Part One: A Tale of Revenge

Robert and Margaret Killjoy sit down to do the annual Christmas non-bastard episode about Nakam, a terrorist group made up of Holocaust survivors who sought vengeance against the Nazis.

(2 Part Series)

FOOTNOTES:

1. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-11-08/ty-article-magazine/.premium/an-eye-for-an-eye-jews-who-sought-to-kill-germans-in-revenge-for-the-holocaust/0000017f-e0d4-d38f-a57f-e6d6c9b30000
2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/26/second.world.war
3. https://archive.ph/qS91#selection-315.0-327.235
4. https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.2979/jewisocistud.18.3.99
5. https://echoesandreflections.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/07-01-06-01_Student-Handout_Pronouncement-by-Abba-Kovner.pdf
6. http://www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/vilna/vilna_pages/vilna_stories_kovner.html

7. https://www.schoeningh.de/display/book/edcoll/9783657705757/BP000032.xml

8. https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/anti-jewish-violence-in-poland-after-liberation.htm
9. Porat, Dina. Nakam (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition. Porat, Dina. Nakam

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Uh, Mary Hallam, Miss it's behind the Chris Bastard, Miss
Robert Evans here podcast. God with Me Today is Margaret
Killjoy and Sophie Lichtermann. Margaret, how are you doing. I'm good.

(00:23):
I'm here for the Christmas Song special, isn't. What we're
gonna do is just sing Christmas carols. That's right. We're
going to sing the version of Frosty the Snowman that
I wrote while on an acid trip that takes seven
and a half hours and is largely a retelling of
the Ring Cycle. Okay, so yeah, I'm also extremely pornographic,

(00:45):
so if you have children listening, you need to get
them away. It is actually a crime in thirty seven
states for them to listen to my version of Frosty
the Snowman. Yeah, and the worst part is is that actually,
if anyone listens to it, Robert goes to Jail's right,
that's right. Um so, Margaret, you will be here to
do the twenties six minute long kazoo solo, which I'm

(01:08):
very excited about. Um oh you did. Actually you do
literally half bells, sweet silver bells, bells that are perfect
for ringing in Christmas, which is great because this is
our yearly Christmas episode. Now. Normally, Margaret, normally for Christmas

(01:28):
we do a non bastard, right like we do a
hero to kind of pep everybody up at the end
of the year. But last year and this year really
you launched a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool
Stuff that's basically a regular weekly version of the Christmas
podcast of the Christmas episodes that we used to do.
So this year I'm doing something a little different, something

(01:51):
we've never done before, which is we're going to be
covering a group of people who were rad as ship
for eighty percent of the story and then things take
a dark term, so the revolutionaries in human history. Yeah,
and this is there's a lot of fascinating moral questions

(02:14):
with the group that we're gonna be talking about. Have
you ever heard about a terrorist group called No com No?
I don't think so. I don't know. We'll find out, Yeah,
we will find out. Indeed, Margaret, before we get into
this episode, I want to do a little thought experiment
for everybody here. I want you to imagine that a

(02:34):
few years down the line, a church or a political
party rises up in the United States, um and and
starts trying to spread a fascist gospel around the country
and and this this gospel takes off among a significant
chunk of the population. And let's say it's far fetched,
but yeah, far fetched. And let's say that that these

(02:55):
fascists are specifically targeting people like you and the folks
that you love. Whatever whatever thing you identify as, whether
it's you know, gender orientation, religion, uh, sexuality, political ideology.
They're targeting like you and the people that you love.
And let's say, imagine they get into power, right, maybe

(03:18):
it's a coup, maybe they actually just straight up win
an election, but they get into power, and a lot
of violence falls, a tremendous amount of violence, and you
lose a lot of the people that you love most
in the world, virtually all of them, over a terrifying
period of years and years of violence. Now being fascists,
they do eventually lose, which is what always happens to fascists.

(03:40):
And at the end of that period, you and the
folks who have survived, are are hardened, are a lot
better at doing violence, and are thinking, who do we
make pay for this? Right? Who is it moral to
punish for this? Obviously the ringleaders, right, the people that
were leading the movement, the people who at a death
squad ship, the people who are actually carrying out the killings.

(04:03):
But what about what about the church is full of
clamoring extremists, what about the civilians who supported the movement
and bade and howled and cheered as they committed their murders.
To what extent are those people guilty? Right? Is it
wise to to just let them all live because the
war is over? Or by doing that are you potentially

(04:26):
endangering your remaining loved ones even more? Because if there's
not consequences, is it the case that maybe they'll do
it again. So that's a question to keep in your mind,
right as we as we start to talk about Eastern
Europe in the late nineteen thirties and early nineteen forties,
that was a fun time to be around. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(04:49):
So that's what we're gonna be talking about, and specifically
we're going to be really focusing on one individual today
of a pretty fascinating fellow named Abbat cove Ner. He
was born Able Kovener on March fourteenth, nineteen eighteen, just
as the First World War was ending in a town
called Sebastopol on the southern tip of Crimea. Now, if

(05:10):
you've casually glanced at European history, you will know that
the southern tip of Crimea in nineteen eighteen as a
Jewish person is a pretty rough place to be. That
is not one of the top places in times I
would choose to be born. Um. Now, Abel's parents were
quite orthodox Jews um in A. In the Fall of

(05:31):
a Sparrow, a Stanford biography of Covener, they're described as
is moderately traditional. I don't entirely know what that means,
but that's that's kind of the way in which they're
They're generally described by the best biographer Kovener has now
Sebastopol did not have a large Jewish population. This is
not a city that has like a particularly significant, um

(05:52):
like sizeable community in it uh and in Czarist Russia,
which you know, is what Kovener's parents had lived under.
Right up until about nineteen seventeen, the ability of Jewish
people to hold jobs had been strictly limited. Right, you
can't really teach at colleges if you're Jewish, at least
you're you're heavily limited from doing it. They have quotas.
There's a lot of different like jobs, you just can't

(06:12):
do your your there's an apartheid system really and in
most of of of Czarist Russia. Now luckily for Abba,
by the time he's born, the Czars are out of power.
Um and his family is is he comes into like
a fairly affluent family. They're large, and they're extremely close.
His father had been an expert appraiser of antique jewelry.

