The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

by Avrom Bendavid-Val

  THE HEAVENS ARE EMPTY

  THE HEAVENS ARE EMPTY

  Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

  AVROM BENDAVID-VAL

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  ON THE WATER

  by Yisrael Beider

  My brothers have reached the far shore,

  Landed on solid ground.

  I alone remain on the water, mid way,

  My ship heavily burdened.

  I was late, thought I could hurry and reach the other side.

  But then, night fell.

  And who knows how long until day.

  The ground where I stand is like the froth on the water.

  I see a little star,

  A sparkling from far away.

  My brothers are sending greetings to me.

  Their flame burns there on the other side.

  This poem, originally in Yiddish, was found among newspaper clippings that Yonteleh Beider had saved. It was written by his brother and probably published around 1939 in Podlaiyisher Tzeitung (the Podlayisher Newspaper), in Mezerich, Poland, where he was living at the time. The Podlayisher Tzeitung published many Yiddish poems by Yisrael Beider.

  This book is dedicated to my father, YomTov (Yonteleh) Beider from Trochenbrod. He went to Palestine in 1932, changed his name to Chagai Bendavid, immigrated to the United States in 1939, and died thirty years later in Washington, D.C. He mentioned Trochenbrod infrequently, yet his longing and affection for it were unmistakable. The memory of that affection impelled me to find a way to stand where that mysterious place was, to try to feel the soul of it, and inspired the years of research that led to this book.

  Chagai Bendavid is the one holding the cigarette in this photo of a construction crew in Tel Aviv, in 1934.

  CONTENTS

  Preface Next Year in Trochenbrod

  by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Introduction The Back Story

  Chapter One The First Hundred Years

  Chapter Two Between the Wars

  Chapter Three Dusk

  Chapter Four Darkness

  Epilogue The Story Continues

  Witnesses Remember

  Glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish Terms

  Chronology

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  NEXT YEAR IN TROCHENBROD

  If the Diaspora could be run backward, if Jewish history, itself, could be funneled and compressed into a single location—some place that captured the vibrancy and catastrophe, the yearning, invention and destruction—we might find ourselves in Trochenbrod. The more I’ve learned about the singular shtetl—and the great portion of my knowledge comes from the book in your hands—the more strongly I feel that it was the most special place ever to have existed.

  In 2002, I contributed my novel, Everything is Illuminated, to the small and diverse library of books devoted to Trochenbrod. It is a highly fictionalized response to a trip I made, as a twenty-year-old student, in an effort to find the woman who saved my grandfather, Louis Safran, from the Nazis. The book was an experiential, rather than historical, record of Trochenbrod. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it was a deeply personal expression of one young man’s experience in his destroyed ancestral homeland.

  The Heavens are Empty is the definitive history of this definitive place. If this book feels more fantastical than my novel, or than any novel you’ve ever read, it is because of Trochenbrod’s ingenuity, the Holocaust’s ferocity, and Bendavid-Val’s heroic research and pitch-perfect storytelling. This rigorously journalistic book reads at times like science fiction, at times like magical realism, at times like a thriller, and always like a tragedy. You might find yourself crying most at the parts that aren’t sad.

  Jews conclude the Passover seder—the recounting of the Exodus from Egypt, and perpetually relevant movement toward freedom—with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.” It’s an odd statement, as most of us who live outside of Jerusalem could, if we wanted, be in Jerusalem this year. We are not there because we choose not to be.

  But the statement does not refer to a Jerusalem that can be found on a map; it refers to an idea. Next year in a place of redemption, a place where the shards of creation are gathered together and we are more like the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

  Trochenbrod will never be redeemed, and we will never, next year, be there. The dead cannot be brought back to life, the buildings cannot rise from the earth. The Diaspora cannot be run backward. And yet here we are, readers of this book, citizens of that place.

  Trochenbrod was the most special place ever to have existed. Not was … is.

  —JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

  Brooklyn, New York

  Introduction

  THE BACK STORY

  There once was a town called Trochenbrod in what today is western Ukraine. It had dozens of businesses of all kinds, and people would travel from all around to shop, work, and sell there. Trochenbrod had a post office, a police station, a fire brigade, a cultural center, schools, and everything you’d expect in a small but lively town. It’s gone now. A trail for tractors and horse-drawn wagons through empty land is all that remains of the once bustling street that ran through the town.

  My father never described his home town (pronounced TRAW-khen-brawd) to me; and I, growing up in 1950s and ’60s America, never thought to ask. Yet every once in a while my father would happen to mention it, and when he did, he said “Trochenbrod” with a tone that conveyed longing, loving remembrance, and sadness, but he also said it with a slight twist of his mouth, a sort of half smile that hinted at “a funny little place.” After he was gone, all I knew of Trochenbrod was the sense of it that my father had conveyed by his way of saying the name. Relatives told me that Trochenbrod no longer existed, but that had no meaning for me. I had never seen proof that it once existed, any more than I had seen proof that it no longer existed. Trochenbrod was only a vague shadow in my imagination, so how could it no longer exist?

