The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (12 page)

Trochenbrod and its sister village of Lozisht had a combined population of over six thousand Jewish souls when the Germans invaded Soviet-held lands on June 22, 1941. In the first days after their invasion of Trochenbrod the Germans marked the town’s houses with Jewish stars, carried out random murders, and invited destruction and looting of Jewish possessions by rampaging Ukrainian villagers freed from restraint by the departure of the Soviets. The Germans immediately set up a local administration system. This included a Judenrat, or Jewish Council, to help carry out German orders like providing Jews for forced labor or collecting “taxes” for the Germans. The German administration system also included Ukrainian auxiliary police and a Ukrainian militia to do the work of policing the Jews, hunting them down when they tried to escape the terror, and assisting the liquidations.

The auxiliary police were known as Schutsmen (
Schutz
is the German word for protection); many of them saw their new roles as nothing more than opportunities for looting, extortion, and brutalizing Jews. The militia tended to be made up of members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Known as “Banderovtsi,” after their ultranationalist leader Stepan Bandera, they were virulently anti-Jewish, and vicious. They worked closely with the Germans as a convenience: their aim was to purify Ukraine by ridding it of Jews, Poles, Russians, and ultimately Germans, and fulfill the long-cherished dream of an independent and “pure” Ukraine. People with whom Trochenbroders had friendly relations before, people from nearby villages, suddenly turned up as collaborators with the Nazi regime and treated their Trochenbrod neighbors with cruelty and brutality.

The Germans wasted no time establishing terror and death as the distinguishing marks of their occupation, particularly for Jews. At the beginning of July they had their Schutsmen gather 150 Trochenbrod men, men selected by the Judenrat, and ship them by truck to Kivertzy. Everyone understood, or perhaps just assumed, that this was a work crew for the railroad depot. At Kivertzy the men were handed over to a detachment of German soldiers, who took them to the yard of the local jailhouse and slaughtered them. Word of what happened came back to Trochenbrod immediately.

Like other settlements, Trochenbrod had to supply a quota of laborers who were sent mostly to Kivertzy to work for the Germans. The Judenrat had to make arrangements to meet the quota, but the Schutsmen would also snatch people off the street for these work crews. Each work crew labored a week or so before it was replaced by the next. The workers slept on the floors in empty warehouses and stables near the railroad station. They worked mostly loading and unloading trains but were put to other heavy work for the Germans as well, like digging trenches or hauling building supplies or doing construction work. At night the men in these crews would be beaten and terrorized by their Ukrainian guards and German overseers; some men never returned.

In October, Trochenbrod’s agricultural farmsteads were confiscated, as were the townspeople’s furs, other warm clothing, and valuable property like farm equipment. The Jews were also commanded to pay a heavy burden of special taxes. Meanwhile, Schutsmen and Banderovtsi extorted gold, silver, and other valuables from them. Jewish life in Trochenbrod became worthless. The temptation and opportunity this provided to walk into the homes of their Jewish neighbors and take what they wanted was, for some Ukrainians, irresistible.

Soon after, the Germans ordered that all Trochenbrod’s cattle be brought to the Kivertzy train station for shipment to Germany. Schutsmen on horses gleefully rounded up the cattle and shipped them off. This basically ended any means for most Jews to support themselves. They were not allowed to leave the town, work the fields, or trade with people outside the town. Again a black market developed, this time more extensive and also more risky than under the Soviets. Milk, grain, flour, potatoes, and fat were smuggled into Trochenbrod in exchange for clothing, valuables, or money. The trade was carried on at night; being caught meant immediate death. Blacksmiths, shoemakers, and some others were still able to make a living, but many Trochenbroders began starving, trying to stay alive on rotten food and scavenged scraps.

Within four months of the start of German control the recently proud and thriving town of Trochenbrod was reduced to abject poverty, hunger, terror, slavery, extortion, beatings, humiliation, and misery of every other kind—and over this wretchedness hovered the prospect of death consuming anyone anywhere at any time for any reason or no reason. This was the life of the Jews of Trochenbrod, the people of Trochenbrod, until the end of their days.

