I Want You to Know We're Still Here

by Esther Safran Foer

  The first day together, before actually going to Trochenbrod, we went on a brief, loosely organized bus tour of the city of Lutsk, with a stop at the official Volyn Regional Archives, where we were given the opportunity to search for family records. Upon arrival, we were sternly lectured by the head of archives: No talking, and no cameras allowed. We were to remain silent or risk ejection. This Soviet-style edict did not take into account the impossibility of quiet in a group that was two-thirds Israeli. They were loud, and they asked not always politely rendered questions when records were not promptly produced. At one point, one of the Ukrainian bureaucrats had enough and began banging her fist on the table. Not much was found in the end, and most of the Trochenbroders walked away disappointed. This was not a satisfying beginning for our group.

  Frank and I decided this was a good moment to peel away and walk around the old city of Lutsk by ourselves. It’s a city that mixes modernity in the form of Soviet-style offices and apartment houses with the history of an old town, including an ancient castle. Lutsk is where my mother and father first met, and I kept looking around, trying to imagine my parents walking these streets, wondering in which of these buildings they had lived back in 1944. We did manage to find the Choral Synagogue, a small, defensive-looking fortification that is now, of all things, a gym.

  After our walk, we returned for dinner with our Trochenbrod landsmen. On the way into the restaurant that night, Betty Gold from Cleveland—the survivor who had written a memoir and whom I had met a year earlier at a Trochenbrod gathering in Washington—introduced us to the Chaitchicks, her cousins who lived in Lutsk. This was fortuitous: My mother had asked me to track down the Chaitchicks, to whom we were remotely related through marriage. This man didn’t look like the Chaitchick cousins we are related to. He looked very much Ukrainian, with his mullet haircut, his skin a deep red from the summer sun, and his open shirt with some kind of dangling chain. We talked for a few minutes, with Betty translating, but we never figured out if he was the Chaitchick my mother had wanted me to find. At least I could report the sighting when I returned and check that assignment off my list.

  The official business of the trip began that evening. Since we were from four different continents, few of us had previously met, so we all introduced ourselves. After that, Moti Litvak, assisted by Avrom, went over the plan. First we’d take buses to Domashiv, a rural village near Trochenbrod. From there we’d switch to horse-drawn wagons, which would pull us to the site of the old town along the defunct road. Once we arrived in Trochenbrod, Shmuel Potash—a ninety-year-old survivor with a near-photographic memory, who was still going strong—would be able to tell all of us where our families’ houses once stood. His father had run the town dairy, and as a child he had delivered milk every morning, which meant he knew—and remembered—the layout well. We would also stop at all of the memorials. Metal from one of the memorials had been recently stolen by locals and sold as scrap, so the Israelis had brought with them large inscribed marble tablets that would, in theory, be impossible to move. I wondered what it must have cost to transport these heavy pieces on El Al from Tel Aviv.

  * * *

  —

  What lay ahead on the itinerary seemed likely to be something of a circus. The next morning, we left the hotel early, en masse, piling onto two modern, large buses. One bus carried the Israelis, the other, the rest of us, including Evgenia Potash, an eighty-eight-year-old survivor who still lived in Lutsk and was presumably related to Shmuel, although I never figured out their exact connection. Evgenia regaled us with stories as we drove. She’d survived by hiding in the woods and had then married a Christian partisan. She let slip that she had a Ukrainian copy of Everything Is Illuminated in her studio apartment.

  After a long bus trip, we saw people lining the road in Domashiv. It seemed as if the entire village had come out to greet us. It was a scene right out of central casting, complete with babushkas—women with scarves tied tightly around their heads—and older men with caps leaning against fences while children ran around in excitement.

  Anna the Translator now took the microphone on the bus to give us some background on the village. Her grandmother was from Domashiv, she said, and she told us that as a child she used to play in Trochenbrod, which by then was no longer a shtetl but simply a place to harvest hay for the winter. They called it the Sofiyevka fields. Sofiyevka was the Russian name for the shtetl. Like Lviv, it had different names depending on who occupied the region.

