Yehuda 'Idek' Friedman, a member of a secret group of Holocaust survivors who plotted revenge against the Germans has died aged 105.
Friedman was born in 1919 in Krakow, one of seven children. As a child, he was a member of the Zionist Akiva movement. His two older brothers emigrated to Mandatory Palestine before World War II; the rest of the family stayed.
All the Jews who had not fled Krakow by winter 1939 were moved into a ghetto. The Jewish community of the city had dwindled from 56,000 Jews before the war to 15,000 by 1940. A trained car mechanic, Friedman was given a work permit to go out to the Gestapo garages and take care of the vehicles.
He would use the opportunity to find food and smuggle it to his family, who all survived until the final liquidation of the ghetto in 1943. However, on March 13, 1943, his parents, three sisters, brother-in-law, and two nephews were taken from their hiding spot, forced to strip, and shot on the Death Hill of the Plaszow concentration camp.
Friedman moves to pre-state Israel
Friedman – the sole survivor – ultimately moved to the pre-state Israel. Here, he joined the secret group named Nakam (“revenge”), founded by, among others, partisan leader (and later poet laureate and Israel Prize winner) Abba Kovner. The group hatched two plans to kill six million Germans as revenge for the Holocaust.
In her 2021 book Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge, academic Dina Porat wrote: “They were the only ones among the Jewish survivors and Jews in general, to attempt revenge on such a scale. The Nakam group was the only one to seek revenge that would do justice in an unjust world, would be both a punishment and a warning for the future, and would not let the Holocaust be forgotten.”
The plots were the subject of a 2018 documentary by the UK’s Channel 4 named Holocaust: The Revenge Plot, for which Friedman was interviewed.
The documentary revealed a never-before-heard audio recording made by Kovner when he was dying of cancer in 1985. “We thought of finding a weapon as unconventional and as severe and as cruel and inhuman as the action that the German nation had inflicted upon us,” Kovner said.
In the recording, the members testified about Plan A: to poison the water supply of major German cities and indiscriminately kill six million men, women, and children. Kovner claimed in the audio recording that, after traveling to Mandatory Palestine, he had received the approval of Chaim Weizmann – who would go on to become president of Israel – though this is unproven. Allegedly, group members succeeded in acquiring the poison from Ephraim Katzir, a chemist and another a future Israeli president.
But Kovner was arrested en route to Europe and threw the poison off the ship. It was rumored that he had been betrayed by the Haganah, but a more likely explanation, writes Porat, is that he was arrested for his involvement with Aliyah Bet (1920-1948’s illegal immigration of European Jews to Israel before and after the Holocaust).
The group then switched to Plan B, which was to target SS soldiers being held by the British at prisoner of war camps in Germany by infiltrating the bakeries that provided bread to the prisoners and lacing them with arsenic. The group succeeded in poisoning thousands of SS soldiers, but it is not known for sure if any died.
“I dedicated my life and soul to revenge,” Friedman told Channel 4.
Porat recalled a 2010 interview with Friedman. Toward the end, Friedman sat tensely forward, his eyes elsewhere, and he said “Why?! Why?! Why was the operation stopped?!
“Father and Mother will never forgive me for not doing anything! Mama, Papa, I did nothing! They stripped them and shot them. I went home, and the place was empty. We were seven children. My uncle had 10. We should have tried again and again!"