The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

by Avrom Bendavid-Val

  7. Hasidic Judaism, or Hasidism, is a subset of Orthodox Judaism that originated in the mid-1700s in a town just southeast of Volyn province. Hasidism emphasized spirituality and joy as key elements of Judaism, in contrast with the typical emphasis at that time on religious scholarship. Different Hasidic sects organized around specific rabbinic leaders, called Rebbes. Hasidic men usually wore dark kaftans, white shirts, and dark fedoras or large round fur hats. Hasidism gradually became a worldwide subset of Orthodox Judaism, but by the early 1800s it was already the rule among Jews in Volyn and neighboring provinces.

  8. Ritual slaughterer for kosher meat.

  9. “Peace upon you,” a traditional Jewish greeting.

  10. A kaftan worn for Sabbath and holiday services.

  11. Tassels on the corners of prayer shawls.

  12. A prayer sanctifying the Sabbath.

  13. Slow-cooked stew, a Sabbath specialty.

  14. Baked dish of mixed ingredients.

  15. Coins given to children during the Hanukah holiday.

  16. Spinning top used for Hanukah games.

  17. Potato pancakes, a traditional Hanukah dish.

  18. Festival of Lots, a happy holiday that falls about a month before Passover.

  Chapter Two

  BETWEEN THE WARS

  The devastation of World War I put an abrupt end to the rise of Trochenbrod’s star, its rapidly diversifying businesses and growing prosperity, its increasing weight as the regional center of economic gravity.

  Shaindeleh Gluz was born in Trochenbrod in 1913, but in the informal memoir she wrote in 2002 she remembered life there during the war years vividly:

  My paternal forefathers were glass blowers. When the glass factory was gone my grandfather became the mayor, tax collector and postmaster of Trochenbrod. He also had a butcher business. My father Zrulik and his brother Itzak ran it.

  Grandma and some of her family left for America in 1914, just as I was starting to crawl. There was a lot of unrest in the world. There were rumors of war, and suddenly it happened; war was declared. All avenues of communication ceased. World War I was for real, it was on. There was no way to escape … no more elaborate plans to migrate. Immigration was stopped, there was no mail, no communication … only pain and suffering.

  The invading army confiscated money, jewels, silver and all valuables from the town’s people. When the war was finally over, the fighting ceased in our town. All the plundering and killing was over. The young girls came out of hiding, no more rapes, no more deaths of the innocent. The commanding officers and their entourage withdrew from Trochenbrod. My grandfather’s home had been stripped of all furnishings that had been in the family for generations, but we were alive.

  The war had taken its toll on my parents, especially my mother. She was very sick. She was always in bed. Things inside of our house weren’t clean and didn’t shine any more. It didn’t smell sweet and good. The aroma of cooking was also gone. Our clothes were torn and neglected. There was little food in the house. Often we were hungry. Mother was too weak to improvise any meals with the little bits of scraps that we had. Most of the time my little brother Yossel and I stayed in bed with Mother to keep warm, but we were so hungry.

  Once in a while, while in bed with Mother, Yossel and I would play a game, “Lets Pretend,” with a large collection of well-worn colorful picture post-cards. The cards were of the Statue of Liberty and the teeming Lower East Side of New York. Mother’s family sent the cards to us when they settled in America. From these pictures, Mother would weave wonderful tales of freedom, peace, happiness and plenty.

  Shortly after Mother passed away, many more sad happenings began. My little brother Yossel and my father became very ill. Yossel and I shared a tiny bed. One morning my little brother’s body was cold and stiff. His little life was snuffed out before he had a chance to live. He died of smallpox. I suppose that Yossel’s death really caused father’s complete breakdown, healthwise, and his death.

  There came a time when we really didn’t have a piece of bread to eat. We foraged in the woods for berries and sour grass. Our bellies became swollen. We found ourselves too weak from hunger, too sick with festering body sores and lice to give a care anymore. We just couldn’t go on anymore. Make no mistake; we were not alone in this situation. All of Trochenbrod was suffering. We became like animals; we hunted for scraps of food; like animals we fought cunningly to survive.

