Behind the Bastards - Part One: A Tale of Revenge

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Robert and Margaret Killjoy sit down to do the annual Christmas non-bastard episode about Nakam, a terrorist group made up of Holocaust survivors who sought vengeance against the Nazis. (2 Part Series) FOOTNOTES: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-11-08/ty-article-magazine/.premium/an-eye-for-an-eye-jews-who-sought-to-kill-germans-in-revenge-for-the-holocaust/0000017f-e0d4-d38f-a57f-e6d6c9b30000 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/26/second.world.war https://archive.ph/qS91#selection-315.0-327.235 https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.2979/jewisocistud.18.3.99 https://echoesandreflections.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/07-01-06-01_Student-Handout_Pronouncement-by-Abba-Kovner.pdf http://www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/vilna/vilna_pages/vilna_stories_kovner.html https://www.schoeningh.de/display/book/edcoll/9783657705757/BP000032.xml https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/anti-jewish-violence-in-poland-after-liberation.htm Porat, Dina. Nakam (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition. Porat, Dina. Nakam See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Merry Hallimus, it's behind the Chris Bastard-Miss-Robert Evans here. Podcast God. With me today is Margaret Killjoy and Sophie Lichterman. Margaret, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm here for the Christmas song special. God with me today is Margaret Killjoy and Sophie Lichterman Margaret. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm here for the the Christmas song special. Isn't what we're gonna do is just sing Christmas carols

That's right We're going to sing the version of frosty the snowman that I wrote while on an acid trip that takes seven and a half hours And is largely a retelling of the ring cycle Okay, so yeah, also Extremely pornographic. So if you have children listening, you need to get them away It is actually a crime in 37 states for them to listen to my version of frosty the snowman Yeah, and the worst part is is that actually if anyone listens to it Robert goes to jail. That's right. That's right So Margaret, you will be here to do the 26 minute long kazoo solo, which I'm very excited about

I brought bells. Oh You did actually you do literally half bells sweet silver bells Bells that are perfect for ringing in Christmas, which is great because this is our yearly Christmas episode now normally Normally for Christmas. We do a non bastard, right? Like we do it a hero to kind of pep everybody up at the end of the year But last year and this year really you launched a podcast called cool people who did cool stuff That's basically a regular weekly version of the Christmas podcast of the Christmas episodes that we used to do

So this year I'm doing something a little different something. We've never done before which is we're gonna be covering a group of people Who were rad as shit for 80% of the story and then things take a dark turn So 90% of the revolutionaries in human history Yeah, and this is there's a lot of fascinating moral questions with the the group that we're gonna be talking about Have you ever heard about a terrorist group called Nakam? No, I don't think so. Oh, I don't know. We'll find out. Yeah, we will find out indeed Margaret before we get into this episode. I want to do a little thought experiment for everybody here

I want you to imagine that a few years down the line a church or a political party Rises up in the United States And and starts trying to spread a fascist gospel around the country and this this gospel takes off among a significant chunk of the population And let's say it's far-fetched, but yeah far-fetched and let's say that that these fascists are Specifically targeting people like you and the folks that you love whatever whatever thing you identify as whether it's you know gender orientation religion sexuality political ideology

They're targeting like you and the people that you love and let's say Imagine they get into power, right? Maybe it's a coup maybe they they actually just straight up win an election, but they get into power and And a lot of violence falls a tremendous amount of violence and you lose a lot of the people that you love most in the world Virtually all of them over a terrifying period of years and years of violence now being fascists They do eventually lose which is what always happens to fascists and at the end of that period You and the folks who have survived are our heartened are a lot better at doing violence and are thinking Who do we make pay for this? Right? Who is it moral to punish for this?

Obviously the ringleaders right the the the people that were leading the movement the people who did death squad shit the people Who are actually carrying out the killings, but what about what about the churches full of clamoring extremists? What about the civilians who supported the movement and and bade and howled and cheered as they committed their murders? To what extent are those people guilty? Right. Uh-huh. Is it wise to to just let them all live because the war is over or By doing that. Are you potentially endangering your remaining loved ones even more because if there's not Consequences, is it the case that maybe they'll do it again? So that's a question to keep in your mind, right? Okay as we as we start to talk about

Eastern Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s Oh, that was a fun time to be around. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so that's what we're gonna be talking about and specifically We're going to be really focusing on one individual today a Pretty fascinating fellow named Abba Kovner He was born able Kovner on March 14th 1918 just as the First World War was ending in a town called Sebastopol on the southern tip of Crimea now if you've casually glanced at European history You will know that the southern tip of Crimea in 1918 as a Jewish person is a pretty rough place to be

That is not one of the top places in times. I would choose to be born Now Abel's parents were quite orthodox Jews In a in the fall of a sparrow a Stanford biography of Kovner. They're described as is moderately traditional I don't entirely know what that means But that's that's kind of the the way in which they're they're generally described by the best biographer Kovner has now Sebastopol did not have a large Jewish population. This is not a city that has like a particularly significant Like sizable community in it and in czarist Russia, which you know is what? Kovner's parents had lived under right up until about 1917 the ability of Jewish people to hold jobs had been strictly limited, right?

