Speaker 1: So make sure the episode starts about six minutes back.
Speaker 1: This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast by Robert Evans
Speaker 1: about Robert Evans, the bastard who just went yeah. I
Speaker 1: was like, I really, I don't so many noises today.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what was happening and just leave. This
Speaker 1: podcast is an engine and the fuel is you being
Speaker 1: frustrated with me. We are going to be the first
Speaker 1: human beings on fucking Mars. Is what we're gonna do? What?
Speaker 1: What has happened? Just we're starting? Are you we announcing
Speaker 1: the competitor to SpaceX that you started? Yeah, SpaceX is
Speaker 1: is going to get their asses kicked by frustrated sof
Speaker 1: X be frustrated. So FAC's gonna be a frustrated sofa. A. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't like the x X greets me out. I
Speaker 1: thought it was space x Y and it was a
Speaker 1: reference to nice. There's a lot of things that could
Speaker 1: be a reference to um Margaret, Yes, what do you
Speaker 1: what do you do? What do you what? What do
Speaker 1: you do? At the start of this podcast, what do
Speaker 1: you do? What do you where? To justify my existence?
Speaker 1: That's right, because everyone has to. That's harder. I write
Speaker 1: stuff I write fiction. So far, I write a podcast
Speaker 1: called Cool People Stuff. So far it's cool. And what
Speaker 1: else do I do? I hang out with my dog. Um,
Speaker 1: he's becoming a reasonable creature. He's about fourteen or fifty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: way way more handleable. And I live alone on a
Speaker 1: mountain in West Virginia. And I watched the world crumble
Speaker 1: as I install solar panels and run another podcast about
Speaker 1: prep pain called Live like the World is Dying. That
Speaker 1: does sound nice? That does sound nice, Margaret. You know
Speaker 1: who didn't live on the top of a mountain is Abakovner.
Speaker 1: He lived in Vilna, which was a rough place to
Speaker 1: live in the period of time that we're talking about. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he beat the odds. Uh, that's the depressing way of
Speaker 1: saying he has already beaten the odds because nearly everyone
Speaker 1: he knows has been exterminated by the Nazis. UM. As
Speaker 1: we start part two, so Covener has just issued what
Speaker 1: we become known as the Ponari Manifesto UM, and it
Speaker 1: electrifies the room. There's also, and this is not his fault,
Speaker 1: one of the one of the problems that exists within
Speaker 1: kind of the way in which some people talk about
Speaker 1: the Holocaust, is there's this attitude that there's this errant
Speaker 1: belief that Jews went to the death camps um kind
Speaker 1: of passively, like sheep to the slaughter, right like that,
Speaker 1: And and that some of that comes from he says,
Speaker 1: let us not go like sheep to the slaughter, and
Speaker 1: there were some like mistranslations that like make it seem
Speaker 1: like he's saying people were going like sheep, sheep to
Speaker 1: the slaughter. None of this, even if you're looking at
Speaker 1: the stories of people who were killed in the camps,
Speaker 1: it was very rarely passive, even to the extent that
Speaker 1: like people were trying to like take care of their
Speaker 1: families and keep their their children from panning. Like none
Speaker 1: of this was like passive. People were dealing with a
Speaker 1: nightmare in the best way that they had available, and
Speaker 1: there was, in fact a lot of resistance, which we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about. And this is a story I'm
Speaker 1: aware of, like one pop culture touchdown from this. I
Speaker 1: get into arguments periodically online with people about you know,
Speaker 1: armed self defense, and one of the things that keep
Speaker 1: that some folks will bring up is that like, um, well,
Speaker 1: none of it, you know, none of it would have
Speaker 1: helped Jews during the Holocaust. Uh. And the reality is
Speaker 1: that having guns did help quite a few Jews during
Speaker 1: the Holocaust. There was a tremendous history of partisan resistance
Speaker 1: and if you would like to see a reasonably good
Speaker 1: movie about that, starring Daniel Craig, uh, you can watch
Speaker 1: the movie to Fiance, which is about the Bielski Atriad,
Speaker 1: which was a group of eventually a couple of thousand. Um.
Speaker 1: Centered around these brothers who I think we're basically gangsters
Speaker 1: prior to the war, which is why they had access
Speaker 1: to some of the some weapons. Um. I'm not on that,
Speaker 1: but I believe that's the story with them. But it's
Speaker 1: about this group who took to the woods of Poland
Speaker 1: after the German invasion and eventually we're able to protect
Speaker 1: several thousand people and fight as partisans. There was a
Speaker 1: significant number of partisans, and Kovner and his his members
Speaker 1: of the hot zmer Hats are are going to become
Speaker 1: some of those partisans. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: I get really frustrated when people talk about that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff too, is that, Um. The first thing, again,
Speaker 1: the only one I've done a lot of research about
Speaker 1: is the war saw ghetto uprising and the main task
Speaker 1: in front of people, the dangerous immediate task was literally
Speaker 1: just getting small arms. Yeah, um small arms. People are
Speaker 1: like explosives manufacturing. Yeah, anyway, people, I don't know anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's I don't know. I get really mad at
Speaker 1: the way people talk about a lot of the stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. And I think one of the things, because
Speaker 1: we're again Kauvner ends on a problematic note, shall we say,
Speaker 1: but one of the things he's right about is that, like, look,
Speaker 1: now we know what's happening. Nobody's coming to save us.
Speaker 1: We have to find a way to kill as many
Speaker 1: of these Nazi sons of bitches as we possibly can,
Speaker 1: which is the a great thing to do. Um Again,
Speaker 1: A none is smuggling hand grenades into the ghetto so
Speaker 1: that they can murder Schermans like this is where, this
Speaker 1: is where the line is now. Um So Connor the
Speaker 1: ponary Manifesto electrifies because he delivers this first to just
Speaker 1: kind of a room full of Youth Movement members that
Speaker 1: he reads it to during a meeting that they were holding.
Speaker 1: Because it was during New Year's celebrations, it was easy
Speaker 1: to kind of disguise the fact that people were gathering.
Speaker 1: But it spreads very quickly through Jewish Europe and it
Speaker 1: ignites a rapid change in the kind of conversations being
Speaker 1: held underground and ghettos across the Greater German Reich. No
Speaker 1: longer was the discussion about hiding and avoiding German wrath.
Speaker 1: Talks started to turn towards the concept of resistance and reprisal.
Speaker 1: In ninety two, Covener helped to found the FPO or
Speaker 1: United Partisans Organization. This was a pan ideological because again,
Speaker 1: even after the Nazis took over a lot of these
Speaker 1: different because you've got your Communists, some of them were
Speaker 1: like insurrectionary, some of whom are Zionists, and you've got
Speaker 1: your Socialists, and you've got your kind of more centrist
Speaker 1: dream and right wing folks who are Zionist, and you've got,
Speaker 1: you know again, people who aren't Zionists but who were
Speaker 1: like left wing activists. All these different youth organizations that
Speaker 1: are constantly fighting each other. And Kulviner is like, look,
Speaker 1: we can't do that right now. Later it's going to
Speaker 1: take everything we have just to not get wiped out. Um,
Speaker 1: so let's all like basically in his pitch is basically like,
Speaker 1: nearly all of us are dead already, what what do
Speaker 1: politics matter? It's time to kill these fucking Nazis. And
Speaker 1: basically at this point, basically everyone's like, yeah, you know
Speaker 1: that that actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: So the FPO gets formed of Wagner's one of the
Speaker 1: people starting this. There's a number of of of or
Speaker 1: of of leaders and stuff in the little in the
Speaker 1: area of Lithuania that are doing this. Um. The guy
Speaker 1: who gets elected to lead the or they hold a vote,
Speaker 1: because there's about three hundred of them. They hold a vote,
Speaker 1: and the guy who gets elected to lead is a
Speaker 1: very cool dude called Yitzak Wittenberg, and he is a
Speaker 1: communist um and they they split the organization up into
Speaker 1: these five man cells, and several five man groups make
Speaker 1: up a platoon, and then the platoons are split into
Speaker 1: two battalions, and Kavner is commanding one of these battalions.
Speaker 1: He calls his men the Avengers, and they set out
Speaker 1: soon to the work of yeah, yeah, to the work
Speaker 1: of stealing more guns and explosives in order to prepare
Speaker 1: for a broader armed insurrection of the ghetto. The FBO
Speaker 1: makes contacts with Soviet partisans in the woods, and they
Speaker 1: work alongside the Polish communist underground. These are just like
Speaker 1: Polish communists, who aren't you wish um to launch a
Speaker 1: series of daring attacks on German military targets. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote now from a Latt Gordon Levett Levitan quote.
Speaker 1: The Villanet ghetto fighters blew up a German military train,
Speaker 1: smuggled in arms, sabotage German military equipment, and set up
Speaker 1: an a legal printing press outside the ghetto, and established
Speaker 1: ties to the Soviet resistance in the city in the forests.
Speaker 1: They also sent emissaries to the Warsaw and Bellish Dot
Speaker 1: ghettos to warn the inhabitants about the mass killing of
Speaker 1: Jews and the occupied Soviet Union and to incite resistance.
