Abba Kovner, partisan and poet, was born in Sevastopol, a Crimean port, before moving to Vilna (Vilnius) as a child. A “born leader,” Kovner graduated from a Hebrew academy and was active in Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist-Zionist youth group that helped shape his overpowering sense of commitment and willingness to sacrifice himself for a greater Jewish cause. Refusing opportunities to escape to Palestine, Kovner was in Vilna when it was occupied by Nazi Germany in June 1941. Within a matter of months, this famous Jewish community had been devasted with over two-thirds of its population killed by Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators. Kovner survived by hiding in a convent. Throughout his life he would refer to the nun who sheltered him and others as Ima, or mother.
In December 1941, Kovner slipped back into the ghetto where the remaining Jews of Vilna lived in appalling conditions and under Nazi control. He helped bring together the ghetto’s divided Jewish political factions into the United Partisan Organization (or FPO). This group trained fighters, gathered weapons, and prepared for what they accepted would be a doomed uprising against the Germans. To galvanize support, Kovner wrote a manifesto that was perhaps the first time that a Jew publicly warned that Hitler intended to murder all of Europe’s Jews. He called on Jews, faced with overwhelming odds, not to “go like lambs to the slaughter” but instead to fight to the end. “True, we are weak and helpless, but the only answer is resistance. Brothers! Better to fall as free fighters than live at our murderers’ mercy.”
While this manifesto inspired Jewish resistance efforts throughout Eastern Europe, the Vilna ghetto rejected Kovner’s pleas for a mass uprising. When the ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, and the Nazis rounded up the last of Vilna’s Jews for deportation, Kovner led a last-gasp escape of 90 Jewish fighters who made their way to the forests outside the city. There, he assembled a band of Jewish partisans known as the Nokmim (the Avengers) that carried out sabotage raids and attacks on Nazis and their local collaborators.
After the Soviets liberated Vilna, Kovner escorted survivors to Palestine. He also hatched a terrible plan to kill six million Germans by poisoning the water supplies of German cities. This plan was abandoned although he and others did attempt to kill German POWs with arsenic. Settling in Israel, he served as an information officer for the Haganah during the 1948 War of Independence and gained fame – and some notoriety – for his angry bulletins calling for “death to the Egyptian invaders” (whom he described as dogs and vipers) as revenge for the Holocaust.
For the rest of his life, Kovner worked on Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh, wrote poetry – he won the Israel Prize for Literature in 1970 – and planned Holocaust memorials. In 1961, he testified at the Eichmann trial. Tormented by memories of the Holocaust, he once commented that for 30 years he had the same dream every night of being chased as his attackers shouted “Raus, raus (out, out)” in German. He died in 1987.