You can't really teach at colleges if you're Jewish at least you're heavily limited from doing it They have quotas. There's a lot of different like jobs. You just can't do you're Europe There's an apartheid system really and in most of Czarist Russia now luckily for Abba by the time he's born the czar's are out of power And his family is he comes into like a fairly affluent family. They're large and they're extremely close His father had been an expert appraiser of antique jewelry Is this a did when with the revolution of 1917 to Crimea? What happened to Crimea did it get into the USSR did it do its own thing? I don't know enough about it's part of the USSR

Yeah, okay, but then also 1918 things are a lot less Yeah, they're not very USSR at that point. Yeah. Yeah, there's still kind of worry moving along, right? Yeah And his family is is moderately well off one of Abba's earliest memories is sitting around the table at a family dinner And a man admiring his grandmother's pearl necklace, which had been in the family for a hundred and fifty years So he has not just a large family, but a family that like They have managed a lot of continuity between the generations, which is is not Necessarily the most common thing in this part of Russia because of how many pogroms there are because of how yeah common the Violences the fact that his family has like managed to keep these things in their possession for so long says a lot, right?

Yeah, Abba is a very smart child. He is pretty much universally regarded as having been particularly a brilliant artist and very charismatic Everybody really likes this kid. He's very inclined to the arts, particularly poetry And he had his family members were called he had a unique ability to memorize and recite things that he'd read And he would do this to keep everyone entertained especially during holidays and family gatherings He would read books and then he would recite them to his family is like, you know Basically, it's the early 1900s and Sebastopol. They don't have like TV or radio This is what I learned Yeah

Bearable Yeah, he's like describing Andor to everybody and During like the Seder or whatever because this is the difference, right? Like if you describe what happened in Andor it sucks But if you if someone were to just act out Andor in front of everyone that would rule Yeah, have you ever seen that movie? I forget the name of it. I think Rain of Fire is the name It's about like dragons destroy civilization. Yeah, it's apocalyptic Britain There's a great scene where like the a bunch of post-apocalypse survivors are like sitting around a campfire doing Star Wars for each other

Yeah Yeah, see that rules acting it out is great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's what Kovner's doing. He's very creative Everybody finds him very entertaining Now this is again 1918 Rough time to be anybody in Sebastopol, but particularly Jewish And his dad is arrested by Soviet secret police when he's four in 1922 This is because private cop private commerce was forbidden in the Soviet Union Obviously in the earliest stages kind of after the czar's fall, it's possible, you know business and stuff continues in regions

It's not like evenly distributed at this point but by the early 20s the Soviet state is kind of starting to Um to to lock into place and he gets fined for his bourgeoisie decadence as you know being a Jewelry guy and he's put in prison for several months This is probably had or at least his biographer who is I should say this right now His biographer is like super pro-Israel And a scientist and a Zionist his father is also a known Zionist and I when I say this We're all of these folks that we're gonna be talking about in the 20s and stuff are Zionists

That doesn't mean entirely the same thing that it does to this day in part because a lot of people who a lot of Jews Who are Zionist in this period are also socialist or also communist and are less thinking about I want to establish You know a state of Israel as it currently exists, which is shall we say deeply problematic when more we want to liberate Like the Palestinian mandate from the British imperialists and establish establish a socialist community there, right? and That's kind of the line Abba's father falls in on his family is very left-wing one of Abba's Cousins is going to found the Communist Party of Israel when that all happens So like that's that's the so they are very left-wing despite the fact that they're they're somewhat affluent, but Zionism is not

Allowed in the Soviet Union, right because a big part of it is like we're going to number one Religion is is a not encouraged in the in the in the early USSR in particular But number two a big part of it is that like well, we're not gonna stay here, right? Like if you're Zionist that you pretty fundamentally don't want to stay where you are in the USSR and they're also not thrilled with that So that probably played a role in his dad getting arrested And he stays in prison for months until the family can put together enough money to secure his release Which is interesting to me because he gets arrested for doing commerce and being right, but he also is too rich He's really not rich enough. Yeah, I don't know, you know, whatever

By 1926 the Cogners had decided that the Soviet Union was not a great place for them They felt there. Yeah. Yeah, especially since again most they are fairly religious Yeah, and they see kind of not that just their religion, but their nationality is under attack So they decide to move some place that's gonna be a little bit more friendly for them It's also again, Sebastopol doesn't have a huge Jewish population So some of it's just like well, maybe we'd like to be in a place where there's a larger Jewish community I'm so nervous about where they're gonna move to Well, they're going to move to a place that never has any problems in the early part of the 20th century in Lithuania

Oh, great. Yeah. Now Lithuania is part of like Poland specifically they moved to Vilna, which is today the capital of Lithuania if I'm not mistaken But back then is part of Poland, right? Yeah So they are attempting to and they've got family in the area, right? You know, so they're they're not just like moving sight unseen. They have a lot of relives there, too This is a good move and for a while the family is Affluent again, but that period quickly ends because Abba's father seems to be a really Generous guy and in this period because of the Civil War in Russia because of all of the chaos after World War one

There's a ton of refugees moving into Vilna, right? And his dad kind of spends money faster than he can make it helping out other refugees in the area because yeah Yeah, pretty pretty nice guy. Yeah Abba, you know goes to a Hebrew school and then he goes to an art university when he graduates I think it's called a gymnasium. I don't entirely I believe that's broadly speaking like a second or a primary school That's my impression, but I always get Europe and people talk about going to gymnasium look everyone does schools wrong, but Europeans particularly do schools wrong And I think it's okay to admit that

