The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

by Avrom Bendavid-Val

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  TUVIA DRORI

  Tuvia Drori was born to Trochenbrod’s Antwarg family in 1918 and fled for Palestine in the autumn of 1939. He now lives in Givatayim, just east of Tel Aviv, Israel.

  When the Polish came back for good in 1921 and 1922 they took Jews for forced work. They came to take my father on Shabbat, and he refused to go. My father work on Shabbat? So they beat him, and I remember well as a child the horror of watching my father being beaten—that’s stayed with me all my life; I can see the image clearly before my eyes today. My father would never work on Shabbat. My father went to America, but found he had to work on Shabbat, so he came back, and stayed in Trochenbrod to the end.

  In 1988, when I went back to Trochenbrod the first time, I found the two mass graves. I saw a small monument with a fence around it. On the monument was written that here were buried the people murdered by Nazis, from Trochenbrod and Lozisht. It was very emotional for me: I fell to the ground and cried.

  When I returned to Israel, no one believed what I had seen; and anyway, they were afraid to go to Russia. A year passed. Then a few of them went, and it opened up, and then people started to go from other towns in the area—Lutsk, Kolki, Olyka—to visit and set up monuments. We arranged for the monuments to be built there in Ukraine, working with the head of the local council. It was a joint undertaking. I was the chairman of Bet TAL at that time. A committee of people organized it here in Israel: Anshel Shpielman, Gad Rosenblatt, others … not me alone.

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  BETTY GOLD

  Betty was born Basia-Ruchel Potash in Trochenbrod in 1930, and spent the first twelve years of her life there. She fled into the forest with her family during the mass murders in August and September 1942. Betty now lives in University Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.

  Everyone in Trochenbrod was Jewish except the postmistress, the gentleman who sold schnapps, and another gentleman who was busy doing things for the Jewish people they were not allowed to do on Shabbos. We were surrounded by Polish and Ukrainian villages. It was a one-street shtetl. Everyone knew everyone and everyone was related to everyone, and we all lived very close to our aunts and uncles, just crossing the street or walking next door to them.

  I remember my grandparents on my father’s side very well. But my mother’s mother lived alone across the street—her husband died many years earlier. We used to love to go there, to my grandmother’s house, and sleep there and live with her, and so on. I had two brothers, Shimon and Baruch, both older than me.

  My mother had a very nice life. They considered her the society lady in Trochenbrod. She was involved in Beitar, she was involved in Jewish organizations, and she would write some plays, and she was always very very well groomed. She was very beautiful, and she always took a great deal of pride in how she presented herself to the people in the shtetl. She never worked, because my father really provided well for her, she didn’t have to. I don’t remember any women working in the shtetl when I was a little girl, at all—unless they helped their husbands a little bit in his business.

  My father worked in his business. I loved my dad a lot. We used to go together on the way to school, and he’d go to the shop, and I’d continue on to the school—and stop in the bakery on the way and buy a kichel [sweet cracker] and put it on my father’s bill. We had a pretty decent life until the war started.

  The best part of course, was when all the families would be together, and visit, and go to the park on Shabbos afternoons, and sing the Shabbos songs. The house would light up on Friday night, before Shabbos. Everybody would be bathed, and dressed, and candles were shining.

  I used to sing at the weddings when I was a little girl. They would be outside, and the whole shtetl would come. I don’t know why they picked me to sing a song or read a poem for the bride and groom. I really loved the weddings. I also participated with my brother in a lot of children’s plays at school as well as in the Beitar organization.

  We had lots of cousins. A cousin wasn’t a cousin, like here; a cousin was a sister or a brother—there was no difference. We lived together, we slept often together, and played together, and went to school together. We didn’t know the difference between sisters or brothers or cousins.

  At least twice a month, every other Friday, I would go with a girlfriend of mine, and we’d both carry a basket. We’d go house to house, we’d collect baked goods and pastries and candy or whatever one could give, and we’d take it to the poor people. I started doing that when I was a very little girl; a lot of children did that in our shtetl. Of course I’d always steal from the things that we gave from our house, because when we started we had a lot from our house already.

