After the start of the war, however, a number of Zionist youth leaders who had managed to flee to the east made the decision to return to occupied Poland. This was the case among the youth movement leadership of Warsaw. Many of them had fled to Vilna in order to escape the Nazi invasion in September 1939. Youth leaders of movements like Hashomer Hatzair, Dror, Betar,
View This Term in the Glossary and He-Halutz such as Mordechai Anilewicz , Zivia Lubetkin, Yitzhak Zuckerman, Josef Kaplan, Frumka Plotnicka, Tosia Altman, and Samuel Breslaw elected to return voluntarily after several months spent in Russia and Lithuania. The youth movement leaders who returned to Warsaw were motivated by a sense of responsibility as local leaders, not only to their young chanichim (movement members), but to the Jewish community as a whole.

Through continued activity during the war, communication between ghettos, and the establishment of an underground press, Zionist youth groups were able to maintain better organization of their movements than other political groups (which collapsed or were greatly weakened under the weight of German persecution and exterminatory policies). Tosia Altman, for example, spent the first half of 1940 traveling to the various Hashomer Hatzair branches in the Generalgouvernement and Galicia to assist in organizing the movement.