The first groups that left went to Narocz
and the final groups that left, went to Rudniki.
The first ones that were sent to Narocz suffered terribly.
First they suffered from ambushes, when they set out, it seems that there were informers from all sorts of places,
also, the farmers didn't cooperate.
But when we went down, when we went south, almost all the groups arrived safely and complete.
Now, it was difficult to separate from the Jews,
it was difficult to separate from the ideology,
it was difficult to separate from family members,
because every one of us left family members behind, those who still survived.
That is how it was with my mother.
They brought us to the base.
At the base I suddenly saw my uncle, Shmuel Shapira,
my father's brother, younger, my father was younger,
running towards me.
The second group was there, Yechiel's Group.
They arrived in the forest long before the FPO. They traveled in trucks; you must know from other's interviews how they arrive
And everyone surrounded me
and asked me "What is happening in the ghetto?" because I was the last.
Pinka and Dovka said that they left the day before yesterday,
then I said that I left during the liquidation.
They asked me "What liquidation?" I said the liquidation of the ghetto, there is no ghetto, they liquidated the ghetto.
When they heard that
they all scattered to the sides.
Blood was flowing from my legs, I was injured, tired, hungry,
finally I had met Jewish people that I didn't need to fear,
and they scattered, everyone walked to the side to cry,
everyone had left parents in the ghetto, brothers, sisters.
Our friends went to join the partisans in Narocz,
and the majority of the FPO was in Narocz.
They had very difficult experiences with the Soviet partisans.
There was rampant antisemitism.
Many were killed, they came,
Here Glazman, who was a Lieutenant Commander in the FPO, came with his group to the forest,
and they took for themselves, in his presence, they took the weapons from them,
the weapons that we had smuggled from the Germans into the ghetto,
and taken out from the ghetto to the forest. We came to the forest and they took everybody's weapons.
A partisan without a weapon is vulnerable. He's not a fighter, he's nothing.
They took, say, some of the young men had leather coats
and they arranged them into family camps, I'm talking about Narocz. - (Interviewer) Yes...
And they suffered terribly, also, not everyone managed to fight,
no, most of them didn't.
They were in family regiments,
and they experienced a period which was very tragic.
- Terrible - (Interviewer): Terrible... And how did they relate to young women?
To girls it was the same everywhere,
the Soviets related to girls in the most despicable way.
We cleared out and started to walk ahead,
it became really dangerous
and dangerous for a number of reasons.
A. In a larger radius you have many more Germans and you need to go to more villages, sometimes to small towns.
Security needs to be much stronger
and it needs to be fortified
but the worst thing was that it would take all night because the village farmers would hide...
And when they would hide, you had to take it from them by force.
Because, initially you took, say, one cow of five, but by the end you left them only one cow.
If he had a weapon
and he cooperated with the Germans,
then there wasn't any choice.
You would go around a village, set fire to it, shoot at it,
and if someone was injured, they were injured,
you couldn't make distinctions.
But to go against children... look, we are not Germans.
We would sit around a camp fire, singing,
obviously most of the songs were in Yiddish,
(Interviewer) It sounds idyllic.
It was idyllic, what else was there to do?
Other than guarding the camps and the surrounding area
from the ambushes that there were and so on,
so there were – I was there in the cold - minus 40 degrees – for a time.
But you had a sense of security didn't you? They didn't reach your camp and you could dwell there in complete safety.
Yes, Yes
We knew that the Germans wouldn't come into the forests.
In forty four We received orders to prepare to assault Vilna.
The Red Army approached from the east
and we were to close off the southern side.
And when we went up, for me it was at least,
it was a sudden surprise that here we were and when you in the middle of life like that,
first of all, you don't believe that it is ever going to end.
You hope, you dream about those types of things, but you never feel it in daily life.
So when the orders arrived
to go up, to leave everything and to go up, so we organized ourselves and went up,
when we reached the village we thought that it was possible to go in, but we were suddenly fired upon.
And I was in the first group to leave.
Approximately how many people?
Oh, a small group, about 12 people, it was meant to be the razietka (advance party),
That is to say the rest of the large camp followed behind us,
Chaim stayed behind because he was injured,
so I left him and advanced with the razietka, walking to Vilna.
We had already walked, for the first time we went out in daylight,
Not at night and we were excited, and the farmers, when we passed through a village,
out of their own free will received us with bread and milk.
That we had needed to steal food from them, they offered.
And there was a red flag, I think, that someone had improvised and we went with a red flag.
We went to the ghetto and we walked and cried and everyone tried to find their family,
maybe and... The destruction was terrible
The sense that
There was no one to talk to.