  For many years, people from Domashiv didn’t speak of their Jewish neighboring village, except, according to Anna, in occasional sob-filled conversations. Anna’s grandmother had been a little girl at play in the fields when she’d heard an unusual commotion. She followed the noise and became an unintentional witness to the mass murder of Trochenbrod.

  * * *

  —

  We’d known we wouldn’t be taking the buses into the place that had once been Trochenbrod—there were no real roads. But horse-drawn wagons filled with hay seemed an oddly playful mode of transportation for this solemn tour. We could appreciate the practicality, though.

  After a few minutes of hesitation, we departed the buses and headed for the wagons driven by the citizens of Domashiv, many of whom had their young children perched next to them. Anna—who always had an eye out for Frank and me, because we had hired her for the other, private excursions on our trip—picked out a comfortable wagon for us, the carriage padded with a bed of hay. We climbed aboard, like kids on a hayride, and settled in with some of our fellow travelers. Our entourage was brought up in the rear by some of the elderly Trochenbroders, who wisely chose jeeps in lieu of wagons.

  Two horses pulled our carriage off the main road and onto a path that took us through the fields. In the background, we could see the flashes of cameras as our fellow Trochenbroders aggressively snapped photos. As if we were not already enough of a spectacle, we were being trailed by a film crew, and a boom mike traveled beside us in another wagon. Our friend and Trochenbroder Jeremy Goldscheider had brought a camera crew to shoot footage for the documentary he was producing on Trochenbrod, this place that was long gone but increasingly well documented.

  The Israelis had brought a large Israeli flag, which they unfurled above a wagon farther back in the procession. It was quite a sight, with a half dozen wagons, a film crew, and some jeeps riding through the woods of western Ukraine in search of a Jewish shtetl that no longer existed. One of the local girls in the front seat of our wagon, who was likely the daughter of our driver, decided to follow suit, unfurling the Ukrainian flag, which now fluttered above us. Frank and I found this more than a little disconcerting; I imagined my mother’s reaction should she see this, which she probably would, given the number of photographs being taken and the fact that a documentary film was being made. There were the Trochenbroders on their triumphant return, waving the Israeli flag. And there was her family, riding under the banner of Ukraine. I suspected she might not see the humor.

  Suddenly the skies above the fields turned gray, and our hayride came to an abrupt end as it began to pour. We tried to see the rain as symbolic—we were about to learn that it had also rained the day after the massacre of the Jews, an atmospheric distraction that allowed the few survivors to make a run for the forest. Still, it was hard to view this downpour as serendipitous given how wet we were, despite the ponchos and umbrellas that Anna had thoughtfully brought.

  After the wagons turned a corner, we emerged from the forest into a clearing and saw the first of the four monuments to the murdered Jews of Trochenbrod—and, to everyone’s relief, someone on the advance team had erected a large tent. The wagons pulled up as close as possible to the tents and we all ran in.

  Our guides were doing their best, but this group of Trochenbroders wasn’t easy, assigning blame all around for having failed to warn the group about the weather. After the bickering subsided, someone had the idea of handing our portabl
e microphone to Betty Gold, the seventy-nine-year-old survivor of the massacre. Betty was what was sometimes referred to as a “professional survivor.” In addition to the memoir that she wrote, she was a regular on the Holocaust commemoration circuit, speaking to community and school groups. On this occasion, however, she was actually here, in Trochenbrod, telling her story on the very spot where it occurred. Later that day she would visit the site of her childhood home for the last time—she would pass away five years later. Even though I had read her book and was familiar with her story, hearing it in this context magnified the miracle of her survival.

