Abba Kovner (; 14 March 1918 – 25 September 1987) was a Polish-Jewish partisan leader, and later an Israeli poet and writer. In the Vilna Ghetto, his manifesto was the first time that a target of the Holocaust identified the German plan to murder all Jews. His attempt to organize a ghetto uprising failed, but he fled into the forest, joined Soviet partisans, and survived the war. After the war, Kovner led Nakam, a paramilitary organization of Holocaust survivors who sought to take genocidal revenge by murdering six million German people, but Kovner was arrested in the British zone of Occupied Germany before he could successfully carry out his plans. He made aliyah to the State of Israel in 1947. Considered one of the greatest authors of Modern Hebrew poetry, Kovner was awarded the Israel Prize in 1970. Biography Abba (Abel) Kovner was born on 14 March 1918, in Oszmiana (now Ashmyany Belarus). His parents were Rochel (Rosa) Taubman and Israel Kovner and his brothers were Gedalia and the youngest Michel. In 1927 family moved to Wilno (now Vilnius Lithuania) to Popławska Street. Abba Kovner was educated at the Hebrew Tarbut Gymnasium in Wilno and Stefan Batory University’s Faculty of Arts. His father had a shop in Wilno selling leather on Julian Klaczko Street. While pursuing his studies, Abba became an active member in the socialist Zionist youth movement HaShomer HaTzair. Abba Kovner was a cousin of the Israeli Communist Party leader and anti-Zionist activist Meir Vilner. World War II After 1939 invasion of Poland, Wilno, where Kovner lived, fell into the Soviet occupation zone. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and captured Vilnius (Wilno) from the Soviets. All Jews were ordered by the occupiers to move into the Vilna Ghetto, but Kovner managed to hide with several Jewish friends in a Dominican convent headed by Polish Catholic nun Anna Borkowska in the city's suburbs. He soon returned to the ghetto. Kovner concluded that in order for any revolt to be successful, a Jewish resistance fighting force needed to be assembled. At the start of 1942, Kovner released a manifesto in the ghetto, titled "Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter!", although the authorship has been contested. The manifesto was the first instance in which a target of the Holocaust identified that Hitler had decided to kill all the Jews of Europe, and the first use