Underground. Away from Kovel.

For us, coming from Czestochowa, it seemed natural to get to Kowel {Ko} as we tried to stay out of the Nazi orbit. But the meeting with the Grochow kibbutz looked like a strange coincidence. It now turns out (from the Zuckerman book) that all had been coming toward Kowel (as it was spelled while still a Polish town); the various Zionist outfits, but also the leadership of the Bund. Although they were no less anti-Zionist than the Communists, the Bundists also were illegal in the Soviet Union [there is a long history behind this. This Jewish outfit had been the first socialist party in tsarist Russia before the Social Democratic party there was founded, then (1903) split into a Menshevik (minority) faction and a Bolshevik one under Lenin; who strongly opposed the Bund's attempt to constitute a separate Jewish unit within the Social Democratic party. The Bund eventually supported the Mensheviks and later, in revived independent Poland, the Polish Socialist party (PPS)]. In 1941, the two main leaders of the Bund in Poland, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter (who had been in Kovel at the time), were executed in the Soviet Union. So it was surely a good idea for the Zionist groups to scatter. For some time, that was my last contact with anyone of the Czestochowa kibbutz, as I left with my brother and Yoine (Jonah) of the Grochow kibbutz toward the latter's home in what had been the Polish town of Lanowce, a few km from the old Polish-Soviet border.



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There isn't much that I recall of that walk, probably because not very much happened. The road was no longer clogged with people streaming east, and there were no more bombardments. The Soviet secret bureaucracies surely had more urgent targets than some youngsters hiking on the main road. The soles of my boots finally wore out all the way, so I walked partly on my socks. As we passed within a few km of Lutsk, another town with much Jewish history attached, it began to rain a little; noteworthy only for being the first rain during that whole September march from the western border of Poland to the eastern one. In Kremenets {Kr} Yoine was no stranger, and he got a horse and wagon; so the very last stage was the most luxurious. But in Lanovitz -as it was pronounced in Yiddish, or Lanovtsy as now rendered from Cyrillic Ukrainian- we had to hide well. During the couple of times we were out on the street, it was with care not to attract attention, notably of Jewish Communists (now released from the jails where the Polish government had kept them). While my brother stayed at Yoine's place, I had been moved to what must have been one of the wealthier homes in the little town. By the time we left after two weeks to try to find our parents, I had probably regained all the weight I must have lost in the preceding three weeks. I hope to be able to tell more about what followed, e.g. at Dubno (also elaborate on the second map; below, where places that have been mentioned, or are to be, have been marked); but in order to get this far, I have had to neglect major current developments I ought to write about. I have in any case now at least written a version of what I promised myself long ago too do: to write what I recall of the amazing retreat of the Czestochowa kibbutz at the beginning of World War II. Only one got lost; and of the four who had to be left behind, two made it anyway, I and my companion from Lublin through Chelm {Kh} (on this pre-WWI map called Kholm as rendered from Cyrillic Russian) to Kowel.



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