Speaker 1: And they do like a meaningful amount of damage. They
Speaker 1: destroy I think a few dozen trains, they kill like
Speaker 1: seventy one Germans, they rescue a couple of hundred um
Speaker 1: like a Jewish people who are at you know, going
Speaker 1: to be eradicated and whatnot. Um Like, they do quite
Speaker 1: a bit of damage, and they focus mostly a lot
Speaker 1: like the anarchists in like Russia, right now, are focusing
Speaker 1: on blowing up trains, on blowing on destroying trains and
Speaker 1: derailing trains right to to stop the flow of war
Speaker 1: material and harm the Nazi war effort and also harm
Speaker 1: their effort to like deport and murder more Jews. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: By nineteen forty three, the Germans have grown weary enough
Speaker 1: of the FPO that they launched a major crackdown and
Speaker 1: eventually succeeded in capturing several officers of Vilma's non Jewish
Speaker 1: communist underground. From these men, they learned that Wittenberg was
Speaker 1: the elected head of the Jewish resistance. They surrounded the
Speaker 1: Vilna Ghetto and promised to destroy it all and kill
Speaker 1: all twenty thousand people inside unless Wittenberg was turned over
Speaker 1: to them. And this is this is a fascinating story,
Speaker 1: because Wittenberg gets captured at one point and they carry
Speaker 1: out a prison break and they free him. But then
Speaker 1: the Germans are like, we're just gonna kill everybody if
Speaker 1: we don't get this guy. So in an act of
Speaker 1: almost unfathomable courage, Wittenberg hands himself over to the Nazis
Speaker 1: and then commit suicide and German custody to save everybody else,
Speaker 1: and control of the organization now hands is handed over
Speaker 1: to Kauvner when the Nazis destroyed the ghetto anyway. Later
Speaker 1: that year, Kavner and his surviving men flee into the
Speaker 1: woods around Vilna, where they liaise with Soviet At Partisans
Speaker 1: and carry out even more insurgent attacks against the Germans.
Speaker 1: By July of nineteen forty four, the German military is
Speaker 1: collapsing in the east and Kaufner takes part in the
Speaker 1: liberation of Vilna with other partisans. It was a pyric
Speaker 1: victory at best. More than forty thousand Jews had been killed.
Speaker 1: The ghetto was basically nothing but ashes and bones, as
Speaker 1: this quote from the Book to Calm makes clear. The
Speaker 1: visitors returned stunned and tends from the blunt reality but
Speaker 1: speaking wide scale slaughter into gigantic round pits, and from
Speaker 1: the beastual brutality of those who had aimed deadly gunfire
Speaker 1: face to face at living creatures. Evidence of that brutality
Speaker 1: was still visible. Scattered bodies remain that had not yet
Speaker 1: received proper burial, and the visitors knew very well who
Speaker 1: had been killed there at the edge of the pits.
Speaker 1: Their parents and all of their neighbors, acquaintances, well to
Speaker 1: do in proletarian, pious, assimilated and baptized, communal leaders, synagogue functionaries,
Speaker 1: peddlers and drawers of water, communists and Zionists, intellectuals, artists,
Speaker 1: and village idiots. Some four thousand babies, all of them,
Speaker 1: as writer amos Oz described the individualish community. When the
Speaker 1: visit was over, Kaufner composed a detailed questionnaire and the
Speaker 1: survivors who had begun to gather filled it out. The
Speaker 1: copies were collected with a view to preparing for future trials, punishment,
Speaker 1: and vengeance. Now Kauvnor gets no time to like, what's that. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's just I mean one, I just have to sit
Speaker 1: on that, right. But one of the things that it
Speaker 1: occurs to me, I mean I remember a friend of
Speaker 1: mine describing to continue Margaret's crime school. Um, sometimes it's
Speaker 1: safer at the front. Not like the front in terms
Speaker 1: of like a war, right, but like you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: being up where the conflict is happening is safer, like literally,
Speaker 1: And I I'm not trying to tell people what they
Speaker 1: should have done retroactively, just interesting to me that it's like,
Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds like the reason that the Partisans
Speaker 1: survived is that they were partisans and they were used
Speaker 1: to moving in and out to the woods. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they escape. A lot of them get out through the
Speaker 1: sewers and stuff like. Yeah, they barely make it out
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases. Yeah, and I'm sure a
Speaker 1: ton of them don't. I'm not trying to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's easy, everyone should just go do that, you know,
Speaker 1: but yeah, anyway, yep, uh it is. It is, um
Speaker 1: pretty pretty fucked up, Margaret y um so uh. Kavner
Speaker 1: was soon obliged to leave Vilma with his avengers. He
Speaker 1: doesn't really have any time to like, nobody has time
Speaker 1: to process this, right, um, like they might not want to.
Speaker 1: They are immediately on with the with the advancing Red
Speaker 1: Army right and are are continuing to act as insurgents,
Speaker 1: basically kind of ahead of the main advance, harassing Nazi
Speaker 1: forces as they retreat. And while he's doing this, he
Speaker 1: repeated repeatedly lobbies with the Soviets to establish a partisan
Speaker 1: regiment of Jewish Hullo cost survivors to carry out acts
Speaker 1: of sabotage in Germany, to like sneak into Germany and
Speaker 1: start blowing up German in history. Um, the Soviets don't
Speaker 1: entirely trust him or other Jewish youth movement veterans since
Speaker 1: they're all Zionists, and this does not happen. And then
Speaker 1: also Kaufner is breaking Soviet law in this period because
Speaker 1: while he is fighting and while he's advancing, he is
Speaker 1: he's this kind of guy who is he's just an
Speaker 1: expert organizer. So while they're doing this, he is building
Speaker 1: an underground railroad to smuggle Jews from the fires of
Speaker 1: the Holocaust over to the British mandate in Palestine. He's
Speaker 1: like building an organization to do this as he is
Speaker 1: running an insurgent war. Um, he's a he's very good
Speaker 1: at organ Obviously he's not the only one doing this,
Speaker 1: but he's a major, major figure in it. His experience
Speaker 1: building and maintaining connections between a far flung network of
Speaker 1: insurgents made him kind of the perfect man for this. UM.
Speaker 1: And again it's worth remembering that during this period, getting
Speaker 1: Jews out of Poland and into Palestine was often the
Speaker 1: only way to keep them alive. Pogroms and massacres of
Speaker 1: Jews continued even as the Nazis retreated. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about that more later, and established another clandestine organization as
Speaker 1: he traveled across Europe, Blue was called Brickhaw and it's
Speaker 1: again it's this underground railroad type sort of situation. As
Speaker 1: he makes connections with survivors across Europe's Jewish communities, he
Speaker 1: starts to come face to face with survivors of the
Speaker 1: Nazi death camps. He and his and again, these guys,
Speaker 1: these guys aren't going to camps. Right in Lithuanian Villa,
Speaker 1: there's not like a big there being shot in the
Speaker 1: fucking woods. That's how that's how the Holocaust starts. Um.
Speaker 1: So they're finding out about the death camps as they are,
Speaker 1: as they're moving west and meeting people who had been there.
Speaker 1: And then later in nine four he and his Avengers
Speaker 1: helped to liberate mashd Neck and they see their first
Speaker 1: concentration camp. Now mash Neck was located in a suburb
Speaker 1: of Lubland, Poland, and somewhere around three hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: thousand people were massacred there. So Kavner comes from Vilna
Speaker 1: where forty to sixty thousand Jews are killed, and this
Speaker 1: just this is like already broke at him. Right, this
Speaker 1: has like turned him into this kind of force for vengeance.
Speaker 1: And then he realizes that like Vilma is a blip
Speaker 1: on the radar, and the total number of people who
Speaker 1: are being killed, and he starts to realize the scale
Speaker 1: of the Holocaust, right, the like the truly Titanic scale
Speaker 1: of the killings that have been carried out. Coming face
Speaker 1: to face with Mashenet convinced Kaufner that simple military victory
Speaker 1: against the Germans was no longer sufficient. Images of a
Speaker 1: death camp were stuck in his mind. Now he had
Speaker 1: spent years obsessed with the destruction of the Villa neg Ghetto,
Speaker 1: his home and then he'd come face to face with
Speaker 1: a massacre six times greater than the entire Jewish population
Speaker 1: of his home town. And even as the war ended
Speaker 1: in German defeat, stories of more massacres poured in. Some
Speaker 1: of these were stories of the greatest death camps like Auschwitz,
Speaker 1: but others were stories of massacres of Jews committed by
Speaker 1: forces who were not Nazis. And I'm gonna quote again
Speaker 1: from the book to Calm When Jews returned in July
Speaker 1: nineteen forty four to Kiev and hoped to reoccupy their houses.
Speaker 1: They discovered Ukrainian squatters who refused to vacate. The Ukrainians
Speaker 1: started throwing Jews from moving train cars and beating random Jews.
Speaker 1: The feeling was of an impending program. There was no
Speaker 1: one to turn to with an alert. In July of
Speaker 1: nineteen forty four, upon the liberation of Lithuania, Jews who
Speaker 1: returned to their homes from the forests and hideouts, attempting
Speaker 1: to find relatives and perhaps a small fraction of their properties,
Speaker 1: were murdered on their doorsteps by neighbors and local Lithuanian
Speaker 1: gangs who hidden the forests and elsewhere in order to
Speaker 1: not be conscripted by the Germans. In the pockets of
Speaker 1: five Jews who had survived the Holocaust but were then
Speaker 1: murdered in the Lithuanian town of a Ks, a note
Speaker 1: was found in Polish saying this will be the fate
Speaker 1: of all the Jews left alive. So this doesn't put
Speaker 1: Kavnor and his men into his men and women. By
Speaker 1: the way, there's a pretty I think it might even
Speaker 1: be a pretty even split of men and women in
Speaker 1: his In his insurgent organization UM it is like they're
Speaker 1: kind of out of their minds at this point, right,
Speaker 1: not only you have to like because the Holocaust is
Speaker 1: still happening, because now it's because yeah, and this is
Speaker 1: again if you have ever had PTSD, what that means.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to I'm not again, I have had it.