  Just when the struggle became too much to bear, when we were ready to succumb to the unknown, fate intervened and help came. One day Trochenbrod was seething with excitement. Since the war was finally over, the ban on traveling had been lifted. The first person to arrive was a rich American. He had been commissioned by concerned relatives in America to go to our town and seek out their relatives. With him he brought letters and money for some of the people. He was also asked to help some of the townspeople to make their way to America. My brother and I reached the center of town just in time to hear the American call our names.

  The Austro-Hungarian Empire, also known as the Habsburg Empire, finally collapsed in 1918. But the Treaty of Versailles signed at the end of World War I did not concretely define the border between the reconstituted Poland and the newly constituted Soviet Union. Immediately, Poland and the Soviet Union took up arms over control of the borderlands area that included Trochenbrod. Again the front moved back and forth through the area. Again Trochenbrod was ravaged. When the Polish were the occupying force they expressed their loathing of Jews in the form of beatings, forced labor, looting, raping, and confiscation of food. When the Soviets were the occupying force they preferred to confiscate property from wealthier people, take over businesses, and hunt for imagined Polish spies. The fighting in this secondary war finally ended in 1920, and in 1921 the Treaty of Riga that divided the borderlands between Poland and Soviet Russia was signed. This is when Shaindeleh Gluz heard her name called in the center of Trochenbrod, and then made her way to the United States. Trochenbrod was now in Poland.

  – –

  For this period of Trochenbrod’s history there is a great deal of source material—though never enough, and some of it contradictory. I found good maps; hand-written Sofiyovka civic records; directories that included Trochenbrod survey information and descriptions; memoirs; and references to Trochenbrod, usually brief references, in several books. Sources like these made it possible for me to draw the physical, commercial, and human outlines of Trochenbrod in the interwar years, but not the content within those outlines. What did the street look like? How did the people dress? How did the ways Trochenbroders made their living affect community life? What were the relations like between rich and poor? How did the Jewishness of the place express itself? What did the kids do in the summer? In short, what was the feel of the interwar Trochenbrod, this “last” Trochenbrod? What was it like to live there?

  I was lucky to fall under Trochenbrod’s spell at a time when a few dozen people who knew Trochenbrod firsthand were still alive. I talked with people born there from 1912 through 1932, and who left as late as 1942. I was able to hear a different perspective, how Trochenbrod and Trochenbroders appeared to Ukrainians and Poles living in other places in the area, from people who still live there and remember well their childhood visits to Trochenbrod. Personal recollections, as unreliable as any one of them might be, collectively made it possible to fill the outlines with the feel of Trochenbrod, with a sense of what was it like to live there. My father left Trochenbrod in 1932; I was capturing things he would have told me.

  Trochenbroders usually went to Lutsk, about 20 miles and the better part of a day’s journey away, for studio photographs, or had photographs made by itinerant photographers who from time to time set up temporary studios in Trochenbrod. This explains why you can look through hundreds of photographs from Trochenbrod and see the faces of its people, most often stiff and posed, and nothing of the town’s physical appearance. By the 1930s box cameras and 35mm cameras were readily available, and at least some
people who visited Trochenbrod, usually immigrants returning to visit their families, snapped outdoor photos. Some Trochenbroders had cameras also, but their photographs were lost in the Holocaust. The one Trochenbroder who was technologically attuned, who photographed outdoor scenes, and survived the Holocaust with her photographs and other personal belongings was the Polish Catholic postmistress of the town, Janina Lubinski. I met her son, Ryszard Lubinski, in the city of Radom, two hours south of Warsaw, and with happiness he gave me most of the photos of 1930s Trochenbrod that appear in this book. They add a layer of concreteness to Trochenbrod like nothing else can; they allowed me to see the town my father grew up in.