They at least name them wrong. However, they name them very wrong. I think I think the US overall the school is a little bit wronger Yeah, I I hate the word gymnasium and I'm angry at them. So that's I'm biased here Yeah, but he goes to a Hebrew school and then he goes to an art university and he is studying I think specifically poetry And he's actually being published as a poet. He's quite good. Yeah, and he's he's studying poetry when things in Europe start to take Well, I say start to take a dark turn. He is in Vilna in the 1920s It's been dark for a while, but they start to get a lot darker in the early 1930s

And again Vilna is a part of Poland that is smack in between Russia Which has just gotten through a civil war that's killed millions and Germany Which has just gotten through like a famine that killed like a million people after World War one and as they're on this They're on this slow road to fascism. It's a terrible place to be and they're about to get split up between the two Nations boy. Are they ever a Margaret are gonna agree to invade together and then hold the joint fucking parades It is going to be a tough It's it's not again one of the worst places you could possibly be in this period of time Yeah, so Abba's father dies in 1932 right as Hitler's rising to power in in Germany

You know, he's just he's a stressed out guy. I think he's kind of older It's not uncommon for the man to be significantly older than his wife in this period in time He dies and his mother Abba's mother is forced to support the family by starting a restaurant And this is very difficult to her because she had a chronic injury to her legs So his mom is like one of these parents who is like Physically disabled and also taking the burden for feeding and supporting her entire family under herself by starting a restaurant But she's a very good cook. It is a successful restaurant Okay

In 1935 when he was 17 Kovner dropped out of Hebrew school having decided that his studies were useless And the teachers were all old assholes by this point. He was convinced Hard not to like in this period and he's convinced in this point that his future lay in Palestine as a pioneer Okay, all throughout Eastern Europe in this period Jewish communities are watching the spread of radical political Ideologies that often adopted anti-Semitism as planks of their belief Young people in young Jewish people who are paying attention to these trends started to form their own youth Organizations and these are both for a mix of like self-defense and to aid them in Carrying out this kind of migration over to Palestine, right? Okay, and not all of them

some of them are Communist organizations that are not Zionist right communism socialist organizations that are organizing along left-wing lines and and plan to stay That's also a significant portion of this but all of these Jewish youth organizations are based heavily on the Boy Scout movement That had been launched by Robert Baden-Powell because it is a quasi military movement, right? Yeah That oddly makes sense There was a lot of that going on in Europe around that time where there was a lot of like hiking clubs would be where you would like Go learn discipline and marksmanship and hang out with your buds Yes, and it's not hard to see why a lot of Jewish youths in a place like Vilma would be like

Yeah, we should probably be like training for some of this stuff, huh? Yeah Looks like shit might get a lot harder very soon. Yeah So I want to read a quote from the Jewish virtual library about these youth groups quote many Jewish youth affected by the process of modernization Which had begun among Eastern European Jewry sought a means of maintaining their Jewish identity and culture outside the stifling barriers of the Stetl and the Orthodox Jewish life on the other hand they were troubled by the crumbling of the foundations of society around them and by the growing anti-Semitism which threatened their very existence in its Early stages the movement was heavily influenced by the Boy Scout movement organized by Baden-Powell and an embrace scouting is a basic Principle to teach ghetto youth self-reliance outdoor life and a love and knowledge of nature

Another important influence upon them was the Wander Vogel movement in Germany which emphasized youths independence and creativity And the Wander Vogel movement is there's a mix of the Nazis that are kind of like inspired and related to it and there's also a Lot of reaction to it because one of the things that happens in the Wander Vogel movement is a lot of German youth are having gay sex Yeah, and they go camping right. Yeah Which is one of the reasons camping is rad and that is that the Nazis do not like we'll talk more about the Wander Vogel movement Okay, yeah, no, yeah, I covered them a bunch on the gay resistance and Nazis episode And so like I'm pretty excited about how both the like right and left wing were like deeply part of the Wander Vogel movement Yeah, it's very

Interesting and messy and cool and it's a it's a yeah Yeah, we don't it doesn't get talked about much. No all stuff that like you really like the messy shit No, no, no, and it's it's stuff. You have to really be reading your your history in order to actually get to yeah Once you do you realize like oh, this was central to a lot of what was happening in this period. Yep So there's a lot of these groups some of them are revolutionary and communist in nature Others are kind of centrist and even conservative and a much more focused on Zionism And again when we talk about Zionism in this period some of these people are we're going to like take our own state in Palestine By by force but a lot of them are just we're probably all going to get killed if we stay here and like farming in

Palestine seems like a better life. So what if we just did that, right? Yeah, there was like Right-wing and left-wing Zionism that are like dramatically different and then even among left-wing Zionism I think that there was kind of a split about whether or not they were trying to create a state Whether or whether they were just like basically trying to go live where they were kind of originally from yeah And where like they wouldn't get murdered and you do have to when you're kind of parsing this out keep that all in mind But they're all aware that they're under the gun here. Yeah. Yeah It's really weird to look at this from the current context of Israel being a Great thing. Yeah. Yeah

But the the right-wing versus left-wing Zionism versus also the left-wing non anti-Zionists like all three groups were doing their thing Sorry, I got excited about this stuff. Yeah. Yeah They're all they're all also there's a tremendous amount of conflict between them. Yeah, totally And we're the part of the story today is how a lot of that conflict comes to an end. Okay The specific youth group that Abaco Abacovner joins is called hashyomer hot there. I I'm sure I'm not getting that quite right, but it's it was kind of I've heard different things They are a Marxist group. They are a Marxist like socialist youth organization I've also heard them described as kind of like soft socialist

