My zeide recounted in the name of Chaim Meir, the caretaker of the Alter Rebbe’s ohel:
Two young men turned up and asked to be allowed within the holy ohel. They came inside and cried at length. As they left he asked them why they had cried so much. Years earlier, they said, the Alter Rebbe had shown them compassion and led them back to the true path.
They were tailors, working in distant villages in the region of Kursk, and they went astray from Yiddishkeit — eating treif and doing everything they shouldn’t have. A few years passed and they decided to return home. Passing by Piena [the village where the Alter Rebbe passed away], they came to the house of a non-Jew and asked for something to eat.
“I don’t have anything for you, ” the goy said.
“Maybe you have a sausage?” they asked. He led them to a room and, after locking the door, told them he would take their money and kill them. Their pleas for mercy went unheeded, but he agreed to let them pray and recite Vidduy. In brief, they cried and wailed an entire day until… he came back and returned their money.
“A great tzaddik stayed with me, ” he told them, “and passed away here. He told me that two Jews would come to my house and ‘This is what you should do’ — namely, cause them to repent. ‘How will I know who they are?’ I asked the tzaddik, and he answered that they would ask to eat treif.”
“Nu,” concluded the two Jews, “when so many years ago, the Alter Rebbe gazed ahead to save us — how can we not cry?”