(06:33):
Um did when with the revolution of Crimea, what happened
to Crimea to get into the USSR to do its
own thing. It's part of the USSR. Yeah, But then
also nineteen eighteen, things are a lot less uh at
that point. Yeah, Yeah, there's still a kind of flory

(06:53):
moving along, right, Yes, Um and his family is moderately
well off. One of ABBA's early memories is sitting around
the table at a family dinner and admiring his grandmother's
pearl necklace, which had been in the family for a
hundred and fifty years. So he has not just a
large family, but a family that like they have managed
a lot of continuity between the generations, which is not

(07:16):
necessarily the most common thing in this part of Russia
because of how many programs there are, because of how
common the violence is, the fact that his family has
like managed to keep these things in their possession for
so long says a lot. Right. Um Abba is a
very smart child. He is pretty much universally regarded as
having been particularly a brilliant artist and very charismatic. Everybody

(07:38):
really likes this kid. Um. He's very inclined to the arts,
particularly poetry. Um and he had his family members were
called he had a unique ability to memorize and recite
things that he'd read. Um. And he would do this
to keep everyone entertained, especially during holidays and family gatherings.
He would read books and then he would recite them
to his family. Is like, you know, basically it's the

(07:59):
early in Sebastopol. They don't have like TV or radio.
This is you guys, saw this YouTube video. This is
what I learned. Yeah, normal only only bearable. Yeah, he's
like describing and Or to everybody in his during like
the Sader or whatever. Because this is the difference, right, Like,

(08:19):
if you describe what happened in and Or, it sucks.
But if you if someone were to just act out
and Or in front of everyone, that would rule. Yeah,
have you ever seen that movie? I forget the name
of it. I think Rain of Fire is the Day
of It's about like dragons destroy civilization and it's apocalyptic Britain.
There's a great scene where like a bunch of post
apocalypse survivors are like sitting around a campfire doing Star

(08:41):
Wars for each other. Yeah yeah, that it out is great.
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's what Kovner is doing. He's very creative.
Everybody finds them very entertaining. Um. Now this is again
nineteen eighteen, rough time to be anybody in Sebastopol, but
particularly Jewish. UM and his dad is arrested by Soviet

(09:03):
secret police when he's four in nineteen twenty two. This
is because private, private commerce was forbidden in the Soviet Union.
Obviously in the earliest stages, kind of after there's ours fall,
it's possible, you know, business and stuff continues in regions.
It's not like evenly distributed at this point. But by
the early twenties, the Soviet state is kind of starting
to um to to lock into place. Uh. And he

(09:26):
gets fined for his bourgeoisie decadence, as you know, being
a jewelry guy. Um. And he's put in prison for
several months. This is probably Had or at least his biographer,
who is I should say this right now, his biographer
is like super pro Israel um and a zion and
a Zionist. His father is also a known Zionist. And

(09:47):
I when I say this, we're all of these folks
that we're gonna be talking about in the twenties and
stuff are Zionist. That doesn't mean entirely the same thing
that it does to this day, in part because a
lot of people who a lot of Jews who are
as eye Anist in this period are also socialists, are
also communist and are less thinking about I want to establish,
you know, a state of Israel as it currently exists,

(10:09):
which is, shall we say, deeply problematic, and more we
want to liberate like the Palestinian Mandate from the British
imperialists and established establish a socialist community there, right Um.
And that's kind of the line ABBA's father falls in on.
His family is very left wing. One of ABBA's cousins

(10:29):
is going to found the Communist Party of Israel when
that all happens. Um. So like that's that's the So
they are very left wing despite the fact that they're
they're somewhat affluent. But Zionism is not allowed in the
Soviet Union, right because a big part of it is
like we're going to Number one, religion is a not

(10:49):
encouraged in the in the in the early USSR in particular. Um.
But number two, a big part of it is that like, well,
we're not going to stay here, right, Like, if you're
Zionists that you pretty fund the Italy don't want to
stay where you are in the U. S s are
And they're also not thrilled with that. Um. So that
probably played a role in his dad getting arrested. Um.
And he stays in prison for months until the family

(11:11):
can put together enough money to secure his release, which
is interesting to me because he gets arrested for doing
commerce and being too enough. Yeah, I don't know, you
know whatever. Uh. By nineteen twenty six, the Kavners had
decided that the Soviet Union was not a great place
for them. Um. They felt there, yeah, yeah, especially since

(11:32):
again most they are fairly religious, um, and they see
kind of not that just their religion, but their nationality
is under attacks. So they decided to move somewhat place
that's going to be a little bit more friendly for them.
It's also again, Sebastopol doesn't have a huge Jewish population,
so some of it's just like, well, maybe we'd like
to be in a place where there's a larger Jewish community.
I'm so nervous about where they're going to move to. Um, well,

(11:55):
they're going to move to a place that never has
any problems in the early part of the twentieth century Lithuania.
Now Lithuania is part of Like specifically, they moved to Vilna,
which is today the capital of Lithuania, if I'm not mistaken,
but back then is part of Poland, right, Um, so
they are attempting to and they've got family in the area, right,

(12:18):
you know, so they're they're not just like moving side unseen.
They have a lot of relatives there too. Um this
is a good move and for a while the family
is affluent again, but that period quickly ends because ABBA's
father seems to be a really generous guy. And in
this period, because of the Civil War in Russia, because
of all of the chaos after World War One, there's
a ton of refugees moving into Vilnia, right, and his

