The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (7 page)

Trochenbroders usually went to Lutsk, about 20 miles and the better part of a day’s journey away, for studio photographs, or had photographs made by itinerant photographers who from time to time set up temporary studios in Trochenbrod. This explains why you can look through hundreds of photographs from Trochenbrod and see the faces of its people, most often stiff and posed, and nothing of the town’s physical appearance. By the 1930s box cameras and 35mm cameras were readily available, and at least some people who visited Trochenbrod, usually immigrants returning to visit their families, snapped outdoor photos. Some Trochenbroders had cameras also, but their photographs were lost in the Holocaust. The one Trochenbroder who was technologically attuned, who photographed outdoor scenes, and survived the Holocaust with her photographs and other personal belongings was the Polish Catholic postmistress of the town, Janina Lubinski. I met her son, Ryszard Lubinski, in the city of Radom, two hours south of Warsaw, and with happiness he gave me most of the photos of 1930s Trochenbrod that appear in this book. They add a layer of concreteness to Trochenbrod like nothing else can; they allowed me to see the town my father grew up in.

When my father marked his bar mitzvah in the early 1920s, the combined population of Trochenbrod and Lozisht was the same as it had been twenty years earlier, about sixteen hundred people. Emigration, disease, and war privation had offset any natural growth. The first few years after the wars were a period of harsh life and recovery. In the early days of full Polish administration, local commandants imposed forced labor on the Jews of Trochenbrod—building roads, administration buildings, and warehouses in the region; supplying the Polish army with food, clothes, and leather goods; hauling construction materials and army supplies; building furnishings for government offices. That hardship was soon replaced with higher-level official discrimination. Government jobs were denied to Jews. Some trades that Jews had been prominent in, such as vodka and salt, were made state monopolies and turned over to Polish Catholic war veterans to operate. Systematic repression of Jews steadily increased throughout the interwar period. So did regular outbreaks of violence against Jews, and these were ignored if not encouraged by Polish officials. Despite this, and because people in the rural areas tended to get along better than in the cities—Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews each having their own social and economic niches—Trochenbrod’s economy again began to grow and diversify.

Although increased contact with the outside world and a measure of political awareness had come about in Trochenbrod to some extent during the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, World War I and the Polish-Soviet war pushed the town on a faster path to modernity—technological, commercial, cultural, social, and political. During the wars Trochenbrod had rubbed up against Russian, Austrian, Polish, and Soviet troops. Some young men had fled to distant cities to avoid the troubles in Trochenbrod or to attend yeshiva, and they returned more worldly wise; some had been taken into the military and were exposed to a secular world and nonkosher food. This all laid the groundwork for a Trochenbrod that during the interwar period had growing ranks of secularists, political movements from the far left to the far right, and businessmen whose enterprises reached out to the larger world.

This is not to overstate the case. Trochenbrod remained surrounded by forests, far from any reliable transportation route for motorized vehicles, and completely and somewhat insularly Jewish. It continued to be a town, a complete town, governed by Jewish custom: always observing the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, always strictly kosher and following Jewish dictates, always filling up its synagogues, and always greeting visiting Jewish scholars with celebrations. For Jews who knew about the town and for most who lived there, this, together with its farming character, lent Trochenbrod an out-of-place and out-of-time almost magical quality.

As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, Trochenbrod was thriving again. Its economy was increasingly becoming the center of trade, artisans, agroprocessing, and light manufacturing for a region stretching in a radius of more than ten miles. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the uniqueness of Trochenbrod’s Jewish farmers at that time. One of the most eloquent expressions of the wonder of this was written by the Israeli writer Jacob Banai in his 1978 book
Anonymous Soldiers
:

Sofiyovka is the name of a small Volyn town in which in the fall of 1938 the first
Etzel
¹
course took place, in which I participated. The Jews led their lives in Sofiyovka as if it was their kingdom. That is where I first encountered Jews who worked in agriculture. In Sofiyovka I saw Jews walking behind their plows; a Jew who takes his cows to the field, and when the time for prayer has arrived he stands in his field and prays as if he is standing in a synagogue.

