The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

by Avrom Bendavid-Val

  1. Jewish paramilitary organization fighting for a Jewish state in Palestine.

  2. Bata is a manufacturer of relatively inexpensive ready-made footwear that it retails through its own international chain of Bata retail stores, a business that thrives even today.

  3. “Sabbath Gentile,” who performed functions like stoking fires for Jews on the Sabbath because religious law prohibits Jews from doing acts of “work” on that day.

  Chapter Three

  DUSK

  In October 1939, Trochenbrod came under Soviet rule once again. But this time there was a well-organized cell of Communists in Trochenbrod to greet and work with Soviet officials. Trochenbrod Communists had been underground during Polish rule, and now they were joined by Communist comrades, both Jewish and Gentile, freed by the Soviets from Polish prisons. The transition to Communist ways started immediately.

  – –

  For this brief era in Trochenbrod’s history, I was able to gather most of the information from living people. By and large, these people had remarkable stories to tell and observations to make—as one might expect of people who escaped or survived the Holocaust. Their first-person accounts are treasures for the way they express what happened in Trochenbrod and how it felt during its darkening last days.

  Local Jewish Communists were installed as mayor, police, and other local officials in Trochenbrod. The Polish post office was closed. The Soviets took over much of the economic property in Trochenbrod—small factories, workshops, even some shops. Typically they put the workers, whether one or a half dozen, in charge, and turned the owner into a worker. Most family enterprises without workers were allowed to continue, but a few were taken over “for the people” by upper-level Communists. People were being driven into poverty, and at the same time, shortages were developing. Food was rationed through a cooperative store. People hid property, including their stocks of food, and a black market for basic necessities developed. The town was pushed steadily in the direction of people having little money, but in any case, there was little to buy.

  The Soviets were not particularly anti-Jewish, and when they took over the public school they allowed the language of instruction for Trochenbrod pupils to be Yiddish, though of course all students also had to study Russian. Consistent with Communist ideology, the Soviets strongly discouraged religious observance—they interfered with synagogue prayers and tried to impose labor on the Sabbath. But in the end, because on a day-to-day basis things were run mostly by local people, ways could often be found to circumvent Communist doctrine. The flavor of this is captured in the memories of Tuvia Drori as he told them to me and also as he wrote about them in his book Ani Ma’amin (I Believe):

  Everybody knew everybody in our small town. Together we played, and as we grew up we talked and argued. We Beitar people knew the secrets of the Communist underground (and sometimes we helped them against the Polish police), and they were aware of our Etzel courses held in town (the last one was at the beginning of 1939). They knew we had weapons and that we were using live ammunition during the drills because they heard the gunshots.

  When the Soviets arrived in October 1939, at first they tried to pull us into Communist activity and convince us to become Communists, which would also be good for our work and social situations; they tried to draw us to their assemblies, social activities, and theatrical shows, but we did not oblige.

  Then they decided (probably because of pressures from above) to arrest us. In my case it was one of my former pupils who came to arrest me. In the first interrogation we were asked about the weapons we had and whether the Beitar youth organization was still active. We didn’t take those interrogations too seriously. The social closeness among us was too strong for them to do us any harm.

  Eventually we were released and returned home, but it was obvious we could not sit idly waiting for the next arrest. The hopes that maybe the war would cease and we would be able to continue our Zionist activities were diminishing. Contacts with the outside world were cut off completely, and we could not bear staying citizens under Stalin’s regime.

  At the end of autumn a group of us from Beitar decided to start moving out, to find a way to Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel]. We knew we would have to steal borders, and who knew where we would end up, as we would be going only on uncharted routes.

  Soon after arrival of the Soviets, between twenty and thirty Trochenbrod young people, like Tuvia and his Beitar friends, began sneaking away with the aim of finding a path to Palestine. They usually left at night and suffered tearful and tragic separations from their families, or slipped out without a face-to-face good-bye because their parents did not want them to leave. None of them ever saw their families again.

