Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge by Dina Porat (review)

Reviewed by: Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge by Dina Porat Alvin H. Rosenfeld Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge. By Dina Porat. Translated by Mark L. Levinson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. 394 pages. 40. 00 (cloth). With the defeat of Hitler's Germany in 1945, World War II in Europe came to a close. But for many of those who managed to survive incarceration in the Nazi camps, closure was never fully achieved. They had seen too much, suffered too much, and could make no sense of the reasons behind what Primo Levi called "the demolition of a man. " To Levi, who had been a prisoner in Auschwitz, the Nazi slaughter was "the central event, the scourge, " of the twentieth century. He called it "the greatest crime in the history of humanity. " Following his return to Italy in October 1945, Levi devoted the remaining 40 years of his life to contemplating the origins, nature, and consequences of that horrendous crime and its perpetrators. In The Periodic Table, he was forthright about his views on national culpability and declared that "every German must answer for Auschwitz, " a view shared by many other Holocaust survivors. He continued to ponder questions of guilt and retribution, and in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, he stated that he End Page 131 was "not interested in revenge" against the Germans but wanted to "understand" them "in order to judge" them. Try as he might over four decades of thinking and writing, he achieved neither full understanding nor anything like justice. To say as much is not to declare Levi a failed writer. On the contrary, he gave us some of the best informed, deepest, most nuanced, and insightful reflections on what Nazi Germany did to nullify virtually all earlier categories of meaning, including that of justice. If, as is traditionally understood, the latter requires that the punishment be proportionate to the crime, what kind of justice could possibly be devised to adequately address the despoilation, dehumanization, and destruction of millions of Jews solely because they were Jews? In Nazi thinking, Jews were considered "lebensunwürdiges Leben" (life unworthy of life). The concept was first employed against fellow Germans who were deemed to be mentally or physically unfit, large numbers of whom were sterilized and murdered. After Bishop von Galen condemned this Nazi program in an August 1941 sermon, the Nazi euthanasia program was stopped but it continued unofficially in German institutions until the end of the war. Scant protest was made against the collective death sentence brought against Jews, who had been branded as subhuman specimens of "life unworthy of life. " Cast out from what they thought had been their rightful place within common humanity, Jews were stigmatized as "Untermenschen, " inferior beings, who were systematically marginalized, ghettoized, robbed, tormented, tortured, and slaughtered by the millions in the ghettos, camps, and killing fields of Nazi-occupied Europe. Primo Levi, a trained scientist and dedicated intellectual, felt compelled to find explanations for what drove Germans under Hitler to commit a crime of this all-encompassing, malign nature. He probed it deeply, but in the end knowledge remained elusive. Other first-hand witnesses to Nazi barbarism took a different path. They knew all they needed to know about the genocidal assault against the Jews and believed that the norms of retributive justice would never be met. They wanted revenge and set out to achieve it. End Page 132 Dina Porat, one of Israel's leading historians of the Holocaust, tells their story in Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge. Pieces of this story were known before, but Porat puts it together in a meticulously researched study that is comprehensive, detailed, clarifying, and engaging from the first page to the last. "Nakam" is the Hebrew word for "revenge. " The "Nokmim" were the Avengers, a group of some 50 Jewish men and women who survived the war as resistance fighters against the Nazis in the forests and ghettos of eastern Europe. Their parents and other relatives and friends perished in the Nazi camps or were shot to death in or near their hometowns. Many left behind appeals. . .