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Welcome back everyone.

One thousand one heroes legends histories and mysteries podcast and part two of the true story of the Bealsky brothers are subtitled today hard choices.

This is your host and teller of history John Haggadorn and as we enter part two the forest camp is growing with new refugees.

Young Aaron has become confident that he can enter most ghettos and holding areas and come out alive often with Jews who have decided living in the woods is a lot better than dying in a concentration camp.

By the spring of 1942 the brothers are set up camp in the forest outside of their home in Stankovich.

They've received guns from the Russian partisan leader Gromov and now they can not only provide protection for the women and elderly they can plan raids for more weapons, food and supplies.

Tuvia, Asail and Zeus using refugees they have trained as commandos will soon be raiding German facilities and caravans for weapons and supplies as well as killing known Nazi sympathizers in the region.

At this time they had 23 members total and their biggest worry was food.

Before the brothers had relied on kindly villagers to feed them but now their numbers were growing and starvation was not an option.

There was a dilemma if they continued to ask nearby villagers for food there was only so much to be had.

If they became forceful or asked for too much those villagers in order not to starve themselves might turn them in.

The brothers decided that fear and intimidation would have to be used to obtain food.

They would need to get the word out of the impression out that they were a much larger resistance group than they were and they would have to range further out of the immediate area.

They would also have to strike fear in the minds of friend and foe alike and they would have to make examples of those whom they knew were Nazi sympathizers.

Some of those people had been friends and neighbors these were just a few of the hard choices they were faced with.

They began sending non combatants on nighttime missions carrying long sticks over their shoulders which in the dim moonlight looked like guns.

They began circling through villages singing Russian songs. They threatened lives. They also recruited those they felt they could trust.

Their biggest concern was the Jews still remaining alive at Novogrutik.

Before they could make plans to rescue them the Nazis on August 7th at 4am in the morning heard all the Jews in the Novogrutik ghetto out into the street.

They ordered them to lie down. A few were shot. They were then loaded onto trucks and driven to a small village just north of a city called Lativka.

Execution pits had already been dug. It was wide open. It was not forested. The Germans no longer needed a forest in which to do their killing. They did it right out in the open at the break of day.

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