  Most made their way to Vilna (Vilnius), where a shelter, the “Internat,” had been established for young people who were fleeing to Palestine from all over Eastern Europe. From Vilna there were many ways these young people made their ways to Palestine, traveling through Turkey, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Transjordan, and more. Travel through Europe was no longer safe. It took most of them one or two years to make the trip; it took many much longer. Quite a few fell out of contact during their journeys and were never heard from again. A few got stuck along the way in Moscow and ended up fading into Soviet society.

  Soviet-German Line, 1940

  Here is Hanna Tziporen’s story: she was eighteen years old when she left Trochenbrod in 1939.

  I was in Beitar, and there was a leader there named Anshel Shpielman. When the war broke out and the Soviets came in we knew there was no way but to try to escape to Eretz Yisrael, to Palestine. When Anshel explored if there was some way we could get there, we heard that if we could find a way to get to Vilna in Lithuania it might be possible to go from there to Palestine. Getting to Vilna was not so easy either, but let’s not dwell on that.

  I went with a friend of mine, Machli Schuster. After we arrived in Vilna, we slept together in one bed; there was only one toilet for everyone; one shower for everyone; we had a communal kitchen. There were Jews there who gave work to refugees like us, so that we’d be able to earn some money.

  In Vilna there were a number of people from Trochenbrod, and many others, trying to get to Palestine. We had to find a place to go where we could earn some money. A rich Jew named Goldberg owned a commercial farm in Mergaloukus, not too far from Kovno (Kaunus), and he let us go there. The men worked in the fields, in tobacco, and the women helped in the house.

  We wanted to get to Moscow, because we heard it was possible to go onward from there to Palestine. One day we were notified that there was a way now to do this. A fellow named Avram, from Pinsk, came to help us for the journey. We needed money for the journey and the visas. Someone was sent to Lutsk, and somehow got the $100 from our parents to get us to Moscow and then maybe a little bit further.

  In Moscow people went to the Turkish consulate to request transit permits to Palestine. But at that time there were so many refugees that the British asked the Turks to refuse the laissez-passer requests so that there would not be so many Jews coming into Palestine. We wandered around Moscow not knowing what to do. A Jew there recommended that we go to the Persian embassy. So I went, together with people from all sorts of political parties, not just Beitar. I received a false entry permit for Iran. A group of more than thirty of us got to Iran.

  We stayed in Teheran several months. Then we were told we had to leave Teheran, so we went to the city of Meshet. There we waited: what will become of us, how will we get to Eretz Yisrael? At that time Iran was having a war with Iraq, so Iraq wouldn’t let us pass. So we went through the desert by train, and made our way to Suez. While on the train we learned that the Soviet-German war had broken out—that the Germans had invaded eastern Poland, where Trochenbrod was, that had been in Soviet hands.

  We went through the Suez Canal by cargo boat, and arrived at Haifa. There the British arrested us and jailed us. We were in the jail for a couple of month
s, and then the British freed us. They couldn’t send us back to anywhere, and that’s how we arrived in Eretz Yisrael.

  Shmulik Potash has a different sort of story to tell. He left Trochenbrod in 1939 to work at a training farm near Lodz, Poland, run by the General Zionist organization. Jewish youngsters went to this place from everywhere in Eastern Europe to prepare themselves, by learning farming skills, to live in a Jewish farming settlement in Palestine. When the Germans invaded Poland, Shmulik quickly decided to return to Trochenbrod by way of Warsaw to say good-bye to family and friends and then make his way to Palestine.

  A couple of days after he got to Warsaw the city was surrounded and besieged by the German army. The Germans rained artillery shells and bombs on the city for three weeks, and effectively leveled about a third of it. Shmulik was stuck there. He knew no one in Warsaw. He wandered around with the bombing going on around him, and by some miracle survived. Then, as he tells it, on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot the Germans conquered Warsaw. Massed German troops were waiting at the edge of the city to swarm in and occupy it.