So they're they're more compared to the people who are like outright communist revolutionaries There are a lot more moderate, but they are Marxist, right? They're not just like social Democrat They are specifically using Marxist and analysis. Yeah propaganda and the way that they see the world Abba's cousin again becomes like the founder of the Israeli Communist Party. So this is like a whole thing in his family. Yeah And it's interesting. He You might suspect because his dad gets arrested by the Soviets because his family has a tough time in the USSR that they might have had There might have been a reactionary strain in them and they would have like pulled away from those politics But that's not really that's not at all really Abba's

Fuck yeah, like his that's not that's not the tack that he takes we'll talk about that a little bit in a second Yeah, but the Hetzom or Hetzar of advocated for Jewish people to abandon the industries. They traditionally worked in In you know places where they were living and instead become labors and farmers so that they'd be able to settle in Palestine one day And you know all of that stuff Some of them had started trying to do this as early as 1919. They are sending there are people moving over there This is how the first kibbutz is get established, right? It's these guys So by the time World War two is getting ready to kick off and that's in the background as Abba's joining this group as he's As he's kind of moving up the ranks. He's becoming a community organizer. He's making propaganda

The Nazis are taking power and consolidating power. You got your light along knives. You got your Anschluss You got your war bell starting to ring for the invasion of Poland Now on kind of the eve of the invasion of Poland the Jewish population of Vilna is about 60,000 and it's one of the most cohesive Jewish communities in all of Europe it hosts what's called the Strussian Library, which is the most famous Jewish library in all of Europe Abba spent a lot of time in that library and he spends the years in the run-up to the war kind of throwing his life into the Hachomar Hatzar and he eventually becomes like one of the leading figures in his local chapter Okay, this passage from a book about Abba called the fall of a sparrow

Describes him just as the war clouds began to gather in Europe. He headed the local branch It's governing body and the regional leadership. His physical appearance was also exceptional He wore his hair long and dressed like the older Hachomar Hatzar members with his shirt collar rather Rather than his jacket collar uppermost wide pants stuffed into his socks and in later years into his boots His dress was influenced by the Bolshevik revolutionaries and he turned it into his own personal style Kovner wrote an exceptionally beautiful Hebrew a great deal for the group's newspaper Which was posted on the clubhouse wall. His sense of humor was well known in the movement summer and winter camps He was as familiar with happiness as he was with sadness said one friend. He was always an intellectual challenge

He had an in an original way of asking questions or discussing problems and impressed everyone with his self-control and seriousness The younger members admired him and the movements instructors recognized his leadership qualities He radiated authority. They said 50 years later And that's one of the things you'll notice about Kovner because a lot of the people who knew him then get get interviewed again Like literally half a century later. Yeah, and there's almost this awe. They all had for him. He's just a deeply charismatic young man Yeah, he's just one of those people that is kind of magnetic to folks Which means you do terrible things or possibly good things He could and it's one of he doesn't seem one thing that he does not seem to have any particular personal desire for power

Which is interesting. He's he's really focused on organizing Um, but not focused on kind of like there's no sort of a cult of personality. He just seems like a deeply likable kid Um, I don't know. Yeah, it's certainly at this point in time. He's nothing but rad. Yeah And again, it's interesting that he he's very focused on kind of cultivating this image of himself as a Bolshevik Especially considering the problems that his dad has but his earliest memories He never because he's very young when the family is affluent He doesn't remember that period at all. His earliest memories are after they moved to Vilna when they're very poor You know when his dad dies when his mom's got to try to keep the family together

And so he is he is very dedicated to the poor. He's very familiar with kind of like class Consciousness and he's he's very humanist. He's a secular guy, right? Like he's not particularly religious He is he didn't get that parents basically. No, no, no He he he grows up a committed Marxist who's very aware of like the divide between rich and poor, you know, yeah Everything changes in his life on September 1st 1939 when Germany invades Poland At once they begin to implement the early stages of the final solution Which had not yet been fully plotted out but was broadly understood by the Nazi elites Yeah, they started forcing Jews into ghettos and mass killings were common in the parts of Poland that the Germans took over

thousands of men were taken by gunpoint at gunpoint and put into forced labor battalions now by the terms of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact Which is the the the the treaty that the Germans and the Soviets sign before the partitioning of Poland Vilna is an apportion of Poland that is invaded and occupied by the Soviet Union as Things begin to settle down and the new Russian occupiers start to take effective control It became clear that the youth movement was going to be forcibly disbanded the issue was of course Zionism which the Russians wanted to discourage. Yeah, rather than risk being split up or disrupted by secret police Kovner made the decision to have his organization go underground Officially the Hatzomer Hatzair had ceased to exist in reality. It was just hiding

Dina Parat in Death of a Sparrow writes the underground's first task was to find or invent new methods for continuing their activities As soon as the younger Hashomer Hatzair members understood that they were not being dispersed But rather that necessity dictated a new modus operandi. They enthusiastically began to construct underground cells They were organized by the leadership into groups of five a method learned from reading pre-revolutionary literature recounted Kovner and only the most reliable members were accepted key members were sent to places outside Vilna disguised as Christians in Private homes and outside the city limits they continued to study Hebrew hid books taken from the great libraries closed by the Soviets which had been the heart and symbol of Jewish Vilna and even held a few seminars and And again at this point, they're primary goal. They're helping refugees