Speaker 1: I'm not I've had I've had a couple of of
Speaker 1: PTSD breaks. I Am not trying to be um uh me,
Speaker 1: I don't mean this in a negative way. You're crazy, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's what you're You're kind of out of your
Speaker 1: mind for a while. That's part of the problem. And
Speaker 1: these people are dealing with not only like the most
Speaker 1: PTSD I can fucking imagine. Um, but now they realize
Speaker 1: that like it's not over. The massacre is continuing, and
Speaker 1: all of this is happening like while they are continuing
Speaker 1: to fight a war. And so between the grief of
Speaker 1: losing all of their loved ones and friends and the
Speaker 1: trauma of years of underground fighting, deadly partisan combat, these
Speaker 1: people are in what you might call a particular state
Speaker 1: of mind. The most obvious consequence is of this is
Speaker 1: an obsession with vengeance, which the end of the war
Speaker 1: does not slack, and as the war kind of comes
Speaker 1: to an end, a lot of these Jewish partisan's people
Speaker 1: who are friends and affiliated with them, with with kaufner
Speaker 1: Um members of different Zionist youth groups in Poland, they
Speaker 1: start to carry out attacks in areas that have already
Speaker 1: been liberated, places where the war has come to an end.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna read a quote from the book to
Speaker 1: calm here. Naza GROUPA, a group of Zionist youth members
Speaker 1: from beds in Poland, aimed to exact vengeance in Germany,
Speaker 1: and Mill Brigg, later a hero in Israel's War of
Speaker 1: Well in the Arab Israeli War, recounted, Uh we have
Speaker 1: She uses the term Israel's War of independence like you
Speaker 1: can whatever. We had nothing to lose. We wanted only revenge.
Speaker 1: Young men and women burning with venge for vengeance, with
Speaker 1: nothing in their world but a mighty urge to kill
Speaker 1: Germans and to destroy whoever was collaborating with Germans. Some
Speaker 1: members of Naza GROUPA, who had volunteered for the Red Army,
Speaker 1: succeeded in acts of vengeance, but not as much as
Speaker 1: they had wished, not as Jews, not as representatives of
Speaker 1: the entire Jewish nation against the higher German nation. One
Speaker 1: of them, Manos d'amont, visited Auschwitz as soon as the
Speaker 1: war ended, and he saw this command written on one
Speaker 1: of the walls of the torture chambers. Jews take vengeance.
Speaker 1: These words guided his future. He and Alex Gatman, a
Speaker 1: fellow member of the group, headed a squad in Austria
Speaker 1: that executed those who had been found guilty. Most of
Speaker 1: the members felt as if they were judges without robes,
Speaker 1: judges of a special kind, who together delivered and immediately
Speaker 1: carried out their sentences. They bound and gagged suspects, held
Speaker 1: a few minutes of trial proceedings for each, and read
Speaker 1: an indictment. They prosecuted murderers who had been active in
Speaker 1: the ghettos and concentration camps, those who had killed with
Speaker 1: their own hands and could be reliably identified, in the
Speaker 1: group's opinion by at least two witnesses. No troop, no
Speaker 1: courte of true justice in the world, would have handed
Speaker 1: down a different verdict if he confessed on his own
Speaker 1: without being interrogated, said Damont. These killers were mostly, but
Speaker 1: not always s S troops. The group then killed the suspect,
Speaker 1: For example, four young men who had been freed from
Speaker 1: the Lansburg Offering concentration camp near Munich, stole British jeeps
Speaker 1: and drove to a neighboring town, whe they mounted a
Speaker 1: pegram of their own for four or five hours, punching
Speaker 1: and beating. Soldiers of the Jewish Brigade who arrived at
Speaker 1: the scene stood there stunned. They couldn't agree with this
Speaker 1: and sent us away. We broke everything around, We broke windows,
Speaker 1: We hit children and old people too. The hatred inside
Speaker 1: of us was terrible, a heavy burden of rage. It
Speaker 1: is difficult to determine how many such incidents occurred, with
Speaker 1: survivors taking action either independently or with a few comrades.
Speaker 1: So again there's like this stuff is happening as the
Speaker 1: war ends. There's like guys busting, like stealing British military
Speaker 1: ship and just driving into German towns and just beating
Speaker 1: the ship out of everybody they encounter, which like I
Speaker 1: get it, man, Like, yeah, it's like it's not good,
Speaker 1: it's not, but it's justice. But it's inevitable to have
Speaker 1: the inevitable consequence of what the Nazis did, Right, I
Speaker 1: feel like there's a difference between justice and consequences that
Speaker 1: doesn't get talked about enough for it's just like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, like you do a bunch of bad ship
Speaker 1: and some other bad ship's going to happen and it's
Speaker 1: not justified inherently like that kid who got beat didn't
Speaker 1: do anything, you know, and like it's not good. It's
Speaker 1: a it's just a thing. It's just it is that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're going to say, and I think it is, like,
Speaker 1: it's bad. It's bad if like children are getting beaten
Speaker 1: in the street, because even if the children believed the
Speaker 1: fun up things their parents told them, they're they're not
Speaker 1: responsible for it. But also the bad thing that's being
Speaker 1: done here, I would say, even though it's being committed
Speaker 1: by these like Jewish concentration camp survivors, the evil is
Speaker 1: still on the Nazis. They're responsible for those kids getting
Speaker 1: beaten in the street. Right, It's not the fault of
Speaker 1: the people who lost everything and are like what these
Speaker 1: people just get to go on living their lives. No,
Speaker 1: we're gonna start hitting them with a fucking bat Like yeah,
Speaker 1: that's uh, you know, it's not it's not It's not
Speaker 1: on them, is what I will say, um, like like
Speaker 1: just like those kids can't be responsible. Nobody who's just
Speaker 1: gotten out of a concentration amp can be responsible for
Speaker 1: their actions in this case like that. Yeah, that's yeah, God,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's a kite like
Speaker 1: if if if if. If you are a person who
Speaker 1: believes that like temporary insanity can render one less complicit
Speaker 1: in an act of violence, you have to say it
Speaker 1: applies here, like, I can't imagine a better example of that, Um,
Speaker 1: but you know what I can imagine, Margaret, What can
Speaker 1: you imagine? A beautiful world, A perfect world, Margaret, A
Speaker 1: shining city upon a hill where people can purchase the
Speaker 1: products and services that support this podcast, A whole city,
Speaker 1: A whole city, Margaret, of just gold and podcasts. That's right,
Speaker 1: most advertisers, we're gonna build it together. We're gonna make
Speaker 1: it real. Is one. I'm so excited to be part
Speaker 1: of my Ah, we're back. We've just built a shining
Speaker 1: city upon a hill. It's great. You can get like
Speaker 1: five different kinds of mattresses there. Um. Back to the story.
Speaker 1: So Covenor in his mates, along with a lot of
Speaker 1: other Holocaust drivers, are kind of spiraling as the war
Speaker 1: comes to an end, and once the fighting actually stops
Speaker 1: for them, everything gets worse. Right as bad as their
Speaker 1: mind state had been previously, they at least had had
Speaker 1: fighting to focus on. Um Once the fightings, once there's
Speaker 1: no fighting for them to do, like, they have nothing
Speaker 1: but their thoughts, right, and that is not a good
Speaker 1: place to be in. UM. Yeah, So, while you know,
Speaker 1: they're kind of trying to cope with the end of
Speaker 1: their part in the war, the Allies are arresting a
Speaker 1: bunch of German officers. They are starting to carry out
Speaker 1: like the the justice part of the of the victory UM.
Speaker 1: But it's it quickly becomes clear to Abatkovner that the
Speaker 1: Allies aren't really interested in ensuring anything that he would
Speaker 1: consider to be justice. So in April of nineteen forty five,
Speaker 1: mere weeks before Hitler's suicide, Abbot Kavner met with a
Speaker 1: number of his partisans and a group of Auschwitz survivors
Speaker 1: in a flat near the recently liberated city of Lublin, Poland.
Speaker 1: This is right after they've liberated that deathcamp. Mashed Neck Kauvner,
Speaker 1: the man who had first warned Jewish Europe about Germany's
Speaker 1: plans to kill them all delivered another address. He warned
Speaker 1: them first that the Holocaust was not over and that
Speaker 1: some terrible form of terrible vengeance against the Germans was
Speaker 1: necessary as an act of self defense. Part of what
Speaker 1: he's saying here is, look, the Poles are still killing us,
Speaker 1: The Ukrainians are still killing us, the Lithuanians are still
Speaker 1: killing us. The Nazis are gone, but they're still killing us.
Speaker 1: And it's because they think they can get away with
Speaker 1: it because the Germans did. And so we have to
Speaker 1: carry out an act of vengeance against the Germans so
Speaker 1: people stopped killing us. Interesting, he tells them the act
Speaker 1: should be shocking. The Germans should know that after Auschwitz
Speaker 1: there can be no return to normality. And this is
Speaker 1: their versions of this idea. There's there's one famous survivor
Speaker 1: and academic who I think the exact line is poetry
Speaker 1: after Auschwitz is obscene, right, that like the severity of
Speaker 1: this crime has rendered like the human attempt to create
Speaker 1: art and obscenity. Um, there's a variety, and Kagner's attitude
Speaker 1: is that like they can't do this and just continue
Speaker 1: to be a country. Um, Like it's this kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like it's hard to argue with that with the man, right,
Speaker 1: um So. Survivors at the meeting recalled that, as usual,
Speaker 1: Kafner's eloquence was hypnotizing. One person who was there described
Speaker 1: their mind state listening to him this way, those who
Speaker 1: came away from the smoke stacks of the crematory and
Speaker 1: know what they want. We want tanks demolishing city streets.