  By climbing across the rubble of a bridge on the Vistula River, Shmulik escaped to a relatively rural eastern suburb of Warsaw called Praga. German troops were there, but having conquered Warsaw—in fact, all of western Poland—they were relaxed about letting people move around a bit. For three days Shmulik wandered around Praga trying to figure out what to do. He had nothing to eat. At one point he had an encounter with a German soldier, with whom he communicated coarsely on the basis of his Yiddish. The soldier, a young man about nineteen years old, challenged Shmulik’s presence in an old tomato field. Shmulik had been rooting around in the soil looking for scraps to eat. In the end the soldier made a sausage sandwich from food he had in his knapsack, gave it to Shmulik, and then warned him away because there were mines in the field.

  The next day the Germans opened the concertina wire they had strung around the city, and as the German soldiers flooded in, people fleeing eastward were able to slip out, Shmulik among them.

  He moved eastward on foot and hitching rides in passing horse-drawn wagons, and describes with wonderment his second positive experience with a German soldier:

  We were walking along the road, and a horse-drawn wagon passed with two German soldiers, one driving it. I raised my arm, they came up to me, and the driver said, “Sure, hop on.” The two soldiers were talking—I couldn’t hear what they were saying because of the noise of the wheels. Suddenly, the one who was not driving turns and looks at me, and jerks his head toward the side of the road in a signal that I should jump off the wagon; the one who was holding the reins didn’t see that he did this. I understood his signal and jumped. The driver was probably talking about robbing or beating me. A second German soldier had helped me survive.

  The Soviets had established a very strong border guard—cavalry, foot soldiers, jeep-mounted troops, guards with dogs—because they were worried about infiltration by German spies. After several failed attempts over several days to steal the border, Shmulik threw caution to the wind one night, sprinted as fast as he could when he saw an opening, and made it, much to his own surprise. A few days later he was back in Trochenbrod where his arrival was greeted with a joyous celebration. He found Communists in charge.

  Word soon reached Trochenbrod about the way station to Palestine that had been set up in Vilna, and Shmulik made his way there. There were no serious border issues because the Soviets were now in control all the way north through Lithuania. From Vilna he went to Moscow. Moscow was followed by a long string of twists and turns that landed Shmulik in one strange place, like Tashkent, after another. It was ten years later, in 1949, that Shmulik finally arrived in what by then had become the State of Israel.

  During this period of Soviet control, despite the changes—growing poverty, loss of businesses, pressure to join the Communist Party or Communist youth organizations, pressure to abandon Judaism, constantly being watched and worrying about being reported for something, frequent interrogations—the people of Trochenbrod could still move about relatively freely, and to some degree maintain their way of life. Meanwhile, many Jews from western Poland fled the Nazis into Soviet-held territory, and about a thousand of them found their way to Trochenbrod and Lozisht.

  The story that Nahum Kohn tells in his book, A Voice from the Forest: Memoirs of a Jewish Partisan, conveys a good sense of what it was like in and around Trochenbrod in those times. Nahum was born and raised in western Poland. Soon after the German invasion he fled eastward and found himself in Lutsk. In Lutsk he eventually found his brother, a friend from his hometown, and the friend’s older brother, all of whom had also fled to what had been eastern Poland, now controlled by the Soviets.

  Nahum was a trained and experienced watchmaker. He found work for several months with another watchmaker that he had come across who had a little business in Lutsk. Under Soviet rules, a person could work on his own but could not have employees. By early 1940 the Soviets had organized their administration sufficiently to fully enforce their idea of socialism, and Nahum had to go to work for a state-run collective for watchmakers. One day, after many months, Soviet officials rounded up the refugees from western Poland in Lutsk and sent them on their way to Siberia, probably concerned that there were spies for Germany among them. Soon after the train was under way, Nahum and a few others jumped off. The escapees included Nahum’s hometown friend and his older brother and a new friend who was also a watchmaker. They hid in a forest—probably the Radziwill forest—for a few days and then Nahum and his friends walked back to Lutsk.