  In Trochenbrod there were no cars. There were a lot of merchants who had horses, and they would go to markets—there were a number of markets in different towns in the area—and they would sell cattle or buy cattle, or sell fruit and vegetables or buy fruit and vegetables; they were traders. That was a big big thing, going to market, for quite a few people in our town.

  Everyone worked the land. They had big gardens, acres and acres. So besides providing food for their families, they had a lot to sell in the market, and make money this way. And also a lot of people had cows, and the milk would be picked up to make butter and cheese and so forth; so they made some of their living from that. We had a goat, and I had chickens, and I even had a horse at one time that I loved to ride, no saddle of course.

  When I was little there was no electricity in our shtetl and there were no paved roads. And then, toward the end of the 1930s, they were paving the road, we had some electricity, and the town was beginning to develop more and more and more. Communication began to happen. Everybody read the Forward and talked politics. My father bought a radio. The first radio in Trochenbrod! That was so exciting; everybody came to see how it was being installed. There were big wires strung above and then going into the ground; I remember men working on it. We also had a phonograph, a wind-up phonograph.

  I remember hearing Polish music on the radio. And then the President of Poland, Yuzef Pilsudski, was making a speech of some sort. I don’t remember what he said, of course, but I remember hearing people saying, “Ooh, Yuzef Pilsudski is going to speak, Yuzef Pilsudski is going to speak,” and that’s when I learned the name Yuzef Pilsudski.

  My eighth birthday party, I think it was my only birthday party. My little friends came. One brought me a bobby pin for a present, and another brought me a ribbon, and another one some pretty colorful rubber bands. Can you imagine that today? Bobby pins and ribbons and rubber bands? But it was so exciting … I was more fond of that than if I would get today a thousand-dollar gift.

  Once my father brought a rabbi—I don’t remember from what city he was—but he was a very famous rabbi, a scribe, and we put him up in our house for a few weeks. My father dedicated a Torah scroll to the shul [synagogue], and this scribe was there writing it. People would come and donate what they could and the scribe would write a sentence or a paragraph in their name. It meant a great deal to everyone. My father put me on top of the closet, an armoire they call them now, and I’d watch the people as they came into our house and make their donations. I watched the people coming and going, but I didn’t understand what it was all about. Then the rabbi—I can see him with his big round fur hat and long beard—explained it all to me. That was very special.

  We knew about Easter and Christmas. You could go into the postmistress’s house, and they had a beautiful tree at Christmas time. They would come and buy things for the holidays—my father’s shop was right next door to the post office. There was one little play I was in at the Polish school where I played the part of an angel. I don’t remember what it was about, but it was Christmastime.

  The postmistress’s son was a friend of mine. They’d invite me at Christmas to celebrate with them. We were good friends with them. I remember going to his house and seeing the Christmas tree and thinking it was so beautiful, so much fun with all the ornaments and eve
rything, and the house was decorated, and we had cookies. I liked it, but I knew it wasn’t our holiday. Maybe I didn’t even know it was a holiday; just a celebration of some sort. Anyway, I knew it had nothing to do with us. It was just fun.

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  BETTY HELLMAN

  Betty was born Peshia Gotman in Trochenbrod in 1921. She left when she was nearly eighteen years old, in late 1938, after the paving of Trochenbrod’s street was well under way. Betty now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  We would go on the postal wagon to Lutsk. Once there were ten of us. The driver made a few of us get off because the horse couldn’t pull so much. So we took turns, and all the way to Lutsk we were jumping off and on the wagon.

  The best thing about spring was that the mud dried up, we didn’t have to deal with the mud. Many times, walking to school, we fell in the mud, with the books even, and we couldn’t get up.

