Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

Abba Kovner moved with his family to Vilnius, where he grew up and was educated at the secondary Hebrew academy and the school of the arts.

In June, 1941, after the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, attacked Vilnius, and established the Vilna Ghetto, Abba Kovner escaped to a Dominican convent headed by Anna Borkowska in the suburbs.
He returned to the ghetto to build a Jewish resistance. and command the United Partisan Organization in the forests near Vilnius, engaging in sabotage and guerrilla attacks against the Nazis.

In December, 1941, several meetings were held, where they decided to resist and to remain in the ghetto rather than trying to escape.
In front of the 150 Jews at 2 Straszuna Street, in a public soup kitchen, Abba Kovner cited:
Jewish youth!
Do not trust those who are trying to deceive you. Out of the eighty thousand Jews in the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" only twenty thousand are left. . . . Ponar [Ponary] is not a concentration camp. They have all been shot there. Hitler plans to destroy all the Jews of Europe, and the Jews of Lithuania have been chosen as the first in line.
We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter!
True, we are weak and defenseless, but the only reply to the murderer is revolt!
Brothers! Better to fall as free fighters than to live by the mercy of the murderers.
Arise! Arise with your last breath!

Aba Kovner is said to have had a major part in unifying haShomer haTzair, Betar, the Communists and haNoar haTzioni, forming FPO Faraynigte Partizaner Organizatzye (United Partisan Organization).
After ther Germans had transported the Jews of the Vilnius Ghetto to camps in Estonia, members of FPO escaped to the forests through the sewers, where they established a partisan group, destroying power and water infrastructures, freeing prisoners from the Kailis labor camp, and blowing up some German military trains.
Abba Kovner cited:
"I remember the first time I blew up a train. I went out with a small group, with Rachel Markevitch as our guest. It was New Year's Eve; we were bringing the Germans a festival gift. The train appeared on the raised railway; a line of large, heavy-laden cars rolled on toward Vilna. My heart suddenly stopped beating for joy and fear. I pulled the string with all my strength, and in that moment, before the thunder of the explosion echoed through the air, and twenty-one railway cars full of troops hurtled down into the abyss, I heard Rachel cry: "For Ponar!"

In 1945, Abba Kovner travelled to Palestine, via Italy, to gather equipement for Bricha.
On his return to Europe, he was arrested by the British, and deported to Egypt, where he was held.

Abba Kovner and Rozka Korczak-Marla founded the Learning and Research Center of the Holocaust in Givat Haviva גבעת חביבה to promote Holocaust education.

On April 26, 1945, Abba Kovner established the Organization of Eastern European Survivors, a semipolitical organization to unite the Jewish people beyond party and political allegiances, and create a Jewish state as the last refuge for a people for whom another Holocaust was predicted/