  She was twelve years old in 1942 when the Nazis began knocking on doors, ordering all villagers, including Betty and her grandmother, to leave their homes and walk about two miles to the center of town. Betty didn’t see her mother and father anywhere. Terrified, she left her grandmother and managed, astonishingly, to return to her house undetected. When she arrived home, however, her house was empty. She then remembered that her father had been building a wall across the back of a storage shed behind the house. She began banging on the wall, begging to be let in, to no avail. She then started to cry, pleading. At last the wall slid open enough for a hand to emerge, pulling her in. Her parents had hesitated initially, thinking the knocking was the Nazis. Betty stood that night, along with fifteen others, behind that wall, which was about three feet wide. Among those hiding was a woman with a one-and-a-half-year-old child, who began to cry. Terrified they would be discovered, the woman made the harrowing decision to suffocate the baby. When the rain began the next day, her family left, making a run for an underground bunker her father had prepared in the woods. Betty spent the remaining years of the war hungry, foraging for food, convinced of the inevitability of death. Yet she and her family managed to stay alive despite several close brushes. Eventually they joined with Soviet partisans and later wound up at a DP camp.

  We listened to Betty as the rain pounded the tent. Once it subsided, we all climbed back into our wet wagons and headed for Trochenbrod’s one and only unpaved street, which was actually more like a dirt path. By the time we arrived, the sun was not only out, but the day had turned glorious.

  * * *

  —

  Shmuel Potash now took a megaphone and, like a human GPS system, began to explain where everyone had once lived. He not only knew all the names but had interesting facts and bits of gossip about virtually everyone in Trochenbrod, magically bringing the shtetl alive. In addition, a beautiful map had been put together by the Israeli Trochenbroders, showing where every Trochenbroder had lived; a poster version was given to each family on the trip. I’d been carrying a blueprint of the shtetl in my head, but now I could really see where my grandmother Brucha had lived, which was one house away from her sister-in-law Sosel Bisker and directly across the road from their cousins the Gornsteins. Five houses up, on the same side of the street as my grandmother’s house, were other Bisker cousins. A few houses farther up were the Kimelblats. Of course, my father’s half sister Choma had married Shai Kimelblat, and by then I had learned that Shai’s cousins Natan and Itzhak were my father’s partners in Lodz after the war.

  Shmuel led the group through Trochenbrod, microphone in hand, delivering a colorful if often hilariously rambling monologue. He had brought twelve members of his family, including children and grandchildren, with him on this trip. He wanted to show them where he came from—in detail. He had a story to go with each house. This guy had been known as Moishe the Fat; this guy was Ellie with a Lump on His Head; this guy loved the ugliest girl in town. He led us through this colorful history as though he were still the little boy delivering the milk.

  What made his recollections all the more amazing was how few visual cues remained. Only one tree still stood from the days when Trochenbrod had been a town. After the Germans had torched everything, the Soviets planted new trees and dug canals. The path we were walking along was apparently much narrower than the old road had been. The forest still remained on the horizon and gave the illusion of having been there for decades, but it was in fact all new foliage.

  As Shmuel spoke, Betty Gold repeatedly wondered aloud about the whereabouts of her family’s former house. Even though this was her third return to Trochenbrod since the war, she found the deconstructed landscape confusing, understandably. As we reached the middle of the street, Shmuel called her to the front of the group and pronounced he had found the spot. Betty walked across brush and stood in waist-high grass and wildflowers. “I never thought I would find this place,” she said tearfully. “I never thought I would be here again.” She picked a bundle of wildflowers to take back to her home in Cleveland.

  * * *

  —

  Despite the somber reason for our visit, most of our fellow travelers were in good moods, energized by the opportunity to play the role of shtetl archaeologist and look for remains. We even had makeshift tools, and there were, in fact, a few artifacts found. One of the Brazilians had “borrowed” forks from the hotel, which she distributed for people to use as digging tools. And, of course, I had brought a supply of Ziploc bags—enough for everyone.