  Our biggest entertainment was going into the forest to pick things. We used to go Saturdays, mostly … they had there blueberries, and they had cranberries in the woods. But God help you if the guard, Radziwill’s forest guard in a uniform, comes. He’d hit you with his big stick; we had a big pot tied on the waist to pick and throw berries in it, and you had to go shhhh, so he wouldn’t hear that we’re there, and sometimes they chased us out. But, you could get a ticket! You paid, like, five zlotys, and you were allowed to pick berries. But who had five zlotys to give them?

  In the fall was like here, it was chilly, and leaves were falling, the wind was blowing, and people were getting ready for the winter.

  The winter was miserable. There was a lot of snow in the winter. I remember when I was laying in bed I was able to write on the wall because it was snow, it was frozen on the wall, but you could write with your finger.

  How we prepared for the winter, you know what they used to do? They used to dig a hole in the ground sometimes, and put in potatoes, and fill it with straw … we had to prepare for our animals; we had a cow, people had horses. You had to have hay, you put it in a little building in back. Our cow stayed in the back part of our house. Because of that, I don’t like milk … it wasn’t very clean. Some people had root cellars. We had that in our house. You’d open up a door in the floor of the house to get to the cellar. We’d have to get the hay in, and put it over the rafters.

  I would say it was like, like a whole Jewish town. It was like the forest had wrapped its arms around the town. And I always used to say it had to be a street torn away from some city, and then landed there. Because it was one street, but nothing around it, behind it; just one street all of a sudden, and you call it a town. So I used to say that this street must have been blown away from some city and landed there.

  It didn’t have just little shops. It had some pretty nice stores. Nice dry goods stores, clothes, material, two shoe stores, butcher shops, grocery stores a few of them, a dairy—we would give them milk from our cow, and they made butter and cheese; they sold butter in Lutsk once a week. There were tanneries that made leather from the raw skins. Avrum Bass opened up a real bakery shop in town. They were pretty well off, they were doing OK.

  There were a few people that were rich, and I’ll tell you why. There was a family by the name Antwarg, and they lived in a very nice big home, that I never was there, I never saw inside it. It had a big fence around it. They had a very beautiful daughter that was very well known in town, and they had money because … some of the families, the husband would go to America, make a little money—some of them never came back to their wives, they found different women in America—and some of them came back with a few dollars. But after a few years, five years, the dollars were gone.

  My older sister married a fellow like this. He had no profession, and if he had a profession what would he do with it there in Trochenbrod? She was a poor girl, my mother had six girls, and her husband died when I was eighteen months old. I was born nine years after the last bunch. So he died and left her with lots of kids, but some of them, their husbands came to America, and they made a few dollars, and my sister married one of the sons whose father came back. He was dressed nicely, with a collar and a tie …

  I went to Lutsk many many times: not so much to buy, no—I couldn’t afford something like that, it was out of the question. I went to Lutsk a lot when I was trying to get to America; the administrative offices were there. And I had very good friends there, elderly people, through marriage we were related. So I was in Lutsk a lot; I knew the city very well, and made a lot of friends there.

  We had our own theater in Trochenbrod; I was in many plays in Yiddish. We had plays around all the holidays. In the Polish school we also had plays, but they were in Polish. I remember Nachman Rotenberg was the wolf when I was Little Red Riding Hood. Tuvia was also one of my friends.

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  IDA LISS

  Ida’s story has an unusual twist. She was born in Chicago in 1912 to parents who had immigrated separately from Trochenbrod, and then met and married in the United States. Her father was from the Gilden family and her mother from the Kerman family. They went back to Trochenbrod in 1912 to visit their families and show off their nearly one-year-old child. They stayed on a bit, then were caught there by World War I, and then stayed longer. Ida eventually returned to the United States. with her mother in 1928, when she was sixteen years old. She is the only person to have grown up in Trochenbrod as a U.S. citizen. Ida now lives in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. She says that these days she spends more time in Trochenbrod than anywhere else—she sees it in her dreams most nights and remembers it clearly and with affection in her daydreams.

