Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

‘Tom? It's me.’

He didn't know how to reply. Her voice alone could still send a charge through him, but now it made him feel wary rather than excited. There was still so much they hadn't said.

Without waiting for him, she spoke. ‘I've just had some sad news. Do you remember Sid Steiner? The man in the old age home?’

‘Of course.’

‘He died last night. In his sleep.’

‘Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.’ He remembered the old boy, playing the piano, his hands fluttering along the keyboard as if he were a teenager.

‘He was the last one, Tom.’ He could hear her voice wavering. ‘There are none left now.’

‘I know.’

‘There's something I need to discuss with you.’ She paused, girding herself. ‘I want to do what my father did, to continue what he started.’

Tom felt his chest seize up. What was she saying? ‘Look, Rebecca. I'm sorry Sid's gone. But DIN has to end sometime. It's not up to you to carry-’

‘No, I don't mean that. DIN is over, Tom. I don't expect you to forgive me for how it ended, but I need you to know that it has. And to know that I will never lie to you again.’

‘I want to believe that, Rebecca.’

The silence held between them. Eventually she spoke again. ‘This is something different I need to do, for Sid's sake. Something my father always did when this happened. I've never done it before. I'm not even sure I know how. But I'd like you to be with me. At my side. Because you're the only one who knows everything that happened.’

‘What is it you need to do?’

‘I want to remember them, Tom. Sid, my father, Hannah, Rivvy, Leah, all of them. I want to remember them. I want to say Kaddish.’

The Final Reckoning is a novel – but the story at its heart is true. A group of Holocaust survivors did, in fact, seek revenge for the Nazi slaughter of the Jews in the months and years that followed the Second World War, and they did so along the lines described in this book. They were known in Hebrew as the Nokmim , the Avengers, and they consisted of a hardcore of around fifty men and women, most of them former resistance fighters from the ghettoes. Others name the group after its motto – Dam Israel Nokeam – which translates as ‘The blood of Israel will take vengeance’ and which abbreviates as DIN.

Their story was first told in English in a truly remarkable book, Forged in Fury , written by the former BBC correspondent in Jerusalem, Michael Elkins. Published in 1971, when many of those involved were still alive, it provides perhaps the fullest account of DIN's post-war activities. More detail has come in subsequent years in memoirs from those involved, including From the Wings by Joseph Harmatz, and in Rich Cohen's excellent account, The Avengers. An interview with Harmatz published in the Observer on March 15 1998 also sheds much useful light.

These sources differ on many of the details but all make clear that there was indeed both a Plan A, a scheme to introduce toxins into the German water supply, and a Plan B, aimed at poisoning former SS officers via a Nuremberg bakery. There is some debate about the number of Nazis killed in the latter operation, but Harmatz – who was directly involved – and others leave no doubt that it happened. The New York Times articles from April 1946 detailing the consequences of that effort, articles which Tom and Rebecca read in the internet café, are not made up: they appear in this book exactly as they were published. They can be retrieved from The New York Times database.

The record also shows that the Avengers' leader, Abba Kovner, travelled to Palestine – as Aron does in this book – seeking the moral authority of those poised to lead the Israeli state-in-waiting. Kovner met Chaim Weizmann, not only the former leader of world Zionism and soon-to-be first president of the state of Israel, but also a renowned chemist. According to Cohen, Weizmann listened to Kovner before declaring, ‘If I were you, having lived as you have lived, I would do what you will do’ – much as ‘the elder’ in this novel gives his blessing to Aron. Indeed, Weizmann put Kovner in touch with a young chemist to supply the poison. In Cohen's book, Weizmann knows only of Plan B rather than the much deadlier Plan A; but Elkins implies that the old man was aware of, and backed, the more lethal scheme.

Aron's fate in this novel reflects the fate of the real-life Abba Kovner, who did board a British ship bound for Europe carrying canisters of poison only to be arrested by British military police late in the voyage, forcing him to abort Plan A. Historians of the episode debate who precisely might have betrayed him, but they are convinced – as Kovner himself was – that it was a fellow Jew and Zionist. The individual who gives up Aron in this novel is wholly fictitious. Indeed, I should stress that my imagined President of the state of Israel is not to be confused with the current occupant of that ceremonial office – even though they are both men in their eighties.

Gershon Matzkin is also my own creation, but he is rooted in reality. He is an amalgam of several figures, including Lebke ‘Arye’ Distel – the blond, blue-eyed Avenger who, according to Harmatz and Cohen, applied the poison to the loaves destined for Stalag 13 – and also the man Elkins calls Ben-Issachar Feld (most likely a pseudonym to protect his identity), whom he later dubs ‘Benno the Messenger’. As a young boy, Feld was charged with spreading word of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. The coded sentence Matzkin carries – ‘Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4’ – was, according to Elkins, the same cryptic line delivered by Feld.

The description of the Kovno ghetto, and the circumstances leading to its creation, as well as the mass killings at the Ninth Fort, are also entirely grounded in documented fact. The pogrom of June 1941 is detailed in many sources, including The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews by Alvydas Nitzentaitis, Stefan Schreiner, Darius Staliunas and Donskis Leonidas. For the account of the ‘Great Action’ of October 28 1941, I was guided especially by Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary by Avraham Tory, as well as from eye-witness testimony collated at the HolocaustResearchProject.org website. The image of the pit that seemed to breathe for three days comes from the Rev Patrick Desbois, quoted in ‘A Priest Methodically Reveals Ukrainian Jews' Fate’, published in The New York Times , October 6 2007. George Kadish, the photographer whose work helps Tom finally unravel this story's mystery, is no invention either: all but the last of the Kadish pictures Tom sees can be viewed online.

The fading DIN list of targeted individuals, apparently hand-delivered to Rebecca's flat, features here just as it appears in Forged in Fury , with the addition of two fictional names: Joschka Dorfman and Fritz Kramer. The statistics presented by Henry Goldman, detailing the huge numbers of Nazis who escaped justice, are drawn from the work of Raul Hilberg; the table of figures appears as a footnote in David Cohen's essay ‘Transition Justice in Divided Germany after 1945’, published in Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy , edited by Jon Elster. Inevitably, given the intense secrecy under which DIN operated, it is close to impossible to verify whom exactly the Avengers managed to kill. Some of the names Elkins cited in 1971 would not survive historical scrutiny now. But it is hard to dispute that Nazis across the world were hunted down and killed in their homes, on the streets and in the dead of night – by a group of men and women determined to show the world that Jewish blood could not be spilled cheaply.