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 Bata2 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:
• Bakeries
• Barber shops
• Beer house
• Building materials
• Butchers—the fattier the meat the more it cost!
• Candy store
• Carpenters
• Cattle traders
• Clothes, ready-made
• Dairies, which bought milk from Trochenbrod families and sold dairy products in local shops and in Lutsk, Rovno, and Kolki
• Dressmakers
• Fabric shops, very popular throughout the region because few people bought ready-made clothes
• General store
• Glaziers
• Grain mills, the largest of which was located on the east side of the street in the far north end of town. It had a motor with different attachments for chopping or grinding a variety of raw inputs. Farmers from throughout the region went there to have their grain milled or their hay chopped into more edible feed for their animals.
• Food, other than produce
• Furniture makers
• Haberdashery
• Hat maker
• Heating system builders
• Herbal remedies
• Horse traders
• House builders
• Ice—the ice was cut from a pond at the far north end of town.
• Inn
• Iron-working
• Lumber mills
• Matzah-making (in season)
• Metal products like nails and other small items
• Midwifery
• Oil presses, to which farmers from all around brought their oil seeds to be crushed, and pressed to produce cooking oil
• Pharmacies, called aptekas, run by the local feltchers, paramedics who treated minor ailments and injuries. When someone was seriously ill they had to be taken to a hospital in Lutsk or Rovno or even Kiev—lengthy, arduous, and potentially dangerous journeys.
• Produce shops
• Restaurant
• Kosher slaughterer
• Tailors
There was also a slaughterhouse and a bathhouse, although not on the main street.
The heads of many families in Trochenbrod were professional traders who regularly frequented regional markets by horse-drawn wagon. They took their products to places like Olyka, Kolki, and Kivertzy, where there were fixed weekly market days for different kinds of products. Some were produce traders—they sold produce like potatoes and cabbage from the fields of Trochenbrod families and bought produce and food products like flour and sugar to sell in Trochenbrod. Others sold Trochenbrod-made goods, especially leather goods, at these markets. Still others traded in livestock.
Trochenbrod supplied artisans—glaziers, house builders, carpenters, builders of cooking and heating systems, painters, bricklayers, roofers, and other specialists—to villagers as far as fifteen miles away. Fifteen miles was the distance a man could walk from Trochenbrod in a day, and then return to Trochenbrod in a day after the job was completed, and avoid night travel made dangerous by robbers, hooligans, and wild animals.
The commercial breadth of Trochenbrod—the almost dizzying array of economic activities in a relatively small and isolated town, the far-flung trading and artisan connections with other places, and the magnetic pull on buyers and sellers from surrounding villages—often came to mind second after family and friends in the reminiscences of Trochenbroders I interviewed. But it tended to be first in the memories of Ukrainians still living in the area today. For example, the first time I visited, as we were trying to locate the site of Trochenbrod we saw an aged woman bent over, working, in the fields of the neighboring village of Domashiv. We asked if she could point us toward the site of Sofiyovka. She slowly straightened up from her hoeing and looked at us stern-faced for a moment, as if to say, “Who is this asking me such things?” Then, as if thinking, Oh, I see you’re foreigners looking for that place … what a place! a huge grin broke out across her weathered face and she twisted and pointed. “There,” she said, “Keep walking in that direction through the fields on the other side of that grove and you’ll see a small black monument that marks the north end of Sofiyovka. If there had been no Germans you wouldn’t need to ask, because you’d see it: it would be a city today, bigger than Lutsk.”
A fascinating idea to contemplate. If there had been no World War II, what would have been? Could Trochenbrod really have become a city—big stone buildings, a tram system, a network of paved streets with sidewalks, cars everywhere, perhaps a railroad spur at last, fancy restaurants and upscale shops—a completely Jewish city, a Tel Aviv in Poland or Ukraine?
As a thriving town that was rapidly growing by the late 1930s, Trochenbrod now had its own post office, constable station, and other government offices. For a while, not only the constable but also the office of the chief of police for villages in the area was located in Sofiyovka. As the Polish government continued to rationalize its administration in its new eastern lands, it established a formal district headquarters in the village of Silno, a few miles away through the Radziwill forest�
�a village much smaller than Trochenbrod. The chief of police relocated there with all other district offices. Local officials reached out to Trochenbrod, the most prosperous settlement in the Silno district, in many ways, especially when it came to taxes.
