Publishers Weekly
09/05/2022
How should Germany’s slaughter of six million Jews during the Holocaust be punished? That fraught ethical question is at the heart of this definitive study of the Nokmim, or Avengers, a small paramilitary group of Holocaust survivors led by “poet and partisan” Abba Kovner who planned to kill millions of Germans by poisoning their municipal water supplies in 1945. Porat (The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David), the former chief historian of Yad Vashem, enriches her extended profiles of individual Avengers, many of whom had fought in partisan militias in the forests of Ukraine and Lithuania, with details about the reaction to their intentions by Zionist leaders who were more focused on rescuing and caring for survivors and maintaining support for international recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine. While the water contamination scheme did not happen, the Avengers poisoned German POWs near Nuremberg by brushing arsenic onto bread loaves; thousands were sickened, but it’s believed no one died. Porat succeeds in capturing the mindset of the Avengers (“After the most horrible event that had ever happened to this people in their long history, it was unthinkable to return to everyday life as if it had not occurred”) while making clear that “revenge was the heartfelt wish of a small, scattered, weak community.” This meticulous and empathetic study gives an overlooked chapter of Jewish history its due. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
"Completely engrossing, Nakam reads like the best detective novel, while also being a first-class work of historical research."—Saul Friedländer, author of Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
"A thoughtful and meticulously researched study of the postwar Jewish plan to murder six million Germans in retaliation for the Holocaust, a topic that had been written out of history for too long because of its moral ambiguity and political sensitivity. A must-read for anyone interested in post-traumatic recovery of victims after genocide.—Laura Jockusch, author of Collect and Record!: Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe
"This elegantly written book gives pause to ponder how great and awful can be the consequences when the law fails to protect those most in need of protection.—David Engel, author of The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Sholem Schwarzbard 1926-1927
"Written by one of Israel's most eminent historians, this fascinating book demonstrates the impossibility of just retribution for genocide, and the vast gap between the integrity of the Avengers and the horrific nature of their goal. Nakam is a deeply-researched, empathetic, and compelling account of the men and women who vowed to avenge the murderers of their families and communities."—Omer Bartov, author of Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past
"In the wake of the Holocaust, the overwhelming priority of Jewish activists in Europe and the Palestine Mandate was the rescue and emigration of survivors and the founding of a Jewish state. Nakam tells the story of the most notable exception to these efforts: the close-knit group of former resistance fighters who resolved on killing six million Germans in a stunning act of vengeance. A deeply-researched, insightful, but also empathetic study."—Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
"This meticulous and empathetic study gives an overlooked chapter of Jewish history its due."—Publishers Weekly
"[Nakam is] part riveting tale, part scholarly disquisition. Porat thoroughly and sensitively interrogates their motivations, their tactics and strategies, and the ramifications of their highly controversial actions, which never fully materialized. Carefully incorporating dozens of interviews with the now-nonagenarian remnants of the group, Porat, a renowned Holocaust scholar and onetime chief historian of Israel's Holocaust museum, adroitly surveys the origins and ultimate futility of the innate human instinct for revenge."—Michael M. Rosen, Washington Examiner
"[Porat's] writing is scholarly yet accessible, tender yet bold. It draws on hitherto unstudied archival sources and in-depth interviews with the surviving avengers themselves....Nakamdelivers new insights about war, trauma, healing, and the ethics of revenge."—Linda F. Burhardt, Jewish Book Council
"The book sets out to solve several historical mysteries. With the drive to avenge, the means to avenge, the targets identified, and the tools to do so: 'Why didn't they manage to take vengeance? Who betrayed them and why?' And how was it possible that this seemingly warm, humane, ethical group of individuals was equipped to carry out such a barbaric plan? This is where Porat's expertise regarding the Yishuv and its relationship to the Holocaust helps to inform the power dynamics at play after the war."—Avinoam Patt, Yad Vashem
"[The Nokmim] were a secretive group, survivors of the Holocaust, who refused to divulge any hard facts about their activities. Dina Porat, a professor of modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, has researched their story in meticulous (and, it should be said, reverential) detail."—Colin Shindler, History Today
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Saul Friedländer
Completely engrossing, Nakam reads like the best detective novels, while also being a first-class work of historical research.”
author of Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past - Omer Bartov
"Written by one of Israel's most eminent historians, this fascinating book demonstrates the impossibility of just retribution for genocide, and the vast gap between the integrity of the Avengers and the horrific nature of their goal. Nakam is a deeply-researched, empathetic, and compelling account of the men and women who vowed to avenge the murderers of their families and communities."
author of Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 - Saul Friedländer
"Completely engrossing, Nakam reads like the best detective novel, while also being a first-class work of historical research."
author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland - Christopher R. Browning
"In the wake of the Holocaust, the overwhelming priority of Jewish activists in Europe and the Palestine Mandate was the rescue and emigration of survivors and the founding of a Jewish state. Nakam tells the story of the most notable exception to these efforts: the close-knit group of former resistance fighters who resolved on killing six million Germans in a stunning act of vengeance. A deeply-researched, insightful, but also empathetic study."
Kirkus Reviews
2022-09-08
An intricate, chilling portrait of a group of Jewish “avengers” of the Holocaust.
In this work translated from the Hebrew, Porat, former chief historian of Yad Vashem, focuses on Abba Kovner (1918-1987), a partisan fighter from the Vilna ghetto (in present-day Lithuania) who became a messianic figure to the waves of traumatized young survivors of the Nazi death camps. Kovner’s manifesto of resistance against the Germans resonated mightily to those “whose lives were reduced to rubble.” For the millions who suffered under the Nazi regime, “life as it had been was replaced by forced relocation, torture, hunger, physical exhaustion, and disease.” Kovner gathered around 50 devoted men and women in a carefully orchestrated underground army, and the group devised two potential plans for wide-scale revenge on the Germans. Plan A involved the poisoning of water sources in several major German cities, while Plan B would target SS and other German prisoners of war in Allied camps. Porat presents many fresh, moving perspectives from the archives, enlivening the narrative with important information gleaned from her interviews with many of the surviving Nokmim (“avengers”). As she chronologically recounts the group’s incredible story, she circles back to the question of why these young people would sacrifice everything for revenge. “They adopted vengeance as an indispensable stage in their rehabilitation,” she writes, “without which they could not return to life, society, and social order.” Moreover, they strongly believed that the blood of the murdered demanded recompense, and the specter of antisemitism still loomed. Porat also tells the little-understood story of how Kovner navigated the more moderate Yishuv (administrators of the Land of Israel) and Haganah (Zionist military) leaders, whose postwar focus was on the rescue and transit of survivors and the construction of a political homeland for the future. Many of the Nokmim kept their silence for decades and rued their inability to carry out their “divine retribution on a cosmic, biblical scale.”
A valuable work of Holocaust research and Jewish history.
