  Motivated by the problem of designing quantum repeaters, we study
entanglement distillation between two parties, Alice and Bob, starting from a
mixed state and with the help of "repeater" stations. To treat the case of a
single repeater, we extend the notion of entanglement of assistance to
arbitrary mixed tripartite states and exhibit a protocol, based on a random
coding strategy, for extracting pure entanglement. The rates achievable by this
protocol formally resemble those achievable if the repeater station could merge
its state to one of Alice and Bob even when such merging is impossible. This
rate is provably better than the hashing bound for sufficiently pure tripartite
states. We also compare our assisted distillation protocol to a hierarchical
strategy consisting of entanglement distillation followed by entanglement
swapping. We demonstrate by the use of a simple example that our random
measurement strategy outperforms hierarchical distillation strategies when the
individual helper stations' states fail to individually factorize into portions
associated specifically with Alice and Bob. Finally, we use these results to
find achievable rates for the more general scenario, where many spatially
separated repeaters help two recipients distill entanglement.
