The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (10 page)

One elderly woman in Horodiche, a Ukranian village about four miles southeast of Trochenbrod through the forest, told me that as a child she would beg her father to take her with him on his shopping excursions to Sofiyovka because for her it was like going to the big city. A Ukrainian from the village of Yaromel about two miles away remembered “beautiful stores there, lots of different kinds of stores.” He also remembered Trochenbrod shopkeepers as gentle and kind people:

We bought things there: fabrics, clothes, shoes, and other things. If we needed to buy something but we didn’t have the money, the Jewish shopkeepers would say, “Don’t worry, it’s OK; when you’ll have the money, you’ll pay me.” They were good people. They trusted everyone.

An old-timer from the nearby village of Domashiv reminisced:

They hired Ukrainians from nearby villages to work in their fields. Ukrainians from the surrounding villages would go there to try to find something to do to earn money. They could get two zlotys for helping in the fields, and the Trochenbroders would give them a cup of tea. They would even hire Ukrainians to cut their grasses for their cattle because the Trochenbrod people were busy trading. They were selling all sorts of leather goods, and they were buying animals for hides to make leather to make those goods.

Before the war everyone was friendly. The Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles all had different professions and did business with each other. People from different villages went around to other villages. They might sew clothes, or repair something in someone’s house. Everyone had his own job, so it was peaceful and friendly, and everyone had his own piece of land and worked on it.

A woman in a formerly Polish village, Przebradze, on what used to be the principal road from Trochenbrod to Kivertzy and Lutsk, knew Trochenbrod and many of its people well:

My parents used to take me to Sofiyovka because there were a lot of shops there where we could by a lot of things. The people from all the villages around Sofiyovka went there to get everything they needed.

We had bees, and we sold honey there in the summer. We took the honey there by horse wagon. People came with jars or whatever containers they had, and my grandfather poured the honey into it. We brought the honey in a bucket, and strawberries also, to sell along the street.

In the final years of the 1930s, modern technology began to find its way to Trochenbrod. The first electricity, radios, bicycles, even movies—Basia-Ruchel Potash remembers one of the 1930s
Gold Diggers
series—made their appearances. The Yiddish newspaper
Forward
was delivered regularly. The district administration office in the village of Silno, not far from Horodiche, acquired an automobile that enabled local officials to visit villages and towns in the district when the dirt roads were passable. Trochenbrod’s post office now also offered telephone and telegraph service. Improved (but not paved) roads made travel to the train station at Kivertzy and to Lutsk routine, though it was still problematic after a rain.

November 10, 1938: Kristallnacht. Most of Trochenbrod’s more than five thousand Jews could not imagine that Hitler’s storm was really as bad as people said—or in any case that it would blow on their pleasant, friendly, and industrious town whose people served everyone in the region well and caused trouble to no one.

Because Trochenbrod was a consequential regional trading and production center, the district administration planted more trees; installed bollards to keep traffic out of the drainage ditches along Trochenbrod’s only street; and even began to upgrade the street, which often became muddy and impassable for wagons, with paving stones—a sort of downtown renewal project. The project to pave Trochenbrod’s street was begun in 1938. Peshia Gotman watched the paving work as a seventeen-year-old preparing to immigrate to the United States. Though she did leave, she recalls desperately not wanting to.

To me Trochenbrod looked like a street that had been picked up from a city and plopped down somewhere in the wilderness, except that the street was mud. Seeing the street being paved convinced me that what we all expected was starting to happen—Trochenbrod was going to become a city, a Jewish city. Why would I leave it?

The ribbon-cutting for the first small paved section of Trochenbrod’s street was held in the spring of 1939. That was the last section paved.

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the U.S.S.R. signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland from the west, and two weeks later the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, taking territory it had failed to keep in its war with Poland twenty years earlier. Trochenbrod came under Soviet rule once again. The Second World War had begun.

At that moment everything began to change. So this is a good time to let Shmulik Potash remind us what the essence of Trochenbrod was before dusk:

Although there were plenty of poor people in Trochenbrod, they were all wealthy. Why? Because they felt their lives were rich and they were satisfied. There’s a saying, “Want what you have, and then you’ll have what you want.” Ninety-five percent of Trochenbrod people were like that. They were salt of the earth, as they say. The very concept of stealing was unknown to them—take something that belongs to someone else, what’s that?

The people who read your book, I want to tell them that there once was a Jewish town of worthy people, hard-working people, honest people, trusting people. All they wanted was to raise children who would also be good people. That’s what Trochenbrod was.

