Hashomer Hatzair, Altman walked to Rovno. When the Soviet Union invaded, Altman and the youth movement leadership evacuated to Vilna, under Polish and then Lithuanian control until June 1940. Altman joined the headquarters of Hashomer Hatzair in Vilna, and helped to organize several unsuccessful attempts to send members of the youth movements illegally to Palestine. The youth movements were concerned about their friends and relatives trapped under Nazi occupation. Because most of the leaders had fled, the remaining members of youth movements could not organize effectively. It was therefore decided to send some of the leadership back into the General Government region of occupied Poland. Altman was considered to be an inspiring leader and good at organizing. Her blonde hair and fluent Polish meant that she could easily pass as a gentile. Most youth movement couriers were women, because Jewish men could be distinguished by their circumcision. After two failed attempts to cross the Soviet and German borders, in December 1939 she visited her family in Włocławek and returned to Warsaw, the first youth movement leader to do so. Altman traveled frequently to Galicia and Częstochowa despite restrictions on Jews traveling by train, where she attempted to organize clandestine education and even training kibbutzim. She sent postcards to youth movement leaders in Vienna, Vilna, and Switzerland, describing the suffering of the Jews under the Nazi regime. After the walling-off of the Warsaw Ghetto, her own family trapped inside, Altman continued to travel under false papers despite the fact that to be caught outside the ghetto was a capital offense. She sent food packages into the Warsaw Ghetto for her family and friends. On 24 December 1941, Altman and Haika Grossman managed to return to the Vilna Ghetto, where they met with Abba Kovner and the leadership of the United Partisan Organization. Altman described the horrible conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, but still urged the Zionist leaders to evacuate there since the Vilna Ghetto was being systematically depopulated in a series of massacres at Ponary. Kovner disagreed, as he believed that there was a systematic plan to exterminate all Jews under Nazi control. The youth movements decided to promulgate the word about mass killings and encourage the ghettoized Polish Jews to resist with force. On her trip back to Warsaw, Altman visited several eastern Polish ghettos, including Grodno, to pass along this message. Smuggling arms Upon her return to Warsaw, Altman