(12:40):
dad kind of spends money faster than he can make it,
helping out out their refugees in the area because he's
a pretty pretty nice guy, um Abba, you know, goes
to a Hebrew school, um, and then he goes to
an art university when he graduates. I think it's called
a gymnasium. I don't entirely. I believe that's broadly speaking,
like a or a primary school. UM. That's my impression,

(13:02):
But I always get whatever. I'm in Europe and people
talk about going to gymnasium. Look, everyone does schools wrong,
but Europeans particularly do schools wrong, and I think it's
okay to admit that they at least name them wrong. However,
they name them very wrong. I think. I think the
US overall the school is a little bit wronger. Yeah,
I don't. I hate the word gymnasium, and I'm angry

(13:25):
at them, so I'm biased here. But he goes to
a Hebrew school and then he goes to an art
university and he is studying I think specifically poetry, UM.
And he's actually being published as a poet. He's quite good,
and he's he's studying poetry. When things in Europe start
to take well, I say, start to take a dark turn.
Is in Vilna in the nineteen. It's been dark for

(13:49):
a while, but they start to get a lot darker
in the early nineteen thirties. Um, and again, Vilma is
a part of Poland that is smack in between Russia,
which has just gotten through his civil war that's killed millions,
and Germany, which has just gotten through like a famine
that killed like a million people after World War One. Man,
is they're on this there, on this slow road to fascism.
It's a terrible place to be. And they're about to

(14:11):
get split up between the two nations. Are they ever
are going to agree to invade together and then hold
the joint fucking parades? It is going to be It's
it's not again, one of the worst places you could
possibly be in this period of time. So ABBA's father
dies in nineteen thirty two, right as Hitler's rising to

(14:33):
power in Germany. Um. You know, he's just he's a
stressed out guy. I think he's kind of older. It's
not uncommon for the man to be significantly older than
his wife in this period in time. Um, he dies
and his mother. ABBA's mother is forced to support the
family by starting a restaurant, and this is very difficult
to her. Because she had a chronic injury to her legs.
So his mom is like one of these parents who

(14:56):
is like physically disabled and also taking the burden feeding
and supporting her entire family onto herself by starting a restaurant.
But she's a very good cook. It is a successful restaurant. Um.
In nineteen thirty five, when he was seventeen, Covener dropped
out of Hebrew School, having decided that his studies were
useless um and the teachers were all old assholes. By

(15:18):
this point, he was convinced that, yeah, he is. He
is hard not to like in this period, and he's
convinced in this point that his future lay in Palestine
as a pioneer. Now. All throughout Eastern Europe, in this period,
Jewish communities are watching the spread of radical political ideologies
that often adopted anti Semitism as planks of their belief.

(15:39):
Young people in young Jewish people who are paying attention
to these trends started to form their own youth organizations. UM.
And these are both for a mix of like self
defense and to aid them in carrying out this kind
of migration over to Palestine, right, um, And not all
of them, some of them are are communist organizations that
are not Zionist right communist socialist organization that are organizing

(16:01):
along left wing lines and and planned to stay. That's
also a significant portion of this. But all of these
Jewish youth organizations are based heavily on the Boy Scout
movement that had been launched by Robert Baden Powell because
it is a quasi military movement, right, that oddly makes sense.
There was a lot of that going on in Europe
around that time, where there was a lot of like
hiking clubs would be where you would like go learn

(16:23):
discipline and marksmanship and hang out with your buds. Yes,
and it's not hard to see why a lot of
Jewish youths in a place like Vilma would be like, yeah,
we should probably be like training for some of this stuff. Yeah,
it looks like it might get a lot harder very soon. Yeah.
Um so, I want to read a quote from the
Jewish Virtual Library about these youth groups. Quote. Many Jewish youth,

(16:46):
affected by the process of modernization which had begun among
Eastern European Jewry, sought a means of maintaining their Jewish
identity and culture outside the stifling barriers of the Stettle
and the Orthodox Jewish life. On the other hand, they
were troubled by the crumbling of the foundations society around them,
and by the growing anti Semitism, which threatened their very existence.
In its early stages, the movement was heavily influenced by

(17:06):
the Boy Scout movement organized by Baden Powell, and it
embraced scouting is a basic principle to teach ghetto youth
self reliance, outdoor life, and a love and knowledge of nature.
Another important influence upon them was the wander Vogel movement
in Germany, which emphasized youth's independence and creativity. And the
wander Vogel movement is there's a mix of the Nazis
that are kind of like inspired and related to it,

(17:27):
and there's also a lot of reaction to it because
one of the things that happens in the wander Vogel
movement is a lot of German youth are having gay
sex and they go camping right um, which is one
of the reasons camping is rat and that is the
thing that the Nazis do not like. We'll talk more
about the wander Vogler movement. Yeah, yeah, I covered them
a bunch on the Gay Resistance of Nazis episode, and

(17:48):
so like, I'm pretty excited about how both the like
right and left wing were like deeply part of the
wander Vogel movement. Yeah, it's very interesting and messy and cool.
It's yeah, yeah, we don't it doesn't get talked about much.
This is all stuff that like you really no, no, no,

(18:09):
and it's it's stuff you have to really be reading
your your history in order to actually get to. Once
you do, you realize like, oh, this was central to
a lot of what was happening in this period. Um.
So there's a lot of these groups. Some of them
are revolutionary and communist in nature. Others are kind of
centrist and even conservative and much more focused on Zionism. Um.