Speaker 1: Rebuilding comes later. Our job now is destruction. Who dare
Speaker 1: is deny it to us? We are Frankenstein's We who
Speaker 1: came away from the ruins will show the world. We
Speaker 1: will snatch up the name Jew in every language, and
Speaker 1: uplifted words of vengeance will light our way. For as
Speaker 1: long as one member of this nation remains. We shall
Speaker 1: not rest. Now this Yeah, that's sketchy. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: this is some unsettling ship that we're delving into. And
Speaker 1: this is like, no one should be calling themselves Germans
Speaker 1: because we've destroyed the state of Germany. Or does that
Speaker 1: mean like literally every German citizen must die. Let's let's
Speaker 1: let's let's let's talk about that in a little bit, Margaret, Okay,
Speaker 1: what you should know is that on a religious name. Note,
Speaker 1: the idea of vengeance is not something that is permitted
Speaker 1: in the Jewish faith and Talmudic law. And the Talment
Speaker 1: is you've got like the Torah, right, which is the
Speaker 1: Old Testament. Effectively, the Talment is like I think like
Speaker 1: eight hundred years of basically commentary from different religious scholars
Speaker 1: on the Torah. Yeah, um. And in Talmudic law, personal
Speaker 1: vengeance is forbidden, right, like vengeance's mind saith the Lord.
Speaker 1: I mean, like vengeance is something God can do. God
Speaker 1: can take revenge you should not take because it's bad
Speaker 1: for you, right, It's like bad, like it is bad
Speaker 1: for people to obsess over revenge. Yeah, And it doesn't
Speaker 1: it doesn't fit within my context of like and this
Speaker 1: is like I'm not like sitting on my my my
Speaker 1: rolling chair in my studio at home in West Virginia
Speaker 1: and like trying to cast judgment. But like one of
Speaker 1: my favorite anarchist assassins whose name I suddenly forget, I
Speaker 1: think it's Kurt Wilkins um his quote after he killed
Speaker 1: someone who had killed fifteen hundred anarchists and indigenous people
Speaker 1: um uh in South America. He his quote was, vengeance
Speaker 1: is unbecoming of an anarchist um. Even though he had
Speaker 1: just done a vengeance, he saw it as this like
Speaker 1: problem solving, right, But the concept a vengeance is like
Speaker 1: not problem solving, it's problem perpetuating most of the time.
Speaker 1: And so it's like not inherently just but that that's said,
Speaker 1: and so that that map says, I don't know, I'm
Speaker 1: just mapping talmaic law to to that as well. I
Speaker 1: guess it's like this idea that ye, vengeance is not
Speaker 1: to know that like good, but it's big understandable, it's
Speaker 1: not good, and it is within kind of the strictures
Speaker 1: of the Jewish religion. It is something that specifically you're
Speaker 1: not supposed to seek as a person. Kavner and his
Speaker 1: fellow survivors, though again these guys were not most of
Speaker 1: them many of them. Some of these guys had been
Speaker 1: like religious Scienists, some of them had not been Zienis,
Speaker 1: some of them been most a lot of them have
Speaker 1: been Communist because Covenor is more on the left. These
Speaker 1: guys are secular and it's and even the ones who
Speaker 1: had been religious before the war, and again this is
Speaker 1: pretty common. By the end of the Holocaust, they don't
Speaker 1: believe anymore. That's also not universal, but fairly common. Um,
Speaker 1: So they're not they don't really care that they're not
Speaker 1: supposed to seek vengeance. Right. Um. One of them credits
Speaker 1: this to the power driven into us by Hitler. Right.
Speaker 1: That's one of the lions that you hear from one
Speaker 1: of these guys in this meeting is that like Hitler
Speaker 1: has like driven into us the power to commit vengeance
Speaker 1: by by the crimes that he committed against our people.
Speaker 1: As the meeting war On, Kavner laid out his plans
Speaker 1: for a quote unique operation of organized vengeance. Jews, including
Speaker 1: Kavner and his men, had already carried out numerous assassinations
Speaker 1: of German leaders and collaborators, but this was not enough.
Speaker 1: The Holocaust was not purely an act of the Nazi
Speaker 1: military or a bunch of party functionaries. The normal people
Speaker 1: of Germany had cheered the slaughter on. They had demanded it.
Speaker 1: Bit by bit, Kovner talked himself and the other survivors
Speaker 1: into a new idea. He described described it as quote
Speaker 1: to pay the Germans back in a way that only
Speaker 1: the survivors of such a massacre can an idea which
Speaker 1: the man on the omnibus to use a figure of
Speaker 1: speech could only consider deranged. But I will not claim
Speaker 1: that our thinking was far from deranged in those days.
Speaker 1: Maybe worse than deranged. A terrifying idea made hooly from
Speaker 1: despair and carrying a sort of suicide within it, a
Speaker 1: mental inferno, an eye for an eye, in other words,
Speaker 1: wiping out six million Germans. Yeah, goddamn it. So that's
Speaker 1: the that's the plan that they land on, is we're
Speaker 1: going to kill six million of them, one for one,
Speaker 1: you know, or close to it. Yeah, that's that's bad.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna go that is that is bad. Beyond
Speaker 1: record as saying that that's bad. Individuals can be culpable
Speaker 1: of crimes, but people are not culpable of croubs by
Speaker 1: where they live. They are not. And I will say,
Speaker 1: obviously it's bad to plan to kill six million civilians.
Speaker 1: I don't think we need to be labor that point.
Speaker 1: But you also it is not illogical. Yeah no, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's where standing, where they are, because and there,
Speaker 1: and I think the way that they would have defended
Speaker 1: it then, because Kavner later that quote comes from him later,
Speaker 1: he's like, yeah, we were deranged. We were crazy, right.
Speaker 1: But um, having that attitude, then you're looking at the
Speaker 1: slaughter continuing and you're looking at like, he's not wrong.
Speaker 1: Regular Germans are complicit in the Holocaust. Every single person
Speaker 1: who stayed in and was a part of that nation
Speaker 1: at war has a degree of complicity in the Holocaust
Speaker 1: that is undeniable as a historical fact um. But the
Speaker 1: and and so his his his attitude is if they
Speaker 1: get away with it, other people will keep trying, and
Speaker 1: maybe they'll try again. The only way to make it
Speaker 1: clear that you can't do this right, that you can't
Speaker 1: do with that, you can't do genocide as a nation
Speaker 1: is if a nation is wiped out for doing it right.
Speaker 1: That's his that's his attitude, And that is the attitude
Speaker 1: of a genocide survivor. And it is um, I will
Speaker 1: I'll say this. Um. This is another thing where there's
Speaker 1: this conversation we have about history, and it's usually by
Speaker 1: like the worst people in the world, where they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you have to judge people by the standards of the time,
Speaker 1: and they usually mean that by it wasn't bad to
Speaker 1: own slaves right right, Um, which it was, and there
Speaker 1: were a lot of people the time we knew it
Speaker 1: was bad where I actually think it's that's an interesting
Speaker 1: conversation to have his situations like this, because I cannot
Speaker 1: personally find it an in me to morally judge a
Speaker 1: person in Kaufner's position for wanting to kill six million Germans.
Speaker 1: It's wrong, but I can't judge it, right because who
Speaker 1: wouldn't think that way? Right? In this time? It kind
Speaker 1: of probably depends on how far along in these plans
Speaker 1: he gets to be honest, like, yeah, god, that's such
Speaker 1: an interesting question of caup ability, right, because okay, in
Speaker 1: the immediate aftermath, right, you're like, you know, the sort
Speaker 1: of temporary insanity as a way of understanding culpability makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense. Um, And but then like sitting
Speaker 1: down and and planning something like, I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: interesting to me. This is not me trying to like
Speaker 1: sit and be like, well, I would have done it different.
Speaker 1: I don't know what I would have done. Of course,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you right now. I suspect had I
Speaker 1: been in his position, I would have agreed with his
Speaker 1: thinking and supported it. Yeah, Like I'm not that's not good.
Speaker 1: I'm not proud of that. I just like, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: if everyone I loved went up in a fucking smoke
Speaker 1: stack and all these people just got to keep having
Speaker 1: a country, I would probably support some terrible things. No, totally.
Speaker 1: And it's it's so interesting too, because it's it's when
Speaker 1: you're blaming the nation of Germany and and it's people
Speaker 1: as constitute it. It's sort of this interestingly like fundamentally
Speaker 1: nationalist kind of idea that like, the people are their nation, right,
Speaker 1: and that's but and that is the attitude that the
Speaker 1: Germans had applied to that's yeah, yeah, And so part
Speaker 1: of what they're saying is like, all right, motherfucker's turnabout
Speaker 1: is fair goddamn play right, And it's the like, okay,
Speaker 1: you killed you killed my husband, so now I'm going
Speaker 1: to kill your husband as like not this is this
Speaker 1: is like you kill my husband, I kill you. That's legit.
