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'The Avengers' chronicles Jewish resistance fighters

The story of Ruzka Korczak, Abba Kovner and Vitka Klempner, young Jews who defied both the Germans and their fellow Jews by violent retaliation against Nazi brutality, is told in "The Avengers"

October 2, 2000
Web posted at: 3:14 PM EDT (1914 GMT)

By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN.com

NEW YORK (CNN) -- In the fall of 1943, as the Nazis prepared to "liquidate" the Jewish ghetto in Vilna, Lithuania (modern Vilnius), a small band of Jewish resistance fighters made their way out of the occupied town through the sewers, disappearing into the neighboring Rudnicki Forest. Among them were two young women, Ruzka Korczak and Vitka Klempner, and a young man named Abba Kovner. Literally out of holes in the ground, this group, backed by the Red Army, staged hit-and-run raids on German outposts and supply lines, eventually joining Russian forces in the liberation of Vilna the following year.

After the war, the fanatical Kovner, together with a band of former partisans called Avengers, hatched a plot to poison German POWs, which was foiled by the British in the midst of the formation of the state of Israel. Kovner, a lifelong Zionist, joined Ruzka and Vitka in Palestine, fighting alongside David Ben-Gurion in the Israeli War of Independence. The story of these three young desperate Jews, who defied both the Germans and their fellow Jews by violent retaliation against Nazi brutality, is told by Rich Cohen in "The Avengers" (Knopf). Cohen, author of "Tough Jews," a rosy-eyed look at American Jewish gangsters, had a personal stake invested in the story of these partisans: he's descended from one of them. His grandmother emigrated from Poland just prior to World War II, and the rest of her family was presumed killed. Years later, Cohen met his grandmother's niece in Israel and met some of her wartime comrades.

"They'd bring out these photo albums and show photos of these little Jewish women with machine guns," he said. "It was an amazing contrast: my image of how they appeared to me as a little kid, these little old Jewish women, and what they had really lived. I was always aware of the story, and only recently for several reasons did I try to pursue it as a writer."

Contrast pervades "The Avengers." Kovner, Klempner and Korczak were cosmopolitan, urbanized Jews (Kovner was a noted poet) who became savage guerrillas. Brutalized by atrocity and deprivation, the partisans became a grim amalgamation of Zionists, Communists, Orthodox and "assimilated" Jews. Unified by a common enemy, the fighters even had their own secret police in the form of hardened men like Isser Schmidt, a Communist Jew who dealt with those Jews "under suspicion" with a bullet. These educated, law-abiding, God-fearing Jews were transmogrified by Nazi bestiality into a mirror image of their enemies.

Rich Cohen

The violence of their vision, which isolated them within the Jewish community, was utterly opposed to the protocol of the Vilna ghetto, under the leadership of a Lithuanian Jew named Jacob Gens. This businessman-turned-policeman worked with Nazi commanders supplying "laborers" for the German war effort, who were exterminated at the nearby camp at Ponar.

Whether Gens knew the implications of his actions or not is unclear (he was shot in 1943, shortly before the partisans took to the sewers), but the author contends that Gens tried to save his people by complying with Nazi edicts. Moreover, Cohen believes that Gens was the favored role model of the time, a trait which sealed the fate of the Jews who chose to follow his orders.

"Nobody believes that they're going to be killed. If you were alive at the time, your sympathy would probably have been with Gens," Cohen said. "He chose to go to the ghetto and took over its leadership because he thought it was the right thing to do. He thought the best way to deal with the Germans was to become necessary to them, then they wouldn't kill the Jews. Gens would have looked like a strong leader who was trying to save you. Abba was young, and he was a fanatic, preaching a kamikaze mission -- 'Let's die fighting.' Gens was saying, 'Let's not die.' "

After World War II and fighting in Israel, Abba Kovner settled down in Israel

The contrast between Gens' and Kovner's visions for Jewish salvation also provides a glimpse into the psychology behind the strategies employed by the Nazis on the Vilna ghetto residents. At one point, a Jewish lynch mob forced Gens to turn over Isaac Wittenberg, a resistance member, to avoid a bloody Nazi sweep of the ghetto. "There were Jews in Vilna who had special yellow passes which they thought would protect themselves and their families," Cohen said. "It's human nature; the Germans divided the society into haves and have-nots. If you have the pass, you think the rulers like you. If you don't have the pass, no one helps you.

"What's amazing," he continued, "is that at the beginning, there were about a hundred members of the underground in Vilna, and about 200,000 Jews. At the end, there were maybe 90 members of the underground and maybe 10,000 Jews. So, though Abba's motto was 'Die fighting,' the underground actually survived the war by fighting."

Cohen observed that Kovner had the right ideology -- and temperament -- to be a resistance leader. "He was convinced that Europe would be the graveyard of the Jews, so he was prepared to believe the worst."

But his desire for revenge wasn't exactly admirable. "He became incredibly violent. You saw it in his plans for vengeance after the war, when he wanted to kill six million Germans by poisoning the water of German cities," Cohen said. "To an extent everyone involved had a little bit of Isser Schmidt in them -- Abba and the others learned it in the woods. Right or wrong, they said that the war remade them in its image."

For this reason, Cohen said, the fighters kept quiet for years after the war. After World War II and fighting in Israel, Kovner settled down. He designed the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, believing it important that people knew Jewish history preceding the Holocaust. But his own history remained hidden to many.

Ruzka Korczak and Vitka Klempner were among the resitance fighters who escaped as the Nazis prepared to 'liquidate' the Jewish ghetto in Vilna, Lithuania

Some commentators have pointed out that "The Avengers," despite a great deal of research by Cohen, primarily rests on the viewpoints of one group: the survivors, now half a century removed from the scene. It is difficult to corroborate the mechanics of the destruction caused by Germans, Jews, Poles or Russians, when the extent of that destruction was so complete.

But the flow of the story, not necessarily its blow-by-blow accuracy, seems to have been Cohen's primary goal. "The Avengers" is a partisan form of oral history, told by eyewitnesses rather than academics, a preservation of stories across generations that will invoke a range of emotions -- from pride to shock -- among its readers.

"Abba seemed insane, but it was an insane time," Cohen said. "That was one of the challenges of the book, to show that it wasn't so simple then. Gens rounded up Jews and sent them to the camps -- he, a Jew, did that to other Jews. But to get to the point where he did that, it was a series of decisions. The right decisions might lead to the worst result."

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Jewish History in Lithuania

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