(18:31):
And again, when we talk about Zionism in this period,
some of these people are We're going to like take
our own state in Palestine by by force, But a
lot of them are just we're probably all going to
get killed if we stay here, and like farming in
Palestines seems like a better life, So what if we
just did that? Right, And there was like right wing
and left wing Zionism that are like dramatically different and

(18:53):
then even among left wing Zionism, I think that there
was kind of a split about whether or not they
were trying to create a state, whether or whether they
were just like basically trying to go live where they
were kind of originally from. Yeah, and where like they
wouldn't get murdered. And you do have to when you're
kind of parsing this out, keep that all in mind.
They're all aware that they're under the gun here. You know,

(19:15):
it's really weird to look at this from the current
context of Israel being a an apartheides great thing. Yeah, um,
but the right wing versus left wing Zionism versus also
the left wing non anti Zionists, like all three groups
were doing their things. Sorry, I get really excited about
this stuff. Yeah, they're all. They're all. Also there's a
tremendous amount of conflict between them and totally um and

(19:38):
we're The part of the story today is how a
lot of that conflict comes to an end of one um.
The specific youth group that Aboca Abacovner joints is called
Hashomer hats their um. I'm sure I'm not getting that
quite right, but it's it was kind of I've heard
different things. They are a Marxist group. They are a
Marxist like socialist youth organise, and I've also heard them

(20:01):
described as kind of like soft socialists. So they're they're
more compared to the people who are like outright communist revolutionaries.
There are there are a lot more moderate, but they
are Marxist right there, not just like social democrat. They
are specifically using Marxist and analysis and their propaganda in
the way that they see the world. Um. ABBA's cousin
again becomes like the founder of the Israeli Communist Party,

(20:23):
So this is like a whole thing in his family. Um,
and it's interesting he uh, you might suspect because his
dad gets arrested by the Soviets because his family has
a tough time in the USSR that they might have
had there might have been the reactionary strain in them
and they would have like pulled away from those politics. Um.
But that's not really, that's not at all really ABBA's

(20:44):
uh like his that's not that's not the tack that
he takes. We'll talk about that a little bit in
the second. But the hats Omer Hauts there advocated for
Jewish people to abandon the industries they traditionally worked in
um in, you know, places where they were living, and
instead become labors and farmers so that they'd be able
to settle in Palestine one day, and you know all

(21:06):
that stuff. Some of them had started trying to do
this as early as nineteen nineteen. They are sending there
are people moving over there. This is how the first
kibbutz is get established, right, it's these guys. So by
the time World War two is getting ready to kick off,
and that's in the backgrounds as Abbas joining this group,
as he's as he's kind of moving up the ranks,
he's becoming a community organizer. He's making propaganda. The Nazis

(21:29):
are taking power and consolidating power. You got your light
along knives, you got your angelus, you got your war
bell starting to ring for the invasion of Poland. Um
now on kind of the eve of the invasion of Poland.
The Jewish population of Vilna is about sixty thousand, and
it's one of the most cohesive Jewish communities in all

(21:50):
of Europe. It hosts what's called the Straussian Library, which
is the most famous Jewish library in all of Europe.
Abbas spent a lot of time in that library, and
he spends the years in the run up to the
war kind of throwing his life into the hat Shomarhatzer,
and he eventually becomes like one of the leading figures
in his local chapter. This passage from a book about

(22:10):
Abba called The Fall of a Sparrow describes him just
as the war clouds began to gather in Europe. He
headed the local branch, it's governing body and the regional leadership.
His physical appearance was also exceptional. He wore his hair
long and dressed like the older Hashomer Hats members, with
his shirt collar rather rather than his jacket collar, uppermost
wide pants, stuffed to do his socks, and in later

(22:32):
years into his boots. His dress was influenced by the
Bolshevik revolutionaries, and he turned it into his own personal style.
Kovner wrote an 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 movements
summer and winter camps. He was as familiar with happiness
as he was with sadness, said one friend. He was

(22:52):
always an intellectual challenge. He had an original way of
asking questions or discussing problems, and impressed everyone with his
self control in seriousness. The younger members admired him, and
the movements instructors recognized his leadership qualities. He radiated authority,
they said fifty years later. And that's one of the
things you'll notice about Kulvner because a lot of the
people who knew him then get get interviewed again, like

(23:14):
literally half a century later, and there's almost this awe
they all had for him. He's just a deeply charismatic
young man. Um. Yeah, he's just one of those people
that is kind of magnetic to folks. He also do
terrible things, or he could, Um, he could. And it's
it's one of he doesn't seem one thing that he
does not seem to have any particular personal desire for power,

(23:36):
which is interesting. He's he's really focused on organizing, um,
but not focused on kind of like there's no sort
of a cult of personality. He just seems like a
deeply likable kid. UM. I don't know. Yeah, at this certainly,
at this point in time, he's nothing but rad um.
And again, it's it's interesting that he's very focused on
kind of cultivating this image of himself as as a Bolshevik,

(23:59):
especial considering the problems that his dad has. But his
earliest memories he never because he's very young, when the
family is affluent. He doesn't remember that period at all.
His earliest memories are after they moved to Vilna, when
they're very poor, you know, and when his dad dies,
when his mom's got to try to keep the family together. Um.
And so he is. He is very dedicated to the poor.

(24:20):
He's very familiar with kind of like class consciousness, and
he's he's very humanist. He's a secular guy, right like,
he's not particularly religious, he is he has committed to Marxists, basically, no, no, no.
He grows up a committed Marxist who's very aware of
like the divide between rich and poor, you know. Um,

(24:41):
everything changes in his life on September one, nineteen thirty nine,
when Germany invades Poland uh at once, they begin to
implement the early stages of the Final Solution, which had
not yet been fully plotted out but was broadly understood
by the Nazi elites. They started forcing Jews into ghettos,
and mass killings were common in the parts of Poland
that the Germans took over. Thousands of men were taken

(25:02):
by gunpoint at gunpoint and put into force labor battalions.
Now by the terms of the Molotov Ribbon trop Packed,
which is the the treaty that the Germans and the
Soviets signed before the partitioning of Poland, Vilna is an
a portion of Poland that is invaded and occupied by
the Soviet Union. As things begin to settle down and
the new Russian occupiers start to take effective control, it

(25:25):
became clear that the youth movement was going to be
forcibly disbanded. The issue was, of course, Zionism, which the
Russians wanted to discourage. Rather than risk being split up
or disrupted by secret police, Kaufner made the decision to
have his organization go underground. Officially, the hat Zomer hats
Air had ceased to exist. In reality, it was just hiding.
Dina Parat in Death of a Sparrow writes the underground's

