In December 1944, partisans from Vilna and Kovno met in Lublin. Those who arrived from the Soviet Union immediately began organizing the Bericha in motion. On January 20, 1945, a few days after the liberation of Warsaw, Yitzchak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, two of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, arrived in Lublin and met with Kovner and his colleagues from the partisans. Kovner later recalled his meeting with Zuckerman: “His face, like mine, was drawn, haggard in the flame of a small candle, and the candle, standing on the low stool between us, flickered as though at the foot of a dead man. Only our shadows on the naked walls were long and mute.”
Zuckerman and Kovner concurred that no Jewish community could be established in the graveyard that was now Poland. The only course was to press for Aliyah through every possible means. However, they disagreed as to the modus operandi.
Yitzchak Zuckerman argued that the group of pioneer leaders must not abandon the remnant of Polish Jewry. It was the duty of the leadership to organize and bring them to Eretz Israel. The veteran leadership was no longer in existence, and it devolved on the younger people who had survived, the ghetto fighters and partisans, to create the organizational framework needed to remove the Jews from Poland. Zuckerman said the departure of the activists would be tantamount to desertion and therefore intolerable.
Kovner said they must leave the detested soil of Europe at once, and in the course of leaving take their revenge on Nazis who were still walking about freely. In Kovner’s view, no “answer” that had been right “beforehand” (before the Holocaust) was “self-evident” - at least not in the former sense - “afterwards” (after the Holocaust). It was therefore inconceivable that one’s human and Jewish awareness should proceed “as formerly”. Anyone who acted as if nothing had changed did not truly grasp what had happened. Kovner, too, was deeply involved in his movement, but the cataclysmic events of the war in Europe were now the overriding issue and took precedence over all else. This was also the source of the idea to establish the League of East European Survivors.
Source: Cholawski, Shalom, “Partisans and Ghetto Fighters - An Active Element Among She’arit Hapleta”, in: She’arit Hapleta, 1944-1948, Rehabilitation and Political Struggle, Proceedings of the Sixth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1990, pp. 251-252.
