The incredible true story behind the movie ‘Plan A’

Plan A, the latest movie by Doron Paz and Yoav Paz, is based on the fascinating true story of a failed plan conceived of by Holocaust survivor and poet Abba Kovner to take revenge on Germany after the Holocaust by poisoning the water system.

The movie opened throughout Israel on January 11.

Plan A focuses on questions of justice, revenge, redemption, and healing that are as relevant today as they were in 1945. It opens with the hero, Max (August Diehl, who appeared in Inglourious Basterds and The King’s Men) asking some powerful questions: “What if I told you your family was murdered? Just imagine for a minute. Your brothers, sisters, parents, your kids. Everyone, murdered, for no reason at all. Now, ask yourself: What would you do?” Max is an intense, haunted-looking survivor of the death camps, and he heads back home to Germany, just after the end of the war, hoping against hope to find someone he loved who is still alive.

But in his old house, he finds only the family that turned him and his loved ones over to the Nazis. He begs for information about his relatives, but the man there beats him, telling him to leave and adding, “Just because the war is over doesn’t mean we can’t still kill Jews.”

The movie's plot and characters

This sets up the whole movie, as the grief-stricken Max wanders the forests, trying to figure out what to do next, and runs into the British Jewish Infantry Brigade Group, led by Michael (Michael Aloni of Shtisel), which is working to relocate survivors to Palestine and hunting and killing Nazis who have been identified by at least two survivors.

But he also comes across Nakam, the group led by Kovner (Ishai Golan), a Polish-born Jew who survived with the partisans in the woods. Nakam is a far more radical group which believed in the principle of “six million for six million.” They are formulating an elaborate plan to poison the water systems of several German cities. Max, sent by the brigade to infiltrate Nakam and report back – although he himself isn’t always sure where his sympathies lie – gets a job at a water company, where he tries to blend in. The tension in the story comes from Max’s shifting sympathies and his struggle to find a way to move on.

The Paz brothers have made a number of movies, most with dark themes, such as Jeruzalem, a movie about zombies taking over the Old City of Jerusalem; The Golem, about a malevolent entity conjured by a woman trying to save her shtetl in Eastern Europe during the time of the Black Plague; and Phobidilia, about an isolated man who shuts out the world.

I interviewed them the day after the assassination of Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in Lebanon, and Yoav commented, “This movie about revenge is more relevant than ever after the 7th of October. Something that we return to in the movie several times is ‘Never Again,’ and it’s something that we added at the end of the credits, too, and then – it did happen again. The movie has acquired an added level of meaning, we want people to see the movie and think about it: What would you do?

“It’s a question we throw at the viewer... Is it right to take revenge? What does it do to us, what does it do to them? What comes out of revenge? There are so many discussions about it right now. We don’t have an answer, we’re all very confused at this stage, but it’s worthwhile to have a discussion about it, about when is it right to stop the cycle of revenge.”

Asked why Kovner is not the main character in this story, since much of the plot revolves around Kovner’s plan, Doron replied, “Kovner is a dominant character in the film, he’s like a satellite that hovers over the movie. He was the living spirit of Plan A, but our hero is fictional, he was inspired by the real avengers, each one of whom was a story unto himself. He was an amalgam of many of the real people involved.”

THEY LEARNED about Plan A just a few years ago.

“We grew up hearing so many stories about the Holocaust, but we never heard this story, we never heard the stories of revenge in school... Even when we met with Holocaust survivors, we never heard about this,” said Yoav. Feeling “the weight of the story on our shoulders,” they set out to meet as many of these avengers as possible, although few are still alive.

They also consulted with Prof. Dina Porat, the chief historian of Yad Vashem.

Doron said, “It wasn’t going to be a documentary, so we asked them a lot about the drama. It’s a fact-based movie that deals with moral questions, and we were fascinated that they stayed in Germany, after the war, they lived and worked with people who, just a few months before, were trying to kill them. They worked with them closely in the waterworks at Nuremberg and there were attempts in other cities as well, and at the same time, they were involved in a plan to poison their co-workers and their families. It fascinated us how they dealt with this during the long months when they waited for the poison to arrive.”

The plan failed because Kovner was not able to obtain the poison in Europe and he had to travel to Palestine to find it. Eventually, Kovner’s plan was discovered by the authorities and he was arrested returning to Europe on a British ship, and threw the poison into the sea.

  Doron said that Max “was torn between the two factions of avengers, the Jewish Brigade who were mostly sabras [natives of Palestine] who landed in Europe at the end of the war... Their idea of taking revenge was very personal, to take war criminals and assassinate them.”

The script moved gradually into the story of Kovner and Nakam, “who took it a few steps further, who thought that all Germans were guilty, which reflects some of the voices we are hearing now, about the war today,” said Yoav.

They were aware that many people would have a negative reaction to them spotlighting this incident, and that it could inspire antisemites to use this fact-based story as proof of their conspiracy theories. In spite of their reservations, Yoav said, “We thought this is a very relevant story to tell, even before October 7 but certainly afterwards.” Doron added, “There is a saying in the film that the best revenge for a Jew is to live a good life. That’s what most survivors, I think, believed, that the best revenge is to have a family, to build schools, hospitals, startups, you name it, that’s the real revenge. Revenge can go in a constructive direction or a destructive direction, in trying to destroy the other side. That’s the revenge spectrum.”

They were thankful that their lead actor, August Diehl, who is not Jewish, “connected to the material amazingly well.” When they told him the story, he took a huge pile of books and went off and read them all. “He knew more about it than we did by the end,” said Doron. Sylvia Hoeks, who plays Anna, a fellow survivor to whom Max becomes close, also threw herself into her role. “She even wanted to learn Yiddish, even though she didn’t have to,” said Doron.

There was a very interesting dynamic of two cultures on the set, the European actors and the Israelis, including Golan, Aloni, and Oz Zehavi. The Israelis’ energy and the Europeans’ seriousness complemented each other very well, they said. The issue of having gentile actors, such as Diehl, portray Jews in the film was not a problem. “We realized it didn’t matter to us what religion the actors were,” said Yoav. “Just as long as they connected to their roles.”

Doron said, “What interested us was the psychology behind the plan... We thought about what it was like to be a guy or a girl in their early 20s, who has lost everyone and everything, they see the world picking up the pieces and they just can’t move on... There was the idea that there were Nazis, and there are Germans and they’re not the same thing, it was as if aliens called Nazis had come to earth and ruled Germany and then disappeared. But there were these people who said, ‘It’s impossible to move on,’ and that feeling was expressed by their plan.”