My grandmother Esther came from a religious family that lived in a dorf, or village, called Kolikovich (Kulikowicze), near Kolki, along the Styr River. It had only a handful of families, and my grandmother’s family may have been the only Jews.
My great-grandfather Yosef Weinberg was a tall, religious man, known for a fierce temper.
My great-grandmother Rose, or Reizel, was a tiny gentle woman, revered by her children and grandchildren. Like almost all of the Jews of Kolki, my great-grandparents and even my grandparents were related, either as cousins or through marriage.
My great-grandfather Yosef Weinberg’s first cousin Itzak Sahm was married to my great-grandmother Rose’s twin sister, Feiga.
Yosef and Rose’s oldest daughter, Chia, sister of my grandmother Esther, married one of my grandfather Srulach’s cousins. Two sisters married two cousins. And it goes on.
I wish I had more stories to attach to these names. A name is not a life, but sometimes it’s the best we can do, and even in flattened form, this recitation is my way of merging memory with history.
One night recently, when I couldn’t sleep, I went downstairs to my computer and started googling the name of the sanatorium in Poland where my maternal grandfather sought treatment and where he ultimately died. Remembering the name my mother had once mentioned, I tried several different spellings and finally stumbled on the TB sanatorium in Otwock, Poland, sixteen miles from Warsaw. The town apparently had a microclimate that made it a perfect place to treat patients with lung diseases. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote about Otwock and its “crystal clear air.” Following several links, I found the Otwock Jewish cemetery, which had a database of graves. One of those graves was that of “Israel Shlomo Bronstein, son of Natan Tzvi,” whom we knew as Nissan. My grandfather’s nickname was Srulach, although his given name was Israel. He died on March 14, 1927, and to my surprise, the website included an actual picture of his tombstone. I had a match! Now I had the exact date of his death and even my grandfather’s middle name, Shlomo. I ran upstairs to tell Bert, who did not entirely share my enthusiasm in the middle of the night. My husband may be interested in my discoveries, but for him they can wait for sunrise.
As it happens, this is the only surviving tombstone of any of my immediate ancestors in all of Europe. Generations of my family lived in this part of the world, but all of their graves have either been destroyed or plowed over, or their bodies rest in mass graves, with no record of them anywhere other than in the Yad Vashem Holocaust database, if someone thought to enter their names.
My mother remained haunted all her life by the fact that she never said goodbye to her mother, who stood silently as she packed her things. She left without a plan. Just a winter coat, a pair of scissors, a change of clothes, and Pesha’s shoes.
In the town square, she joined four of her girlfriends, Sura Kleiman, Bryna Weiman, Kittle Dricker, and Sura Mechlin. Together they followed the retreating Russian army and stayed ahead of the approaching Germans. But the five women were quickly separated in the chaos of their exodus. Three remained together and my mother ended up with Sura Mechlin, the one she knew least well. They spent the rest of the war as virtual sisters. All five of them survived and built new lives in Israel, Canada, and, in my mother’s case, in the United States.
My mother and Sura traveled by horse-drawn wagon for a few days on the road east, with a Russian man my mother had worked with at a store in Kolki. But as the Soviet troops retreated, they saw the horse, wagon, and able-bodied young man and immediately requisitioned him. Before he left, however, he handed my mother a small suitcase and told her not to open it until he was gone. And here my mother did indeed have luck: The suitcase turned out to be filled with money that the man had taken from the store as he left. It was enough to get my mother and Sura started on their journey, even if it didn’t last long.
The two “new sisters” kept moving east, following the retreating army, sleeping in barns and fields at night. They figured out how to hide stolen potatoes in the lining of their pants. People they met along the way sometimes gave them food. From the farmers, a little milk and maybe honey. Sometimes they just had to go hungry.
One difficult day’s quest for survival led to another as they moved ever farther into Russia. They wandered the country for the ensuing three years, walking, hitching rides, sometimes hanging off trains. The grueling pace took a toll. My mother’s legs swelled from all the walking. At one point, she developed sores from malnutrition, and Sura tended to her, sometimes helping her to dress. They became dependent on each other as they traveled, eventually making their way into Asia and figuring out how to survive moment to moment.
During the war, about one million Jews from the former Soviet Union, including Poland, managed to escape into Russia, with a significant number making it all the way into Central Asia, like my mother and Sura. It has been estimated that about 300,000 of these died due to disease and starvation, while others died as Soviet soldiers.
“I was the lucky one,” my mother would say. “The others were in very, very bad shape, the ones I left behind.”
My mother was the boss, Sura told me years later, when I first met her in Israel in 1999. Sura brought me a Kiddush cup, celebrating life, from her home as a gift to remember her by.
“If there were just ten grains of rice to put in water to make soup, Ethel insisted we save two for the next day,” Sura said. They walked for miles, mostly by night, sometimes exchanging a little rice with local families for soap to wash themselves. My mother repeatedly told Sura that they had to save something so they could buy new dresses when they went home to see their families again.
