 Ziv, Yitzhak. See Zalmanson (later Ziv), Yitzhak Zommerstein, Emil, 193, 195 Zorea, Meir, 214 Zuckerman, Yitzhak (Antek), 74, 194–95, 211–13, 255, 267, 368n42 Zukunft, 81 Zweig, Stefan, Magellan, 230

411