Trochenbroders who survived the war, or their children, tell of a somewhat mysterious “Dr. Klinger.” Late in 1941, not long before the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war in early December, this Dr. Klinger, a German Jew living in Lutsk, passed himself off as a Gentile. No one seems to know for certain what Dr. Klinger was a doctor of, or for that matter if he was really a doctor at all. He made contact with the Nazi leadership and arranged to employ the Jewish leather workers of Trochenbrod to produce leather goods, especially boots, for the German army. The production was done in Trochenbrod, so the people he could keep engaged as leather workers—as many as possible—were saved from being sent on forced labor crews.

A number of Schutsmen had suspicions about Dr. Klinger, since no one had ever seen him or heard of him before, and some of them had noticed friendly behavior between the German Dr. Klinger and his Jewish laborers. One night in mid-1942, drunken laughter and then shouting was heard from a drinking party Schutsmen were having, and then a single gunshot was heard. In the morning Dr. Klinger’s body was found in the street with a bullet through his head. The townspeople buried him as a Jew in Trochenbrod’s cemetery.

As winter turned into spring in 1942, it became increasingly clear to many Trochenbrod townspeople that the Germans intended ultimately to kill them all, by slave labor, by starvation, or by outright murder. Some built false walls in their houses or farm buildings and prepared hiding places behind them; some prepared bunkers in the forest; some found ways to obtain false identity papers and began to slip away; and some young Trochenbrod men fled into the forest, as did Nahum Kohn, and began training themselves to be partisans. Most, however—because they would not believe what could no longer be denied, because they clung to hope that their usefulness to the Germans would protect them, because they were certain that God would intervene and save them, or because they could not imagine what they could do about it—struggled to survive, suffered under a heavier and heavier burden of despair, and awaited their fate.

One of the things that is striking in the stories of what took place in and around Trochenbrod as its sun was setting is the degree of barbarism displayed toward the townspeople by Ukrainians, and to a lesser extent Poles, from neighboring villages—and with that, the extraordinary degree of kindness and readiness to put themselves at risk to help their Jewish neighbors shown by quite a few Ukrainian and Polish families. A Ukrainian in the nearby village of Yaromel, for example, told me of his father hiding “a very good person named Itzik” from Trochenbrod in their house for a few days. Then the Germans began searching all the houses very carefully looking for Jews, and it became a matter of mortal risk, so they had no choice but “to say good-bye” to Itzik.

One Trochenbrod survivor told me of a Polish family that hid her family, and later brought food to them where they hid in the forest; and also of Ukrainians who during the winter let Jews hiding in the forest warm themselves in their houses, fed them, and offered food from their gardens. A Ukrainian from the Polish village of Przebradze described a family friend, a red-haired Trochenbroder, who had obtained a false passport that identified him as non-Jewish. He stopped at their house to say good-bye, hid with them for a day, and then continued on to Lutsk to lose himself among the crowds. When the family of Basia-Ruchel Potash hid in the forest, a Polish man who had been her father’s customer sometimes brought food to them, and alerted them to dangers. People in the nearby Ukrainian village of Klubochin helped Trochenbrod families survive in the forest and gave support to their young men who formed partisan units.

In preparing for its grisly work, the Nazi murder machine was very organized and methodical. The plan called for a schedule of exterminations that would leave Ukraine essentially “Judenrein,” free of Jews, by October 10, 1942. Accordingly, most of the Jewish people of Kolki were slaughtered on August 9, most of the Jews of Olyka on August 10, and the bulk of Trochenbrod’s Jews were scheduled for slaughter on August 11. The Nazis began the process of organizing the mass murder for Trochenbrod with a number of advance actions meant to ensure that everything proceeded efficiently. They and their Schutsmen killed a large number of people in their homes and in Trochenbrod’s street, and undertook other forms of terror to reinforce a sense of helplessness, hoping in that way to ensure submission and minimize attempts to escape. They conducted a program of psychological trickery to encourage denial on the part of their victims, not a few of whom to nearly the end believed they were being corralled for labor details.