(25:49):
first task was to find or invent new methods for
continuing their activities. As soon as the younger Hashomer hats
Air members understood that they were not being dispersed but
rather that necessity dictated a new modus operandi. They enthusiastically
begin to construct underground cells. They were organized by the
leadership into groups of five, a method learned from reading
pre revolutionary literature, recounted Covener, and only the most reliable

(26:11):
members were accepted. Key members were sent to places outside Vilna,
disguised as Christians, in private homes and outside the city limits.
They continue to study Hebrew hid books taken from the
great libraries closed by the Soviets, which had been the
heart and symbol of Jewish Vilna, and even held a
few seminars. And again at this point, their primary goal
they're helping refugees. They're trying to continue to carry out
the practice of their religion, the study of their history,

(26:34):
and they're also continuing there. They're not able to continue
to help people immigrate over to Palestine right now, but
they are. They're trying to like keep that UH infrastructure
setups that they can again one of these days. UM. Now,
they're not an insurrectionary organization at this point, and they
don't have any desire to fight a rebellion against the
Soviet state UM, but be able to keep doing Their

(26:56):
ships are that and covener in. An number of others
are aware that like ship with the Nazis, is going
to cook off and there will be a need to
fight at some point, and so they are kind of
consciously setting themselves up in a structure that will be
able to survive and resist in the in the days
that are coming. And those days come pretty quickly, you know,

(27:18):
it comes before other things. What's that, Margaret? It's uh,
the ability for people to exchange money for goods and services.
That's right, Margaret, that's really the most revolutionary activity is
exchanging money for goods and services. Absolutely. M Ah, We're

(27:46):
back my socks tucked into my fucking boots because I'm
a I'm a I'm a I'm a radical. If I
don't know, if you start with him tucked into your socks,
that was the look that I was more nervous about.
When he had his pants tucked into his boots. That's
always a solid look, right, No, no notes talked into
your socks. I don't know, I gotta see it. What

(28:08):
about having your boot stucked into your socks? What if
you put your boot your socks on the outside of
your boots. If you're attempting to move across terrain in
ways that you don't leave noticeable tracks while doing things
at night. I've heard that that's a reasonable thing to do. Well.
This has been Margaret's advice on how to carry out

(28:28):
an insurrection. Welcome. Now it's time to go back to
the story. So, um, we've just been talking about Covener
and his fellows are kind of preparing themselves for the
future inevitability of a guerrilla war, and that inevitability becomes inevitable.
I guess on June twenty two, nineteen forty one, when

(28:51):
Germany institutes Operation Barbarossa, which is still the largest military
organism operation in human history. I think they invade with
like three and a half million men or something. It
is a Titanic operation, um. And if you Titanic, yes, yeah,
And it ends a lot worse than the Titanic. Um,

(29:12):
but it's going it goes great for a while. Again,
like the Germans carry out the largest encirclement operations that
have ever happened. There's like million man blocks of the
Soviet Army that are just like annihilated or surrender or whatnot.
It's a whole big thing. It's not going well for
them at first, Um and the Germans fairly quickly into
the Lithuanian portions of the uss Are, including Vilna. Um.

(29:36):
This comes as a shock everyone. Kavner is ready for
something to happen, right, He's not shocked by the fact
that the Nazis do Nazi ship but everyone's shocked at
how poorly the Red Army performs, right, by the fact
that they fall apart so quickly um and so they
don't really they're not able to get away from this, right,
some Villna Jews handfuls are able to escape, but nearly

(29:58):
everyone is trapped by Luftwaffa bombardment and verr Machten's circlement.
So Vilna is going to be because it's one of
the first large Jewish communities that the Nazis take over
during Barbarossa, and they're going to use it as kind
of a proof of concept, right they are testing out
extermination it is. It is one of it's one of

(30:19):
the first large Jewish communities that's going to be annihilated
by the Germans. Um. Now, when they go in and
start exterminating people, most of the actual killing is being
done by members of the Lithuanian right wing members of
actually kind of adjacent to these Jewish youth movement organizations, right,
these right wing UH clubs and and paramilitary organizations who

(30:43):
had been underground under the U s SR. But when
the yeah, when the Nazis take over, they're like, hey,
we would love to take vengeance on Lithuanian leftists and Jews,
and the Germans are like, absolutely, guys. And I'm gonna
quote from Dina Porat again. When Einsatz Commando nine into
Vilma in early July, it immediately became clear that the
wave had reached the city's Jews as well. Einsetz Commando

(31:06):
nine but belonged to the Einsetz group and the s
S units that followed in the Verhrmacht'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 s S command, and right wing units were integrated

(31:26):
directly into it. That left little behind the facade of
Lithuanian independence and the Lithuanian murder of Jews, whether committed
on their own initiative or under German ages, brought them
nothing in return. The coordinated effort of the two German authorities,
the s S and the Army and the Lithuanian units
began on July fourth and marked the beginning of the
oppression and eventually the destruction of the Jewish population in Vilma.

(31:46):
The German military government issued decrees which the Lithuanian Urban
Administration put into operation the Einsetz Group and sent Lithuanians
to kidnap and murder Jews, sometimes participating themselves. Where Leverrmacht
kidnapped Jews for forced labor, the just called the Lithuanian
kidnappers Chopoon's, and some were local utes who had received
a small bounty from the Germans for every Jew turned in.