The Polish government imposed a variety of taxes. For businesses there were permit and turnover taxes. A shop owner, for example, bought and annually renewed a business permit, and then paid taxes on the turnover of the business. Households had to pay into a compulsory government fire insurance program that supposedly covered the costs of fire protection as well as rebuilding. There were excise taxes on matches, liquor, tobacco, kerosene, and other nonfood basics. And then there was the chief of police. In the late 1930s this was a big man: one Trochenbroder described him as over six feet tall and three feet wide. He regularly came from Silno to visit the Sofiyovka part of his domain. He would stop into Trochenbrod shops, reach out his hand to the shopkeeper, and say a friendly “Shalom aleichem.” He had come for the police tax: you knew that when you reached out your hand to shake his, there needed to be a few zlotys in it that would not be there when your hand came back. Trochenbrod had all the trappings of a vibrant commercial town.
There was a lot of agriculture in addition to commercial enterprises. Most Trochenbrod families not only drew a good portion of their food from the farm fields behind their houses, they earned a little extra money from their farming. Behind each house was a shed and perhaps a barn and other outbuildings, and then a vegetable garden. Beyond the vegetable garden Trochenbrod families grew beans, potatoes, cabbage, corn, and other fruits and vegetables, and beyond that was a field reaching back as far as the forest to pasture the cows and other animals. This was a pattern similar to the one that had been practiced in Trochenbrod for a hundred years.
Many Trochenbrod families kept cows, and most also kept chickens and other livestock like geese, goats, and horses. Workers of the three dairies in town circulated among the homes each day to buy milk, one of the multiple small sources of income for many Trochenbrod families.
Larger Settlements, Trochenbrod Region
People had close commercial relations with the surrounding towns, and many also had relatives in Lutsk, Rovno, or Kolki. Transportation was improving—the road from the Kivertzy railroad station to Lutsk was now paved, there was limited bus service between Kolki and Lutsk, and both train and bus service were available between Lutsk and Rovno—and many Trochenbroders now frequently traveled to the cities of the region. Basia-Ruchel Potash, Ellie’s daughter, was a child growing up in Trochenbrod in the 1930s. She remembers feelings like those of country girls everywhere when they set eyes on the big city:
I liked to go with my father when he went to the big city, Lutsk, when he went to buy leather and things. He would take me along. I’d look at the buildings and the people and the shop windows and the cars; it was so exciting! I dreamt that when I grow up that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to live in the big city.
Trochenbrod’s economic expansion and diversification and extension of its market reach continued at a brisk pace until late 1939, bringing with it more than a doubling of Trochenbrod’s population, from sixteen hundred people to over five thousand in Trochenbrod and Lozisht, in the interwar period.
Some of that population growth resulted from people moving to Trochenbrod from surrounding cities because they married into Trochenbrod families; or because it was a uniquely desirable place where one could earn a living, enjoy a rural environment with many city conveniences, and live in a Jewish town; or both. Some of the population growth happened because more people stayed in Trochenbrod than before: it had become more difficult to gain entry as an immigrant to many destination countries, including the United States, and now as more of a commercial center than an agricultural settlement the fixed acreage of Trochenbrod did not limit livelihood opportunities the way it had in earlier generations. And some of the population growth was caused by a minor baby boom spurred by economic recovery, a measure of stability, and the prospect of a decent, possibly even prosperous long-term future in Trochenbrod.
A rapid expansion of social initiative also started in the mid-1920s and continued into early 1939, with political, spiritual, educational, and cultural expressions. Zionism took strong hold in Trochenbrod, as it did elsewhere in Eastern Europe in this period. Virtually all young people were organized into Zionist movements that spanned the political spectrum from far left to far right. The most robust Zionist youth movement in Trochenbrod was Beitar, which had a strong self-defense orientation. Even Ryszard Lubinski, the only Gentile born in Trochenbrod, was close to Beitar:
There were Jewish organizations in Trochenbrod, and sometimes they fought among themselves. Do you know of an organization called Beitar? I was close to the people in that organization. The head of it was someone named Anshel Shpielman. That organization wanted to fight for Palestine, for a Jewish state in Palestine. The other organizations wanted to negotiate for land, and that caused some conflict among them.