  If I was able to go to Trochenbrod now, I’d point out to you where I lived. I can just see my house where I lived. And where my uncles lived: one uncle lived on one side of us and one lived on the other side. One uncle had a granddaughter named Baske. And Baske had a love affair with a Blitzstein; I don’t know if they ever got married or not. But every Saturday he used to come there for lunch; and I used to see, she put powder on, and lipstick, and made herself look beautiful. She was a gorgeous girl, but she used to do all that stuff, and I knew he was coming.

  The main street was nothing but a long road of dirt. It wasn’t bricks, or wood, or anything, nothing but mud. And on each side of the street was like a ditch where the soldiers used to hide in there. And they had a board over that; if you walked you walked on the board, not a sidewalk, there was no sidewalk. And in the middle was enough for a horse and wagon to go through; there was no cars, only horse-and-wagons—in the mud.

  We lived there in a white stucco house. That was my grandmother’s house. Baba Rivke, it was her house; we lived in her house, a white stucco house. Everybody had a backyard. It was as big as like, maybe 25 by 125. A big-size lot; everybody had a lot that big. And we used to grow potatoes, and vegetables, and everything they could grow in the backyard.

  We lived in the middle of Trochenbrod. One side was north Trochenbrod and one side was south Trochenbrod, and we were like in the middle of Trochenbrod. If I was there, I could walk right up to the house and show you which house I lived in.

  When I go to sleep, what do you think I do? I don’t watch television, I can’t see it, I don’t even turn it on. So what do you think I do? I dream about things from my life, like Trochenbrod. I can see, I can see … I can see Trochenbrod right in front of me.

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  RYSZARD LUBINSKI

  Ryszard Lubinski is the son of Trochenbrod’s Polish postmistress. This was a government job that Jews were not permitted to have. Ryszard’s mother took the job because she needed work and because she grew up in a western Polish town with many Jews, knew their ways, and was comfortable among them. After arriving in Trochenbrod she fell in love with the forest ranger of the Lopaten Forest, where during the war Medvedev’s partisan detachment would be based, and married him. The couple separated while Ryszard’s mother was pregnant. His mother was joined by her sister to help run the post office, and she helped also with Rysza
rd’s birth in 1929. Ryszard grew to age twelve in Trochenbrod, among its Jewish families, Jewish children, Jewish food, Jewish customs, and Jewish languages. Today Ryszard lives in Radom, Poland.

  I went to the Polish public school in Trochenbrod together with my Jewish friends. I was living in Sofiyovka until winter 1942, until the Shoah1 there took everything. I was twelve years old when we left.

  Toward the end of the 1930s, long after my mother and father were separated, my mother was a young, attractive, well-educated woman about thirty-five years old. She was looking for friends of her general age and type, and in Trochenbrod that meant Jewish girls. Jewish girls from Sofiyovka, or later, from elsewhere. When the Russians reorganized the educational system to ten grades instead of seven as it was under the Polish government, they needed more teachers for more classes, so many Jewish teachers arrived from other places to work in the Sofiyovka school. These people were a society for my mother because they were a similar age and education. Many of these teachers lived in our house because when the Russians came they shut down the post office and we had extra space in the house.

  Once a rich Russian named Lenko discovered mineral waters at Zuraviche, which was not too far north from Sofiyovka. A small hotel was built there for people who would come for the waters. I heard that later the Soviets organized it into a big resort. There were people from Sofiyovka who worked in that place, at the baths. Because my mother was the head of the post office, she was often invited to big events there, together with the police chief, as a Polish official person. My aunt, my mother’s sister, worked there after the post office was closed. She would steal food from there, and that’s how we ate in those days.

  Chaim Veitzblum was one of the teachers that lived in our house, with his wife. He had run away from Olyka. He was a very talented teacher: he could sing, he played an instrument, he painted, and he taught mathematics. My mother and another person created false documents for him, so he became Albin Ostrovsky. A year later, after we left Sofiyovka, he visited us in a village where we stayed for a time. He was driving a farm wagon, and he had a big mustache, and he had changed his character, and he looked and acted just like a rural peasant. The trick saved his life. I wonder if he’s still alive somewhere.