Speaker 1: But again whatever, talking about what it also leads to,
Speaker 1: probably you know, this is why in Rojava, and we
Speaker 1: talked about this a lot in the Women's War podcast,
Speaker 1: so much of the justice system that they have built
Speaker 1: is based around ending reprisals, is based around someone killed someone.
Speaker 1: We have to bring the families together and get the
Speaker 1: families of the victims to agree to a situation by
Speaker 1: which the punishment on the person who committed the murder
Speaker 1: is severe, but the families are not locked into a
Speaker 1: cycle of vengeance, because that that's what's been destroying us,
Speaker 1: and it will destroy us if we let it right,
Speaker 1: and they're right to do that. And this is like, again,
Speaker 1: killing six million Germans is insane. Um, It's just it's
Speaker 1: an insanity that I cannot more like, there's no moral
Speaker 1: judgment here when I say that, right, they these these are,
Speaker 1: as Coffner said, they are deranged, and they are embarking
Speaker 1: on a deranged plan, and so to the extent that
Speaker 1: what they're doing is evil. Here, I again I placed
Speaker 1: this evil at the Nazis feet. Coffner just wanted to
Speaker 1: be a poet farmer. Right, you don't want to be
Speaker 1: doing this, you know. Um, so you know again, if
Speaker 1: you're I think the basic level, like the basic moral
Speaker 1: question here is illustrated well as as most moral questions are.
Speaker 1: In the movie Rambo First Blood. Right, they drew first Blood?
Speaker 1: You know, I haven't seen that so long. It's it's
Speaker 1: pretty base. And I remember that I remember liking it. Um, Yeah, Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: so so, so how far along do they get in
Speaker 1: this terrible plan? Because I'm I'm really to find out
Speaker 1: how he I'm curious because he obviously later was like
Speaker 1: just kidding. That wasn't the best plan, not entirely, Margaret.
Speaker 1: We will talk about that more too, but yeah, it's time.
Speaker 1: It's time to move on. So before we get into
Speaker 1: what he does and how he tries, I do want
Speaker 1: to make the point that he is completely right when
Speaker 1: he says that the Allied justice was not sufficient, and
Speaker 1: to make make it clear how insufficient it was, I
Speaker 1: want to read a quote from an article in the
Speaker 1: Guardian by Jonathan Friedland. After the war, a light officials
Speaker 1: identified thirteen point two million men in Western Germany alone,
Speaker 1: is eligible for automatic arrest because they had been deemed
Speaker 1: part of the Nazi apparatus. Fewer than three and a
Speaker 1: half million of these were charged, and of those, two
Speaker 1: and a half million were released without trial. That left
Speaker 1: about a million people, and most of them faced no
Speaker 1: greater sanction than a finer confiscation of property that they
Speaker 1: had looted, a temporary restriction on future employment, or a
Speaker 1: brief band from seeking public office. By nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: four years after the war, only three hundred Nazis were
Speaker 1: in prison. From an original one to list of thirteen million,
Speaker 1: just three hundred paid anything like a serious price, because
Speaker 1: it would have never been a never ending task, says
Speaker 1: David Cessarini, a research professor at Royal Holloway University of
Speaker 1: London and a leading authority on the Holocaust. He cites
Speaker 1: the British attempt to convict those responsible for the killing
Speaker 1: at Belsen. The trial took nine months and left the
Speaker 1: British exhausted. That was just one camp, and there were
Speaker 1: what seventy camps with hundreds of people at each one,
Speaker 1: to say nothing of the Gestapo officers and the men
Speaker 1: of the Einsetz group. And pursuing all those responsible for
Speaker 1: the slaughter of the Jews would have been trying thousands
Speaker 1: upon thousands of people, and it would have ended in
Speaker 1: the jailing of almost the entire adult male population of Germany.
Speaker 1: The Allies put their hands up in despair. And what
Speaker 1: I will say is, yeah, maybe we should have jailed
Speaker 1: the entire adult population in Germany, right like maybe maybe
Speaker 1: maybe something certainly more than three hundred, right um? And
Speaker 1: and again six just murdering six people indiscriminately is not
Speaker 1: certainly not the right answer. But I don't know. If
Speaker 1: you're going to say what should have happened, I tend
Speaker 1: to consistently line up with a funckload more of those
Speaker 1: people should have been killed. Yeah, But if they were
Speaker 1: going around being like, sorry, you were in the Nazi army,
Speaker 1: I don't care that you're a private You're dead now
Speaker 1: because I yeah, I think that's just we're going consequences
Speaker 1: of a decision you made. We make permanent decisions every day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if your permanent decision you made as you join
Speaker 1: the Nazi military, people fled, people, people tried to sabotage
Speaker 1: the Nazi military. There's even motherfucker's like there there are
Speaker 1: a couple of cases of like doctors who joined the
Speaker 1: s s under duress and then saved people in the
Speaker 1: camps who were like rescued from trials because Jews that
Speaker 1: they'd save came forward like no, no, this guy was like,
Speaker 1: actually people did, and if you did, I think the
Speaker 1: thing too. Here's what I'll put out. Take a leaf
Speaker 1: out of the Romans book, and of that five million
Speaker 1: kill one in ten see, and I do love a
Speaker 1: good decimation, but I think that my issue with this,
Speaker 1: I actually would rather that, um, these the Holocaust survivors
Speaker 1: who are not part of a who have their own
Speaker 1: militia go and kill a huge chunk of people who
Speaker 1: were part of the Nazi party rather than a system
Speaker 1: an apparatus that like tries and like condemns people to death.
Speaker 1: It's like and it's a weird anti death penalty thing
Speaker 1: for me. That is like gets back into this idea
Speaker 1: that like, I don't trust the systemization of murder right,
Speaker 1: and so in the any system that could have killed
Speaker 1: all of the Nazi soldiers later would absolutely do even
Speaker 1: worse then these other people who are dreaming of revenge.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe that's why, you know, maybe maybe a cool
Speaker 1: thing to have done. I say cool in a inappropriate sense.
Speaker 1: But you you take these groups who by the way,
Speaker 1: these folks like Kauvner and like the folks I read
Speaker 1: a quote about earlier, these different Jewish armed organizations, they
Speaker 1: kill somewhere around fifteen hundred Nazis after the war something,
Speaker 1: and maybe you just say, hey, guys, you have a
Speaker 1: license to do whatever you want in bringing people to
Speaker 1: justice for a two year period or something. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: free travel throughout Europe. You know, you you take this on. UM,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know certainly. What we can
Speaker 1: all agree on is what was done was woefully insufficient.
Speaker 1: And it's probably part of why there have been so
Speaker 1: many genocide since because one of the things that World
Speaker 1: War two proved is that actually, you can wipe out
Speaker 1: a people and kind of get away with it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The only thing you can't do is be a private
Speaker 1: invading Russia. Yes, oh no, you will not get away
Speaker 1: with that. Um So, in July of ninety six, Polish
Speaker 1: residents of Kilcy murdered forty two Jews who had returned
Speaker 1: from Nazi camps to their homes. This sparked a mass
Speaker 1: exodus of survivors from Poland. Prior to the massacre, around
Speaker 1: a thousand Jews per month had been immigrating from Poland
Speaker 1: to the month after Kilsey, twenty thousand fled. It was
Speaker 1: thirty thousand a month after that. Um And as best
Speaker 1: as anyone can tell, around two thousand Jewes were massacred
Speaker 1: post war by Polish civilians and similar killings. And another
Speaker 1: one of the questions you can have after this is,
Speaker 1: like all this ship that happened in Palestine after this,
Speaker 1: How much of it would have happened if people had
Speaker 1: felt like they didn't have to flee their homes in
Speaker 1: order to not die. Um. There's a question to be
Speaker 1: added there too. Um. So Kavner and his comrades saw
Speaker 1: have decided, we're gonna kill six million Germans. Um. And
Speaker 1: they name their new organization, which was about fifty or
Speaker 1: sixty people. This is not a huge group. They name
Speaker 1: it inn com, which is the Hebrew word revenge. Now,
Speaker 1: there was a lot going on in the Jewish underground
Speaker 1: just after the war, and Kaufner was an integral part
Speaker 1: of a number of different organizations that were dedicated to
Speaker 1: smuggling survivors out to Palestine and providing people with emotional
Speaker 1: and financial support through building a European Survivors network. So
Speaker 1: people getting out from these different areas, fleeing places that
Speaker 1: still weren't safe, would immediately be be met face to
Speaker 1: face with another Holocaust survivor, so that like the person
Speaker 1: who was helping them with like know what they had
Speaker 1: been through. Um. So he has access to a potentially
Speaker 1: limitless number of volunteers. And by the way, one of
Speaker 1: the points you kind of encounter reading the Kammas. While
Speaker 1: they don't tell a lot of other people about their plans,
Speaker 1: many of the folks that they are working with would
Speaker 1: have agreed with this um and again because they've all
Speaker 1: just survived the Hall, I guess um not hard to
Speaker 1: see why, but he is. These are And one of
Speaker 1: the things about this is like having gone through what
Speaker 1: they've gone through in the war, the fifty or sixty
Speaker 1: people that he's picked are like perfect insurrectionaries. They are
Speaker 1: None of them will talk, none of them will break
Speaker 1: under any kind of torture or question. These are the
Speaker 1: best underground like you, you could not find a more
Speaker 1: capable group of underground fighters than the people in the Calm.
Speaker 1: And he specifically, he hand picks the people in this organization.