  One of the Americans on the trip, Ethel Kessler, worked beside me as we dug up the broken remains of a plate. Some of the Israeli kids found shards of brick from the old factory. My grandmother Brucha’s second husband, Baruch Kuperschmit, had made bricks, and I wondered if perhaps he’d been involved in the creation of some of these. As we dug, one of the locals with us found a token from the old post office, and, according to Shmuel, this was right at the spot where the building had once stood. It seemed bashert—destined—that Ethel Kessler, the art director of the U.S. Postal Service, was there with us. The man from Domashiv handed the coin to Avrom, whom he knew from Avrom’s previous visits to Trochenbrod and Domashiv. I viewed the coin as the perfect artifact for my glass-jar memory collection. Avrom and I went back and forth for a bit, like kids arguing over a toy, until Avrom’s wife intervened on my behalf. I now have the token—an admission I’m not sure I should be proud of, but there it is in my collection, and I cherish it.

  Shmuel continued to speak, despite complaints from some of the Israelis in the group, who were growing tired of the way he was monopolizing the microphone. Finally, after about an hour, he ran out of steam and climbed into a jeep to recuperate.

  Without Shmuel at the lead, the group was able to quicken its pace, and we made our way to the army surplus tent for lunch. I learned, unsurprisingly, that Frank and I were not alone in our aversion to the standard, pork-heavy Ukrainian diet. Some three-quarters of the group declared themselves vegetarian in an effort to avoid eating the potentially offending meat without insulting our hosts. Betty Gold joked that she could live on bread, which she actually sort of had for about a year while in hiding in the forest. In her memoir, she described sneaking into homes and stealing bread, which was then rationed among her family and the others with whom they were in hiding. Sometimes she would grow so hungry that she couldn’t help but pilfer some for herself at night, and then she’d blame it on mice. We all took her cue and raided the breadbaskets.

  Seated on benches at long picnic tables inside the tent, bedraggled from the rain, we must have resembled a group of refugees. The Israelis began to lead us in Hebrew folk songs. We all grew emotional and our eyes moistened, not for the first or last time that day.

  After lunch, we went to the first of the memorials, which was basically just a plaque that had been installed by the Soviets at the far end of what was once the town.

  Then we moved down the path another twenty yards, arriving at the site of the second memorial erected by Trochenbrod survivors—the one that the Israelis planned to restore with the marble they had brought with them from Tel Aviv. Shmuel Potash’s grandchildren, wearing white kipot, carefully glued the new plaque in place, as their grandfather, now rejuvenated after his rest, guided them.

  The group watched, snapping photos and t
aking videos. This was why we were here, after all—to keep these memories alive, to ensure that the town was not forgotten, to not allow it to disappear into the Ukrainian landscape of newly planted trees.

  Evgenia, the old survivor from Lutsk, pushed her fragile body to the front of the group. “My mother and father died here. I want to say Kaddish,” she said.

  Shmuel disagreed, insisting that Evgenia’s parents had actually died at another spot, but the crowd managed to silence him.

  A Hasidic rabbi suddenly appeared. An apparition in a long black coat, he stepped into the forest next to the memorial. No one was quite sure what he was doing there, but someone must have alerted him to our presence. He explained that he came from Lviv and made it his life’s mission to identify mass graves. We later learned that his forensic methodology involved holding two poles above the ground. If they moved, that meant that Jews were buried there. So maybe this was not the most scientific approach, but we were nonetheless relieved to hear him tell us that we were in the right spot. We then commenced readings in both Hebrew and English about Trochenbrod and the Holocaust. Shmuel recited Kaddish for Evgenia’s family and for his own, as well as for everyone killed in Trochenbrod.

  Betty Gold sat at the base of the memorial and wept uncontrollably. We all looked toward the flag that the Israelis had carried with them to the grave and began to sing the Israeli anthem, “Hatikvah.”

  As the rest of the group moved on, Frank and I lingered. We wanted to leave behind our family’s Rosh Hashanah card. Because we weren’t sure which of the memorials marked the spot where our ancestors were buried, we decided to leave our message at every Trochenbroder grave site, of which there were several. We dug a few inches into the ground, placed our family photograph, and covered it with earth.