Either way, when Kovner sailed for Europe with the poison, he drew suspicion from British authorities and was forced to toss it overboard before he was arrested.įollowing that setback, attention shifted toward Plan B, a more limited operation that specifically targeted the worst Nazi perpetrators. Initiated by the resistance fighter and noted Israeli poet Abba Kovner, the idea was to poison the water supply of Nuremberg, a plot that could have potentially killed hundreds of thousands.īut there were deep reservations even among the Avengers that such an operation would kill innocent Germans and undermine international support for the establishment of Israel. The first plan of action described by Harmatz was audacious. “As many as possible,” he quickly replied. So the group set out with a simple mission. “We didn’t understand why it shouldn’t be paid back,” said Harmatz, who was nicknamed Julek, and lost most of his family in the Holocaust. While there were some isolated acts of Jews harming individual Nazis after the war, the group, codenamed Nakam, Hebrew for vengeance, sought a more comprehensive form of punishment.
There was a deep sense of justice denied, as the vast majority of Nazis immersed themselves back into a post-war Germany that was being rebuilt by the Americans’ Marshall plan. The Nuremberg trials were prosecuting some top Nazis, but the Jewish people had no formal representative. For even more, the whole concept of reprisals seemed pointless given the sheer scope of the genocide.īut a group of some 50, most young men and women who had already fought in the resistance, could not let the crimes go unpunished and actively sought to exact at least a small measure of revenge. For others, physical retribution ran counter to Jewish morals and traditions. For most, merely rebuilding their lives and starting new families was revenge enough against a Nazi regime that aimed to destroy them. “We didn’t want to come back (to pre-state Israel) without having done something, and that is why we were keen,” Harmatz said in a hoarse, whispery voice from his apartment in north Tel Aviv.ĭespite a visceral desire for vengeance, most Holocaust survivors were too weary or devastated to seriously consider it, after their world was shattered and 6 million Jews killed during World War II.
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