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In 1944, a band of Jewish guerrillas emerged from the Baltic forests to join the Russian army in its attack on Vilna, the capital of Lithuania. The band was led by Abba Kovner, a charismatic young poet and Zionist leader. In the ghetto, Abba had built bombs, sneaking them out through the city's sewer tunnels to sabotage German outposts. His chief lieutenants were two teenage girls, Vitka Kemper and Ruzka Korczak. At seventeen, Vitka and Ruzka were perhaps the most daring partisans in the East, the first to blow up a train in occupied Europe. Each night, the three of them shared a bed, raising gossip, but what they found together was more than temporary solace. It was a great love affair. Then, in the last terrifying days of the war with travel in Europe still unsafe for Jews and the extent of the Holocaust still widely unknown they hatched a plan for revenge: before it was over, they would have smuggled enough poison into Nuremberg to kill 10,000 Nazis. The Avengers is the story of what happened to these rebels in the ghetto and in the forest, how they took revenge, and how fighting for the state of Israel, they moved beyond the violence of the Holocaust and made new lives. Here, from RICH COHEN, the author of the highly praised Tough Jews, is one of the last great untold stories of World War II.
In 1944, a band of Jewish guerrillas emerged from the Baltic forests to join the Russian army in its attack on Vilna, the capital of Lithuania. The band was led by Abba Kovner, a charismatic young poet and Zionist leader. In the ghetto, Abba had built bombs, sneaking them out through the city's sewer tunnels to sabotage German outposts. His chief lieutenants were two teenage girls, Vitka Kemper and Ruzka Korczak. At seventeen, Vitka and Ruzka were perhaps the most daring partisans in the East, the first to blow up a train in occupied Europe. Each night, the three of them shared a bed, raising gossip, but what they found together was more than temporary solace. It was a great love affair. Then, in the last terrifying days of the war with travel in Europe still unsafe for Jews and the extent of the Holocaust still widely unknown they hatched a plan for revenge: before it was over, they would have smuggled enough poison into Nuremberg to kill 10,000 Nazis. The Avengers is the story of what happened to these rebels in the ghetto and in the forest, how they took revenge, and how fighting for the state of Israel, they moved beyond the violence of the Holocaust and made new lives. Here, from RICH COHEN, the author of the highly praised Tough Jews, is one of the last great untold stories of World War II.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
About the Author-
RICH COHEN has written for the New York Times Magazine among many other publications. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and recently co-wrote a filmscript with Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger. He lives in New York City.
Reviews-
The only good thing Hitler ever did for the Jews was to unite them. Larry King, signature voice of television journalism, narrates a story of unification, a compelling piece of Holocaust history, in which a band of Lithuanian Jewish partisans fights the Germans with guerilla warfare before it existed. Their leader, Abba Kovner, slept between his lieutenants. King's delivery comes fast and clear. The match of author and reader creates a quality contribution to WWII literature. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
September 4, 2000 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.
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Bahrain, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
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The only good thing Hitler ever did for the Jews was to unite them. Larry King, signature voice of television journalism, narrates a story of unification, a compelling piece of Holocaust history, in which a band of Lithuanian Jewish partisans fights the Germans with guerilla warfare before it existed. Their leader, Abba Kovner, slept between his lieutenants. King's delivery comes fast and clear. The match of author and reader creates a quality contribution to WWII literature. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
