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ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM

n the plane back home,
Barbara Wiener handed
her father a small piece
of wallpaper. It was pink,
with flowers. Abe Asner held the
paper, looked at it, and said noth-
ing.
One month later, he asked to see
it again. "I helped put this up," he
said, quietly. "It was in my sister's
room."
For Asner, the wallpaper was a new
memory. Much of what he endured
during World War II remains clear,
and he can tell story after story
about his years as a partisan.
For Wiener, the wallpaper was a
tangible piece of a world that no
longer exists, a piece of her own his-
tory. She took it from a broken-
down house in Lithuania where her
father had grown up, and which,
along with the family that lived
inside, was almost entirely destroyed
by the Nazis.
Asner, of Windsor, recently returned
from a trip to Eishishok in Poland
(now Lithuania). The visit is part of
a documentary, There Once Was a
Town, which airs locally 10 p.m.

Ro a dt

Sunday, Oct. 1, on PBS (WTVS-
Channel 56 in Detroit).
The program traces the lives of
four of the town's survivors, a jour-
ney led by author and historian
Yaffa Eliach. Asner went back to
Eishishok at the invitation of Eliach,
whom he has known since she was a
young girl. Accompanying him were
his daughters Cheryl Gold of
Windsor and Barbara Wiener of
West Bloomfield, as well as other
family members.
Wiener grew up in Windsor, then
stayed in Michigan after she married
her husband, Detroit native Jody
Wiener. A former speech pathologist
with the Detroit Public Schools, she
wasn't exactly excited when she
learned of her father's plans to
return to his childhood home.
"Eager?" she asks incredulously.
"It was the last place I wanted to go.
In fact, when my father asked me, I
actually took the phone away from
my ear and stared at it."
Then she considered her parents'
history. Both had been partisans who
often spoke of their lives in Europe,
"but there were so many holes,"
Wiener says. "It was like a jigsaw
puzzle, and I could never get the
pieces all together."

In a new

documentary,

a Windsor

man and his

daughters

return to the

Poland of his

youth, where

nothing

is the same.

Asner was originally from the town
of Nacha, now part of Belarus. His
father died of pneumonia when Abe
was 8. "It was such a tragedy for my
mother," he remembers. "She was left
with seven young children."
Determined to see that her sons
receive a Jewish education, Abe's
mother sent her older boys to cheder,
where they remained until 1938.
The war broke out in 1939, and Abe
and three of his brothers were draft-
ed into the army.
In 1941 his mother died. Abe was
staying in nearby Eishishok, about 39
miles south of Vilna, where he worked
building roads for the German gov-
ernment. There were rumors that the
Nazis were approaching. Most of the
town's 3,500-member Jewish commu-
nity, however, opted to stay — and
virtually all were murdered.
But several days before the Nazis
came to Eishishok, Asner knew,
instinctively, that he must leave.
He went back to Nacha, but was
soon ordered, with his three broth-
ers, to the Radom (Poland) Ghetto.
There, his job was to pick up the
corpses that lined the dark streets.
Asner knew that "tomorrow, if not
today, they're going to kill us." So he
escaped from the ghetto with his

Left: Cheryl Gold, Abe Asner and
Barbara Wiener in Nacha, where
Abe grew up. "It was the last place
I wanted to go," says Wiener.

9/29
2000

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Right: Abe Asner, second from right, went
back to Eishishok at the invitation
of author and historian Yaffa Eliach, center,
whom he has known since she was a young
girl. They are pictured in the
men's cemetery in Eishishok.

Above: Barbara Wiener of
West Bloomfield in front of her
father's home in Nacha: "I took a few things
— I don't know why — pieces of brick and
shutter, and a piece of wallpaper"