The Zionist groups met regularly. Sometimes separately and sometimes in cooperation, they had educational programs; put on plays; held evenings of Hebrew music and dance; conducted special holiday events; promoted the use of modern conversational Hebrew; and sent more than a hundred Jewish “pioneers,” to Palestine. A return to the Hebrew language, which was to be the language of the new Jewish state, was one of the basic principles of Zionist youth groups. By the mid-1930s, the language of Trochenbrod, Yiddish, was joined by widespread use of modern Hebrew in homes and at some public meetings. Formal and informal Hebrew language classes proliferated. Trochenbrod, that little isolated town in the midst of Ukrainian villages and forests, even produced poets and essayists who published their work in both Hebrew and Yiddish.
A point of pride among many native Trochenbroders is that in 1938 the first training course outside Palestine for Etzel officers was conducted in Trochenbrod. Etzel was an early Jewish nationalist organization associated with the Beitar Zionist youth movement. Etzel members believed in the use of military force to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Menachim Begin, who fought the British in Palestine as a Jewish terrorist and later became prime minister of Israel, was an Etzel leader. Trochenbrod offered the nationalist Zionist leaders of Etzel a unique set of circumstances for their military training: relative remoteness from the eyes of disapproving Polish authorities; a rural environment with both open land and forest land; a concentration of sympathetic Zionist youth; and a Jewish town that could supply provisions and fraternally accommodate the training.
Alongside the secular Zionist fervor in Trochenbrod, Jewish religious observance, tradition, and scholarship were only slightly diminished there. All the Trochenbroders I spoke with who were young men and women in Trochenbrod in the 1930s had been ardent Zionists, but the men also had been yeshiva students in places like Olyka, Rovno, Mezerich, Lublin, and Warsaw. Many synagogues flourished in Trochenbrod in the mid-1930s—some Trochenbroders told me that as many as nine functioned simultaneously in this small town. Everyone in Trochenbrod followed Orthodox Jewish law and customs. As one Trochenbroder put it, “You were either an Orthodox Jew or they called you a goy [Gentile].” Trochenbroders continued to govern their lives and the life of the town by Jewish custom, observe Sabbath prohibitions scrupulously, celebrate all the Jewish holidays robustly as community events, and pray three times each day.
A “Talmud Torah,” a Jewish day school for boys that had a number of teachers and taught the classic Jewish religious texts, thrived in Trochenbrod in the mid-1930s, as did many smaller cheders. Most children went to Jewish school for a few hours each day after Polish public school. Families that could afford it also hired private teachers for additional Jewish or Hebrew instruction at home.
Trochenbroders who were youngsters in the 1930s reminisce about the Sabbath using the same words as those who experienced Sabbaths in Trochenbrod two or three generations earlier. It was a day for which everyone prepared by baking chalah [braided
egg bread] and special chulunt dishes that would cook all day over a low fire; cleaning themselves and their houses; sending the children door to door collecting baked goods to give to the poor; and dressing in a manner appropriate for greeting and being in the company of “the Sabbath Queen,” an affectionate moniker for the special Sabbath day. There were always guests for the Sabbath, often merchants visiting Trochenbrod who could not get home before the start of the holy day, on which travel is forbidden. Everyone who was able happily brought someone home from Friday night prayers to share dinner and their home for the Sabbath.
The women generally left it to their husbands to intercede with God in the synagogue while they, together with their daughters, worked on the special Sabbath meal that was served to the family when the men and boys returned from prayer. Following an after-meal nap, families would go for a stroll, visit relatives, meet in a small park to gossip and talk politics, or perhaps let the children run to find wild blueberries in the Radziwill forest. Sabbath was a day of peace, rest, prayer, family, good eating, socializing, making excursions to the Radziwill forest, singing Sabbath songs and pausing to savor the goodness that God, hard work, and Trochenbrod provided.
Ryszard Lubinski, though he was a Polish Catholic, could not help also being caught up in Trochenbrod’s Sabbath:
There were Shabbos goys3 in Trochenbrod; I helped with that all the time, to light fires for heating and keeping the food warm. We helped our neighbors with that as friends, to keep the fire going. But there were hundreds of houses in Sofiyovka and Ignatovka, so people would come from the villages to tend the fires for the Jews, and made a little money from that. Most of the houses had the same organization: in the kitchen everybody had a stove and an oven to bake bread. I remember that for Shabbos, once everything was made, on Friday they would put it inside the bread oven so it would stay warm for the next day. I remember the smell of that very well.
The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod Page 6