Speaker 1: He will only we use the term Holocaust survivor very broadly, right,
Speaker 1: and it applies to people who, like, you know, they
Speaker 1: got beat up in the street by Nazis in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty three and then they fled the country. Right, that's
Speaker 1: a Holocaust survivor, right, And I wouldn't I wouldn't take that.
Speaker 1: Or somebody who you know gets out in forty and
Speaker 1: manages to like flee into France and then get to
Speaker 1: England or something right ahead of the that's a Holocaust
Speaker 1: survivor somebody who hides out in another person's house for
Speaker 1: the whole war, pretends to be a gentile. Those are
Speaker 1: Holocaust survivors. But they are not the same kind of
Speaker 1: Holocaust survivors as somebody who sees his home burnt to
Speaker 1: the ground and fights in the woods for three years,
Speaker 1: or somebody who is interned at Auschwitz and watches, you know,
Speaker 1: a million people die around them. There is a difference, right,
Speaker 1: And Kaufner will only accept into the calm people who
Speaker 1: have been in the deaf camps, people who have been partisans,
Speaker 1: and not just even that, they have to have taken
Speaker 1: a form of individual personal sabotage against the Nazi state
Speaker 1: while in that situation. So these are these are tough people, Um,
Speaker 1: these are These are some very frightening motherfucker's. And Kafner
Speaker 1: is so respected and the desired for vengeance is so
Speaker 1: overwhelming that a lot of the partisans he picked when
Speaker 1: they picks, when they learn about the plan, are almost
Speaker 1: delirious with joy. Kaufner gathers his handpicked partisans with him
Speaker 1: in a flat in Budapest, where they all live communally
Speaker 1: as they're carrying out the early stages of this operation,
Speaker 1: and by late nine he and his top lieutenants had
Speaker 1: picked out two plans, Plan A and Plan B. Plan
Speaker 1: A is to acquire poison and send it through the
Speaker 1: water supply and nerum in Munich and discriminately killing the
Speaker 1: populace of both cities. Mira Verbon Schavletsky, a member of NAKAM,
Speaker 1: told Dina Parat later that she was in seventh heaven
Speaker 1: when Kavner revealed the plan. Another member, Zela Rosenberg, said,
Speaker 1: Kaufner's words shouted inside me in an insane tail spin. Um,
Speaker 1: they are on board, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah um. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote next from a report from Herrot's on on
Speaker 1: how Plan A goes. Joseph Harmett was chosen to be
Speaker 1: in charge of the activity in Nuremberg, one of the
Speaker 1: symbols of the Nazi regime. I was grateful to be
Speaker 1: chosen for this job, he said before his death in
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen. Working under him was Wilick Shannar, who
Speaker 1: was hired to work in Nuremberg center for distilling drinking water.
Speaker 1: Parat discovered that he was able to obtain the plans
Speaker 1: of the water system and in the end even gained
Speaker 1: control of the main valve. While the group members were
Speaker 1: preparing to carry out the mission, Kauvner was supposed to
Speaker 1: provide them with the poison, but he lingered too long
Speaker 1: during his visit to Palestine. Only in December nineteen forty
Speaker 1: five did he return to Europe disguised as a soldier
Speaker 1: returning from leave. According to his testimony, before boarding the ship,
Speaker 1: friends in the Haganah, the pre state military force, provided
Speaker 1: him with poison packaged in tubes of toothpaste and shaving cream. However,
Speaker 1: on his way back he was detained by the British
Speaker 1: on the deck after his forged papers aroused suspicion. The
Speaker 1: poison which he was holding was tossed into the sea.
Speaker 1: So Number one, there's a lot of debate about whether
Speaker 1: or not the Haganah tipped off the British, right that like,
Speaker 1: some of them handed over the poison, and then when
Speaker 1: others found out, they were like this probably should let
Speaker 1: this go down, yea um. But he the poison winds
Speaker 1: up in the ocean, and it is impossible to say
Speaker 1: how many people might have been killed if Kafnor had
Speaker 1: gotten the poison to Europe. Um. They have control over
Speaker 1: the main water valve in Nuremberg, right, it's it's six
Speaker 1: million is probably not a realistic estimate, but they could
Speaker 1: have killed tens of thousands, I mean potentially, when you
Speaker 1: consider how chaotic things were at the end of the war,
Speaker 1: the lack of basic medical infrastructure, the lack of functioning hospitals.
Speaker 1: It's not unreasonable to think they might have been able
Speaker 1: to kill hundreds of thousands if they had, if they
Speaker 1: had gone and actually been able to try this. But
Speaker 1: they're not able to. Covener spends months in custody and
Speaker 1: kind of afterwards he is a known man to the Allies, um,
Speaker 1: and so he can no longer participate in the COM's plans. Um.
Speaker 1: He eventually settles on a kibbutz in Palestine. What if
Speaker 1: he um, what if he is able to settle into
Speaker 1: quiet life of supporting advertisers. Oh Jesus Christ, that was bleak, Margaret,
Speaker 1: Thanks thanks for this is not my show. Um, here's
Speaker 1: here's some ads. I guess so, Oh, Kauvner is kind
Speaker 1: of out of the picture of Nicom. He doesn't invite
Speaker 1: and you kind of get the feeling that he starts
Speaker 1: to like pull himself out of the tail spin a
Speaker 1: little bit. He invites a bunch of members of the
Speaker 1: group over to his kibbutz Uh. They visit. Some of
Speaker 1: them start to give up at this point, but others
Speaker 1: decided to carry out a Plan B. Do they have
Speaker 1: the Plan B the whole time? Oh? Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: And the Allies the ally and they're working towards Plan
Speaker 1: B at the same time as they're working towards planning
Speaker 1: and always have a backup plan. And this is actually
Speaker 1: cooler um. Indiscriminately poison the water supply of a large
Speaker 1: city is a bad thing to do. This is kind
Speaker 1: of rat So the Allied authorities had in turned former
Speaker 1: s S members at the tension camps outside of Nuremberg
Speaker 1: and Da Kau, one of the Avengers lead key Distal,
Speaker 1: was hired to work at the bakery that's Surbriet supplied
Speaker 1: bread to prisoners and guards at the Nuremberg camp. According
Speaker 1: to Dina parat quote, he first thought to inject poison
Speaker 1: into the bags of flour in the warehouse, later into
Speaker 1: the oh mixers, and finally he reached the conclusion after
Speaker 1: consulting with the group members that the poison should be
Speaker 1: spread on the bottom of the loads. So Distal spends
Speaker 1: months rising through the ranks at the bakery staff until
Speaker 1: he gets yeah, rise like bread, until he's put in
Speaker 1: charge of the bread warehouse, and he learns every aspect
Speaker 1: of the distribution system. This included the fact that German
Speaker 1: captives were given cheap black bread while the American guards
Speaker 1: were given more expensive white bread. This was a big
Speaker 1: break for New Calm. They were willing to mass murder Germans,
Speaker 1: but they like, again, the Americans have just liberated Nazi Germany.
Speaker 1: Don't want to murder those guys. It's like they would
Speaker 1: feel kind of bad about that. Um. Now, I should
Speaker 1: note that there's also some quotes. You'll get some really
Speaker 1: chilling quotes, Like there's one member of the Calm was like,
Speaker 1: if Kafnor had wanted us to murder a Jew for
Speaker 1: some reason to carry out our plans, we would have
Speaker 1: done it, Like we would have done anything. He told us.
Speaker 1: If you're willing to poison intoscriminately a city, you're going
Speaker 1: to kill a lot of Jews. Yeah, yeah, that that
Speaker 1: is also probably well actually, given the realities of the Holocaust,
Speaker 1: probably not at that I don't actually know enough about
Speaker 1: when people started getting back into Germany and started living
Speaker 1: in those cities. Acond Yeah, um, so yeah he is,
Speaker 1: And so this is the plan um they And again
Speaker 1: this shows like what competent, because they have they have
Speaker 1: in the space of a few months, gotten people at
Speaker 1: high levels in the water distribution network, like in like
Speaker 1: managing the waters, like the freshwater system and fucking the
Speaker 1: city of Nuremberg. And they've gotten other people managing like
Speaker 1: the bread distribution at this at like prisoner of war
Speaker 1: camps where huge numbers of s S prisoners are being held. Um.
Speaker 1: And they do this all simultaneously. And Distal and his
Speaker 1: chunk of new Com find another source of poison and
Speaker 1: they smuggle it into the warehouse under a raincoat. Several
Speaker 1: members of to COM succeed in hiding themselves in bread
Speaker 1: baskets where they wait for the night to fall. When
Speaker 1: the other workers had left for the day and locked up,
Speaker 1: they all left hiding and start painting poison using paintbrushes
Speaker 1: over loaves of bread. This was a static work for them.
Speaker 1: And when they've covered three thousand loaves, they paused to
Speaker 1: kiss each other. It's arsenic that they're putting on this bread.
Speaker 1: Two days later, Germans at the camp started to fall sick.