  When my father marked his bar mitzvah in the early 1920s, the combined population of Trochenbrod and Lozisht was the same as it had been twenty years earlier, about sixteen hundred people. Emigration, disease, and war privation had offset any natural growth. The first few years after the wars were a period of harsh life and recovery. In the early days of full Polish administration, local commandants imposed forced labor on the Jews of Trochenbrod—building roads, administration buildings, and warehouses in the region; supplying the Polish army with food, clothes, and leather goods; hauling construction materials and army supplies; building furnishings for government offices. That hardship was soon replaced with higher-level official discrimination. Government jobs were denied to Jews. Some trades that Jews had been prominent in, such as vodka and salt, were made state monopolies and turned over to Polish Catholic war veterans to operate. Systematic repression of Jews steadily increased throughout the interwar period. So did regular outbreaks of violence against Jews, and these were ignored if not encouraged by Polish officials. Despite this, and because people in the rural areas tended to get along better than in the cities—Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews each having their own social and economic niches—Trochenbrod’s economy again began to grow and diversify.

  Although increased contact with the outside world and a measure of political awareness had come about in Trochenbrod to some extent during the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, World War I and the Polish-Soviet war pushed the town on a faster path to modernity—technological, commercial, cultural, social, and political. During the wars Trochenbrod had rubbed up against Russian, Austrian, Polish, and Soviet troops. Some young men had fled to distant cities to avoid the troubles in Trochenbrod or to attend yeshiva, and they returned more worldly wise; some had been taken into the military and were exposed to a secular world and nonkosher food. This all laid the groundwork for a Trochenbrod that during the interwar period had growing ranks of secularists, political movements from the far left to the far right, and businessmen whose enterprises reached out to the larger world.

  This is not to overstate the case. Trochenbrod remained surrounded by forests, far from any reliable transportation route for motorized vehicles, and completely and somewhat insularly Jewish. It continued to be a town, a complete town, governed by Jewish custom: always observing the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, always strictly kosher and following Jewish dictates, always filling up its synagogues, and always greeting visiting Jewish scholars with celebrations. For Jews who knew about the town and for most who lived there, this, together with its farming character, lent Trochenbrod an out-of-place and out-of-time almost magical quality.

  As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, Trochenbrod was thriving again. Its economy was increasingly becoming the center of trade, artisans, agroprocessing, and light manufacturing for a region stretching in a radius of more than ten miles. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the uniqueness of Trochenbrod’s Jewish farmers at that time. One of the most eloquent expressions of the wonder of this was written by the Israeli writer Jacob Banai in his 1978 book Anonymous Soldiers:

  Sofiyovka is the name of a small Volyn town in which in the fall of 1938 the first Etzel1course took place, in which I participated. The Jews led their lives in Sofiyovka as if it was their kingdom. That is where I first encountered Jews who worked in agriculture. In Sofiyovka I saw Jews walking behind their plows; a Jew who takes his cows to the field, and when the time for prayer has arrived he stands in his field and prays as if he is standing in a synagogue.

  That picture deeply ingrained itself in my memory, and it was the first taste I had of our vision of a Jew in his homeland. I also saw children there, not organized in any activities, but actually small children playing in the fields, dancing and singing Hebrew songs. What a magical place was this Sofiyovka!!!

  Memories like this, perhaps reinforced by what lingered in the minds of children who left Trochenbrod at a very young age, and also the memoirs of people who left Trochenbrod well before World War I, have given many today the notion that Trochenbrod was essentially a farming village. In fact, by the 1930s, and perhaps well before that, no one in Trochenbrod actually made their living from farming. Although everyone worked their land to some degree, the livelihoods of most Trochenbrod families, or by far the larger part of them, now came from retail shops, leather-related businesses, construction trades, small-scale manufacturing, and trading.

  By now, growing numbers of Ukrainians and Poles from surrounding villages were employed in the town’s fields, houses, and sometimes even businesses. It became more and more common for people from surrounding villages not only to shop in Trochenbrod but also to sell things there house to house or from their wagons. Trochenbrod was, as before, one long street with houses, shops, workshops, small factories, and synagogues, but now also with public buildings like schools, a cultural center, the post office, and the constable’s office lined up along it. Many houses had already been rebuilt or were now being rebuilt, improved, and enlarged; and now most shops had their own storefronts and carried an ever-increasing variety of goods. As it embarked on the 1930s, Trochenbrod had become truly a regional town.

