They Dared to Live 

They Dared to Live will be based on my father's memoir, and the oral remembrances of my eighty–six year old mother. It recounts the confusion, fear and unbelievable resourcefulness my parents displayed during the Holocaust as they fought with the Partisans against the Nazis. 

The story recounts their experiences in the Ghetto of Vilna and Boronovich, the heroism of my father as a leader fighting with the Partisans, and the resilience of my mother who was with the Partisans as cook and guard. Within my father’s writings we also find poignant tales of the bravery and everyday accounts of the lives and personalities of other men and women in the extraordinary circumstances of the Holocaust. 

The resounding message embedded in his writing and my mother’s memories is the call for courage and the will to live against all odds, which is emblematic of the human sprit. 

Joseph Sabrin 

What’s a Jewish Partisan? 

Jewish Partisans were an organized resistance movement across occupied Europe who fought the Nazis and their collaborators. In Vilna, the Partisans worked in conjunction with Russian forces, and as the German lines broke, both forces moved in to take back city after city. 

My family and the Partisans

I was born in the Vilna Ghetto on December 21st, 1942. My father had already escaped to the forests before the Nazi liquidation of his labor camp. My mother soon fled with the help of local farmers, hiding with me in haystacks when I was hardly a month old. She then changed my name and put me into a Catholic orphanage and went to find my father to fight the Nazis. 

My name is Joseph Sabrin. I am one of the only remaining holocaust survivors to have been born in Poland during the war. It was rare for babies to be born, let alone survive in those days, but I did. As a commander with the Partisans, my father, Abrashe Szabrinski, destroyed train tracks and bridges, conducted night attacks on German encampments, and raided German supply columns. Again and again my father, and those with him, successfully engaged German soldiers and were victorious against them. The Germans wouldn’t even enter the forest where the Partisans ruled. These Partisans lived off the land in the harshest conditions imaginable, defying a ruthless army that was engaged in exterminating as much of the Polish and Lithuanian Jewish population as possible. 

The story of a baby 

I was an infant when my mother fled Vilna. She took the help of a kind Polish peasant who brought goods into the ghetto daily. He smuggled us out in his wagon. From that point forward, she hid wherever she could find lodging for the night. At times this meant we slept in haystacks, at other times we stayed with local Christian farmers. But she knew she could not keep this daily game up for long before the Nazis discovered her. So with the help of some of the Polish farmers, she got an introduction to an orphanage where she subsequently put me under an assumed name. 

She then fled to the forest where she knew the Partisans were operating, both to reconvene with my father, and to finally escape the daily terror of evading the Nazi presence. In the forest, the Partisans ruled, and here she was safe so long as the Partisans kept the Nazis at bay. 

When Vilna was liberated, and Russian forces reclaimed the area along with the Partisans, my father and mother came to the orphanage and reclaimed me. My mother tells the story of how they could not find me at first in the orphanage, and it was not until their second trip to the orphanage that she recognized the smiling pudgy face of her infant son, whom she had left so many months before, in the skinny sad face of the dirty boy in the darkened corner. 

What are we doing? 

It wasn’t until my father died that we found his Yiddish memoir, written on the typewriter that I had given him. I had suspicions of what he did, or had to do all my life, but I wasn’t prepared for what he wrote. I have had his memoir translated, and I want to combine his story with my mother’s memories and my own to tell the story of how one Jewish family survived the Holocaust and came to America. 

I want to express the whole account with as much depth as possible, rather than in separate memoirs, so that people can see what one family endured to make it from the Holocaust to America in the entire fullness of their struggle. As much as this is a story of the horrors of WWII, the lives of the Vilna Jews who lived and died is also an American story. I want there to be an indelible record of what we endured. And I want my parent’s story brought to light and my father’s unabridged memoir to be made public as part of the historical archive. 

There are few things I care of outside of family. I want to have this story given to the world in its entirety. 

How will the funds be used? 

To begin with, the Yiddish manuscript has already been translated into English. Now we have to edit the manuscript, first into an orderly format; at present, the memoir is arranged in episodes and anecdotes without regard for lineal, historical, or relational order. Also, the people and places presented in the material often have multiple names or nicknames and the memoir shifts between these names without explanation. These are just two examples of the minor editing that needs to take place first before the memoir is easily readable. 

We will then write the full story using both my father’s edited memoir and the oral recollections of my mother, combined with my own memories and discoveries with historical references. By this method we will create an accurate picture of the “hows” and “whys” of my family history. For instance, my father’s memoir has almost no mention of my mother or me until after the retaking of Vilna. But my mother’s oral testimony explains exactly how she escaped the Vilna ghetto with me as an infant, and how she placed me in the care of a local orphanage to seek out my father in the forests. By combining these two, we get the full and accurate story, which is as compelling as it is informative. The funds will also be deployed for editing, research, printing, as well as other daily incidentals.