Vitka Kempner

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Jewish resistance fighters after the Soviet occupation of Vilna (July 1944), on the far right Vitke Kempner, in the middle standing her future husband Abba Kovner , on his right Rozka Korczak

Vitka Kempner (also Vitke Kempner or Witka Kempner ; born March 14, 1920 in Kalisz ; † February 15, 2012 in Kibbutz En HaChoresch , Israel ) was a Polish - Jewish partisan leader in World War II and became a member of the Nakam organization . After the war she was an Israeli and worked as a psychologist .

Life

Vitka Kempner grew up in a Jewish family in Kalisz. When the Wehrmacht conquered the city in 1939, it was 19 years old. She managed to flee to the Soviet-occupied Vilna ( Yiddish Vilne) in what is now Lithuania , known as the "Jerusalem of the East" and known as the "Jerusalem of the East" , and she never saw her parents who had stayed behind in Kalisz again. Just eight months after their escape, the Wehrmacht marched into Vilna for Operation Barbarossa , and their hope of escaping to Palestine soon was gone. All of the city's Jews were rounded up in the Vilna ghetto in 1941 . Vitka joined the Jewish youth organization Haschomer Hazair in Vilnius , where she met Rozka Korczak and Abba Kovner . Vitka heard of the systematic murder of Jews from a survivor who escaped mass execution in the forest of Ponary . While the chairman of the Judenrat , Jacob Gens , did not believe the news, Vitka Kempner, Rozka Korczak and Abba Kovner decided to set up a resistance organization. Since Vitka spoke Polish without a Yiddish accent, she was able to move inconspicuously outside the ghetto with her blond hair and thus played a crucial role as a courier and agent. In January 1942 she participated in the founding of the Jewish United Partisan Organization ( Fareinigte Partisaner Organisatzije , FPO). In the summer of 1942, as part of an FPO command, she succeeded in destroying a Wehrmacht arms transport train with a self-made bomb. This successful combat action served the Vilna poet Hirsch Glik (1920–1944) as a template for his poem Shtil, di nakht iz oysgeshternt . When the Vilna ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, Vitka Kempner escaped with Abba Kovner, Rozka Korczak and several hundred FPO members through the sewer system into the forests in the vicinity of the city, to be found in the forests of Rudniki under the name Nokmim (“Avengers “) To continue the fight. As part of the Red Army, the Nokmim were involved in the capture of the city of Vilna, for which Vitka Kempner received the Soviet Union's Medal of Bravery .

Immediately after the end of the war, Vitka Kempner became a member of the underground organization Nakam ("Revenge") founded by Abba Kovner, which sought retaliation against the German people for the Shoah by killing several million Germans. The Jewish leadership in Palestine was against this plan, but Nakam continued his activities. After Kovner was arrested by the British secret service , Kempner chose a US prison camp in Nuremberg - Langwasser as his destination , where around 30,000 Nazis and SS men were held. Several thousand loaves of bread were poisoned with arsenic on April 13, 1946 , causing some 2,000 prisoners to become seriously ill, but according to the camp's documentation, all of them survived. Contrary to these official data, Rich Cohen stated that about 100 Nazis died in the camp. Investigations by the Nuremberg public prosecutor's office, however, as well as interviews in the Nürnberger Nachrichten in 1999 with men of the Waffen SS who were poisoned in 1946 , showed that “clearly” no one had been killed at that time.

After the Nuremberg poison attack, Vitka Kempner organized the escape of the Nakam members to Palestine. There she married Abba Kovner in 1946, with whom she settled in the kibbutz En HaChoresch and had two children. They were direct neighbors of Rozka Korczak and her family. Vitka Kempner later worked as a clinical psychologist . She outlived her husband Abba Kovner, but also her neighbor Korczak by about 24 years. When she died in Kibbutz En HaChoresch , she had four grandchildren.

literature

  • Stephen K. Stein: Kempner, Vitka (1920–). In: Bernard A. Cook (ed.): Women and War , Volume 1. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara (California) / Denver (Colorado) / Oxford (England) 2006, pp. 339f.
  • Reuben Ainsztein: Jewish resistance in German-occupied Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Library and information system of the University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg 1993, pp. 24–26. Translated from English and edited by Jörg Paulsen. ISBN 3-8142-0459-X
    • Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. With a historical survey of the Jew as fighter and soldier in the Diaspora . Elek, London New 1974, ISBN 0-236-15490-7
  • Jim G. Tobias, Peter Zinke: Nakam. Jewish revenge on Nazi perpetrators . 1st edition. Konkret Literaturverlag, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-89458-194-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jerry Silverman: The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse (New York) 2002, p. 96.
  2. ^ Rich Cohen: The Avengers - A Jewish War Story. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2000, p. 212.
  3. ↑ Elizabeth Jändl: "Nakam" -Attentat in stock: NN readers remember. In: Nürnberger Nachrichten . November 5, 1999, accessed April 19, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Kempner, Vitka
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kempner, Vitke; Kempner Kovner, Vitke; Kempner-Kovner, Vitke; Kempner, Witka; Kowner, Witka
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Jewish partisan in Lithuania and Israeli clinical psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Kalisz , Poland
DATE OF DEATH February 15, 2012
Place of death Kibbutz En HaChoresh, Israel