Chapter Four

DARKNESS

I
n the early morning hours of Sunday, August 9, 1942, twenty men of
Einsatzgruppe
C, one of the German extermination units, rode into Trochenbrod on motorcycles. In their wake were eleven German army trucks carrying about one hundred Schutsmen. The Schutsmen spread out and ordered everyone to go immediately to the center of town for a meeting where they would be issued labor cards. While pushing everyone, the Schutsmen freely shot people, tens of them, as they moved bewildered to the designated location.

After a long and frightening wait, the German commander arrived and informed the townspeople that henceforth they would have to live in a ghetto in the area where they were standing, in the middle of Trochenbrod. He told about fifty leather workers and some professionals, ones the Germans wanted to continue working for them, that they must move with their families into a cluster of houses just beyond the north end of town, in the vicinity of the flour mill. Then Einsatzgruppe troops lined everyone up in ranks to count them and determine, according to a formula they used, the depth of pit they would need at a given width and length. People were allowed to return to their homes to gather clothing and other small things for the ghetto, whatever they could carry, but had to be back in the ghetto within two hours.

The Schutsmen lined up along the sides of the street. As long lines of men, women, and children trudged down the street carrying sacks of belongings on their backs, the Schutsmen opened fire from time to time, murdering randomly. They also looked in the houses and dragged anyone they found outside and shot them. Trochenbrod’s street echoed with gunshots and the cries of dying people. The goal was now to escape the bullets and get to the ghetto as fast as possible. The ghetto became a longed-for objective. A large number of people dropped their sacks and raced to the forest, using drainage canals for cover whenever they could. Many escaped this way, but many were shot as they tried. For the rest of the day and that night gunfire and cries were heard as the Schutsmen went from house to house hunting Jews and killing them when they found one, and incidentally pillaging. The next morning, Trochenbrod’s street was littered with bodies.

That day, August 10, was quiet. There was no life in Trochenbrod except in the ghetto in the center of town and in the barracks of Germans and Schutsmen. People hiding in the forest saw that the Germans and their helpers were searching for them and killing anyone they found. Many calculated that their situation in the forest was hopeless and decided to sneak back into the ghetto at night and take their chances with their fellow Trochenbroders. Many still believed, or convinced themselves, that it was possible that they would be assigned to forced labor crews, and nothing more.

The following day Trochenbrod’s Jews were called out of the ghetto houses and were told to prepare for transport: they should bring food for three days with them. They were piled into trucks and taken, group after group, two hundred at a time, to the killing pit in the Yaromel forest about two miles away that Schutsmen had prepared several days earlier—actually several pits, each meant to accommodate single rows of victims one on top of the other. The Trochenbrod Jews were ordered down from the trucks a short distance from the pits, and they approached their destinies on foot in loose ranks. The Germans demanded that everyone undress. One of Trochenbrod’s prominent rabbis was in the first row of people that would be shot. He assured the hopeless Trochenbroders that it was acceptable for them to obey the German masters, and he undressed: the Germans immediately shot him, and his naked body collapsed into the pit.

Each few rows of people saw clearly what happened to the rows before, and many became hysterical with terror and despair. Sometimes, as a row of Trochenbrod Jews was pushed toward the edge of the pit, one of them would jump a guard and scream for everyone to run, and others in the row would bolt. Most who bolted were shot, but often a few evaded the bullets and escaped into the forest. Their deaths were only delayed. They were hunted by everyone—Germans, Schutsmen, Banderovtsi, and local villagers. Most were soon found and cut down.

As each row of people approached the pit they had to deposit their rings and money in buckets and place their clothes on steadily growing piles. They were ordered to lie down in the pit, on top of the bodies of those who went before them. Then Schutsmen and Einzatsgruppe soldiers walked up and down the edge of the pit shooting bullets into the backs of the heads of their Trochenbrod victims, just as they had moments before into the heads of the preceding row of the brothers and sisters of those victims. The murderers stepped on the squirming bodies of little children and shot them in the head as well. Late in the afternoon, the first
Aktion
(literally, military operation, but in this case mass murder) was completed. The trucks made a final trip back to Trochenbrod carrying the clothing and other things taken from those who were slaughtered, for temporary storage in the empty Trochenbrod houses.