In 1945, Abba Kovner, after visiting the site of the Ponary massacre and the extermination camp at Majdanek, and meeting survivors of Auschwitz in Romania, decided to take revenge. He recruited about 50 Holocaust survivors, mostly former Jewish partisans, but including a few who had escaped to the Soviet Union. Recruited for their ability to live undercover and not break down, most were in their early twenties and hailed from Vilnius, Rovno, Częstochowa, or Kraków. Generally known as Nakam ("Revenge"), the organization used the Hebrew name דין ("Din", "judgement"), also an acronym of דם ישראל נוטר ("Dam Yisrael Noter", "the blood of Israel avenges").