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A Poisoned Life
Moshe Temkin
Abba Kovner didn�t �go like a sheep to the slaughter,� but, as two new studies reveal,his was far from a picture-perfect Zionist-icon life
By the time I was growing up, in Israel of the 1970s and 80s, Abba Kovner was already an old man. He was a perennial TV guest on shows that aired on Holocaust Remembrance Day. With his deep voice, longish gray-white hair, and dark features, there was always an unmistakable air of gloom to his appearance. By then his poetry was no longer taught in the school system, but my friends and I knew, vaguely, that Kovner was considered a hero: During World War II he had been a leader of the Jewish underground in the ghetto (it didn�t really matter which), he had fought and killed Nazis, and he had lived to tell the tale. We also knew that after the war he settled on a kibbutz, where he raised a family, worked in the fields and wrote poems. He also became a spiritual-political leader in the labor Zionist movement. He was Zionism personified: His story was the stuff that sixth-grade textbooks used to be made of.
But Kovner was by no means uncontroversial, a man of the consensus. Holocaust survivors, like every other group in the country, have their politics, and Kovner was embroiled in them up to his neck. Some survivors, including many who fought under Kovner, worshiped him; but others loathed him. A lot of those feelings depended on one�s political affiliation (Kovner belonged to the left-of-center Mapam), but he was also the type of person who evokes extreme reactions.
Kovner�s importance in Israeli life did not stem from either his poetry or his politics. Rather, he was the �ideal� Holocaust survivor. He had refused to die passively. He had killed rather than be killed. And it was he who coined the famous (or infamous) phrase about not dying �like sheep led to the slaughter.� Even if he has been somewhat forgotten since his death from throat cancer in 1987, Kovner is now the subject of two new books: �Beyond the Reaches of Our Souls,� by Tel Aviv University history professor Dina Porat; and �The Avengers,� by New York journalist Rich Cohen. Porat�s scholarly Hebrew book spans Kovner�s entire life; Cohen�s is mostly an account of Kovner�s experiences between 1939 and 1948.
Why Kovner? For one, his story is compelling. Born in 1918, he was one of the founders of the Vilna branch of Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist-Zionist youth movement, and began to write Hebrew (and Yiddish) poetry while in his teens. Porat deftly depicts the quasi-religious nature of Kovner�s leadership; her vivid descriptions of his theatrical style help explain why some of his fanatically loyal followers in Hashomer Hatzair would remain at his side throughout the war and even up to his death. When the Nazis stormed into Vilna, Lithuania, in December 1941, Kovner, then 23, went into hiding in a convent, where, in an epistle to his friends in the ghetto, he wrote his line about not dying like �lambs going to the slaughter.� Early the next year, he secretly joined the rest of the Jews in the ghetto, and immediately entered the Vilna underground, which, at one point, had about 250 members.
The first leader of the underground, a communist named Isaac Wittenberg, was encouraged by his comrades, including Kovner, his second-in-command, to turn himself in � the Nazis had threatened to destroy the ghetto and all its residents if he didn�t. Wittenberg was quickly executed by the Nazis, and Kovner took his place. The affair would haunt Kovner the rest of his life: He always claimed that it was a constant source of pain to him, and he was occasionally accused of being too quick to urge Wittenburg to surrender. Unlike the more famous Jewish underground of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Vilna underground never really engaged the Nazis in combat. They spent most of their energies trying � in vain � to persuade the rest of the Jews in the ghetto that the efforts of the Judenrat (the German-appointed Jewish leadership) were futile, that they would all perish anyway, but that it was better to die having at least fought. In September 1943, Kovner decided to abort his plan for an uprising and fled with his coterie into the Rudnicki forest. A few days after the escape, the last Jews of the ghetto were taken to Ausch-witz. In the forest, Kovner and his fellow fighters joined the fiercely anti-Semitic Lithuanian partisans, who barely let them live to the end of the war. They never did get to fight.
Even after Vilna was freed by Soviet troops, Kovner�s ordeal did not end; in fact, this is where Porat�s narrative becomes most riveting. He narrowly escaped imprisonment by the Soviets, who were purging everything in sight (later in life, Kovner�s hatred for the USSR nearly equaled his hatred of Germany). After traveling through Eastern Europe and witnessing the awful destruction the Germans left in their wake (according to Porat, Kovner first contemplated suicide when he saw the ruins of his family home), he left for Palestine. Kovner at this point still had a loyal band of hardened fighters � one of whom was his future wife, Vitka Kempner � waiting in Europe for his instructions.
