Dina Porat

Nakam is the Hebrew for ‘revenge’, and the 50 men and women who planned mass poisonings of Germans in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War were the Nokmim, ‘Avengers’. They were a secretive group, survivors of the Holocaust, who refused to divulge any hard facts about their activities. Dina Porat, a professor of modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, has researched their story in meticulous (and, it should be said, reverential) detail. As Porat herself admits, not every question has an answer, or even lends itself to an interpretation. Even today, some of the surviving Nokmim, well into their nineties, remain tight-lipped, not from fear or regret, but because they do not think the outside world would understand.

Acts of vengeance after 1945 were certainly not uncommon, both from the Allied forces and liberated camp inmates. The bestiality of the Nazis had plumbed unfathomable depths and many could think of nothing but vengeance. Marshal Zhukov told his Red Army soldiers to take ‘a brutal revenge against the Hitlerites’. Porat records that between 150,000 and 200,000 ‘Russian babes’ were born after mass rapes.

Jewish partisans emerging from the forests and the surviving ghetto fighters discovered that there was no one left. Their families and friends were gone. On returning home, they found squatters who asked quizzically: ‘Are you still alive?’ There were pogroms in Kielce, Radom, Częstochowa and Łódź which Soviet forces did not attempt to prevent. Nor did they punish the perpetrators.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Colin Shindler is emeritus professor at SOAS, University of London.… (mais)