The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

by Avrom Bendavid-Val

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most important day on the Jewish calendar, fell on September 21 that year. As the date grew closer, more and more people came in from the forest to spend what they knew was likely to be their last Yom Kippur praying with their Trochenbrod friends and relatives. About two weeks earlier, thirty of the leather workers were marched to the Yaromel forest to dig a second set of mass grave pits near the first. While digging the pits, one of them, reportedly the tanner Moshe Shwartz, suddenly rose up and attacked three of the guards with his shovel while screaming to the others to save themselves. Many began to flee into the forest, but most them, like Moshe Shwartz, were killed by German and Schutsmen gunfire.

  On Yom Kippur the second Aktion was completed: almost everyone in the Trochenbrod ghetto was taken to the second mass grave pit and slaughtered the same way the first group had been slaughtered nearly six weeks earlier. Again, a few remained alive in the ghetto somehow. The remaining leather workers were moved into the largest synagogue, at the north end of Trochenbrod, and continued to work as slave laborers. In December all remaining Jews were taken to the pits and shot. To mark completion of Trochenbrod’s eradication in Jewish measure, in human measure, the Nazis set fire to the synagogue where the leather workers had been held—the spot now marked by a modest black marble monument.

  Many of Trochenbrod’s houses disappeared soon after the families who had lived in them were murdered. The Germans demanded at least one laborer for five days from every household in the surrounding villages to work on dismantling many of Trochenbrod’s houses and other buildings. All remaining furniture was removed from the houses and then the buildings were dismantled into building materials. Clothes and furniture were sold to local villagers. Some of the building material was used for local military construction, and the rest was loaded onto trucks and taken to Kivertzy for shipment to Germany to offset shortages there. Later, partisans set fire to some buildings and houses that were left, in order to deny their use to Germans, Schutsmen, or Banderovtsi. After the Germans were driven out by the Red Army in 1944, Ukrainians from the surrounding villages took anything remaining that could be moved, including the paving stones from Trochenbrod’s street.

  Trochenbrod had vanished.

  – –

  Of the more than six thousand people in Trochenbrod and Lozisht when the Nazis invaded, possibly as many as sixty survived. These were people who retreated with the Soviets or escaped later across the Soviet border; or people who got hold of false documents and disappeared from Trochenbrod, like the red-haired friend of the woman from Przebradze; or people like Label Safran who were hidden by Polish or Ukrainian families or in some cases protected by an entire village; or people like Basia-Ruchel Potash and her family who fled into the forest and somehow survived there; or people like Chaim Votchin who became partisans before the Nazis could trap them, and did not die as partisans. Many more Trochenbroders initially escaped the mass slaughters, perhaps several hundred, but most of them did not survive the war.

  This story of Trochenbrod will end with the voices of three who did survive those last awful days: Basia-Ruchel Potash, Chaim Votchin, and Ryszard Lubinski. They are among the few from Trochenbrod who have stories to tell about that period. Others who witnessed those days were silenced in their witnessing.

  The Nazis skillfully took advantage of Ukrainian nationalist sentiments to first turn Ukrainians against Jews and other Ukrainians, and then set Ukrainians and Poles against each other. They stirred up a cauldron of Ukrainian Banderovtsi, Schutsmen, and Communists; Polish self-defense groups and partisans; German army officers of many ranks and units and ordinary German soldiers; and stoked the flames so that innocent Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews—Jews above all—would be consumed in its boiling waters. It is against this background that you should read the following accounts. Every act of defiance or revenge against the murderers and their partners, every help to those defying or taking revenge, every bold move to try to survive, every help given so that some might survive, all these were acts of great risk and heroism.

  Basia-Ruchel Potash now lives as Betty Gold in University Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. She was born in Trochenbrod in 1930 and speaks of a delightful childhood there surrounded by a warm extended family, lots of friends, wonderful experiences, rural freedom, and a rich community life. Her childhood suddenly took a downward turn at the age of nine, when the Soviets arrived in Trochenbrod. It turned far more severely and threateningly downward when the Germans took over. But nothing came close to what she and her family endured hiding in the Radziwill forest from the murder and madness the Nazis brought to Trochenbrod. Her story of triumph begins at age twelve:

  My father and his cousin had a big wooden shed in back, it was long and narrow; they would store wood and tools and other things in there. Because of what they heard from refugees from western Poland, they decided—just in case—to build a false wall in the shed, so that if the Nazis come to get us we could go behind the wall and hide. They built it secretly at night.

  Later—I remember it was a hot summer day—the Germans and Ukrainians surrounded the shtetl, and they took everybody out of their homes. We all had to shlep whatever we could carry, and we had to go to certain houses in the middle of town. This was the Trochenbrod ghetto. I was with my immediate family—my father, my mother, my two brothers, and my father’s mother, who lived with us at that time. My other grandmother, she lived across the street, didn’t want to go to the ghetto, so she hid; we saw before we left, that they found her and took her out and shot her. They led us to the ghetto, everyone in Trochenbrod I think.