OPPOSITE:
Between the wars. A paved road runs from the city of Lutsk, in the lower left corner, about 8 miles northeast to the Kivertzy railroad station. From there the road continues unpaved about 20 miles northeast to the much smaller city of Kolki. Following that road from the Kivertzy railroad station, just past the village of Ozero you would have turned right to Przebradze on your way to Trochenbrod. Passing by the entrance to Kol. Yosefin on the left, you would have entered Trochenbrod from the south. To Trochenbrod’s southeast is Horodiche. Silno, the administrative center, is slightly northeast of that. In the southeast corner of the map is the town of Olyka. Northeast of Trochenbrod is Klubochin, a village from which Ukrainian partisans cooperated with those from Trochenbrod during the German occupation. Northeast of Klubochin is Lopaten, where Medvedev had his partisan headquarters. Immediately northwest of Trochenbrod is its sister village of Lozisht. Just northwest of Lozisht is the village of Domashiv, and southwest of that is the village of Yaromel. Due west of Domashiv is Trostjanets, where you would turn left to get to Trochenbrod-Lozisht if you were coming from Kolki. The paved road eastward from Lutsk connects it to the city of Rovno
.

1
. Jewish paramilitary organization fighting for a Jewish state in Palestine.

2
. Bata is a manufacturer of relatively inexpensive ready-made footwear that it retails through its own international chain of Bata retail stores, a business that thrives even today.

3
. “Sabbath Gentile,” who performed functions like stoking fires for Jews on the Sabbath because religious law prohibits Jews from doing acts of “work” on that day.

Chapter Three

DUSK

I
n October 1939, Trochenbrod came under Soviet rule once again. But this time there was a well-organized cell of Communists in Trochenbrod to greet and work with Soviet officials. Trochenbrod Communists had been underground during Polish rule, and now they were joined by Communist comrades, both Jewish and Gentile, freed by the Soviets from Polish prisons. The transition to Communist ways started immediately.

– –

For this brief era in Trochenbrod’s history, I was able to gather most of the information from living people. By and large, these people had remarkable stories to tell and observations to make—as one might expect of people who escaped or survived the Holocaust. Their first-person accounts are treasures for the way they express what happened in Trochenbrod and how it felt during its darkening last days.

Local Jewish Communists were installed as mayor, police, and other local officials in Trochenbrod. The Polish post office was closed. The Soviets took over much of the economic property in Trochenbrod—small factories, workshops, even some shops. Typically they put the workers, whether one or a half dozen, in charge, and turned the owner into a worker. Most family enterprises without workers were allowed to continue, but a few were taken over “for the people” by upper-level Communists. People were being driven into poverty, and at the same time, shortages were developing. Food was rationed through a cooperative store. People hid property, including their stocks of food, and a black market for basic necessities developed. The town was pushed steadily in the direction of people having little money, but in any case, there was little to buy.

The Soviets were not particularly anti-Jewish, and when they took over the public school they allowed the language of instruction for Trochenbrod pupils to be Yiddish, though of course all students also had to study Russian. Consistent with Communist ideology, the Soviets strongly discouraged religious observance—they interfered with synagogue prayers and tried to impose labor on the Sabbath. But in the end, because on a day-to-day basis things were run mostly by local people, ways could often be found to circumvent Communist doctrine. The flavor of this is captured in the memories of Tuvia Drori as he told them to me and also as he wrote about them in his book
Ani Ma’amin
(
I Believe
):

Everybody knew everybody in our small town. Together we played, and as we grew up we talked and argued. We
Beitar
people knew the secrets of the Communist underground (and sometimes we helped them against the Polish police), and they were aware of our
Etzel
courses held in town (the last one was at the beginning of 1939). They knew we had weapons and that we were using live ammunition during the drills because they heard the gunshots.

When the Soviets arrived in October 1939, at first they tried to pull us into Communist activity and convince us to become Communists, which would also be good for our work and social situations; they tried to draw us to their assemblies, social activities, and theatrical shows, but we did not oblige.

Then they decided (probably because of pressures from above) to arrest us. In my case it was one of my former pupils who came to arrest me. In the first interrogation we were asked about the weapons we had and whether the
Beitar
youth organization was still active. We didn’t take those interrogations too seriously. The social closeness among us was too strong for them to do us any harm.

Eventually we were released and returned home, but it was obvious we could not sit idly waiting for the next arrest. The hopes that maybe the war would cease and we would be able to continue our Zionist activities were diminishing. Contacts with the outside world were cut off completely, and we could not bear staying citizens under Stalin’s regime.

At the end of autumn a group of us from
Beitar
decided to start moving out, to find a way to
Eretz Yisrael
[the Land of Israel]. We knew we would have to steal borders, and who knew where we would end up, as we would be going only on uncharted routes.

Soon after arrival of the Soviets, between twenty and thirty Trochenbrod young people, like Tuvia and his
Beitar
friends, began sneaking away with the aim of finding a path to Palestine. They usually left at night and suffered tearful and tragic separations from their families, or slipped out without a face-to-face good-bye because their parents did not want them to leave. None of them ever saw their families again.

Most made their way to Vilna (Vilnius), where a shelter, the “Internat,” had been established for young people who were fleeing to Palestine from all over Eastern Europe. From Vilna there were many ways these young people made their ways to Palestine, traveling through Turkey, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Transjordan, and more. Travel through Europe was no longer safe. It took most of them one or two years to make the trip; it took many much longer. Quite a few fell out of contact during their journeys and were never heard from again. A few got stuck along the way in Moscow and ended up fading into Soviet society.