That picture deeply ingrained itself in my memory, and it was the first taste I had of our vision of a Jew in his homeland. I also saw children there, not organized in any activities, but actually small children playing in the fields, dancing and singing Hebrew songs. What a magical place was this Sofiyovka!!!

Memories like this, perhaps reinforced by what lingered in the minds of children who left Trochenbrod at a very young age, and also the memoirs of people who left Trochenbrod well before World War I, have given many today the notion that Trochenbrod was essentially a farming village. In fact, by the 1930s, and perhaps well before that, no one in Trochenbrod actually made their living from farming. Although everyone worked their land to some degree, the livelihoods of most Trochenbrod families, or by far the larger part of them, now came from retail shops, leather-related businesses, construction trades, small-scale manufacturing, and trading.

By now, growing numbers of Ukrainians and Poles from surrounding villages were employed in the town’s fields, houses, and sometimes even businesses. It became more and more common for people from surrounding villages not only to shop in Trochenbrod but also to sell things there house to house or from their wagons. Trochenbrod was, as before, one long street with houses, shops, workshops, small factories, and synagogues, but now also with public buildings like schools, a cultural center, the post office, and the constable’s office lined up along it. Many houses had already been rebuilt or were now being rebuilt, improved, and enlarged; and now most shops had their own storefronts and carried an ever-increasing variety of goods. As it embarked on the 1930s, Trochenbrod had become truly a regional town.

One sign that this was happening is the town’s appearance in Poland’s first official “Illustrated Directory of Volyn,” published in 1929. The directory listed only places that were economically or touristically significant, and Trochenbrod was considered one of those. The entry for Sofiyovka reads,

Eleven kilometers east of Trostjanetz is Sofiyovka. It is an industrial town.… The easiest access route by rail is through the Kivertzy station (22 kilometers). The main industry is leather-working, and there are over 20 small leather workshops. In addition there are many Jews there; they are farmers. The town is built on pilings on swampy land, and during the spring snow-melt the water rises to the floors of the houses. There is a new and sizeable wooden church, built with pine and oak, funded by the Radziwills.

Yes, a church! More on this later.

Also in 1929 there was an entry for Sofiyovka in
Ksi
ȩ
ga adresowa Polski
, a privately published Polish business directory. The entry listed about ninety nonfarm businesses in Sofiyovka in a wide variety of sectors that included shops, workshops, small factories, and traders. Next to each type of enterprise appear the names of the proprietors of those businesses. Many prominent Trochenbrod family names show up there—names that today are spread throughout North and South America and Israel, and also throughout this book: Antwarg; Blitzstein; Bulmash; Burak; Drossner; Fishfader; Gelman; Gilden; Gluz; Halperin; Kerman; Kessler; Potash; Roitenberg; Safran; Schuster; Shpielman; Shwartz; Szames; Wainer. In this
Ksi
ȩ
ga adresowa Polski
entry the only distinctly Polish names in the long list of Sofiyovka business proprietors are those who run the government-monopoly vodka and tobacco shops.

The breadth of enterprises in this town as early as 1929 may be surprising at first, considering the extent of physical and personal devastation suffered there in the wars. But after having recovered in basic physical terms, stabilized in human terms, and settled into the idiosyncrasies of the Polish administration, around the mid 1920s Trochenbrod had begun to reclaim its place as a regional commercial center with renewed energy. And while some Trochenbrod families never recovered the economic well-being they enjoyed before World War I, and some now even scraped along mostly with the help of money sent by relatives who lived abroad, as the 1930s got under way, many Trochenbrod families were beginning to do relatively well and saw that a comfortable future might be possible in their town.