Speaker 1: More than former s S men caught stomach poison and
Speaker 1: it is unclear if any die records aren't great at
Speaker 1: this time. Some reports youll here is that it was
Speaker 1: like close to a thousand, you know, several hundred prisoners
Speaker 1: died eventually as a result of this. Dina Parat claims
Speaker 1: they failed to kill anyone. I don't really know who's
Speaker 1: right here. Dina kind of has a vested interest in
Speaker 1: making it seem like they didn't kill people. Um, I
Speaker 1: don't actually know what went down. Um, but they certainly
Speaker 1: get a lot of s S men sick. And you
Speaker 1: know what, I don't care what happens. I don't care
Speaker 1: at all. And like I don't care at all even
Speaker 1: if they're prisoners. I don't care. Well, I mean especially,
Speaker 1: I think it is beautiful that it is not their prison,
Speaker 1: they're not their guards they're killing them. It's their former victims,
Speaker 1: the victims. That's fine. That's completely phone notes on this one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: except that the poisoning is apparently every time I've read
Speaker 1: about people like trying to do mass poisoning in history,
Speaker 1: it usually fails really terribly all nearly always. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: actually very hard to do, and it's hard to say,
Speaker 1: like would would the water plan if worked? They had
Speaker 1: a lot of poison it was, it was supposed to
Speaker 1: be a pretty good quality. It's also kind of worth
Speaker 1: noting part of why they choose to poison the water
Speaker 1: is that for hundreds of years in Europe, like every
Speaker 1: time water would go bad in a well or something,
Speaker 1: the juice would get blamed and murdered. And so they
Speaker 1: were kind of being like, we're going to do it
Speaker 1: this time, right, Like that was like part of the thinking,
Speaker 1: um that that that tracks so well to just be
Speaker 1: like you call as monsters for a thousand fucking years,
Speaker 1: moderately a thousand years. Yeah, we'll do it now. Motherfucker's
Speaker 1: I get it. Bad thing to do, but to get it. Um. So,
Speaker 1: the Allies never caught in a calm for the poisoning,
Speaker 1: but when they analyzed the arsenic used they concluded that
Speaker 1: they could have killed about sixty people with it. It
Speaker 1: suspected the reason why this doesn't work that well as
Speaker 1: that they spread it too thin on the bread um.
Speaker 1: And this is something that members of the group would
Speaker 1: regret for the rest of their lives. Um, yeah, I
Speaker 1: get it, guys, I get it. So not long after,
Speaker 1: another group of the common Surgeons, headed by a hero
Speaker 1: of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, attempted to carry out the
Speaker 1: same plan in the Dachau camp. The plan was canceled
Speaker 1: at the last minute for unknown reasons. And it's kind
Speaker 1: of at this point that Nacom starts to fall apart.
Speaker 1: The mania of the wars the derangement, as as Kagnor
Speaker 1: would later claim, has faded, and now people are starting
Speaker 1: to look at the possibility of a future. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: there are a few men who stayed loyal to the mission.
Speaker 1: After a visit to Kavner and Palestine, a small group
Speaker 1: returned to Europe to try again. Their efforts were constantly
Speaker 1: stymied by the new Federal Republic of Germany, and many
Speaker 1: of them were arrested by After turning to crime to
Speaker 1: finance their efforts. They all eventually immigrated back to Palestine,
Speaker 1: where many turned the rage and hate that they'd to
Speaker 1: spend upon the Germans towards a new enemy. So a
Speaker 1: bunch of the guys who are in the calm become
Speaker 1: senior officers in the Israeli Defense Establishment. One becomes the
Speaker 1: chief of the i d F. At one point, a
Speaker 1: couple one or two become generals. A number of NECOM
Speaker 1: fighters and affiliates and other Jewish militant organizations start the
Speaker 1: massad um. And yeah, a lot of very nasty things
Speaker 1: result from that. They do kill like about fifteen d
Speaker 1: Nazis too, which is is fine, um, but you know,
Speaker 1: the nakba happens. Uh, there's a you know, the establishment
Speaker 1: over time of an apartheid state, the displacement of a
Speaker 1: large number of people. Um, a lot of pretty pretty
Speaker 1: ugly stuff, and a lot of it is done by
Speaker 1: people who had been in this group and these other groups. Now. Covnor,
Speaker 1: because he's tried to poison six million people, has kind
Speaker 1: of ruined any chance of a political career for himself,
Speaker 1: but he remains a prominent and a popular poet and
Speaker 1: INSPI rational war leader. During the nineteen Arab Israeli War,
Speaker 1: he was made a propaganda officer, and he used his
Speaker 1: skillet poetry to try and encourage his soldiers to carry
Speaker 1: out violence without sympathy or guilt. He issued a series
Speaker 1: of battle missives, one of which was published after the
Speaker 1: surrender of an Israeli unit during the Battle of Nit Sonham. Now,
Speaker 1: these Israeli soldiers had been hopelessly outnumbered and cut off
Speaker 1: by the Egyptians. They're kind of surrounded. They surrendered to
Speaker 1: the Egyptian army. Kaufner is furious about this. He sees
Speaker 1: them as traders. He calls them traders, and he publishes
Speaker 1: a poem titled Failure just days after the fighting, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from a study by Michael Arbel,
Speaker 1: denouncing them for not fighting to their last drop of
Speaker 1: blood and for not defending every inch of territory with
Speaker 1: their lives. By failing to do so, Kauvner claimed the
Speaker 1: surrendering fighters demonstrated to the Egyptian enemy that it was
Speaker 1: possible to vanquish the defenses of a Jewish settlement within
Speaker 1: a matter of hours and undermine the conviction essential to
Speaker 1: the morale of every Israeli fighter that few, that the
Speaker 1: few are capable of defeating the many. Toward the con
Speaker 1: lusion of the missive Coauvner vehemently called out, better to
Speaker 1: fall in the trenches of home than to surrender to
Speaker 1: a murderous invader. To surrender so long as the body
Speaker 1: still lives in the last remaining bullet continues to breathe,
Speaker 1: it's magazine. It's magazine, to a disgrace, to emerge, to
Speaker 1: the invader's captivity, to a disgrace, and to death. Now
Speaker 1: this caused outrage at the time because he's calling these
Speaker 1: soldiers who have like fought and surrendered like cowards, um.
Speaker 1: And this is compounded in because Kauvner's wrong. He's saying, like,
Speaker 1: the Egyptians are murderous monsters, how dare you surrender them?
Speaker 1: And the Egyptians treat these Israeli soldiers as lawful prisoners
Speaker 1: of war and turn them to their home because it's
Speaker 1: a war and there's rules, and they return them home afterwards.
Speaker 1: So these guys don't die. That's because they surrender, which
Speaker 1: is why it's it's good to respect the rules of war, um,
Speaker 1: which cared about as soon as he exactly which exactly
Speaker 1: again we all understand how he came to stop caring
Speaker 1: about the Every enemy is the Nazis, right, That's not
Speaker 1: just him, that's a lot of these these people, right,
Speaker 1: even though like you know, the Egyptians are not the Nazis. Um,
Speaker 1: not that there's not ugly stuff that happens in these
Speaker 1: wars that are going to follow, but it's not the
Speaker 1: same um. And these returning soldiers attack Kafner for calling
Speaker 1: them treasonists, and a later investigation by the I d
Speaker 1: F concludes that the soldiers had acted appropriately. Kafner had
Speaker 1: simply lost all sense of proportion. He remained an influential
Speaker 1: poet for the rest of his life, though, winning the
Speaker 1: Israel Prize for Poetry in nineteen seventy and dying in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties seven from laryngeal cancer. Because he is just
Speaker 1: when I tell you this guy was a chain smoker,
Speaker 1: you have to think about, like what it means to
Speaker 1: be a Holocaust survivor in a chain smoke. This guy
Speaker 1: is this guy is consuming cigarettes at like the nation
Speaker 1: state level. Yeah, I mean a cigarette is a is
Speaker 1: a symbol of no future, right, Yeah, that is? That
Speaker 1: is its charm and its poison. Is that there's a
Speaker 1: symbol of I'm doing something because I don't care what
Speaker 1: happens to me. Yeah. There may be no people alive
Speaker 1: who smoke the way this man was capable of smoking.
Speaker 1: We've lost the capacity for smoking like that in the
Speaker 1: species um, so other members of nicom. They'll remain alive
Speaker 1: into the twenty first century, and they don't really no
Speaker 1: one really talks about what has This is kind of
Speaker 1: like not very well known at all. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: still not that well known, but this is really not
Speaker 1: known at all until kind of the nineteen eighties when
Speaker 1: some of the when the people who survived start to
Speaker 1: be like, oh, we're not gonna live forever, we should
Speaker 1: probably like talk about what happened, right, And so that's
Speaker 1: the point at which historians and sociologists start to interview
Speaker 1: them on their about how their feelings on revenge had
Speaker 1: evolved throughout the decades. And by the way, there's going
Speaker 1: to be if you start researching this, you may find
Speaker 1: some of the books you read by some of these
Speaker 1: survivors there are points that I've laid out of here
Speaker 1: that they will disagree on. There's several books by survivors.
Speaker 1: And then Dina Parratt has written two books, and she's
Speaker 1: kind of the academic who has talked to the most
Speaker 1: of these guys. There's points of disagreement, there's things we
Speaker 1: don't know because again, everybody like the Foggle War, everybody's
Speaker 1: like older like they were kind of crazy at the time.
Speaker 1: You're not, You're not. There's points that you're not going
Speaker 1: to get the exact history on because nobody knows it right.
Speaker 1: There's disagreement from people who were all there. You know,
Speaker 1: that's just the reality of of historiography. So but there
Speaker 1: are interviews with a number of these guys, So we
Speaker 1: have kind of information from historians and sociologists about how
Speaker 1: these people's feelings on revenge had evolved through the decades,
Speaker 1: and as far as I can tell, they didn't change
Speaker 1: their minds. Boulak Benyakov, who led in a calm after
Speaker 1: ninety seven, said that he could not have looked himself
Speaker 1: in the mirror if he hadn't tried to get revenge.