They worked on farms and even in factories, making gun parts for the Soviet army. They found themselves in Kazakhstan and then, for a while, they worked in a city near Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The distance from Kolki to Tashkent is nearly 2,600 miles, if you use a direct route, about the same as the distance from New York to Los Angeles. Ethel and Sura hardly took a direct route, and much of the trip was on foot. But they were determined to make it, even as they watched people along the way giving up.
Sometime in 1944, when the war was not yet over, my mother and Sura heard that Kolki and neighboring shtetls had been liberated, so they immediately began to calculate how to go back home. They finally obtained a permit to leave Uzbekistan and go to the front lines in the west to offer medical support. Having survived this long, they had no interest in going to the front lines. Along the way they met a group of teenage Jewish girls who had become experts at forging documents and who produced falsified documents that would allow my mother and Sura to avoid the battles and go to Kolki.
They wrote a letter to Stalin—or at least he was the intended recipient—and somehow, somewhere, they received a letter from the Russian authorities saying all the Jews in Kolki had been killed. My mother and Sura refused to believe it. Even though the war wasn’t actually over, they went home.
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When they finally arrived in Kolki, they met Sura’s brother-in-law, who had survived by hiding in the woods. He recounted everything that had happened to their families, person by person. After he told the handful of other returning survivors who returned to Kolki what had happened to their families, he left for Palestine, where, according to my mother, who met him years later, he literally never spoke another word.
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I wish I knew more about him. I wish I had more details—my mother told me that she wished she’d had paper and pencil to record their journey, but she was too busy surviving. I can at least tell you what I know.
When they returned, my mother was able to identify her house—or her former house—which had been burned down; the wheel from the “oil factory” in the backyard was still there, sticking out of the ground.
As my mother wept, a woman on the other side of the street walked by, wearing her siste
r Lifsha’s dress. There was no mistaking the dress, because it had been sent by an American relative.
My mother and Sura wanted to say Kaddish for their families, but the mass grave was in the forest outside the village, and they were warned against going into the woods.
A neighbor my mother knew, seeing that she and Sura were hungry, offered them a meal that included a piece of meat. Sura ate, but my mother wouldn’t touch the meat. She recounted this story for Jonathan, when he was writing his book about vegetarianism, Eating Animals.
“He saved your life,” Jonathan said.
“I didn’t eat it.”
“You didn’t eat it?”
“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”
“Of course.”
“But not even to save your life?”
“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”
3
My father’s story proved more difficult to excavate. He died when I was eight, an event that is still difficult for me to talk about. Even as I have pieced together a plausible history, he remains an enigma; the more I learn, the less I know, both about him and his experience during the war.
There are no pictures of my father growing up, none of his prewar family, of his parents, who are my grandparents. No pictures of his sister and her husband, who are my aunt and uncle.
Bits and pieces of information have come together over the years from cousins in Israel and from other Trochenbrod survivors, in Brazil and Israel, from conversations in Ukraine, and from documents that only recently were made available through the Holocaust Museum. I have utilized every available ancestry tool I could find and have located long-lost relatives as well as ones I didn’t know existed but none directly linked to my paternal grandfather’s family. I have pieced together an impressive archive, but the reality is that it is easier to find information on—or at least references to—the fictitious shtetl that sprang from Jonathan’s imagination than it is to find details about the place where my father actually lived.
I have come to accept that I will never know my father’s full story: how he survived the war, the precise details of what he endured, of what haunted him and continued to cast shadows even on the new life he made in America. What I do know is that solving the mystery of the black-and-white photograph of my father and the family that hid him during the war, and of finding Trochenbrod—or at least assembling fragments of events, piecing together a narrative of the sister that I never knew—has been, for me, the way of finding my father.
I am writing today in my chilly basement office, wrapped in my Trochenbrod hoodie. It was given to Jonathan on the movie set of his adapted novel, which, were one to write a fairy-tale end to this tragic story, would pretty much sum up how strange and unexpected this journey for my father’s past has proven to be.
“Memory begat memory begat memory,” Jonathan writes of his fictitious “Trachimbrod,” and it is in fact in these memories that my knowledge of the real Trochenbrod resides. Over the years, this search has led me to voraciously absorb every detail and anecdote that I can find, to assemble information about Trochenbrod piecemeal, like the shards of memory in my glass jars:
* * *
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We know that after the rain fell, the air smelled like wildflowers.
That there was mud.
And geese.
And snakes.
And these snakes, according to one survivor, were so plentiful that they would come into the houses and the children would play with them and feed them at mealtimes, like pets. Once, a rabbi came to Trochenbrod and, hearing the complaints, said, “I will drive them away!” The rabbi went out into the field, tore up some grass, and threw it into the next field while uttering some words—a prayer, or a spell, or a shopping list, or a curse. Whatever it was, it worked, and that was the end of the snake infestation in Trochenbrod. Or so the story goes.