  Once we got to the ghetto my family and my father’s cousin’s family went back to the house, because you were allowed to go back to get some things if you came right back to the ghetto. They left me with my grandmother in the ghetto to watch our belongings. And I sat there with her, and I saw that nobody came back from my family. Right away I thought they must be hiding behind the false wall. And I got scared, and I got angry why they left me. And I was so torn. My grandmother’s sitting there with her belongings, and I’m sitting next to her, and all the other Jews were there. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to live, I wanted to go back; she couldn’t go back, so I left her. That was a very tough day in my life.

  I started running back to our house at the south end of town. As I ran down the street, all the people were walking toward the ghetto, and I was running the other way, and there were the Nazis and Ukrainians with their guns. One of the Germans was busy looking up at something, so I crawled right between his legs, he happened to be standing that way. As I got close to my house I saw there were soldiers in the distance, so I crawled on the ground between the twigs and the bushes along the side of my house.

  I got to the false wall, and they wouldn’t let me in! They were afraid that the Nazis were using me to find them, so they wouldn’t answer when I called to them. I finally started crying, and I said, “There’s nobody with me, I’m just alone, there’s nobody with me, I’m just alone.” I convinced them to open the secret door, and they let me in.

  There were seventeen people in that hiding space behind the false wall. Three small children. My cousin’s youngest baby was crying. The mother choked her to death; she wanted to save her two boys and the rest of us. We weren’t allowed to cough, or even breathe loudly, because Nazis were all over the place. We were holding our mouths; the grownups were stuffing rags and things in our mouths, not to sneeze, not to cough, not to talk.

  The false wall was vertical boards. I looked through a crack between the boards at one point, and I saw they had a truck full of babies. An open truck. Two soldiers that I saw through the crack, they were still leading people to the ghetto, but they were grabbing babies and throwing them by the arm, by the leg, into the truck. And the mothers were reaching for their babies, and screaming. I saw that, and I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t understand what it was all about, I couldn’t believe it. I saw my little cousin thrown on the truck like a sack of meat �
�� how does a child control herself, and not scream and cry when she sees a thing like that? I knew those faces, I knew those babies, I saw them every day of my life. When you’re told to be quiet and keep your mouth shut, and you watch that … there’s nothing we could have done; if I had gone out they would have thrown me in the truck too. I thought, “Maybe they’ll just take them to the ghetto, they don’t want them to walk, they don’t have the patience to wait until babies and toddlers and little kids will get there, so they took them in the truck, and that’s how they’re transporting them just to the ghetto, and then they’ll give them to the parents.” No, nothing like that.

  A day passed. The next day we heard a lot of shooting. We were still hiding behind the false wall. I did not see what happened, but we heard the shooting clearly, maybe a mile or two away, so we heard it real loud. We found out from a survivor afterward, someone who ran away from the shooting, that they took the rabbi, the parents, the children to a big pit to shoot them. Some ran away, some were shot trying to run away. Some made it to the forest, and when we met them in the forest, sometimes months later, they told us about it.

  We couldn’t get out from our hiding place the next day because they picked our house to store valuables and clothes they took from the houses and from people they killed. There were so many soldiers there, unloading and packing and moving things, that we couldn’t escape. We had to wait through another night and day. The next night, in the middle of the night, we crawled out into a garden that was next to that building. It was raining, we were so grateful it was raining, we hoped nobody would hear us. We crawled to the canals that drained the water: they were long, maybe half a mile. In the canals we crawled to the Radziwill forest, and that’s where we ended up.

  After a short while things seemed to calm down, and we went back to the ghetto. Almost everybody had come back for Yom Kippur. The Germans and Ukrainians surrounded the ghetto, took everyone from their houses and killed them all. How did we get out of it? My father threw us out the window, and yelled, “Run, and we’ll meet there and there in the forest.” They were the last to get out of the window, after the children were thrown out. My cousin and her husband had two children there—she had choked her third back in the wall; my parents had three children. Her two boys were gunned down: we survived. She was left with none. My parents survived with all three.

  Running to the woods through the drainage canal I stepped over my uncle’s body, bleeding to death, I stepped over my cousin’s bodies, I stepped over my girlfriend’s body, I stepped over a rabbi’s body. Not just me, but everyone running was jumping over these dead and bleeding bodies of their friends and relatives, some of them screaming for help. My father was yelling, “Run, run, run, don’t stop,” and we were jumping over dead, half-dead, wounded people we knew, our own flesh and blood, while we were running to save our lives. Can you imagine how we felt, how your heart aches with guilt and pain?