They're trying to continue to carry out the practice of their religion the study of their history And they're also continuing there. They're not able to continue to help people immigrate over to Palestine right now But they are they're trying to like keep that Infrastructure setups that they can again one of these days. Yeah Now they're not an insurrectionary organization at this point and they don't have any desire to fight a rebellion against the Soviet state But I just want to be able to keep doing their shit while the Soviets are That and Kovner and a number of others are aware that like shit with the Nazis is going to cook off And there will be a need to fight at some point. And so they are kind of consciously

Setting themselves up in a structure that will be able to survive and resist in the in the days that are coming And those days come pretty quickly well June 22nd, you know, it comes before other things What's that Margaret? It's the ability for people to exchange Money for goods and services that's right Margaret That's really the most revolutionary activity is exchanging money for goods and services absolutely During the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations

And you know what? They were right I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the FBI Sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside an undercover investigation In the first season of alphabet boys We're revealing how the FBI Spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced Cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns

He's a shark and on the good badass way and nasty sharks He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called in sync What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space And when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories But there was this one that really stuck with me About a soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth His beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world Listen to the last soviet on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI Isn't based on actual science

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price Two death sentences and a life without parole My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman join me as we put forensic science on trial To discover what happens when a match isn't a match And when there's no science in CSI How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus

It's all made up Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts Ah, we're back. I got my socks tucked into my fucking boots because I'm a radical What if you start with him tucked into your socks? That was the look that I was more nervous about When he had his pants tucked into his boots, that's always a solid look, right? No notes Tucked into your socks, I don't know. I got to see it to believe it What about having your boots tucked into your socks? What if you put your socks on the outside of your boots?

If you're attempting to move across terrain in ways that you don't leave noticeable tracks while doing things at night I've heard that that's a reasonable thing to do Well, this has been Margaret's advice on how to carry out an insurrection Welcome. Now it's time to go back to the story We've just been talking about Kovner and his fellows are kind of preparing themselves for the future inevitability of a guerrilla war And that inevitability becomes inevitable, I guess On June 22, 1941, when Germany institutes Operation Barbarossa, which is still the largest military operation in human history They invade with like three and a half million men or something

It is a titanic operation Much like the Titanic Yes, it ends a lot worse than the Titanic It can't fail But it goes great for a while Again, the Germans carry out the largest encirclement operations that have ever happened There's like million-man blocks of the Soviet army that are just like annihilated or surrendered or whatnot It's a whole big thing. It's not going well for them at first

And the Germans fairly quickly enter the Lithuanian portions of the USSR, including Vilna This comes as a shock Kovner's ready for something to happen, right? He's not shocked by the fact that the Nazis do Nazi shit But everyone's shocked at how poorly the Red Army performs, right? By the fact that they fall apart so quickly And so they don't really, they're not able to get away from this, right? Some Vilna Jews' handfuls are able to escape

But nearly everyone is trapped by Luftwaffe bombardment and Wehrmacht encirclement So Vilna is going to be, because it's one of the first large Jewish communities that the Nazis take over during Barbarossa And they're going to use it as kind of a proof of concept, right? They are testing out extermination Oh, fuck, uh-huh It is one of the first large Jewish communities that's going to be annihilated by the Germans Now, when they go in and start exterminating people Most of the actual killing is being done by members of the Lithuanian right wing

Members of, actually, kind of adjacent to these Jewish youth movement organizations, right? These right wing clubs and paramilitary organizations who had been underground under the USSR Yeah, that tracks But yeah, when the Nazis take over, they're like, hey, we would love to take vengeance on Lithuanian leftists and Jews And the Germans are like, absolutely, guys And I'm going to quote from Dina Porat again When Einsatzkommando 9 entered Vilna in early July It immediately became clear that the wave had reached the city's Jews as well

Einsatzkommando 9 bug along to the Einsatzgruppen The SS units that followed in the Wehrmacht's train And their principal mission was to kill the Jews and communist party activists who had remained behind The activities of national Lithuanian institutions were drastically curtailed And only those dealing with urban matters were left intact The Lithuanian police force was placed under SS command And right wing units were integrated directly into it That left little behind the facade of Lithuanian independence

And the Lithuanian murder of Jews, whether committed on their own initiative or under German ages Brought them nothing in return The coordinated effort of the two German authorities, the SS and the army And the Lithuanian units began on July 4th And marked the beginning of the oppression and eventually the destruction of the Jewish population in Vilna The German military government issued decrees Which the Lithuanian urban administration put into operation The Einsatzgruppen sent Lithuanians to kidnap and murder Jews, sometimes participating themselves

Where the Wehrmacht kidnapped Jews for forced labor The Jews called the Lithuanian kidnappers Chappuns And some were local youths who had received a small bounty from the Germans for every Jew turned in They broke into homes at will, robbed and beat with no fear of retribution And made the lives of the Jews intolerable These are the proud boy types, right? And the oath keepers and shit, yeah That's how the Germans are doing it here

It's fitting because like when the Nazis take over they just use the existing police force And then added more right wing stuff to the existing police force This is, that tracks, yeah Yeah, it completely tracks There's a lot going on here that again is going to become very common among the rest of the areas the Nazis have taken And it's because, number one, these Einsatzgruppen units are not great at most things They're certainly not good at anti-partisan conflict Okay, that's good