  They found their way to a large livery stable, where they hid with the help of the Jewish owner. They needed to work and earn money, so after a week of hiding Nahum took a chance and went to the local Soviet government office and asked how he could find work. After looking at Nahum’s documents the official understood that Nahum was not supposed to be there, but he was sympathetic. He conspicuously pretended everything was in order and told Nahum that he was not allowed to work in Lutsk but could find work in a small lumbering town twenty-five miles to the east. When Nahum reported this back at the livery stable they all understood that the idea was simply to get away from Lutsk, and the stable owner had a better idea for that.

  He told them that not far from Lutsk there were “two villages of Jewish peasants.” A friend of his from there by the name of Schuster would visit him soon, and he would see if “something can be arranged.” It turned out that something could indeed be arranged, and soon Nahum and his friends were looking, wide-eyed, down the street of a now much poorer Trochenbrod.

  When we arrived there, it was the first time in my life that I saw Jewish farmers. I could never have imagined this, and I rejoiced when I saw them. Everyone had primitive leather-working equipment at home, and they worked on hides. So they lived from their fields, their cows, their horses, and their hides. They were totally surrounded by forests; the nearest road was twenty or thirty kilometers away. I was curious, so I used to ask old-timers how they came to be there. They told me that the area had been totally unsettled and wild when their ancestors came …

  With our watch-repairing skills we could earn something. The people in Trochenbrod-Ignatovka didn’t have wristwatches, but they had ancient clocks on their walls, and before our arrival there had been no watchmaker. So they brought these antiques to us and bartered food in exchange for repairs …

  A number of months after Nahum’s arrival in Trochenbrod the German army invaded and took control. Nahum soon went into the forest and put together a small partisan group mostly of Trochenbroders. They dedicated themselves to disrupting German army units and supply trains and taking revenge on Ukrainians who betrayed their neighbors and had tortured and murdered Jews or turned them over to the Germans. The unit was eventually decimated by the Germans and their collaborators. Nahum and two other survivors found and joined a Soviet partisan detachment led by a famous partisan commander, Dmitry Medvedev, headquartered in the Lopaten fo
rest a few miles northeast of Trochenbrod.

  Basia-Ruchel Potash had what she remembers as a rich and wonderful childhood in Trochenbrod, despite her brushes with small-time anti-Jewish hooliganism among the Sunday churchgoers. That started to change as soon as the Soviets took control. You can hear in her brief childhood memories of that period a steadily rising tension as Soviet control unfolds toward a Nazi takeover.

  I remember in 1939 the Russians came and took over our shtetl. They made us go to the Russian school, and they wanted us all to join their youth organization—they gave us little scarves and called us “Young Pioneers.”

  They told us all to report anybody who said things against the Russians. But the influence of our parents at home overrode anything they told us. We knew we had to be quiet, not to say certain things, behave in a certain way. They would send you to Siberia if you made a wrong move. And then you had the left-wingers, a few of them; they could turn you in too. Those Socialists, they were so excited, they thought the Russians would take away from us and give it to them. It didn’t work that way. The Russians kept the businesses and made those people managers or whatever, but they didn’t share with them the wealth of the others. Some of them followed the Russians when they left. They followed them to Russia.

  When the war with Germany broke out in 1941, they were going to take my father into the Red Army. My father didn’t want to go to the army. So we had a secret, my dad and I. There was a certain flower, dandelions I think, and he told me that I should go out and pick these flowers, and we would go above, in the attic in our house, and he rubbed the flower on his arm, and he’d wrap it around, and eventually it caused tremendous sores on his arm, really bad—I think they would amputate it here in America. He did it to stay out of the army. I’m the only one who knew about it: not my brothers, nobody. When his arm was ripe and ready at last, that’s just when the Russians left and the Germans, Hitler, took over.