Video Transcript: Abe Asner

Abe escapes death

I see three planes, Russian planes come to bomb the airport, but the Germans took it over. Then three fighters took it off Germans they shot down the planes, and right there in the middle here I am. They saw me. They grabbed me, the Germans. I said, “Here, I’m finished.” That’s what I thought. They grabbed me. One was taking off my pants. One is taking off my shirt. One is looking in my bag, what I have. And I took, I have a Lithuanian passport, and I took out the passport and I give it to them. I’m, it say in the passport I’m Jewish, all they don’t understand Lithuanian. They give me the passport and the one German said “not to shot him because he speaks Russian, he speaks German. He knows everything, you know. He’s some kind of spy.” I have nothing to say. They let me go.

The importance of mining trains

If we blow up a train, then many soldiers get killed. If they’re carrying food or ammunition, they not coming in time. They’re coming maybe two weeks later or ten days later. Secondly, if you blow up the train, the traffic is stopped for some, for so long. I don’t know for how many, two days, or three days, further depending on the operation. Everything counts, you know. If you don’t, if you not bringing to the front, food, ammunition, or anything what they need, then they couldn’t fight,

Abe decides not to go back to the ghetto

The winter’s coming. The winter is going to show tracks in the snow. It’s not so easy. People decided to go back to the ghetto in Grodno. Grodno still was a ghetto, and lots of people went back to the ghetto like Saul, his father, his mother. And I said, “Me and my brothers, we’re not going back to the ghetto. We’re not going. We’re going to win, doesn’t matter what. If I die, I’ll die standing up not to shoot me in the back.”

Fooling the Lithuanians

One time, in the village was maybe about eighteen Lithuanian with a machine gun. We start to chase them, chase them to the forest, and I know they had a machine gun. I know they are coming down there to massacre us with the machine gun. I was walking with Saul, and saw a hill. It was maybe about 50 feet high all around. I said to the guys, “Let’s go all around that hill, and they’ll think there are a lot of us because we’re going around.” They were watching us, I know. So, we were seven maybe fifty. We go around maybe four or five times around that hill, and then they ran away after.

Enough for one more

She said, “Take me, together.” I said to her, “I can’t take you. I’ve got to ask my brothers, because we are four in this.” The younger brother was with me, and the older brothers wasn’t with me. I said, “I’ll ask my brothers, and I’ll come back from the forest and I’ll take you.” And then she was start to walk away and my younger brother said to me, “Take her.” Said, “If twenty-eight people going to starve, we’re going to starve twenty-nine. If twenty-eight have enough to eat, then we have enough for twenty-nine.” At that time, we were twenty-eight.

“The night is our mother”

I think, if I would write a book, if I would write a book, the title would be, ”The Night of Our Mother” because lots of things we used to do at night. The night was protecting us. A mother protects her children, the night will protect us. The night was our mother.