Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge

Today's nonfiction post is on Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge by Dina Porat. It is 400 pages long and is published by Stanford University Press. The cover has the title in red and pipes all around. The intended reader is someone who is interested in forgotten post World War II history. There is mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. 

From the dust jacket- Nakam (Hebrew for "Vengeance") tells the story of "The Avengers" (Nokmim), a group of young Holocaust survivors led by poet and resistance fighter Abba Kovner, who undertook a mission of revenge against Germany following the crimes of the Holocaust. Motivated by both the atrocities they had endured and the realization that murderous antisemitic attacks on survivors continued long after the Nazi surrender, these fifty young men and women sought retaliation at a level commensurate with the devastation caused by the Holocaust, making clear to the world that Jewish blood would no longer be shed with impunity. If successful, they would have poisoned city water supplies and loaves of bread distributed to German POWs, with the aim of killing six million Germans.
While the Avengers' story began to come to light in the 1980s, details of the relations between the group and Zionist leadership and the motivations of its members have remained unknown. Drawing on rich archival sources and in-depth interviews with the Avengers in their later years, historian Dina Porat examines the formation of the group and the clash between the formative humanistic values held by its members and their unrealized plans for violent retaliation.

Review- The book is based on first hand interviews and documents from the Nakam themselves. Porat spent years interviewing, reading, and researching the 'Avengers' and their mission and it shows. Porat does a wonderful job bringing this forgotten history into the light. She helps the reader understand the feelings of the Nakam and the world that they have survived and the new world that they felt lost in. We follow the Nakam from the founding of their order to the end of their lives and the peace that they finally found in living. I will warn that this is a more academic text, so at times it is very slow, but the people the story is about is very compelling. I would recommend this book if you are interested in World War II history. 

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.