Both of us, that is, I and my friend Yankel Lubchanski, quickly became the most active members, the regular "hewers of wood and bearers of water" of the Rakov Aid Commitee. Every morning, we went with a wagone-driver to the Red Cross with a list of the names of the homeless souls, to collect their provisions, which consisted of loaves of bread, flour, sugar, barley, salt, oil, and so forth. We delivered it to the Rabbi’s store-house, where the homeless would come to collect their "dole".

Twice a week, we would drive those great oxen, bearing the stamp of the Russian Red Cross, to the Jewish slaughterhouse. Those oxen, in turn, served us well: for their sake, we were saved more than once from falling into the hands of the police and the gendarmerie, who were constantly on the lookout for such young fellows as us. It worked this way: whenever we saw those "grabbers" coming, we would poke our oxen with our long sticks. The oxen would take flight...and we would chase after them! And when that happened, not even the harshest, strictist policeman would try to stop us and demand our passports, because anyone could see that we were engaged in a very important function: to serve and protect a genuine Russian ox!

One day the village received a visit from the eminent Dr. Nakhum Gergel, who was well-known for his activities in the Jewish community. He was the director-in-chief of the Petrograd Central Jewish Refugee Commitee, which went by the shortened name, "YEKOPA". The Committee had established as its chief purpose the amelioration, as far as possible, of the tragic lot of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, deportees, and war orphans, who had been wandering on foot for weeks and months, or tossed about in locked rail-cars over all the highways and bywas of Greater Russia.

Dr. Nakhum Gergel was, as far as I was concerned, the ideal person for this difficult, thankless task. First of all, he was a true Jew, "one of us", with a warm Jewish heart and a genuine sympathy for the needy Jewish masses. Secondly, he possessed a great deal of enery. He was stationed with his staff in great city of Minsk which lay in close proximity to the northwest front, and which was also the main point of convergence for the great streams of Jewish homeless. Wherever he went, even in the most cast-away village, he brought a ray of hope. He mobilized the local Jewish intelligentsia, to help re-settle those of the homeless, who no longer had the will to go further; the remainder, who constituted the greater portion, he helped to evacuate to the central Russian provinces.

Among the legions of homeless, it was rumored that this very Dr. Nakhum Gergel had been personally excused from military service by no less an authority than the Russian Czar himself, in order to help deal with the problem of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were in transit on all the roads of Russia, thereby interfering with the mobility of der Russian Army.

Dr. N. Gergel was especially satisfied with the work we were doing in the village of Rakov. My friend Yankel Lutchanski and I were the "dynamo", the driving force behind the local Aid Commitee. The entire technical apparatus lay on our young shoulders. Because the rabbi and the townsfolk, the commitee members, in addition to their concerns for the homeless, also had problems of their own...with regard to family, business, and other such things. We, on the other hand, were "free as birds"...without home or family, alone in the world. We didn’t have to worry either over our livelihood....because, like the homeless, we also lived from the meager "refugee’s dole".

We drew close to those lonely, harried and beleaguered ones, as though they were bone from our bone, and flesh from our flesh.....and they, in turn, drew close to us. They would often come to us with all their problems.

Often there would break out an argument between us and the rabbi, Reb Avraham Kalmanovitch, because we would often decide, on our own initiative, to do certain things for the homeless, without having asked his permission in advance. But fundamentally, as a strictly religious Orthodox Rabbi, his biggest greivances against us were: that we didn’t go to the House of Study every day to pray; that we shaved our beards, didn’t wear the fringed undershirt, and other such terrible sins, which were a disgrace to the names of Slobodka and Novardok.

We would constantly argue with him:

"Rabbi, don’t forget, that "preservation of life" takes precedence over even Sabbath..."

But he would not accept this for an excuse. And when Dr. N. Gergel, from Minsk, returned for an inspection, seeing how deep was the rift between us and the strictly observant Rabbi, he took our side:

"Rabbi", he would say with his characteristic, good-humored smile, "don’t worry about them, I take responsibility for all their transgressions. And I have a good place for them...I will pass them on to the Jewish big-shots of Petrograd. They are already carrying so many sins and trangression, it won’t hurt them to carry a few more..."

And he arranged for us to receive a certain stipend for our work, so that we should have a steady income. He also gave us a kind of insignia, with special arm-bands, to wear on the sleeve of our left arms, as a sign that we were not just anybody, rather we were important workers, officials even, possibly no less important than those who worked for the Russian Red Cross.

Those white arm-bands with the red lettering turned out to be very useful for us, no less than those Russian oxen from the Red Cross....the arm-bands served as a kind of protection, a talisman against the evil eye of the ever-present "grabbers", as they were called in the shtetl.

Those "grabbers" consisted largely of homeless Warsaw Polish-Russian police, who, after the German occupation, had been evacuated behind the Russian lines. And so to demonstrate to the higher authorities that they were still performing a useful service, and that they were not eating the bread of charity....they began to lord over and harrass the Jewish villages, just like they used to do "back home". They went around through the Jewish villages night and day, like dog-catchers, looking for contraband, runaway soldiers, and hidden revolutionaries. In this way, they hoped to protect both their beloved "Tsar Batyoushka", and the exposed rear flank of the Russian Army.

The first few times when we appeared outdoors, those "grabbers" used to put us through the gauntlet, demanding to see our passes, our dokuments. They examined us with sharp, probing eyes, from head to toe, highly suspicious as to why such healthy young fellows should be found so far from the front. But to their deep chagrin, they were unable to do anything to us, because on our passports it was clearly stated, in black and white, under the official mark of the two-headed Russian eagle, that we were but young, young pups, altogether hardly seventeen years old.

Now, however, that were were wearing the white armbands which had been given to us by our beloved Dr. N. Gergel, along with official Russian documents, certifying that we were working for the relief effort, those same "grabbers" stopped harassing us altogether, as though they no longer had any jurisdiction over us. In fact, we became quite good friend with them, "colleagues" even, from time to time even sharing a conversation or a cigarette, and letting them know that if they themselves, as refugees, needed anything, they shouldn’t be embarrassed, they should report to us, and we would see what we could do for them. And takkeh, thanks to that friendship "across enemy lines", we were later able to secure the release of more than one young, homeless father, more than one young boy from the neighboring Volozhin Yeshiva, who had fallen into their hands.

In our hilfs-arbet, we frequently came into contact with the local military authorities; for example, to obtain a permit to be able to travel after curfew; a permit to travel to a neighobring village to puchase wood for the homeless; to appeal an order comandeering a house from a homeless family; and quite often, to get medical help for the sick: which, in those days, could only be obtained in the military field-hospitals, which were found in and around the villages. Our requests were usually accomodated, often more fully than we had anticipated.

We encountered fine example of genuine Russian generosity, as it was so often described in Russian literature, in the person of the chief military doctor Vlassevsky, who bore the title "Polkovnik". His name in particluar is etched in my memory. He could truly be reckoned among the "righteous gentiles". Each time we called on him to attend the sick, even in the middle of the darkest night, he would go without hesitation. He would provide the sick one with all necessary medicine; sometimes, he even took a few roubles from his own pockent, and left them for the sick one. Nor was this an isolated example; there were many others like him, who exhibited genuine human kindness to the Jewish homeless.

Yes, we yeshiva-boys, the eternal sojourners with the dispersed camp of Israel, learned from our experiences, that there was a world of difference between the great Russian People and the Russian Czarist Government. And this knowledge was for us, in those dark days, a source of some consolation.