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One Living Word

No more willful silences.
No more verbal contact, he who loved to listen to so many will never again hear his own voice among them.

He will sit with his friends over talk from now on under constraint.
The talk. The thoughts. The friends.
And as he listens through the secret door he will turn his inner ear to the dark murmur: Son of man,
all this and all this never was and never will be
as good as one living word.

-Abba Kovner

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This is Abba Kovner when he was younger and joining the FPO.

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This was after Wittersberg died and made Kovner the FPO leader.

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This is when Kovner testified against Adolf Eichmann.

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Eliminate, typically by violent means; kill.

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The Jewish quarter in a city.

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After Kovner left Vilna and joined up Soviet partisans and lead the famed group called the " avengers"

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Abba Kovner was a young Jewish boy raised in Vilna. He was born in 1918 in Sebastopol. He had a typical Jewish life. As a youth become interested in the zionist movement and joined a young local group called "Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair". June 1941, the German launched an attack on the Soviet Union and occupied Vilna. Some of the Jews escaped with the soviet union but the Germans trapped around 60,000 of Jews in Vilna. A few weeks later the Germans started their first aktion. Einsatzkommando 9 got about 5,000 Jewish men and took them to ponary. On august 31 Nazi staged the “Great Provocation.” The SS made two ghettos in vilna called ghetto No.1 and ghetto No.2. There were around 30,000 Jews forced into ghetto No.1 and about 9,000 to 11,000 forced into ghetto No.2. Kovner and sixteen others from "Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair" hid from the Nazi in covent The FPO began to attack the Germans some of the Jews were against the resistance one of them was Jacob Gens. Jacob tried to convince the Germans not to punish the jews in the ghetto for the FPO actions. Jacob even tried to sell out some of the members of FPO. The Germans took 1200 Jews and sent them out of Vilna .He was later interrogated by the Germans and they felt that he was working for the FPO and shot him ten days later and liquidated the ghettos. The FPO tried to urge the remaining Jews to help them but they “chose not to heed his call to  arms.”  Although the ghettos were completely liquidated the FPO applied their goals. The ghetto fighters escaped and joined the soviet partisans and performed many heroic acts of sabotage. Kovner later testified against Adolf Eichmann and then dedicated his life to poetry; he died at the age of 69 september 1987.

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FPO stands for United Partisan Organization- In German Fareinikte Partisaner Organizatzie

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“We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter” from Kovner speech

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“Jewish youth! Do not trust those who are trying to deceive you. Out of the eighty thousand Jews in the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" only twenty thousand are left. . . .  Ponary is not a concentration camp. They have all been shot there. Hitler plans to destroy all the Jews of Europe, and the Jews of Lithuania have been chosen as the first in line.We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter! True, we are weak and defenseless, but the only reply to the murderer is revolt! Brothers! Better to fall as  free fighters than to live by the mercy of the murderers. Arise! Arise with your last breath!"