WNakam was a group of about fifty Holocaust survivors who, in 1945, sought to kill Germans and Nazis in revenge for the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Led by Abba Kovner, the group sought to kill six million Germans in a form of indiscriminate revenge, "a nation for a nation". Kovner went to Mandatory Palestine in order to secure large quantities of poison for poisoning water mains to kill large numbers of Germans, and his followers infiltrated the water system of Nuremberg. However, Kovner was arrested by the British on his return to Europe and had to throw the poison overboard.
WJoseph Harmatz was a Lithuanian-born Jew who fought as a partisan fighter during World War II. After the war, he joined Nakam and plotted acts of revenge that were aimed at killing Nazis and other Germans to avenge Jewish deaths during the Holocaust. After emigrating to Israel, he headed World ORT, a Jewish non-profit organization that promotes education and training in communities around the world.
WVitka Kempner was a Polish Jewish partisan leader during World War II. She served in the United Partisan Organization and, alongside Rozka Korczak and founder Abba Kovner, assumed a leadership role in its successor group, the Avengers (Nokmim).
WAbba Kovner was an Israeli poet, writer and partisan leader. In the Vilna Ghetto, his manifesto was the first time that a target of the Holocaust identified the German plan to murder all Jews. His attempt to organize a ghetto uprising failed, but he fled into the forest, became a Soviet partisan, and survived the war. After the war, Kovner led a secretive organization that aimed to take revenge for the Holocaust by killing six million Germans, but he was arrested by the British before he could carry out his plan. He made aliyah in 1947. Considered one of the greatest poets of modern Israel, he received the Israel Prize in 1970.
WSimcha Rotem was a Polish-Israeli veteran, who was a member of the Jewish underground in Warsaw, and served as the head courier of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB), which planned and executed the Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazis. He was one of the last two surviving Jewish fighters in the Warsaw uprising and the last surviving fighter from the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising.
WDaniel Kahn & the Painted Bird is a Germany-based klezmer band founded by Jewish-American singer-songwriter and actor Daniel Kahn, originally from Detroit, Michigan. The band was formed in 2005 and is based in Berlin. They have released five albums through German world music label Oriente Musik. The name of the band comes from the title of the novel The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński.
WStalag XIII-D Nürnberg Langwasser was a German Army World War II prisoner-of-war camp built on what had been the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg, northern Bavaria.
WVengeance and Retribution Are Mine: Community, the Holocaust, and Abba Kovner's Avengers is a book by Israeli historian Dina Porat on Nakam, a small group of Holocaust survivors led by Abba Kovner which sought violent revenge against Germans. She chose the title to express her belief that humans should leave revenge for God. It was first published in 2019 by Pardes Publishing / Haifa University Press in Hebrew, and is the first scholarly book on Nakam.