Porat is excellent on Kovner�s mental state after the war. He was enraged, anguished and obsessed with revenge. During the war he had concentrated all his efforts and energies on leadership and survival. When the external horror ended, the internal horror began. He began to grapple with what he had done and what he had seen. Almost everyone he had known in his youth was dead. He had mistakenly shot two Jewish partisans. He was forced by Soviet partisan commanders carrying out anti-Semitic purges to choose a number of Jewish partisans for execution. He had helped force Wittenberg to his death. Kovner�s sense of loss, tragedy and guilt was overwhelming. He could not bring himself to accept the fact that the war was over. In Kovner�s mind, the only good Germans were dead ones.
Out of this mindset came Kovner�s astonishingly insane and morally repugnant plot for mass revenge: He wanted to kill 6 million Germans by poisoning the waterworks of a number of major cities in Germany. There would be no distinction between the culpable and the innocent; it would be similar to the original Nazi crime. It was the only way, in his opinion, that the Jewish people could be avenged. And he began to organize this operation in earnest.
This was Plan A. Kovner also conceived Plan B: to poison thousands of SS soldiers and bureaucrats awaiting trial in the Nuremberg POW camp. In the end, Plan A did not go through: Kovner was betrayed. While sailing to Europe with the poison, in the spring of 1946, he was arrested by the British, who had been tipped off, according to Porat, by Yishuv leaders who got word of the plan and feared its consequences. Kovner was imprisoned for two months in Egypt (the second time he thought about suicide), but managed to send word to his partners to proceed with Plan B.
The result: a small band of members of Nakam (�Revenge�), as he and his comrades called themselves, sneaked into the POW base and painted arsenic on about 3,000 loaves of bread. No one knows precisely how many ex-soldiers were killed: Estimates have varied from about a dozen to hundreds (the former figure, Porat argues, is far more likely).
Much has already been written about Nakam. Perhaps the most notable exposure outside of Israel occurred in 1998, when Michael Freedland of the Observer interviewed former Nakam member Joseph Harmatz, who proudly admitted to the Nuremberg poisoning.
But Porat has one-upped everyone. The biggest mystery up till now was where Kovner got the poison for Plan A. Kovner claimed until his death that Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who was also an eminent chemist and later Israel�s first president, met with him early in 1946 and supported his plan, and then directed one of his men to supply the poison. Kovner had refused to name the connection. Tom Segev argued in �The Seventh Million� that Weizmann was out of the country at the time Kovner claimed they met, and Porat proves this. According to her, Kovner met with Weizmann only after the failure of Plan A.
But her real scoop is that Kovner received the poison from a young chemist named Ephraim Katzir � another future president of Israel. Katzir did not know that Kovner intended to kill millions of people, but he did know about Plan B. Porat pulled off a double feat: she not only names Katzir, but also interviewed him. Katzir uneasily but openly confessed to the facts.
These parts of Kovner�s life � the Holocaust and its aftermath � make up the most interesting chapters of Porat�s book. After that, understandably, it�s all pretty anticlimactic. And this is where the trouble with Porat�s magnum opus begins. Instead of sifting through her countless sources and producing a synthetic narrative, Porat, not a graceful writer to begin with, simply included in her overlong text a lot of material that should have been footnoted or just edited out. As a result, the dramatic effect of the story is often lost in an ocean of needless information.
Another glaring weakness is Porat�s unconcealed admiration for her subject. The book is written in an annoyingly intimate tone: Kovner is usually just �Abba,� his wife is �Vitka,� and so on. Not surprisingly, you often get the feeling that Porat sees Kovner and the supporting characters in the book as her friends, rather than as subjects for detached historical analysis.
NEXT TO RICH COHEN�S BOOK, �The Avengers,� however, Porat�s study seems magisterial. The 32-year-old Cohen�s previous book, �Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,� was a fawning account of Jewish mobsters of the 30s and 40s in Brooklyn. His new effort is centered on the relationship formed in the ghetto between Kovner, Kempner and a third woman, Ruzka Korczak, who was Cohen�s grandmother�s cousin (Cohen hints at a love triangle, though he never makes this clear). The focal point here is Nakam, which Cohen presents without any moral complexity.