It’s a safe guess that a policy of economic diversification in order to promote growth and stability in Trochenbrod never crossed the mind of anyone who lived there. But, willy-nilly, that is what happened. Diversification of economic activity is a time-honored family strategy, especially among rural families, to pin down a dependable stream of income. Add to that the unusual range of economic opportunities presented by involvement of Trochenbrod families in both agriculture and town businesses, an entrepreneurial heritage handed down from urban roots, and a potential market that included a dozen or more villages in the area, not to mention three cities, and you have the formula for a community of people who would discover and seize a wide variety of economic opportunities. And once they seized one they immediately began to build on it.

A good example of this was Moishe Sheinberg. Moishe was somehow involved in the butcher business in Trochenbrod when he noticed that, like Jews, Polish people for some reason did not eat the hind quarters of cows. He figured that there must be lots of castoff cow rumps he could sell to Ukrainians. Indeed there was. He was able to buy these parts relatively cheaply and then sell them at market in Kivertzy. Moishe was, of course, strictly kosher: he would never eat the nonkosher meat he sold.

Then there was Avrum Bass. Avrum was a farmer who sold his produce at market, and had a horse and wagon to transport his goods. He would often bring produce back from the market in his wagon to sell in Trochenbrod, so he became both a farmer and a produce trader. His familiarity with horses led him to sell the one he had and buy another, and before long he was also a horse trader. Sometimes he brought bread back from the market to sell in Trochenbrod. Why not bake it here and offer fresher bread that people from the nearby villages might also come to buy? Soon enough, Avrum Bass was a relatively well-to-do businessman who grew and traded produce, was a trader in horses, and owned a bakery in Trochenbrod.

Dairy owners in Trochenbrod took their milk and butter to Lutsk, Rovno, and Kolki to sell. Why come back with empty wagons? They began bringing back sugar, cooking oil, and eventually a wide variety of other goods from the cities to sell in Trochenbrod. They expanded their dairy shops into grocery stores and thought of themselves not just as dairymen but also as grocery shopkeepers and traders in city goods.

Ellie Potash started out making shoes and selling them in his small Trochenbrod shop like so many others. To get an edge on the competition he bought a horse and wagon and made rounds in the villages to take orders from customers and sell shoes directly to them. People would ask him for other leather goods, especially boots, belts, and bridles. Steadily he expanded his “export” business, and by the mid-1930s had a workshop in its own building (next to the post office) making a wide variety of leather goods for a steady market of customers in the villages around Trochenbrod. He made a good living from this and was able to build a very nice new house. He could not have imagined that just a few years later his house would be selected by the Germans as one of the places to store the belongings of their victims, and then to quarter themselves, while Ellie and his family struggled to survive the winter hiding in the Radziwill forest.

As the entry in the 1929 “Illustrated Directory of Volyn” implied, if there was a single dominant industry in Trochenbrod, it was leather. The leather business included buying skins and buying cows for their skins; tanning; working leather into a wide variety of products, especially boots and shoes; leather goods shops; shoe shops; shoe repair; and exporting leather and leather goods to cities in the area, trading at regional markets, selling from wagons of leather merchandise village by village, and wholesaling to small shops in other villages. The biggest tannery, possibly the biggest business, in Trochenbrod was owned by the Shwartz family and employed seven Trochenbrod workers. David Shwartz, who wrote the memoir from which passages are quoted in the first chapter of this book, was one of the Shwartz family children.

Trochenbrod tanners were known for making regular rounds of the surrounding villages looking for and buying cows with skin that would meet their high standards. Sofiyovka boots were considered the highest quality available anywhere for many miles around because of both the leather and the craftsmanship. The steady demand for boots spawned a large number of shoemakers and shoe shops in Trochenbrod to serve people who came from villages and even towns all around to buy shoes, and especially boots, which were so important in the muddy rural area. There were about forty thriving leather-related enterprises in Trochenbrod by the late 1930s. The town’s fame as a center for footwear drew so many customers that eventually even a Bata
²
store was established there, a store where people could buy relatively low-cost ready-made shoes that were brought to Trochenbrod from Bata factories elsewhere.

Other businesses that lined Trochenbrod’s bustling street by the late 1930s were: