There is a famous story told about Rav Mordechai Pogromansky (Reb Mottel, as he was universally known), who was a great Torah scholar and famous in the world of the Lithuanian yeshivos before the Second World War. Caught in the Nazi vise, he spent the war years in the Kovno ghetto where he was scrupulous in preserving a life of Torah in the ghetto with great devotion. Miraculously, he managed to escape and fled to Poland when Lithuania was annexed by Russia after the war. Eventually, he made his way to Czechoslovakia, and later into France, where he moved to Aix Les Bains and thereafter to Versailles, heading up the yeshivah there. The war took its toll on Reb Mottel and the state of his health was bad. The renowned Sternbuch family brought him to Switzerland, to be treated by the top doctors. In 1949, Reb Mottel passed away.