For Cohen, a journalist, Kovner�s postwar revenge plan is simply another uplifting tale of �Tough Jews� who don�t take any crap from goyim. Cohen likes Jews who aren�t bookish, who prefer action to reaction. He likes Jews who kill. Mobsters perfectly fit his bill; so does Kovner. One wonders how effusive he would have been if Plan A had gone through.
�Tough Jews,� for all its childish adulation of numbskull killers, was adequately researched and written. It was the sort of thing Cohen should be writing; he was in his element. This time around Cohen has tackled a topic which is starkly unsuited to his cartoonish view of life.
The text is cluttered with overreaching clich�s (�the Soviet troops exuded the brutality of the steppes�), grandiose obsequious statements (�Abba was the first Jew in Vilna to see the scope of the Nazi plan�), contrived conversations that read like scripts for an anachronistic fourth-grade play (Ruzka to another member of the underground: �Will you be able to look into the eyes of a child in Israel when that child asks, �What did you do?��) and embarrassing historical explanations.
Here is Cohen on why the British passed the White Paper of 1939, limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine to fifteen thousand a year: �The British did not want to offend the Arabs, who were far more numerous than the Jews, and also had oil.� The three-year Arab revolt that drove the British to pass the policy is not mentioned, nor is the fact that Palestine did not then have, as Israel does not have now, any oil. If Cohen is referring to the �Arab World� in general, then that�s plain silly.
This is just a typical example of Cohen�s shoddy research. There are no citations or footnotes. Why bother? Cohen simply quotes everyone and asks that we take him at his word. The book is based almost entirely on conversations with Kovner (whom he knew from childhood), Kempner and Korczak, but as they were at the center of many controversies, their testimonies often tell only one side of the story. He takes for granted Kovner�s claim that Weizmann supported his plan to murder 6 million Germans. A quick glance at Segev�s book, whose title appears in his bibliography, might have saved him from the embarrassment of ignorance.
One needs to turn to Porat�s convoluted book to get the straight story. Unfortunately, most of Cohen�s readers never will. The fact that Kovner decided not to rebel in Vilna is made by Cohen to look like the ultimate act of heroism, even though according to Porat, Kovner probably got a case of cold feet. The Wittenberg affair is glossed over. So are all of Kovner�s traumatic experiences in Palestine. The fact that his own brother was killed, along with several other Jews, by Soviet partisans after escaping the ghetto on Kovner�s orders, is ignored. An entire sequence in which Kovner and Kempner shot two Jewish partisans by mistake is excluded. And the list goes on.
The bottom line, for Cohen, is that Kovner was a hero. He is a tough Jew, a man�s mensch. Anything that shows him as human, or weak, is left out. Cohen�s Kovner never thought about killing himself. He showed no mercy or pity. When Jewish partisans led by Kovner torched a Lithuanian peasant village, killing almost all its inhabitants, in retaliation for the killing of one of their own, Porat makes it clear that Kovner didn�t like the carnage. In Cohen�s book, however, he is totally unrepentant. And what�s worse, that�s supposed to be admirable. He�s a tough Jew, remember?
Near the end of the book, Cohen reveals his true motivation. He thinks that the Holocaust is portrayed in America as a story of only passive suffering, of victims. �It is the story of boxcars and death camps. It is a story sanctified by Hollywood in the work of Steven Spielberg and that incorrigible Italian funnyman, Roberto Benigni. Yes. This is an important story; maybe the most important � and yet: It is not the only story. Sometimes, when I look at the picture of Abba in the forest, his eyes cold and hard, a gun in his hands, I think, �I can�t believe it�s a Jew.��
Cohen, of course, has it all wrong. Kovner was just as much a victim of the Nazis as anyone who survived Auschwitz. The war left him morally and psychologically devastated. He came out of it thinking that murder was part of the natural order. Like many other survivors, even those who languished in Cohen�s ignominous death camps, Kovner never was able to escape the horrible clasp on his spirit of the Holocaust experience. His life was not an uplifting adventure; it was a tragedy.
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