Abba Kovner (Hebrew: אבא קובנר; born 14 March 1918) is a Jewish partisan in Reichskommissariat Ostland and leader of the United Partisan Organization, the strongest anti-Nazi resistance movement in Ostland.
"We will not go like Sheep to the Slaughter."
These words have defined the entire life of Abba Kovner, the leader of the loose confederation of partisans known as the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (United Partisan Organization). From the presses of Germania newpapers roll, telling of the evil deeds of Judeo-Bolshevik terrorists:of the graves dug for innocent men, women, and children. A devil in the skin of a man Goebbels would claim.
History[]
Born in 1918, Kovner grew up in a world that despised him and his family for the simple reason of their faith and culture. As a local leader of the Marxist Zionist youth group HaShomr HaTzair, Kovner watched anxiously as the sparks of the Second World War exploded into an inferno - and in 1942, as an influential man in the Vilna Ghetto, became one of the first to correctly determine the sum of German antisemitism: the total annihilation of Europe's Jews. Kovner refused to go quietly into the night and instead led his young partisan group into the forests outside of Vilna - calling themselves the Nokmim, the Avengers.
Kovner was not under any delusion of grandeur over his position. It was a hopeless war. The best he could ask for was to show the world that he, his friends, and his comrades had taken a stand against immeasurable odds - all attempts at justice had, however, faltered. The sympathetic officers in the Wehrmacht were executed for treason - the officers he assassinated were always replaced. Every slave camp that was liberated and destroyed only served as fertile ground for the next to be constructed. Even upon the West Russian War, between the assassination of Wilhelm Keitel, the conspiracy with Panteleimon Ponomarenko and the Schutzstaffel Rebellion - no justice was gained. The earth became littered with bodies Ponomarenko and Keitel among them, united in their insignificance.
Even after all these long, Bloody years, Abba Kovner is still not the monster that Germany assumes him to be. He is not a mythical slaughterer of innocents nor children; rather, he is a Dybbuk: a vengeful spirit in the skin of a man, heart aching for justice.