It was the second day of the Six-Day war. Bombs were falling everywhere. The sound of missiles hurtling through the air, the piercing wails of air raid sirens coupled with the tremendous, resounding “boom” as the bombs exploded on the streets of Yerushalayim, sowed fear and trepidation among the masses.
R’ Pinchos Menachem Alter zt”l, the young Rosh Yeshivah of Sfas Emes (future Gerrer Rebbe), huddled together with his Rebbetzin and young children in the air-raid shelter on the bottom floor of Yeshivas Sfas Emes.
Suddenly, there was a lull in the bombing and the Rosh Yeshivah couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The sweet sounds of kol Torah began to waft down into the shelter from the nearby beis medrash of Yeshivas Sfas Emes. Two chavrusos were learning. Who could be learning at a time like this, when all were cowering in bomb shelters in terror?
It was two elderly chassidim, Reb Leibel Lichtenstein and Reb Meir Gershon Sharetzky. They had a daily seder in the early, pre-dawn hours of the morning and they weren’t about to let bombs falling in the area disrupt it.
The Pnei Menachem became very emotional upon seeing this love of Torah and devotion to learning, and although he virtually never spoke about himself, at that moment he shared with his children a story that he had experienced in his own life. The story transpired just a few weeks after his bar mitzvah, following the outbreak of World War II.
The Warsaw Story
The young bachur, Pinchos Menachem, was in Warsaw as the Nazi blitzkrieg began strafing the beleaguered city with wave after wave of bombs. Within days, they had conquered Warsaw and had begun to terrorize the Jewish residents of the city, beating them, randomly shooting them, and snatching them off the streets to force them into dehumanizing slave labor.
Young Pinchos Menachem, however, had a seder with one of his cousins. It was a kevius (time set aside for learning) that he wasn’t ready to give up. Despite the desperate conditions outside, he surreptitiously made his way through the alleyways of Nazi-occupied Warsaw to the home of his chavrusa.
To his misfortune, a Nazi noticed the young Jewish lad and grabbed him off the street, throwing him into a truck that was transporting Jews to slave labor. As the truck filled up with other ill-fated Jews who had been caught, a Gerrer chasid who was passing by noticed, to his horror, that the ben zekunim (youngest son) of the Rebbe was on the truck!
He hid in waiting and, as soon as the saw the guards had somewhat slacked off in their duty, he motioned to Pinchos Menachem to slip away and follow him. He thereby saved the Rebbe’s son from terrible torture or death. The Pnei Menachem remembered this story and how the koach haTorah had protected him at that terrible time.