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Vitka
Kempner Kovner’s life-story is one of struggle, courage, and
determination. Not only did she manage to survive the
Holocaust, but also as a member of a Partisan unit from Vilna,
she engaged in acts of sabotage and physical resistance
directed against the Germans.
Vitka,
wife of poet/ underground leader, Abba Kovner, was born and
raised outside of Vilna, in the Polish city of Kalish.
“Kalish was on the German border, and by the second day of
the war the Germans invaded the city. Thus for me the war
began very early on," Vitka recalls.
Shortly
after the Germans arrived in Kalish, the Jews of the city were
expelled to a monastery. “I saw how the Germans were
treating the Jews and how they were humiliating them,"
says Vitka, "and very quickly I decided to escape.”
That night Vitka said goodbye to her parents, without truly
imagining that their parting would be forever. “It took a
long time for me to understand that it was the end,” she
relates.
Together
with other youths from her vicinity, Vitka, then 19-years-old,
began her journey to Vilna. As a member of the HaShomer
HaTzair Youth Movement, she was informed that in Vilna,
which was not yet under German occupation, she could join the
ranks of other youth group members and possibly immigrate to
Palestine. It was a hard journey; Vitka and the other youths
had to cross areas that were under Soviet occupation in order
to reach Vilna. Fortunately,
the Germans did not succeed in thwarting their escape
and Vitka arrived in Vilna, where she lived until Russia
annexed the region in 1940, forcing her to leave.
In June 1941, Vilna was occupied by the Nazis, and Vitka
returned to the city. "I remember coming back to a
different city than the one I left," says Vitka.
"They began rounding up the men and we started to live in
great fear. We decided to hide whomever we could outside the
city.”
At
the same time, rumors began circulating about the ghetto:
It
was a time of fear. We did not know where the Jews were taken
to from the ghetto, and why they did not come back. When we
arrived at the ghetto, everything was still warm: the unmade
beds, the hot burners; it was obvious that somebody had lived
there until very recently.
When
they understood the fate of the Jews, there was a great deal
of ambivalence: Should they flee? Should they fight?
Once
we arrived at the decision to stay and fight, we gathered all
those who were hiding in monasteries, including Abba Kovner.
When I arrived at his monastery, the head-nun begged us not to
go. She said she was willing to hide us all. We told her that
it wasn’t right to look after ourselves and leave the other
Jews behind in the ghetto, and that we must fight for the sake
of everyone. 'In that case,' said the nun, 'I am also coming
with you.' And indeed she came with us to the ghetto, but the
guards identified her as a non-Jew and would not let her
enter.
Inside
the ghetto the underground established three goals: to hold an
uprising if informed that the ghetto was about to be
liquidated (otherwise they would endanger Jewish lives in
vain), to execute terrorist attacks outside the ghetto, and to
join the Partisans in the forest.
“I
joined the team that was responsible for terrorist attacks
outside the ghetto, and my first and important mission,
together with Yoske Maskovitz, was to detonate a bomb on the
railway in order to damage the train that transported
equipment to the war front,” recalls Vitka.
Detonating
the bomb turned out to be the easiest part of the mission. In
order to determine where and when to place the bomb, Vitka had
to exit the ghetto many times, an act involving much danger
and permitted
only to those in work groups. “I sat entire nights following
the trains’ routes, trying to determine the hours they
passed by and when the Germans patrolled and checked the
railways.”
Once
Vitka managed to escape from the ghetto, she had to remove the
Yellow Star, an act punishable by death had she been caught.
Returning to the ghetto, too, was not simple and once, taking
a wrong turn, she ended up in a grove in the middle of a Nazi
training camp. Gathering her wits, she approached the Germans
and pretended to be a Polish woman who was lost; thanks to her
correct accent, she succeeded in deceiving them.
“Finally,
after months of planning, and with the help of a policeman
from the ghetto, we sneaked out the bomb that Abba had built
and detonated it. When we managed to get back into the ghetto
[without being discovered] it was a day of celebration,”
Vitka remarks. The bomb worked as planned, and according to
the newspapers, a great deal of damage was done to the train
cars, and a few soldiers were killed. “The Germans believed
in collective responsibility and had they known that Jews had
executed the bombing they would have had us killed by the
thousands.” The
Germans did not imagine that this was the work of Jews, and,
therefore, retaliated by executing all the residents in a
nearby Polish town.
After
fighting in the Vilna ghetto, Vitka joined a division of
Jewish Partisans, and at the end of the war she joined a
retaliatory group:
We
had seen concentration camps, and after what we witnessed
there we decided that even though the war was over, we had to
take revenge for the spilling of Jewish blood. We carried out
one mission in which we poisoned a camp of SS soldiers, and
following this mission we understood that we had to leave
Europe.
Vitka
arrived in Palestine in 1946, and settled in Kibbutz Ein
Hahoresh, where she still lives today. She and Abba Kovner
(who passed away in 1987) have two children and four
grandchildren.
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