  Trochenbrod suddenly stopped being only a shadow in my imagination when for forgotten reasons I found myself in a Mormon family research center, decided to search for Trochenbrod, and discovered my first factual representation of it in print: its coordinates 50º55′21.68″ north, 25º42′07.54″ east. Under the coordinates was an explanation that the town had many Jews; was known by two names, Trochenbrod and Sofiyovka; and was completely destroyed in the Holocaust. Instantly it was real: a place that really once was, and that really is no more. It had two names, so it couldn’t have been just a no-place, I supposed. What might still be there? There had to be at least some signs of buildings that once were there, at those coordinates.

  Thoughts like these floated occasionally around the edges of my consciousness as I went about my career in economic development in poor countries, until one day working in Warsaw I realized that where Trochenbrod had been situated was just over the border and a bit south in Ukraine. Visiting it should not be too difficult. Why not do it? The year was 1997. I found my way to the phone number of a young man in Lviv who was beginning to build a business of genealogical research for Jewish families and was willing to serve as a guide, translator, and driver for people like me. We talked over the terms and agreed on date for a trip to find Trochenbrod in November of that year.

  The young man’s name was Alexander Dunai. About ten years later Alex was described with great affection by another customer-become-friend, Daniel Mendelsohn, in his book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Alex helped Daniel visit a small town in Ukraine where members of hi
s family had lived and were murdered, and to research what happened there, during some of the time when he was also helping me.

  To prepare for the trip I visited the Library of Congress. There I found, among other things, a Russian map from the late 1800s, and with the help of the coordinates I was able to locate Trochenbrod on it. The map was delicately drawn. When I photocopied the area around Trochenbrod in larger scale I could see the town’s outline and the trails running through it; it was almost like having an aerial photograph of Trochenbrod. I quickly walked outside the august building so I could let go a shout of excitement. Pieces were falling into place. I couldn’t wait to get to Ukraine.

  When I think back on that day I find myself smiling—not at how excited and eager I was, but rather at my innocence. I didn’t have the slightest idea that what I would experience and discover on each visit to Trochenbrod and the surrounding area would make me feel I had to return there to dig deeper, and that this would happen again and again for more than a decade. I didn’t have the slightest idea that I was about to fall under the spell of a vanished place, vanished people, a vanished civilization and its rich culture, even vanished nations, and new nations, all intertwined with historic currents and cataclysms. I didn’t have the slightest idea that to know Trochenbrod I would have to learn about many aspects of world history I knew nothing about before, so I was about to commit to the biggest research project of my life. I didn’t have the slightest idea that I was about to embark on an odyssey more enriching than anything I had ever experienced.

  My brother Marvin and I, with a copy of the map in hand, landed in the small and quirky Soviet-era airport for the city of Lviv, beautifully modeled after an old-fashioned railroad station. Known as Lvov in earlier days, Lviv is the de facto capital of western Ukraine. We were met by our jovial and slightly rotund Alex with his faithful Lada—the USSR’s version of a 1972 Fiat. We looked around Lviv a bit and then headed off on the ninety-five-mile drive northeast to the city of Lutsk. Ukraine was in its early post-Communist period: no ATMs; no regular gas stations on intercity roads; no reliable hot water; and other than in a few places in the major cities, no decent restaurants and no credit cards accepted. The roads were in terrible condition and the faces of most buildings were heavily scarred by Communist crumble. In the city, signs of poverty could be seen everywhere—signs like little more than the basics for sale in the streets and on nearly barren store shelves; shabbily-clothed people shuffling about in worn-out shoes with mostly struggle and deep worry etched on their faces; and all manner of shysters and thieves swarming about trying to get their hands on your money. The rural areas, with their rudimentary horse-drawn wagons; animals running about; decrepit houses with water wells, outhouses, and wood-and-tar-paper sheds; haystacks everywhere; streets of mud; and people bent over in the fields using primitive farm tools seemed not to have changed since at least the turn of the last century.

  An immigrant from Lutsk that my brother found in New York had given us the name and phone number of a Lutsk acquaintance. The acquaintance (Vladislav was his name) turned out to be an ardent Communist who had not yet come to terms with his demotion from party apparatchik to virtual irrelevance—he ranted on and on about how much better off everyone was in Communist days. As Vladislav put it, he had been a Jew before he was an Internationalist. He knew about Trochenbrod, and with pleasure showed us its approximate location on a large regional map in the one-room Lutsk Communist Party Headquarters. He also introduced us to a woman, Evgenia, who was born in Trochenbrod and as a sixteen-year-old had survived the Holocaust by hiding with her parents in the forest. They eventually were found and protected by partisans. She fell in love with one of the Ukrainian partisans and stayed with him in Lutsk after the war. She told us that a group from the Israeli Trochenbrod organization had set up a monument at the site of Trochenbrod five years earlier. Evgenia asked to come with us on our excursion to Trochenbrod the next day.

