The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

by Avrom Bendavid-Val

  While a bar mitzvah in Trochenbrod was cause for little more than a piece of sponge cake, some fruit, and a taste of schnapps for the men after prayers, weddings were a different matter altogether. Much of the town showed up for the outdoor ceremony. Children recited poems and sang songs, and one of the women baked a huge challah and danced while holding it before the bride and groom. It was a time to forget everything else and rejoice. The bride and groom performed their rituals under the wedding canopy—sips of wine, wedding ring, reading of the ritual wedding contract, seven blessings, more sips of wine, and smashing a glass underfoot. A wedding feast was rounded out with schnapps and vodka; a toast, another toast, and then another toast; merry singing and dancing, men with men, to the unbridled exuberance of a klezmer band. A klezmer trio was brought from Kolki for every wedding: Tzalik, who beat the symbols and drums; Chaim, whose fingers danced wildly on the clarinet; and Peshi, the fiddler with a big white beard. There was nothing like a Trochenbrod wedding—that’s how it seemed to Trochenbroders.

  Under the Polish administration a regional public school was established in Trochenbrod—it was actually located in Shelisht, a hamlet between Trochenbrod and Lozisht that was really a part of Trochenbrod. In this school young Trochenbroders were exposed to Polish-language studies, mathematics, literature, and other secular subjects, and Jewish subjects as well. Ukrainian children from nearby villages also attended this school, and were playmates with their Trochenbrod classmates during the school day. Several Trochenbrod natives to this day have strong memories of participating in Polish-language plays at school, like Little Red Riding Hood, even while they rehearsed Yiddish plays in Trochenbrod’s cultural center or Hebrew plays in their Zionist groups.

  Prince Janush Radziwill—of the same Polish Radziwill family that later in the century Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier, married into—owned vast lands in the region of Trochenbrod. These lands included the forest that bordered fields on the east side of town. The Jews of Trochenbrod often grazed their cattle in the Radziwill forest, took Sabbath walks and picked berries there, from time to time would quietly cut down a tree or two for their own use, and in a manner of speaking considered it their forest. This drove a running cat-and-mouse game with Prince Radziwill’s forest rangers, but on the whole the people of Trochenbrod had cordial relations with the prince himself. Prince Radziwill’s palace was in the small town of Olyka, about twelve miles south of Trochenbrod. To this day there is a horse trail heading south from where Trochenbrod used to be that is known as the Olyka trail.

  In the late 1920s, Prince Radziwill built a Catholic church at the edge of his forest, just east of the northern end of Trochenbrod, to serve about thirty Polish families that lived southeast of Trochenbrod. No one knows why he built the church exactly in that place, but the result was that on Sundays a large group of Poles walking to and from church passed through Trochenbrod’s muddy street in their go-to-church finery, almost as if promenading in Lutsk, with their priest at the head of the crowd.

  Some natives of Trochenbrod recall that young men in these strolling church groups would, as they passed through town, strike at townspeople just to show who was boss. Tuvia Drori, who was born in Trochenbrod and fled to Palestine in 1939, declared, “Yes, they would hit Jews on their way to church; it was a mitzvah [good deed] for them!” But other people who spent their youths in Trochenbrod think the scuffles were incited by young Trochenbrod men who sometimes taunted the Poles on their way to church. Shmulik Potash (not related to Ellie and Basia-Ruchel), who also left for Palestine in 1939, remembers the processions as a good thing for Trochenbrod because while walking through town churchgoers often stopped into a Trochenbrod shop to buy something.

  Basia-Ruchel Potash was first exposed to serious anti-Jewish behavior by the church processions.

  It was on a Sunday, on the way back from church—they had to pass through our shtetl, the Gentile people—and on the way back from church a bunch of Polish men attacked a bunch of Jewish boys. My uncle was one who was attacked. He was pretty beaten up, black and blue, real real bad. Everyone started to run and close their doors and hide inside because they were afraid for their children and themselves getting beaten up. I saw that with my own eyes. I was screaming, I was hysterical, I was crying. I witnessed other things like that many many times. Mostly it would take place on Sundays, when they would go to or from church through our town. They would call out, “Dirty Jew,” or call us names, or hit us. We tried to stay out of their way. It wasn’t that bad yet. But through a child’s eyes, whatever I saw had an effect on me: I realized that I’m Jewish and I realized that they don’t like us. I realized that I had to be careful and stay out of their way.

  Peshia Gotman remembers the church as the object of an adventure more than in connection with the processions:

  I remember that church, and how! My mother gave me a good beating because I ran to be at the “otpus”—it’s when they have their services outside, it’s like a big picnic, it’s some kind of ceremony—I was maybe ten years old. I was with a whole bunch of kids. They usually had ice cream, and all kinds of toys; it was like a big picnic, the whole church was having a picnic outside. I got a big spanking for that, because I was not supposed to go to the church.

  Perhaps Prince Radziwill had devious intent when he set things up so that Trochenbroders would be drawn to their windows and yards by weekly church processions and would have a relatively good view of the church and the goings-on in its yard. While there were many different perspectives on the subject, there’s no escaping the fact that in the 1930s, the Polish Catholic church and the weekly churchgoer processions were prominent in the life of the Jewish town of Trochenbrod.