There's not a shitload of them And it's kind of, again, most of them are like not, like, the participating in these mass killings Like leads to a lot of suicides and drunkenness among the Einsatzgruppen So whenever they have the opportunity to use locals to do the killing for them They're going to prefer that just because it kind of preserves German unit strength Yeah There's a number of reasons why they do it this way The Jewish community in Vilma is taken wholly by surprise by this

Many chose to hide themselves in an attempt to survive Kovner recoils at the prospect of hiding and of fleeing the ghetto But he does, he's kind of forced to, right? Because members of his organization are like, no, we're going to get killed if we stay here We have to try to, like, hide with Gentiles who are friendly elsewhere in the city So that we can take action later Kovner agrees to do this, but he writes that he's covered in shame by the idea of hiding in a closet He is a fighter, he does not want to be hiding, right?

But sometimes you have to make strategic decisions about when and where you fight Yes, and they do And he takes shelter in a group in a Dominican convent That's like, these nuns, by the way This is normally a show, and generally when we bring up nuns on this show, it's very negative These nuns are based as shit These are the coolest fucking nuns I have ever heard about You're going to love these nuns

So these nuns take Kovner and a couple of his friends in And they are, you know, trying to, like, he agrees to do this But while he's locked up, he's sending out letters He's arguing whenever he gets face to face with someone That we need to get back in the ghetto to fight back and defend, like, our community Part of this is because his girlfriend gets, he doesn't get to escape with her She stays in the ghetto, and for a couple of weeks She's sending him letters about how bad the conditions are

And then the letters stop abruptly, and they never pick back up again And he doesn't know what's happened to her, she's been killed But he doesn't, he's not able to find that out He has no good information about what's going on And in the early days, all the Jews in Vilna have are conflicting rumors about the slaughter Because one of the ways the Germans carry out the massacre is They put together a second ghetto And this provides them with the ability to move large numbers of the Jews

Without making it seem suspicious We're not, you know, we're taking you to the next ghetto And then these guys all get taken out and massacred, right? But they don't have to say we're going to kill all these people And there's a little bit of plausible deniability, so it stops a panic from taking Like happened in Andor in the jail scene Exactly, like that So most of these people, which is tens of thousands of people

From mid to late 1941, are taken to a place called Ponari Which had previously been a pig-nicking spot And they were gunned down and tossed into mass graves Most of the actual killing again is done by Lithuanian right-wing partisans One local witness to the slaughter later wrote 11th July, lovely weather, it's hot out There are white clouds and a gentle breeze Shooting can be heard from the forest, presumably from training

The shooting started at 4pm Then I was informed that many Jews were transported to the forest Via the road to Grodno and were then shot This was the first day of executions, a depressing feeling The shooting stopped at about 8 in the evening For the Germans, 300 Jews or 300 enemies of humanity For the Lithuanians, 300 Jews or 300 pairs of shoes, trousers and clothes Damn, that's such an interesting way of breaking it down about

Will the Germans hate the Jews and we just want to steal all the shit from the Jews Yep, that is a big part of what is happening here So that's good When the Germans occupied Vilna, the ghetto has again a population of 60,000 I've also heard 80,000 because of the refugees There's not like a census being taken that's particularly good By December of 1931 though, less than a third remain December of the same year

So in less than a year they go from 60,000 to 20,000 Cool Because of how many are massacred But while these massacres are occurring because the Germans There's some plausible deniability and there's not great Again, there's not like internet, social media There's not like a lot of good ways to figure out what's happening outside your door So a lot of Vilna's Jews still don't believe that the annihilation is being carried out

Yeah, that's happening in Warsaw too Well, and part of why they don't believe it is they have friends and relatives over in Warsaw And at this point in time, a lot of the correspondence that the Vilna Jews are getting from their relatives in the west Is that like, yeah, there was some killing earlier, but it's calmed down And like, we think it's gonna be okay And again, this is also, we're talking centuries of Jewish history We're like, yeah, there will be these eruptions and there will be massacres But then things will calm down again

They'll deal with some bullshit laws, but like, we don't get wiped out, right? And that's kind of what people think is happening And so there's this belief among a lot of this, even though a lot of people have been killed That like, it's not going to be as bad as it is, as it clearly is And again, I'm saying this, these people are not like irrational, they're not weak, they're not shitty They're dealing with an unprecedented situation, right? Now, as early reports of German atrocities start to leak out in the middle of 1941 The standard belief, so there's this group, and this is every ghetto, right?

There's an organization called the Judenrat Which is, rat is like a, it's spelled rat, like the animal But it's like a governing council, right? This is just like a general word in the area And the Judenrat is the governing council of the ghetto, right? And the Nazis endorse and establish Judenrats in the ghettos that they take, you know, control of Yeah, to make people think that they have any control over their own lives Yeah, and it's a mix of some of these guys who are part of the Judenrat are

As with, you find in any community, like self-serving assholes who they get better kind of conditions And better food by doing this A lot of them though are just people who are, well, if we work with them We can avoid getting massacred We can like reduce the amount of violence our community has to suffer again there And again, a lot of like people in specifically radical organizations are really angry A lot of the folks who agree to be in the Judenrat Obviously, I'm not gonna come down morally on anybody who's trying to survive the fucking holocaust