(32:07):
They broken to homes at will, robbed and beat with
no fear of retribution, and made the lives of the
Jews intolerable. These are the proud boy types, right, the
oath keepers and ship Yeah. Well, and now the Germans
are doing it here. It's fitting because like when the
Nazis take over, they just used the existing police force
and then added added more right wing stuff to the
existing police force. This is that tracks, Yeah, yeah, that

(32:30):
it completely tracks. There's a lot going on here that
again is going to become very common among the rest
of the areas the Nazis have taken. And it's because
number one, these Einstz group of units are not great
at most things. They're certainly not good at antipartisan conflict. Um.
There's not a shipload of them. And it's kind of again,

(32:53):
most of them are like not like. The participating in
these mass killings like leads to a lot of suicides
and drunkenness among the Einsets group. So whenever they have
the opportunity to use locals to do the killing for them,
they're gonna prefer that just because it kind of preserves
German unit strength. Um. There's a number of reasons why

(33:15):
they do it this way. The Jewish community enveilment is
taken wholly by surprise by this. Many chose to hide
themselves in an attempt to survive. Kavner recoils at the
prospect of hiding and of fleeing the ghetto. Um. And
but he does, he's kind of forced to write because
members of his organization are like, no, we're going to
get killed if we stay here. We have to try
to like hide with gentiles who are friendly elsewhere in

(33:37):
the city so that we can take action later. Um.
Kavner agrees to do this, but he writes that he's
covered in shame by the idea of hiding in a closet.
He is a fighter. He does not want to be
hiding right, Um, but sometimes you have to make strategic
decisions about when and where you fight. Yes, and they do,
and he he takes shelter in a group in a
Dominican monitor or a Dominican convent. That's like these nuns.

(34:02):
By the way, this is normally a show, and generally
when we bring up nuns on this show, it's very negative.
These nuns are based as ship. These are the coolest
fucking nuns I have ever heard about it. You're gonna
love these nuns. Um. So these nuns take Kauvner and
a couple of his friends in um and they are
you know, trying to like he's he's he's. He agrees
to do this, but while he's locked up, he's sending

(34:23):
out letters. He's arguing whenever he gets face to face
with someone that we need to get back in the
ghetto to fight back and defend like our our community. Um.
Part of this is because his girlfriend gets is he doesn't.
He doesn't get to escape with her. She stays in
the ghetto and for a couple of weeks she's sending
him letters about how bad the conditions are, and then
the letters stop abruptly and they never pick back up again,

(34:47):
and he doesn't know what's happened to her. She's obviously
she's been killed, um, but he doesn't. He's not able
to find that out. He has no good information about
what's going on. And in the early days, all these
all the Jews and villana have are conflict lifting rumors
about the slaughter, because what one of the ways the
Germans carry out the massacre is they put together a
second ghetto, and this provides them with the ability to

(35:10):
move large numbers of film and Jews without making it
seem suspicious. We're not you know, we're taking you to
the next ghetto. And then these guys all get taken
out in massacred, right, But they don't have to say
we're going to kill all these people and there's a
little bit of plausible deniability, so it stops a panic
from taking right like happened in and or in the
jail scene, exactly like that. Um So most of these people,

(35:31):
which is tens of thousands of people from mid to
late are taken to a place called Ponari, which had
previously been a picnicking spot, and they were gunned down
and tossed into mass graves. Most of the actual killing,
again is done by Lithuanian right wing partisans. One local
witness to the slaughter later wrote, eleventh July lovely weather.

(35:51):
It's hot out. There are white clouds and a gentle breeze.
Shooting can be heard from the forest, presumably from training.
The shooting started at four pm. Then I wasn't formed
that many Jews were transported to the forest via the
road to Grodno and were then shot. This was the
first day of executions, a depressing feeling. The shooting stopped
at about eight in the evening. For the Germans, three
hundred Jews or three hundred enemies of humanity. For the Lithuanians,

(36:14):
three hundred Jews or three hundred pairs of shoots of shoes,
trousers and clothes. Damn. That's such an interesting like way
of breaking it down about like, well, the Germans hate
the Jews and we just want to steal all the
ship from the Jews. Yep. That is a big part
of what is happening here. Um, So that's good. When

(36:36):
the Germans occupied Vilna, the ghetto has again a population
of sixty thousand. I've also heard eighty thousand because of
the refugees. There's not you're not gonna get there's not
like a census, right being taken. That's that's particularly good.
By December of nineteen thirty one, though less than a
third remain Yeah, December of the same year. So in
less than a year they go from sixty seventy people

(36:57):
to twenty thousand, um because of how many are massacred.
But while these massacres are occurring because the Germans, there's
some plausible deniability and there's not great Again, there's not
like the Internet, social Media's not like a lot of
good ways to figure out what's happening outside your door.
So a lot of Vilna's Jews still don't believe that
the annihilation is being carried out well, and part of

(37:22):
why they don't believe it is. They have friends and
relatives over in Warsaw, and at this point in time,
a lot of the correspondents that the Villaina Jews are
getting from their relatives in the West is that like, yeah,
there was some killing earlier, but it's calmed down, and
like we think it's gonna be okay. And again this
is also we're talking centuries of Jewish history where like, yeah,
there will be these these eruptions and there will be massacres,

(37:45):
but then things will calm down. Again. You have to
deal with some bullshit laws, but like we don't get
wiped out right, um. And that's kind of what people
think is happening. Um. And so there's this, there's this
belief among a lot of this even though a lot
of people have been killed, that like it's not going
to be as bad as it is as it clearly is.
And again I'm saying this, these people are not like irrational,

(38:06):
They're not weak, they're not shitty, They're they're dealing with
an unprecedented situation right now, as early reports of German
atrocity start to leak out in the middle of the
standard belief. So there's this group and this is every ghetto. Right,
there's an organization called the udn rot Um, which is
rot is like a it's spelled rat, like the animal,

(38:26):
but it's like a governing council. Right, This is just
like a general word in the area. And the juven
Rat is the governing council of the ghetto, right um,
and the Nazis endorsed and established June Rots in the
ghettos that they take, you know, control of and to
make people think that they have any control over their
own lives. Yeah, and it's it's a mix of some