  By the mid-1930s, many Trochenbroders who had emigrated before World War I, particularly to the United States, managed, despite the Depression, to return to Trochenbrod to visit the town and their relatives. David Shwartz was one of those people. His memoir was inspired by a visit he paid to Trochenbrod with his wife in 1934. Basia-Ruchel Potash remembers with great clarity even today a visit by American relatives well over seventy-five years ago:

  In 1933 an aunt and uncle of ours came to visit us. Of course we had a big open house, all of Trochenbrod was invited, and everybody came to the party to honor my aunt from America who had been sixteen or seventeen years old when she left for the United States. They were like big celebrities today. It was so much fun. I was asking her stories about America. I was so curious; I remember her telling us about black people in America, and I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. At the party we took a picture of everyone; and what do you think happened in the middle of taking a picture? The cow came and left some droppings. Everybody laughed; that was funny—in our backyard.

  Those who visited reported mixed stories. Most remembered their Trochenbrod with fondness and a rich sense of community and Jewish life that was missing for them in America, and felt freshly the pangs of longing for that way of life when they visited. But they were Americans now, and many saw Trochenbrod’s relative prosperity through American eyes as unacceptable poverty, primitiveness, and removal from modern urban living. Visitors from abroad often brought with them envelopes of dollars, some for their own relatives and some for relatives of their Trochenbrod friends in the States. Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the United States were getting increasingly nervous about Hitler’s rise, and many of the visitors came to Trochenbrod with the aim of convincing relatives to leave. One family tells of their grandparents going back carrying extra suitcases for the Trochenbrod family members they had hoped they could persuade to leave.

  Despite being the only Jewish town in Europe, Trochenbrod was never widely known, even among Jews. But its unique character meant that neither was it quite as obscure as thousands of other Eastern European shtetls. More than a few Jews sought it out as a place to live and many more as a place to visit, a place where they could see and breathe the air of a Jewish town—and good country air, at that. T
he special quality of Jewish life in Trochenbrod may have contributed to creating a somewhat outsized share of relative notables in the Jewish world. Eliezer Burak, a Trochenbroder who moved to Palestine as a Jewish pioneer in the 1920s, wrote an article about his beloved Trochenbrod that was published in Hebrew in Tel Aviv in 1945. In it he recalls a handful of Trochenbrod’s “famous people” from just before and during the interwar period, especially those who helped spread Jewish culture.

  Rabbi Yehezkel Potash, the permanent “Starusta” [government-appointed “Elder”] of the town in the days of the Czarist government. He was a scholarly and learned man, and served the people of Trochenbrod well with his honesty and intelligence.

  Hirsch Kantor, a comedian who was master of his profession and very talented. At weddings and other gatherings he would bring joy to everyone with his rhymes and his cleverness.

  Rabbi Moshe Hirsch Roitenberg, the scholar, ran a cheder in the town, and also served as a cantor, and he too had great talent as a comedian. His jokes were published in the newspapers Heint and Moment, which pleased him a great deal. Journalists would come all the way from Warsaw to interview him.

  Two high-level Communists: Motel Shwartz who was a well-known Commissar in the Odessa fleet, and Yaakov Burak who was an admiral on a Russian warship and a university graduate. In the period of the Soviet purges Shwartz disappeared, and Burak drowned with his ship near Kronstadt in the war between the Bolsheviks and the Whites. These two had studied many years in the Slobodka yeshiva, and Motel Shwartz was even a certified rabbi.

  Yisrael Beider, a son of the Rabbi Moshe David Beider, was a teacher in nearby Olyka, and after that moved to Mezerich near Brisk [Brest-Litovsk] and continued his literary work as a poet and essayist in both Hebrew and Yiddish.

  Yitzhak Aronski, a young and talented journalist, a feature writer published widely in Polish Jewish newspapers. He helped establish “The Volyner Shtima,” which was published in Rovno, and founded a library in Trochenbrod as part of his personal mission to encourage widespread reading of newspapers and books.

  Hitler goose-stepped onto the scene in Europe, became chancellor of Germany in 1933, and in 1934 signed the German-Polish nonaggression pact. Among other things, the pact essentially left no restrictions on Nazi propaganda in Poland. From 1934 until Hitler’s invasion of western Poland in 1939, Poland’s repression of Jews, along with anti-Jewish hooliganism and actual pogroms, echoed those in Germany with slightly less shrillness. Relatives abroad were urging Trochenbrod families to leave. But Trochenbrod had not been directly affected much by anti-Jewish hooliganism, apart from the occasional Sunday brawl, and was prospering and modernizing like never before. The few who did consider leaving were torn.

  By the late 1930s, Trochenbrod had become the place to shop and do business in the region. Many elderly Ukrainians today remember visiting Trochenbrod as children with their parents, and being awestruck at everything that was available for sale there, at the nice houses (“like ours, but bigger, better, nicer, and with nice things in them”), and at the hustle and bustle in the street. The intense regional commercial activity in Trochenbrod meant that during the workday, parts of the town were a Babel of Ukrainian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and sometimes Russian—and when relatives visited from the United States, English too. The commercial hubbub during the workday was such that one almost forgot that this was a Jewish town.

  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.