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Area Businessman Aids Extraction
Efforts in Ukraine
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
T hree weeks ago, Gary
Wasserson wasn’t aware he had
relatives in Ukraine, let alone
that he’d be there when they fled the
country to Poland.

“It seems like a year has passed in a
week,” Wasserson said.

The Montgomery Country busi-
nessman recently returned from an
eight-day trip to Poland and Ukraine,
where he organized an extraction team
to help five of his cousins leave Lviv,
Ukraine, and enter Poland.

“When I looked at their eyes when I
met them at the border ... they had that
same blind stare that you saw in the
concentration camp survivors when
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Gary Wasserson on Zoom with members of his “structured grassroots” network
of individuals helping to extract Ukrainians from their war-torn country
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www.TheHearthAtDrexel.org they were liberated,” Wasserson said.

The family was relocated to Krakow,
Poland, where Wasserson rented them
a home to stay temporarily.

During his brief time in Eastern
Europe, Wasserson, with the help of
his daughter’s partner Kevin Rowell,
a disaster relief specialist, organized a
network of volunteers and nonprofit
leaders to build a “structured grass-
roots efforts” to help extract hun-
dreds more Ukrainians, both Jews and
non-Jews. A WhatsApp group originally with
four members has ballooned to more
than 200 people. Now back home,
Wasserson has been receiving hun-
dreds, if not 1,000, texts a day. He
hasn’t gotten more than four hours
of sleep since the endeavor started.

Wasserson’s wife, Ellen, describes their
home as “Grand Central Station” in all
its busyness.

Wasserson learned of his cousins
in Ukraine from Steven Blotner, a
relative whose father was interested
in family history. Blotner reached
out to Wasserson shortly after Russia
invaded Ukraine.

Blotner and Wasserson’s original
plan was to raise money to send over
to the family members; Wasserson ini-
tially invested $100,000 in the effort.

But after an hour of pondering how
else to help out, Wasserson was struck
by the similarities of the situation to
World War II, when many Ashkenazi
Jews were trying to cross borders to
escape from authoritarian rule.

“This is a ‘never again’ moment,”
Wasserson said. “I can’t leave any-
body behind, whether they’re Jewish,
Muslim, Catholic — I don’t care. We’ve
got to do everything we can to get as
many humans to safety as possible.”
While at the border, Wasserson wit-
nessed families, mostly women and
children, waiting in a five-kilometer
line for three-and-a-half days to cross
the border. What Wasserson didn’t see
was a tremendous effort by organiza-
tions and government bodies to lead
the extraction or evacuation efforts.

“There’s no government showing
up here. There’s no Red Cross; there’s
nothing,” Wasserson said.

Particularly for the women whose
husbands were drafted into the mili-
tary, human trafficking threats loom,
Wasserson said, increasing the urgency
of extraction efforts.

According to Rowell, who helped