We know, from the interviews and memoirs of survivors, there were good solid houses, on high foundations, rectangular, with dirt floors.
A prosperous town, the population was 99 percent Jewish.
A thriving commercial center, it was the place to shop.
Some believe Sholem Aleichem visited Trochenbrod and drew inspiration there for his character Tevye the Dairyman.
The smell of freshly baked bread infused the air as the Sabbath approached, and in the summer, with the windows open, it might have been possible to hear everyone in town singing the same songs on the Sabbath, as though the village was one big family at one great meal.
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The shtetl is gone and yet it still shapes my life. I have spent what seems like a lifetime gathering testimony from books and documentaries, from the few family photos that remain, from survivors’ accounts, from oral histories, from reunions of survivors, and from the visit to Trochenbrod that I would undertake in 2009, with my son Frank. My home office overflows with papers and photographs, with large three-ring binders labeled “Trochenbrod,” with boxes and folders full of documents and family stories. With map reproductions—some of such ancient provenance they look like they ought to be peopled by dragons and mythical beasts. With letters—tucked inside a folder, one of them five pages long, in neat, handwritten Yiddish from Itzhak Kimelblat in Brazil, eager to tell me his story, to maintain a connection to this vanished place.
While much of what I know about my family history has been deliberately and painstakingly assembled, a lifelong research project that has sent me on a scavenger hunt through libraries, the Internet, and around the globe, the broad outline of Trochenbrod’s history requires no excavation—the arc of its inception to its violent decimation is readily accessible from the history books.
Trochenbrod was part of the Second Polish Republic before it was part of the Soviet Union before it was occupied by Nazi Germany as part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact—or the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact or the Nazi German–Soviet Treaty of Non-Aggression, depending on which Wikipedia entry you prefer or where you stood in relation to the tanks.
Without getting too deep into the weeds of history, it is worth considering how it is that Jews wound up cultivating this marshy parcel of land, with its remote location, its poor soil, and its many snakes. Avrom Bendavid-Val, who was driven by a similar compulsion to explore Trochenbrod, notes in his book The Heavens Are Empty that Jews were not historically known as farmers, perhaps because of the conflict between religious practices and the demands of agrarian life—or maybe simply because of prohibitions against Jews owning land.
The short answer is that this part of Ukraine wound up, in the late 1700s, in what was known as Russia’s Pale of Settlement, which stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and was home to between five and six million Jews.
It was in many ways idyllic and in more ways not. Jews were subject to heavy taxation, conscription into the Russian army, and were denied many civil rights. But they could avoid some of the more draconian measures if they agreed to cultivate farmland, which is what resulted in the creation of the Jewish shtetl of Trochenbrod.
These things I know from history books. What I have been able to gather from piecing together family history is more prosaic:
I know that my father’s mother, Brucha, and her family lived in Trochenbrod, one house away from where her brother Yurchem and sister-in-law Sosel lived.
That a few houses farther up, on the same side of the road, were cousins Avrom and Sara Bisker.
That next door to them was Peretz Bisker, father of Ida Bisker Kogod, grandfather of Bob Kogod, whom we met in the United States. On the other side of the street were the Kimelblats, whose son Shai married my father’s half sister, Choma.
I know that in Trochenbrod everyone had a nickname,
something I learned later was important in identifying people. I would also learn that nicknames were derived from either a shortcoming or a profession. Accordingly, there was Chaim Nutta, the shoemaker. And Shaul Avramchick, who was known as the big eater; “Belly Button” Itzy, who was a government-appointed rabbi. There was Leib “the big one” and Leib “the small one.” There was Itzy “with the nose” and Helchick the butcher and Ephraim “who cries in the synagogue” and Pinchas the carpenter and Yankel the blacksmith and Chava the midwife and Ydel “the dumb one,” and I could go on and on, and perhaps I should, because part of the point of this narrative is to keep these stories alive.
* * *
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Despite my efforts, it remains the case that I know virtually nothing about the Safran side, my paternal grandfather’s family. I don’t know whether my grandfather had any siblings or where he came from. I hired a researcher in Ukraine in 2005 to try to find documents that might shed light on my grandfather’s family. He found nothing and believes my grandfather Yosef Safran came from elsewhere, probably a larger town. The only record that I could find is a 1929 Polish business directory available on the Internet, which lists a “Szafran” doing business in Trochenbrod.
Actually, I learned years later that my grandmother’s family, the Biskers, didn’t exactly come from Trochenbrod but from its adjacent sister village, called Lozisht. The two were connected, along a single road, and always thought of together.
While my father had some distant cousins in the United States, none of them knew him before he immigrated. His closest relatives were three first cousins living in Israel. From them I learned that my grandmother Brucha remarried and my father had a half sister, Choma or Nechoma. My father’s cousin Shmuel Bisker told me that my father was not only his cousin but his best friend.
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