Abraham Asner - October 10, 1982
Helping Runaways
And one day we have uh, a cousin, a uncle with two girls and they lived too somewhere in, in the woods. We know about them. We hear they get killed from the people down there, from... How they get killed I don't know exactly, after we find out. Where and was the girls somewhere. They killed the, the brother, the father-in-law saw 'em and two girls left they went down there. There's a, a story. Anyway.
Do you know the story?
Yeah. I'll come to them later. And uh, they went to look for the girls, because they told 'em the girls was waiting for us. Finally we came one place, we was waiting, me and my brother and two men show up. They run away from Grodno ghetto. And we know them because they, they used to be in, in that Natsher Pustshe, the ghetto. We, we know them. And I know one, but I was in the army with him in Vilna before the war. And the other one I know, I met him in uh, Alytus, in town in Lithuania. They told us what happened in Grodno, this and this. And they ask us, where are we? They want to live close to us somewhere. I say I, I told 'em, we couldn't bring you to our place. He said, why. He asked me why. I said, we have orders from that uh, leader not to bring anyone. And my brother was against this. Then they start to saying, it doesn't matter to you, we're going to live not far from you just to be close something to you. And then I start to talk to my brother. He says, "Let's take 'em. It's not Russians, they are Jews. It's not uh, ??? where we don't trust 'em. Let's take 'em." Finally we decided to take 'em. Took 'em back. And we don't go for the girls because they go another time. We took 'em back. We come to our place. We brought 'em in to our place and, down there, like was, we was a little bit organized already. Was a group over here uh, simple what live in ??? Now a group over here was uh, living mostly Jews and, and a--four groups was over there. And they are strictly Jewish too and another group was Russian with Jewish, too. And he was the leader of all of them, that uh, Ivan Ivanovitch. And one time our uh, to, to go straight, they find uh, was a ton--I'll, I'll come to this later a while--it was a town ??? and they kill all the Jews. This was uh, right on the border too from Poland and um, Lithuania, not far. They killed all the Jews uh, exactly how they killed the Jews down there I couldn't tell you.
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