  The following morning Alex’s Lada carried the four of us another twenty-five miles northeast, first on a paved road, then a dirt road, then on a tractor trail through the forest. In a village called Yaromel, near where we knew Trochenbrod’s mass graves were located, we found an older man who remembered Trochenbrod. His name was Mikhailo. He wore high boots, a heavy black coat, and a Russian-style winter hat. He stood straight but held a cane. His face was lined with age but filled out and handsome, and he seemed robust, like a peasant who had been both well-worn and well-exercised by a life of hard work. Mikhailo remarked that Trochenbrod’s people were Jewish and gentle and trusting, and he remembered well the horrors of the Nazi occupation. He had been waiting over fifty years for someone to ask him about it. I fought back tears that took me by surprise when he said that, and for a few moments I couldn’t speak. Walking was hard for Mikhailo—he limped and kept his balance with the cane—but he insisted on going with us into the forest to show us Trochenbrod’s mass graves. Mikhailo and Evgenia—two who experienced different sides of the Holocaust in Trochenbrod—walked ahead, side by side, chatting in Ukrainian.

  A few hours later, after visiting the mass grave site, we found ourselves wading through knee-high grasses looking for the site of Trochenbrod itself. Eventually we saw in the far distance first a black speck barely visible against the tree line, and then clearly the Trochenbrod monument, an upright slab of black marble. We ran toward it whooping, arms spread wide as if to embrace a lost relative. The monument had been set up at the north end of town, at the spot where Trochenbrod’s largest synagogue was sent up in flame by Nazis after they murdered the last of Trochenbrod’s people. Near the monument I noticed a triangle of intersecting trails. That same triangular intersection was prominent on the old Russian map. One of those trails had been Trochenbrod’s only street. I looked down a double row of scraggly trees and bushes, and felt a shiver: this had been Trochenbrod. There had been people working, families eating, children playing—a place full of life here. My father was born and raised here. And this place didn’t slowly come undone, first one family leaving, and then another: it was cut down.

  Alex’s Lada was about a mile way, where we had left it as the trail we were driving on began deteriorating into an impassable muddy track. When we got there we found the car hopelessly sunk in mud. Evgenia was tired, so Marvin stayed with her by the car while Alex and I hiked back to Domashiv, the closest village to Trochenbrod, to hunt for a tractor to pull us out. Next to one villager’s house we saw a tractor that still had markings of the now-defunct Soviet collective farm that gave it up. We knocked on the door and were welcomed warmly by the present tractor owner, who readily agreed to give us a hand. As he was bringing up buckets of water from the well in his front yard and pouring them into the radiator of his tractor to prepare it for the task ahead, an old toothless man, his father, came running out of the house waving his cane in the air and screaming, “Amerikanski! Amerikanski!” He declared that Ukraine had the richest soil in the world and would be a great nation today, greater than America, if those stinking Communists hadn’t ruined everything, forced the villagers to have passports so they couldn’t leave the villages, and taken their sons for the army and to work in factories so that now none of them know how to farm. Alex translated, and we smiled and nodded our heads as we backed toward the tractor and hopped on. While the son drove us away, the old man continued his tirade standing in the middle of the village street waving his cane, shrinking into the vanishing point.

  We extricated the Lada and started our journey back to Lutsk. By now it was dark. All day I had been captivated by the countryside: gaggles of geese running everywhere in the villages, fields both fallow and flourishing, vast forests, bulrush-bedecked streams weaving back and forth through the low areas, villages and horse wagons and wells and fences that seemed frozen in a long ago time, yellow and green flatlands flowing away to the horizon on one side and ending abruptly at the edge of a forest on another. We were driving slowly along the rough dirt road that led several miles through the fore
st to the intercity road. No people, no traffic, no lights, no noise except for that made by our Lada. I asked Alex please to stop the car and shut off the engine. We got out and stood for several minutes in awed silence. I looked up and saw a very deep and dark blue sky with billions of shimmering stars and sparkling swirls like no sky I had ever seen before. Tears of happiness began to well up at the wonder of this sight, and I realized that I was looking at the same sky my father had gazed at night after night for the first twenty years of his life.

  I was hooked. I had to know more. I had to know more about Trochenbrod. I had to know more about the villages in the area. I had to know more about the land here. I had to know more about the forests. I had to know what life was like in Trochenbrod. Over the next twelve years I returned again and again, usually helped by Alex, and also by Ivan Podziubanchuk, an inquisitive and enterprising farmer in Domashiv who became a good friend. On one trip I studied records in the State Archives in Lutsk; on another I walked the length of Trochenbrod’s street just to feel its reach and also to look in the ground for artifacts; on another I visited villages in the region and collected firsthand Ukrainian and Polish memories of Trochenbrod; on another I explored partisan history in the area. On one trip I sneaked onto a Ukrainian air force base, lubricating the way with bottles of bourbon I had brought with me from home, and was surprised to see jet fighters bunkered along the runway as we took off in a tiny canvas airplane I had hired because I had to see from above how the clearing that Trochenbrod had occupied was set among the surrounding forests.