Speaker 1: He still regretted that it had failed. Most of his
Speaker 1: comrades seemed to agree, feeling that the Germans had deserved
Speaker 1: it and ruling that they had not succeeded in clear
Speaker 1: carrying out Plan A. When one survivor was asked how
Speaker 1: she could possibly have made peace with the mass poisoning
Speaker 1: of babies, children, and other civilians, she answered, if you
Speaker 1: had been there with me at the end of the war,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't talk that way, that's completely possible. Yep again,
Speaker 1: but no, no, no, it's just like, yeah, you can't
Speaker 1: expect people like it's obviously not everyone who lived through that.
Speaker 1: In fact, most people who lived through that didn't feel
Speaker 1: entirely the same way, but a lot of them did
Speaker 1: and that's valid. Um, I'm glad they did not succeed
Speaker 1: in poisoning six million people to death and discriminately, but
Speaker 1: to get it, and it's it's them. You know. There's
Speaker 1: a there's a really good song about this whole story
Speaker 1: by a he's a German Jewish musician. Um. The band
Speaker 1: is one second. I'm gonna pull this up right now.
Speaker 1: It's actually how I heard about this story first, and
Speaker 1: then I wound up reading the books. Um, and it's
Speaker 1: it's a pretty pretty dope song. It's called Um six
Speaker 1: Million Germans by Daniel Kahan and the Painted Bird, And
Speaker 1: there's um there's a couple of lines in there because
Speaker 1: it kind of ends with him talking about how these
Speaker 1: guys all became part of the Israeli military establishment, of
Speaker 1: the of the birth of this apartheid state, of all
Speaker 1: those violence that gets done in the wake of that,
Speaker 1: And there's a line he has in their convengence set
Speaker 1: or one second, le let me pull up clear, because
Speaker 1: I don't get this wrong. They put aside their rage
Speaker 1: and hate and work to build a Jewish state with
Speaker 1: Jewish towns and Jewish farms and Jewish guns and nuclear arms.
Speaker 1: Now conventions put upon the shelf be taken out later
Speaker 1: on someone else. Be careful how you read this tale,
Speaker 1: lest your own prejudice prevail. Look around the world today
Speaker 1: and consider the role that vengeance plays for history has
Speaker 1: its unpaid debts, and is it better if we forget?
Speaker 1: I like that it ends with a question. You know, yep,
Speaker 1: it's a good song. I mean, it's like it's so
Speaker 1: hard because if you come with almost any other story,
Speaker 1: it would be so easy for me to be like, well,
Speaker 1: here's how I feel about vengeance, and here's how I
Speaker 1: feel about justice. And you know, um, and you look
Speaker 1: at this and you're just like, yes, it's fucking messy.
Speaker 1: Ship is fucking messy. Um. This is not, you know,
Speaker 1: as uplifting, maybe as some of our other Christmas episodes.
Speaker 1: I I would not feel confident calling these people bastards
Speaker 1: because I think to some extent the things they have
Speaker 1: lived through make it impossible for me to fully morally
Speaker 1: judge them, even for the bad things that they've done. Um.
Speaker 1: That's where I am. You're allowed to feel however you
Speaker 1: want to feel about this stuff, but you know it's
Speaker 1: worth thinking about. Um. I will say when we're talking
Speaker 1: about things that the Nazis have done that are evil,
Speaker 1: obviously all of the killings, all of the millions and
Speaker 1: millions and tens of millions of deaths are the worst.
Speaker 1: But one little crime of the basis, I will say
Speaker 1: is the fact that, as I was researching this, I
Speaker 1: had a literal moment where I thought, well, ship would
Speaker 1: the world have been better if they've done it? If
Speaker 1: they'd killed six million? And that was the lesson everyone
Speaker 1: else who thought about genocide for the rest of history
Speaker 1: took out from it. Right. Yeah, And the answer is no,
Speaker 1: by the way. But the fact that I and I'm
Speaker 1: going to guess most of you are going to spend
Speaker 1: some time actually thinking about that is another crime we
Speaker 1: should lay at the Nazis. Fee No, that's such a
Speaker 1: fucking good point. I had a moment where I was like, well,
Speaker 1: what would have happened if they've done that? And it's like,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter because spreading the idea that killing millions
Speaker 1: of people and discriminately can ever possibly there's ever a
Speaker 1: good way to do. And it's interesting because if it's
Speaker 1: like if they had dismant whatever is a million hypotheticals,
Speaker 1: but the idea that Germany should cease to exist, which
Speaker 1: I also don't whatever whatever, I don't think any countries,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, yeah, but like you know, if like Germany
Speaker 1: does so bad that it doesn't get to exist anymore, Um,
Speaker 1: it's so, and then it I would love to know more,
Speaker 1: you know, because it's like, as far as I understand
Speaker 1: has explained to me by an Italian friend, the Italian
Speaker 1: fascist system like stayed kind of intact and just changed
Speaker 1: its name in a lot of ways, or at least
Speaker 1: a lot of the individual functionaries continued and like I
Speaker 1: don't know, and versus Germany that seemed to like Germany
Speaker 1: presents itself as having had a national reckoning. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: certainly I will say of the Axis powers, they have
Speaker 1: done the best job of that that that is probably
Speaker 1: very fair to say. You do get these weird moments.
Speaker 1: I was visiting Sachsenhausen, which is it's not a death camp,
Speaker 1: but it's a concentration camp, so obviously a lot of
Speaker 1: people died there that its main goal was not killing.
Speaker 1: That had started as a place for political prisoners, and
Speaker 1: UH continued that way under the Nazis. Uh. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a very bleak place, although it is the museum
Speaker 1: that the Germans have set up there is very very good.
Speaker 1: If you are ever near Berlin, you have a chance
Speaker 1: to see Saxon House, and I think you kind of
Speaker 1: owe it to yourself to see it. UM. I went
Speaker 1: during the dead of winter, so it was snowy, and
Speaker 1: there was this moment where you're like walking through it. You're,
Speaker 1: you know, we're all bundled up in three layers and
Speaker 1: it's just frigid, and then you walk in to one
Speaker 1: of the indoor areas and the first thing you see
Speaker 1: is one of the uniforms, the winter uniforms that the
Speaker 1: inmates wore, and it's very affecting. UM. But as we're
Speaker 1: like coming into it, we have this great tourist guide
Speaker 1: who's this brit who has been living in Germany for
Speaker 1: like thirty forty years, and he's he's walking us through
Speaker 1: and he points out this building outside of kind of
Speaker 1: the museum area, and he's like, back when the camp
Speaker 1: was active, that's actually the administrative building. That's where like
Speaker 1: they did all of the sort of administrative tasks for it.
Speaker 1: And I was like, well, what is it now and
Speaker 1: he said, oh, well, it's like a training facility for
Speaker 1: the Berlin police, right right. Um, So you know there's
Speaker 1: you know, critiques I might have, but but yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean generally speaking, yes, the Germans have done, of the
Speaker 1: access powers, the best job of of reckoning with those crimes,
Speaker 1: and I think probably it also would be fair to
Speaker 1: say a better job of reckoning those crimes than like
Speaker 1: the United States has done with slavery. Um. But also
Speaker 1: like there are repeated we just we just had another
Speaker 1: group of like right wing Germans arrested for trying to
Speaker 1: overthrow the government and store of the Reichstag. So you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's there's issues to right, I mean like there's
Speaker 1: there's Nazis everywhere. Now like that's another there are Nazis everywhere.
Speaker 1: I will say, I am not convinced. I don't think
Speaker 1: I think it's probably fair to say there's not like
Speaker 1: more Nazis as a percentage of the population in Germany
Speaker 1: now than a number of other places. So, UM, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know. Like, this is not a
Speaker 1: thing where I can say and here's the moral lesson
Speaker 1: to take out of this story. This is just some
Speaker 1: stuff that happened that you you, I think you should
Speaker 1: think about. Uh. Yep, they're a good episode anyway for Christmas,
Speaker 1: Happy holidays? Uh uh fuck great, great, Yeah, we're going
Speaker 1: to well if you like lighthearted violence, god damnit. Um.
Speaker 1: I have a book coming out called Escape from Insul Island,
Speaker 1: which asks the very important question of what if all
Speaker 1: of the men who felt like they were owed a
Speaker 1: woman by the government got tricked into moving to an
Speaker 1: island where they were stuck. Uh. And it's coming out
Speaker 1: on February one. You can pre order it. You can
Speaker 1: get it through the publishers Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness,
Speaker 1: or if you're listening to this in the future, you
Speaker 1: can get it wherever books are sold. And I have
Speaker 1: a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff. And I
Speaker 1: have another podcast called Lived Like the World Is Dying,
Speaker 1: which is about community and individual preparedness. That's what I
Speaker 1: have to plug, Sophie, do you have anything to plug? Ah?
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastard's doing a live as f sketch fest
Speaker 1: in January on the Yeah Good podcast at cool Zone
Speaker 1: Media and All the Things. Yeah, if you'll find an
Speaker 1: even more fucked up story to talk about in a
Speaker 1: room full of people where you all have to stare
Speaker 1: at each other and think about the ethics of violent
Speaker 1: responses to genocide. No, no, it'll probably be about some
Speaker 1: guy you sold children poison or whatever. Really fine, it'll
Speaker 1: be funny. Yeah, Well, here we go. Happy Happy Christmas. Bah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: talk to talk about in a calm to your family
Speaker 1: at the dinner table this year during the holiday. Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
Speaker 1: media dot com, or check us out on the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.