  One sign that this was happening is the town’s appearance in Poland’s first official “Illustrated Directory of Volyn,” published in 1929. The directory listed only places that were economically or touristically significant, and Trochenbrod was considered one of those. The entry for Sofiyovka reads,

  Eleven kilometers east of Trostjanetz is Sofiyovka. It is an industrial town.… The easiest access route by rail is through the Kivertzy station (22 kilometers). The main industry is leather-working, and there are over 20 small leather workshops. In addition there are many Jews there; they are farmers. The town is built on pilings on swampy land, and during the spring snow-melt the water rises to the floors of the houses. There is a new and sizeable wooden church, built with pine and oak, funded by the Radziwills.

  Yes, a church! More on this later.

  Also in 1929 there was an entry for Sofiyovka in Ksiȩga adresowa Polski, a privately published Polish business directory. The entry listed about ninety nonfarm businesses in Sofiyovka in a wide variety of sectors that included shops, workshops, small factories, and traders. Next to each type of enterprise appear the names of the proprietors of those businesses. Many prominent Trochenbrod family names show up there—names that today are spread throughout North and South America and Israel, and also throughout this book: Antwarg; Blitzstein; Bulmash; Burak; Drossner; Fishfader; Gelman; Gilden; Gluz; Halperin; Kerman; Kessler; Potash; Roitenberg; Safran; Schuster; Shpielman; Shwartz; Szames; Wainer. In this Ksiȩga adresowa Polski entry the only distinctly Polish names in the long list of Sofiyovka business proprietors are those who run the government-monopoly vodka and tobacco shops.

  The breadth of enterprises in this town as early as 1929 may be surprising at first, considering the extent of physical and personal devastation suffered there in the wars. But after having recovered in basic physical terms, stabilized in human terms, and settled into the idiosyncrasies of the Polish administration, around the mid 1920s Trochenbrod had begun to reclaim its place as a regional commercial center with renewed energy. And while some Trochenbrod families never recovered the economic well-being they enjoyed before World War I, and some now even scraped along mostly w
ith the help of money sent by relatives who lived abroad, as the 1930s got under way, many Trochenbrod families were beginning to do relatively well and saw that a comfortable future might be possible in their town.

  It’s a safe guess that a policy of economic diversification in order to promote growth and stability in Trochenbrod never crossed the mind of anyone who lived there. But, willy-nilly, that is what happened. Diversification of economic activity is a time-honored family strategy, especially among rural families, to pin down a dependable stream of income. Add to that the unusual range of economic opportunities presented by involvement of Trochenbrod families in both agriculture and town businesses, an entrepreneurial heritage handed down from urban roots, and a potential market that included a dozen or more villages in the area, not to mention three cities, and you have the formula for a community of people who would discover and seize a wide variety of economic opportunities. And once they seized one they immediately began to build on it.

  A good example of this was Moishe Sheinberg. Moishe was somehow involved in the butcher business in Trochenbrod when he noticed that, like Jews, Polish people for some reason did not eat the hind quarters of cows. He figured that there must be lots of castoff cow rumps he could sell to Ukrainians. Indeed there was. He was able to buy these parts relatively cheaply and then sell them at market in Kivertzy. Moishe was, of course, strictly kosher: he would never eat the nonkosher meat he sold.

  Then there was Avrum Bass. Avrum was a farmer who sold his produce at market, and had a horse and wagon to transport his goods. He would often bring produce back from the market in his wagon to sell in Trochenbrod, so he became both a farmer and a produce trader. His familiarity with horses led him to sell the one he had and buy another, and before long he was also a horse trader. Sometimes he brought bread back from the market to sell in Trochenbrod. Why not bake it here and offer fresher bread that people from the nearby villages might also come to buy? Soon enough, Avrum Bass was a relatively well-to-do businessman who grew and traded produce, was a trader in horses, and owned a bakery in Trochenbrod.