(38:48):
of these guys who are part of the judn Rat
are as with you find in any community, like self
serving assholes who they get better kind of conditions and
better food by by doing this. A lot of them, though,
are just people who are well, if we work with them,
we can avoid getting massacred, we can like reduce the
amount of violence our community has to suffer. Again there

(39:10):
and again, a lot of like people in specifically radical
organizations are really angry at a lot of the folks
who agree to be in the June Rat. Obviously, I'm
not gonna come down morally on anybody who's trying to
survive the fucking Holocaust, like this is a fucking nightmare.
But in this case, you know, there is there are
these reports are starting to filter into the ghetto um

(39:32):
and the June Rats official line is that the killings
that have occurred outside of Vilna are the results of
an isolated, crazy German commander, not a broad policy of genocide.
And it's gonna be okay, right, their job is to
keep everybody calm um, and that's what they're trying to do,
is like they they in the end, it was the

(39:56):
wrong call, right, Yeah, they didn't know it was the
wrong call. The p who joined at least again only
when I've looked at as the one in the warsaw
and it was like a lot of the people who
were part of the jude and Rot were like, yeah,
this is how we think we will best survive this
intact and and they were wrong. And but they were wrong,
but they didn't there was no way to know they

(40:18):
were wrong besides like, yeah, they're not wrong because like
they were pad people or whatever. They're wrong because in
part because this was not in a lot of times
in which Jewish communities had faced danger in the past,
stuff like this had been the right thing to do
right had had been the thing that preserved the community. Um. Again,

(40:40):
this is just an unprecedented time. They are wrong, But
I have no I have no interest in morally totally
any of the people making decisions, but possibly situation. Oh,
the products and services that support this podcast, Margaret. They
they think all times are precedented as shit, and they
don't care about you. Yeah, but that's because we care

(41:02):
about them. It's a one way It's like an anxious
versus um. It's like an attachment style problem, you know
that we have with ads. Oh, I would just say
that we have so much love for them that there's
no there's no cosmic space for them to love us. Left.
It's our fault. Yea, it is our fault. Yeah, Ah,

(41:29):
we are we are. We are that because we think
m hmm, that's right. I think we're the first people
to come up with that idea. So these guys, you know, again,
we have no interest here in morally judging the members
of the unon Rock. But the fact that they make

(41:49):
this choice to try to convince their people that annihilation
is not imminent. Um, it's not going to be the
right thing to do right. It does not wind up
helping the matter um. In late summer, a number of
women escape from mass graves at polmari Um. And this
is a thing that happened, right. These are you know,
they're they're either they're wounded but they survived, or they

(42:09):
kind of feigned death. And they wind up under a
pile of the corpses of their loved ones and then
dig themselves out in the night, and they make it
back to the fucking ghetto or or back to Vilna.
And they managed to find like friendly people to talk
to and they try to warn everyone, right, they try
to be like, no guys, like they are going to
kill us all they're already doing it um and again,

(42:30):
I'm gonna pass over to Dina parat here um. The
un Rod forbade anyone to meet with them, but even
individuals far removed from the un Rod had the greatest
difficulty in believing the survivor's accounts. Peha aaron Owitz, who
arrived wounded at the home of Dr. Mark Vretsky, the
ghetto children's physician, managed to convince him, although he hesitated

(42:52):
for a long time before believing her. Others, however, were
certain she had gone mad, and she stopped telling her
story It was in Vilna and Lithuania, the 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 do those living in safety.
Perhaps the opposite was true, that those who lived near

(43:13):
the killing pits and the train stations from which the
transports left did not believe, because if they had, they
could no longer have continued living. This is the I
know that there's no bottom to the worst thing that
one could experience during this time, but this is up there.
You survive a mass shooting, I mean a mass grave situation,

(43:37):
You survive execution, You crawl out underneath your friends and family,
You go and warn everyone, and everyone is like, okay, Cassandra,
you're just crazy because they can't believe the enormity you're
telling them, Um and no one, these women, I mean, well,
and that's probably not not a part of it too, right.

(44:01):
So Abba Kovner, like most Villna Jews, did not know
what to do it first, because he's not getting he's
not he hasn't sat down face to face with all
these people. He's just it's just rumors, right, And it's
rumors that he's hearing while he's hiding underground in a
Dominican convent. Right. Um. Now, he does eventually succeed kind
of an in late summer early fall in leaving the

(44:22):
convent and moving to a safe house in the ghetto
with some of his comrades. And in September, a group
of two women and one eleven year old escaped the
burial pits and make it back to Vilna. Uh. They
visit a doctor again who was a member of the
hats Omer under Abba Kovner. So this is a guy
who's like one of his his his his boys, and
when the doctor hears their story, he invites Kovner to

(44:43):
come and talk to them. So, for the most part,
Kogner spent the early months of occupation focused on smaller tasks. Right.
He's establishing communications lines, he's helping get safe houses, he's
getting his people in position, he's trying to facilitate their
movement wherever he can. And this is the first moment,
because he's kind of just been keeping himself busy, this
is the first moment where he's forced to come to

(45:04):
terms with the fact that his community is being exterminated.
His immediate thought was that he needed to kill himself. Um,
he just wants to die. Like the second he learns
that this is happening, his immediate urge is to commit suicide. Um,
which is valid but of course, yeah, literally any reaction
would be that. But of course he can't. He decided

(45:28):
he like, he can't. He wants to do that, but
he can't do that because his people are in danger.
So he decides to opt for the next best thing
to suicide, armed resistance. Now let's get back to those nuns.
I was telling you what, I'm really excited about this.
I'm really excited to when actually do good. The mother
Superior who had hosted, who had hid Covener and his

(45:49):
friends in the convent, had been distraught when they left.
She did not want him to leave. She wanted to help.
She repeatedly told him that she wanted to fight alongside them. Um,
she's a pretty good lie. And after hearing a bunch
of this, Kaufner basically tells her, if that's how you
really feel, get us some weapons. And so one day
in December of nineteen forty one, she shows up in

(46:10):
full nun garb outside the ghetto with a bunch of
hand grenades hidden under that. Yeah, that's fucking rat. That
is quality nunning. Um. She she has officially won my
favorite nun award. M so good on you there. There's

(46:33):
a ton of really good ones. Uh, there's the whole
like thing. Clear you've seen the map of like Catholics
versus voters of the Nazi Party in Germany. Yeah, it's
just an inverse map, um. Yeah, which is interesting of
course because Catholics were very down with fascism in Spain
at literally the same time. But like, it's just it's interesting.