Totally This is a fucking nightmare Yeah But in this case, you know, there is, there are these reports are starting to filter in to the ghetto And the Judenrat's official line is that the killings that have occurred outside of Vilna Are the results of an isolated crazy German commander, not a broad policy of genocide And it's gonna be okay, right? Their job is to keep everybody calm

Right And that's what they're trying to do I feel like the Judenrat is like, they, in the end it was the wrong call, right? Yeah They didn't know it was the wrong call Who joined it, at least again, the only one I've like looked at is the one in Warsaw And it was like a lot of the people who were part of the Judenrat were like Yeah, this is how we think we will best survive this intact

And they were wrong But they were wrong But they didn't, there was no way to know they were wrong besides like Yeah Yeah They're not wrong because like they were bad people or whatever In part because this was not in a lot of times in which Jewish communities had faced Danger in the past

Stuff like this had been the right thing to do Right? Had been the thing that preserved the community Again, this is just an unprecedented time They are wrong, but I have no interest in morally judging Totally Any of the people making decisions in this impossible situation Oh, the products and services that support this podcast, Margaret

Yeah They think all times are precedented As shit And they don't care about you Yeah But that's because we care about them, it's a one way Yeah It's like an anxious versus, it's like an attachment style problem

You know, that we have with ads Oh, I would just say that we have so much love for them That there's no cosmic space for them to love us left It's our fault Yeah, it is our fault Yeah During the summer of 2020 Some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations

And you know what? They were right I'm Trevor Aronson And I'm hosting a new podcast series Alphabet Boys As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation In the first season of Alphabet Boys

We're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man Who drives a silver hearse And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns He's a shark And not in the good and bad ass way He's a nasty shark He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time

And then for sure he was trying to get it to happen Listen to Alphabet Boys On the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Lance Bass And you may know me from a little band called NSYNC What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space And when I was there, as you can imagine

I heard some pretty wild stories But there was this one that really stuck with me About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space With no country to bring him down It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev Is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth His beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI Isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today Is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price

Two death sentences and a life without parole My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman Join me as we put forensic science on trial To discover what happens when a match isn't a match And when there's no science in CSI How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts Ah, we are, we are, Margaret That's because we think That's right, I think we're the first people to come up with that idea Yeah So these guys, again, we have no interest here in morally judging the members of the Judenrod But the fact that they make this choice to try to convince their people that annihilation is not imminent It's not going to be the right thing to do, right?

It does not wind up helping the matter In late summer, a number of women escaped from mass graves at Polnaree And this is the thing that happened, right? Either they're wounded, but they survive, or they kind of feign death And they wind up under a pile of the corpses of their loved ones And then dig themselves out in the night And they make it back to the fucking ghetto Or back to Vilna, and they manage to find friendly people to talk to

And they try to warn everyone, right? They try to be like, no, guys, like, they are going to kill us all They're already doing it And again, I'm going to pass over to Dina Parat here The Judenrod forbade anyone to meet with them But even individuals far removed from the Judenrod had the greatest difficulty in believing the survivor's accounts Pescha Aronowitz, who arrived wounded at the home of Dr. Mark Foretsky The ghetto children's physician managed to convince him, although he hesitated for a long time before believing her

Others, however, were certain she had gone mad, and she stopped telling her story It was in Vilna and Lithuania, the first places in Europe to see mass murders That people began to doubt the stories of those who had escaped death Whether they recounted them to Jews who lived nearby and were candidates for the same fate Or to those living in safety Perhaps the opposite was true That those who lived near the killing pits in the train stations from which the transports left did not believe Because if they had, they could no longer have continued living

This is the... I know that there's no bottom to the worst thing that one could experience during this time But this is up there You survive a mass shooting, I mean a mass grave situation You survive execution You crawl out underneath your friends and family You go and warn everyone and everyone is like, okay, Cassandra, you're just crazy Yeah

Because they can't believe the enormity of what you're telling them Yeah And no one believes women Well, that's probably not a part of it too, right? So Abba Kovner, like most Vilna Jews, did not know what to do at first Because he's not getting... he hasn't sat down face-to-face with all these people He's just... it's just rumors, right? And it's rumors that he's hearing while he's hiding underground in a Dominican convent, right?

Now, he does eventually succeed kind of in late summer, early fall In leaving the convent and moving to a safe house in the ghetto with some of his comrades And in September, a group of two women and one 11-year-old escape the burial pits and make it back to Vilna They visit a doctor, again, who is a member of the Hatsomer under Abba Kovner So this is a guy who's like one of his boys And when the doctor hears their story, he invites Kovner to come and talk to them Okay So for the most part, Kovner spent the early months of occupation focused on smaller tasks, right?

He's establishing communications lines, he's helping get safe houses, he's getting his people in position He's trying to facilitate their movement wherever he can And this is the first moment, because he's kind of just been keeping himself busy This is the first moment where he's forced to come to terms with the fact that his community is being exterminated His immediate thought was that he needed to kill himself He just wants to die, like the second he learns that this is happening, his immediate urge is to commit suicide Yeah Which is valid

Yeah, I mean But of course, yeah, literally any reaction would be valid Yeah, exactly But of course, he wants to do that, but he can't do that because his people are in danger So he decides to opt for the next best thing to suicide, armed resistance Now, let's get back to those nuns I was telling you about Yeah, I'm really excited about this, I'm really excited when Catholics actually do good The mother superior who had hosted, who had hid Kovner and his friends in the convent had been distraught when they left

