Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Abraham Asner - October 10, 1982

Then uh, my brother was working in the woods and that time I was in the ghetto by myself. Not by myself, with, with uh, more brothers, because we were six brothers. And then the, the police decided to bring in the, the people from, where they're working in the woods in the ghetto. My brother, my older brother could go away but he was worried about us, to help us to, to safety or something. I was horrible thing. I wish he don't come back. When he, he come back, I say, "What for you come back? You could stay." He says, "I was worrying about you, from you, all of you." Finally, that was uh, surrounded the ghetto maybe about three days, and then May the tenth. Oh yeah, I start before Pesach the... about the matzah. You don't have any woods or any, anything? Then uh, I said to my brother, to my younger brother, we'll go, we'll cut down a few posts from the fences. And we'll make, we'll uh, bake some matzah. That's the way it was. We cut down a few uh, ??? posts and it was real good, dry wood, oak, hardwood. We would bake some matzahs from uh, from just ordinary flour, rye flour. Just according to tradition. And we have some matzahs. Then May the tenth, they start to shoot the people. We hide. I hide, my brother hides in... My brothers hide in some places uh, other places. And we hear when they start to take out the people. Me and my three brothers, we hide separate. The younger brother and my sister, she couldn't hide. They was... My younger brother was a little bit sick and my sister, she said to, to us--she was the oldest in the family--and she said to us, "Boys, hide yourself, save yourself. We'll, we'll go to the death." When we saw it and they took away my brother with my sister, with lots of people, the, the kids was crying and some kind of funny feeling. And we hear the shooting and everything. Then a few hours later they, somebody start to yell from downstairs from the--they know where I was hiding. Somebody start to say, "People come out, it's all finished. They're going to leave some people to work in the ghetto." Well, then they come out.