(46:56):
I find it interesting. There's like a billion of them.
Yeah know, there's there's a wide variety of Catholics and
this this one rocks. She tells him that she wants
to join the Jews and fight with them because God
is now in the ghetto. That's that is her. Like,
it's very I think this is pre liberation theology, but
she is very much like the place for me because

(47:18):
is with the people being oppressed, because that's where God's
going to be total, which is fucking based. Um. Smuggling
grenades into the ghetto in your habit is rad as shit.
Um so she and she is like, let me come,
I want to fucking kill some Nazis with like I
need you to go back to the convent, like this

(47:39):
is how you can help us best. We're not ready
to do that yet, but thank you for all of
these and grenades. Um. He later wrote quote, I mixed
in with the column of Jews returning from their day
of forced labor. I felt my soul torn. What would
happen if it the grenade fell from my hand, or
if I tripped and fell, and because of me, a
whole community where to trip and fall as well. Till

(48:00):
that day, I had never touched a hand grenade. I
didn't know how to use one. So he's got some
weapons there, he doesn't really know what to do with them.
That's that's a process, right. Um So, while he and
his partisan's plan for their first attacks against the German occupier,
Kavner puts it upon himself, now that he knows what's happening,
that he knows the stakes are complete annihilation. He takes

(48:21):
it upon himself to put out a warning to the
rest of Europe's Jews. The mass killing of the Holocaust
had started in Lithuania and Vilma's Jewish community was among
the very first to be wiped out. Jews further west
still had no idea what was coming for them, and
the international community knew even less. He had to warn them.
So the same month he gets those grenades, December of
nineteen one, Kavner writes a message that is soon smuggled

(48:45):
into ghettos all across the East, particularly in Poland, and
makes its way out of Nazi Europe and across the world.
I'm going to read it to you now, Jewish youngster,
do not trust those that deceive you. Of the eighty
thousand Jews and the Jerus Salem of Lithuania Vilna, only
twenty thousand have survived in front of our very eyes.
They tore our parents, our brothers, are sisters from us.

(49:08):
Where are the hundreds of men who were abducted for
labor by the Lithuanian kidnappers. Where are the naked women
and children who were taken from us on the terrible
night of the provocation. Where the Jews who were taken
away on yam Kapur, Where our brethren from the second Ghetto,
whoever was taken out of the ghetto gates never returned again.
All the roads of the Gestapo leave to lead to Ponari,

(49:28):
and Ponari is death. Hitler is plotting to annihilate all
the Jews of Europe. It befell the Jews of Lithuania
to be first in line. Let us not go like
sheep to the slaughter. It's true we are weak and defenseless,
but the only response to the enemy is resistance. Brothers.
It is better to die as free fighters than to
live at the mercy of murderers. Resist to our last breath.

(49:50):
Yeah this guy, Yeah yeah, This is the first major
warning that comes out that like, what is on the
table is complete an I Lakavner is the one who
gives it. So that's where we're gonna end part one.
All right, um, lots of good stuff. Well well, actually,

(50:13):
I mean I don't know. I have no idea what's
going to happen next. So it is, this is a
fascinating story, Margaret. But at this point, I mean, Kavnor
is an amazing man. Uh and at this point like
a guy who is handling himself impossibly well in an
impossible situation. Um, as are a number of other people,

(50:33):
including that based ass fucking mother superior Uh, what a
what a what a rab lady? So think about that
and uh go smuggle hand grenades to someone who maybe,
uh probably should just Margaret, you've got some plug doubles
to plug. I have a story about nuns coming out,

(50:55):
Oh you do? Or rather I have a story with
some nuns in it. I have a book, Escape from
Insul Island that does what it says on the title
on the cover, and it is coming out from Strangers
and the Tangled Wilderness on February one, and you can
pre order it at Tangled Wilderness dot org and get
a free poster of the cover. It's a really cool cover.

(51:16):
I think it'll people will be excited about it. Um,
it's a cool cover. It's a very good book. And
you know, when you think about it, Margaret, the Vatican
is kind of an in cell island. Yeah it is.
I'm sorry. The Catholics are definitely the good guys on
this episode, but I couldn't resist that. That's fine. I

(51:39):
guess their vall cell you know, yeah, yeah, definitely ostensibly
ostensibly cell. Um. Yeah, that's that's what I got. I
also a podcast people can check out called Cool People
Do Stuff. It's really good. Thank you. Yeah. Sometimes Robert's there,

(51:59):
Sophie's yeah, I'm always there. Yeah. I'm also sometimes on
sub stack where you can find me. Yeah, it's shatter
zone dot sub stack dot com. Check that out. I
write things usually is one thing every week, so you
can read more ship from me. If for some reason,

(52:19):
I'm not in your life enough. Um. Anyway, go to
hell and Robert we're doing We're there's a behind the
Master show at s F Sketch Fest in in January, right,
really you'll be there, really, Okay, I've never heard you
do that voice before, and I didn't enjoy it. I'm
just letting you know. Yeah, I didn't enjoy it either.

(52:40):
It was a little loud. Honestly, I feel terrible about that. Yeah,
it's January twenty tickets stress, I don't know. There's probably
a link. Hell yeah, I won't make the sound joke again.
I already made it once. M I enjoyed it. I
enjoyed it the first and second time. Thank you. I
appreciate on and R and by. Behind the Bastards is

(53:05):
a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.