She did not want him to leave, she wanted to help, she repeatedly told him that she wanted to fight alongside them She's a pretty good ally, and after hearing a bunch of this, Kovner basically tells her, if that's how you really feel, get us some weapons And so one day in December of 1941, she shows up in full nun garb outside the ghetto with a bunch of hand grenades hidden under her hand Yeah Yeah Fuck yeah That's fucking rad Yeah

That is quality nunning She has officially won my favorite nun award Yeah So good on you There's a ton of really good ones There's the whole like thing, clear You seen the map of like Catholics versus voters for the Nazi party in Germany Yeah

It's just an inverse map Yeah Which is interesting of course, because Catholics were very down with fascism in Spain at literally the same time But like, it's just, it's interesting, I find it interesting Look, there's like a billion of them now, you know, there's a wide variety of Catholics And this one rocks, she tells them that she wants to join the Jews and fight with them because God is now in the ghetto That is her, like it's very, I think this is pre-liberation theology But she is very much like, the place for me is with the people being oppressed because that's where God's going to be

Yeah, totally Which is fucking based Smuggling grenades into the ghetto in your habit is rad as shit Yeah So, and she is like, let me come, I want to fucking kill some Nazis with you Yeah I need you to go back to the convent, like this is how you can help us best We're not ready to do that yet, but thank you for all of these hand grenades

Yeah He later wrote, quote, I mixed in with the column of Jews returning from their day of forced labor I felt my soul torn, what would happen if it the grenade fell from my hand or if I tripped and fell And because of me, a whole community were to trip and fall as well Till that day, I had never touched a hand grenade, I didn't know how to use one So, he's got some weapons now, he doesn't really know what to do with them, that's a process, right? Right, yeah So, while he and his partisans plan for their first attacks against the German occupier

Kovner puts it upon himself, now that he knows what's happening, that he knows the stakes are complete annihilation He takes it upon himself to put out a warning to the rest of Europe's Jews The mass killing of the Holocaust had started in Lithuania And Vilna's Jewish community was among the very first to be wiped out Jews further west still had no idea what was coming for them, and the international community knew even less He had to warn them, so the same month he gets those grenades, December of 1941 Kovner writes a message that is soon smuggled into ghettos all across the east, particularly in Poland And makes its way out of Nazi Europe and across the world

I'm going to read it to you now Jewish youngster, do not trust those that deceive you Of the 80,000 Jews in the Jerusalem of Lithuania, Vilna, only 20,000 have survived In front of our very eyes, they tore our parents, our brothers, our sisters from us Where are the hundreds of men who were abducted for labor by the Lithuanian kidnappers? Where are the naked women and children who were taken from us on the terrible night of the provocation? Where are the Jews who were taken away on Yom Kippur? Where are our brethren from the second ghetto?

Whoever was taken out of the ghetto gates never returned again All the roads of the Gestapo lead to Ponari, and Ponari is death Hitler is plotting to annihilate all the Jews of Europe It befell the Jews of Lithuania to be first in line Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter It's true, we are weak and defenseless, but the only response to the enemy is resistance Brothers, it is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of murderers Resist to our last breath

Yeah, I fucking like this guy Yeah, yeah, this is the first major warning that comes out That like, what is on the table is complete annihilation Kovner is the one who gives it So, that's where we're going to end part one Alright Lots of good stuff Well actually, I don't know, I have no idea what's going to happen next

This is a fascinating story, Margaret But at this point, I mean, Kovner is an amazing man And at this point, like a guy who is handling himself impossibly well in an impossible situation As are a number of other people, including that based ass fucking mother superior What a rad lady So, think about that and go smuggle hand grenades to someone who... Margaret, you got some pluggables to plug? I have a story about nuns coming out

Oh, you do? Or rather, I have a story with some nuns in it I have a book called Escape from Incel Island that does what it says on the title on the cover And it is coming out from Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness on February 1st And you can pre-order it at tangledwilderness.org and get a free poster of the cover It's a really cool cover, I think people will be excited about it It's a cool cover, it's a very good book And you know, when you think about it, Margaret, the Vatican is kind of an in-cel island

Yeah, it is I'm sorry, the Catholics are definitely the good guys on this episode, but I couldn't resist that one No, that's fine I guess they're vol-cell, you know? Yeah, yeah, totally, yeah Definitely vol-cell, sure It's densibly vol-cell Yeah, that's what I got

I also have a podcast people can check out called Cool People the Cool Stuff You do! It's really good Oh, thanks Margaret's there Yeah, sometimes Robert's there Sophie is there I am sometimes

Yeah, I'm always there I'm also sometimes on Substack where you can find me Yeah, it's Shatterzone.substack.com Check that out, I write things, usually one thing every week So you can read more shit from me if for some reason I'm not in your life enough Anyway, go to hell Robert, we're doing... There's a behind the message show at SF SketchFest in January, right?

Really? You'll be there! Really? Okay, I've never heard you do that voice before and I didn't enjoy it I'm just letting you know Yeah, I didn't enjoy it either It was a little loud Honestly, I feel terrible about that

But yeah, it's January 20th, get tickets via SF SketchFest Hell yeah I don't know, there's probably a link Hell yeah I won't make the sound sketchy joke again, I already made it once I enjoyed it the first and second time Thank you, I appreciate it Excellent

All right Bye Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com Or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse

And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI Isn't based on actual science And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price Two death sentences and a life without parole

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts