The Avengers: A Jewish War Story [Hardcover]

Rich Cohen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 19, 2000

In 1944, a band of Jewish guerrillas emerged from the Baltic forest to join the Russian army in its attack on Vilna, the capital of Lithuania. The band, called the Avengers, was led by Abba Kovner, a charismatic young poet. In the ghetto, Abba had built bombs, sneaking out through the city's sewer tunnels to sabotage German outposts. Abba's chief lieutenants were two teenage girls, Vitka Kempner and Ruzka Korczak. At seventeen, Vitka and Ruzka were perhaps the most daring partisans in the East, the first to blow up a Nazi train in occupied Europe. Each night, the girls shared a bed with Abba, raising gossip in the ghetto. But what they found was more than temporary solace. It was a great love affair. After the liquidation of the ghetto, the Avengers escaped through the city's sewage tunnels to the forest, where they lived for more than a year in a dugout beside a swamp, fighting alongside other partisan groups, and ultimately bombing the city they loved, destroying Vilna's waterworks and its powerplant in order to pave the way for its liberation.

Leaving a devastated Poland behind them, they set off for the cities of Europe: Vitka and Abba to the West, where they would be instrumental in orchestrating the massive Jewish exodus to the biblical homeland, and Ruzka to Palestine, where she would be literally the first person to bring a first hand account of the Holocaust to Jewish leaders. It was in these last terrifying days--with travel in Europe still unsafe for Jews and the extent of the Holocaust still not widely known--that the Avengers hatched their plan for revenge. Before it was over, the group would have smuggled enough poison into Nuremberg to kill ten thousand Nazis. The Avengers is the story of what happened to these rebels in the ghetto and in the forest, and how, fighting for the State of Israel, they moved beyond the violence of the Holocaust and made new lives.

From Rich Cohen, one of the preeminent journalists of his generation and author of the highly praised Tough Jews, a powerful exploration of vindication and revenge, of dignity and rebellion, painstakingly recreated through his exclusive access to the Avengers themselves. Written with insight, sensitivity, and the moral force of one of the last great struggles of the Second World War, here is an unforgettable story for our time.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Rich Cohen, author of Tough Jews, has written what he calls "a Holocaust story without a concentration camp" about Jewish resistance fighters during World War II. The Avengers: A Jewish War Story describes how three young Jews--Cohen's cousin Ruzka Korczak, her friend Abba Kovner, and Kovner's future wife Vitka Klemperer--created an armed, underground movement behind the German lines in Poland with the goal of sabotaging the Nazis and helping the Russians advance. Cohen reports that Kovner described the group's dilemma this way: "If we act cowardly, we die; if we act courageously, we die. So we might as well act courageously." The group's fighting outlasted the war to exact revenge on the Nazis held in Nuremberg and finally to fight for Israel in the 1948 War for Independence. Researching The Avengers, Cohen spent time with the surviving resistance fighters in Israel and in Eastern Europe. The result is a deeply personal and impassioned defense of a movement that some readers will view with pride and others will condemn as vigilantism. This book, like Tough Jews, is a lively, intelligent, and heartfelt work of Jewish history. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

As a child visiting an Israeli kibbutz on a family vacation, Cohen met a relative who had survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel. Slight and gray-haired, Ruzka looked a lot like Cohen's grandmother, but her stories introduced him to a little-known, remarkable group of Jews: the Avengers, who fought Nazis in the gloomy forests of Eastern Europe and later battled for Israel's independence. As Cohen notes, these "were the kind of people who inspired Joseph Goebbels to write in his diary, 'One sees what the Jews can do when they are armed.'" An ardent Zionist, Ruzka left her home in Poland in 1939, as German troops were occupying the country, and made her way to Vilna, Lithuania, where she hoped to find passage to Palestine. Arrested as an "illegal immigrant" upon her arrival, she was released through the efforts of a Zionist youth group who gave her shelter in their headquarters. There, Ruzka met Vitka Kempner, another young girl on her own, and Abba Kovner, a charismatic young man whose steadfast belief in resistance and canny strategies inspired the Avengers. In period-perfect detail, Cohen portrays scenes of ghetto life in Vilna, the efforts of a Jewish leader who thought he could help his people by collaborating with the Germans and, above all, the riveting story of the Avengers' escape from the ghetto, their acceptance of a renegade German officer who hated his army and their eventual emigration to Palestine. Cohen (Tough Jews: Father, Sons and Gangster Dreams) delivers a compelling story that not only amplifies the accepted version of Jewish experience in the Second World War, but also provides a terrific narrative of courage and tenacity. Photographs. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (September 19, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375405461
• ISBN-13: 978-0375405464
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #580,882 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Out of the ashes, January 7, 2002

By 

Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Avengers (Paperback)

I was drawn to this book by the story of Abba Kovner--a Vilna native, a partisan and a poet. Although Cohen's writing is fine, it offers little poetic value. But like other readers, I could not put the book down.

This novel-like non-fiction offers many layers. The book opens with the author's discovery of his family and roots in Israel. Cohen's grandmother--one of nine siblings in Plosk, Poland--immigrated to America in 1920. The family intended for everyone to follow, but like so many poor Eastern European Jews, ran out of money. No one else was able to leave.

Several years after World War II, Cohen's grandmother learned from a former Polish neighbor that nearly every Jew in Plosk had perished. But her eldest brother's daughter, Ruzka Korczak, had survived as a partisan in the forests near Vilna, fighting with Abba Kovner and Vitka Kempner. She was the only member of the family in Poland who survived.

The book swiftly transports readers to the Vilna ghetto and a tale of survival and great courage. Shortly after Hitler and Stalin signed their non-aggression pact and German divisions flooded her area and town, Ruzka determined to move to Warsaw, where she hoped to meet the Zionist Youth Guard, HaShomer HaTza'ir. She planned to return to Plosk a few months later, when things calmed down. About 10 miles outside Warsaw, with the city in flames, she ran into a friend who told her HaShomir had moved to Vilna, in the Russian zone. She traveled three weeks to reach Bialystok and then crossed at night into Vilna, where shortly afterwards she met Vitka Kempner and Abba Kovner.

At that time, 200,000 people lived in Vilna, a third of them Jewish. But the Jewish minority was heavily divided into factions--the communists, who distrusted Bundists, who distrusted Zionists, who distrusted Orthodox Jews. All of them distrusted assimilated Jews, and all feared the Soviet police, the NKVD. Threatened with arrest, Vitka fled Vilna, but returned weeks after the Nazis overtook both Vilna and her own location. On September 6, 1941, 30,000 Jews were forced into the Old Jewish Ghetto, where before only 1,000 had lived.

By then, the Jewish people were gravely threatened. Abba Kovner hid in a nearby convent. But rumors of the murder of thousands in the forest of Ponar brought him back to Vilna, at Vitka's behest, to hear the story from a single survivor named Sara.

At this dramatic juncture, Kovner realized that the Jewish people could escape only by battle. In December, 1941, he told fellow Ghetto residents that Ponar was a death trap and began to search for arms, an effort assisted by a former communist named Isaac Wittenberg, and Joseph Glassman. Together they located, bought and smuggled weapons into Vilna through the sewers, even obtaining grenades from the Mother Superior who had earlier hidden Kovner. Wittenberg was forced to surrender to the Nazis and committed suicide in prison.

By 1943, the Germans were taking Jews from the Ghetto by increasing thousands and Kovner recognized that most would never return. He planned his escape, taking Vitka, Ruzka and others with him into the forests to fight. Leaving his mother was the hardest thing he had ever done. Her last words to him--"What will become of me?"-- forever rang in his ears.

But Kovner put the survival of a few Jewish fighters above his family. When World War II was over, he went on fighting, alongside David Ben-Gurion, for his people's right to their ancient Jewish homeland of Israel.

Nowadays we sometimes use the word hero lightly. Kovner and two daring female fighters really earned the label: They helped to lead the Jewish people triumphantly out of the ashes into an era of rebirth.

We owe Rich Cohen our gratitude for bringing these heroes once again to life. Alyssa A. Lappen

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book about courage and resistance, April 7, 2005

By 

Mark T. Sorna "Real Person" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Avengers: A Jewish War Story (Hardcover)

I have read many books about Jewish resistance during World War II and this one is among the best I have read. Once I started reading it, I could not put it down. The book covers the life of Abba Kovner, a Jewish resistance fighter from Vilna, through World War II and its aftermath. At the end of the war, Abba planned and executed acts of revenge against the Nazis. This is described in the book as well as Abba's participation in Israel's War of Independence. The book is well written and easy to read. It gives you two different pictures of Jewish suffering during the war. One picture is that of many of the Jews in the Vilna Ghetto.....one of fear and submission to the Nazi oppression. The other picture is that of Abba and his group of partisans.....one of resistance and hatred of the Nazi oppressors.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kids who raged, "We won't go like humble lambs!", February 7, 2003

By 

toothygrin "toothygrin" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Avengers (Paperback)

I'm a slower reader. I get bored by a lot of books but this was impossible to put down. Rich Cohen covers the pivotal story of young people confronted with outrageous injustice. While others were trying to placate the Nazis & the local Gentiles these teenagers said: NO--!

The writing is very good with a combination of novelistic and journalistic styles.

I feel very enriched by having read it and recommend the book 100%.