  We could still stay in the forest because there were still trees with plenty of leaves. While we stayed there my father and his cousin and a couple of other men who were with us decided they would build bunkers in different spots in the forest to prepare for the winter … so if they find us in one spot we’ll have someplace else to run to. They dug nine bunkers over a few months. They covered them up with twigs and tree limbs; they would leave a very small entrance where you could just crawl in. So the roofs of the bunkers would look like the forest floor.

  While it was warm we stayed outside. At one point my father and the other men decided we should stay in a nearby marshy area where the trees were thick; that would be the safest place. They built a platform from tree limbs over the water, and we lived there day and night. To survive we would go out at night—mostly I would go out, because my brother was circumcised, and if he was caught they could pull down his pants and see he was Jewish. I had a little babushka, and I would go out and find as much food as I could in the yards and orchards of villagers.

  In order for me to get back to the family, to find my way back, I’d clap my hands—it could have been some forest animal noise. When I clapped, they’d clap back to me, and that’s how they directed me to the platform with the food—apples, or a piece of bread, or whatever I could get. That’s how we lived, that’s what we ate. For water we used rain water that we caught in a little pot, or sometimes we drank from the swamp even, if it got bad—we could get so thirsty we didn’t have a choice. And we just sat there with nothing to do.

  At that time there was a Gentile family that my father told about our hiding. We were so hungry, we didn’t have what to wear, what to eat anymore, that he figured what have we got to lose, we’ve got to tell this Gentile family—customers they were, actually—where we were, maybe they’ll help us. And they did. When my mother ran away she took with her a few Russian gold coins—she stuffed them in her bosom. In fact, when she fled from the house she had to bribe a Nazi soldier with a gold coin: he took it and let her run, and then he shot at her as she ran. Maybe he missed on purpose, who knows.

  So we gave them all the gold we had left—there wasn’t much—and they did help us out with a little bread, they would drop off a few packages here and there. We were extremely grateful. It was a life saver for us. And they did not report us, they were loyal and righteous people.

  After that, winter set in, and we started to hide in the bunkers. It got to be really very cold. We had with us a coat lined with fur. Don’t ask me how or why, but my parents, when they ran from the house in the ghetto, they took with them the gold coins and the fur-lined coat. A man’s coat, my father’s coat. That was our only protection from the cold, in addition to any clothing we had that hadn’t fallen apart yet, and we treasured it. When winter set in it really became disastrous because you couldn’t go out for food—your footprints in the snow would lead the villagers to us. If you didn’t eat for three days you just didn’t eat for three days. You had to wait to walk in a snowstorm or until the snow melted.

  One time a really wonderful thing happened: my oldest brother got hold of seven loaves of bread. He stole them from a Polish home. They were baking bread, and he stole them. When he came we almost attacked him, everybody wanted the bread. My dad dug a little shelf inside the bunker, and he stored the breads there. He gave us a speech that it’s winter, we can’t go out for food now, so this bread’s going to have to last as long as possible. Nobody gets more than one piece a day. He showed us the size of the piece for each day with his fingers. In the bunker I was the one lying next to the shelf. I couldn’t help myself; I’d pick little pieces of the bread and suck it like a lollypop. I picked and I picked and I picked. The next day they discovered the picking and decided there must be a mouse in the bunker. But then they got me to admit that I was the mouse. So the next day they had me sleep on the other side of the bunker. That bread lasted about a month.

  There were nine people in the bunker. We would lie side by side, and if one person turned around everybody had to turn, we were packed that close. It was a shallow dugout: we could sit up, but we couldn’t stand up. We were just lying there day and night, looking at each other, hardly talking. And eventually the coat with fur lining got full of lice, so we had to get rid of it. The lice got into our hair—I had very long hair, long pigtails, and my father and cousin both had knives, and they sat down, and they cut my hair off. One strand at a time, they would hold it out and cut it off.

  We were cold and we were hungry and we were desperate. We had a little tiny stove of some sort; I don’t know where it came from. You could make a little fire. If my brother found potato peelings, you could lick it and stick it to the outside of the little stove, and you could cook the potato peelings that way and eat them. Of course we got so sick afterwards because they were garbage, we got them out of the garbage or a pig sty and they were smelly, and they were rotten, and then we would throw it all up anyway. But it filled us up momentarily, so we did it anyway.

  At one point one of the Gentile people came and we thought it was the Ger
mans or the Ukrainians that had found us, and nobody wanted to go to see who it is. We heard the footsteps right outside the opening. If they’d take one more step they’d fall in on top of us. My younger brother was asleep, and they woke him up and said, “Go see who’s there.” He didn’t know what was going on, so he went to see. He called back, “Oh it’s Yuzef.” That was our Polish friend. Yuzef came to tell us that he heard in his village that there’s a bunker of Jews hiding in the forest, and the Germans are going to come to get them tonight. He came to warn us that they found out about us.

  We knew about another group from Trochenbrod who ran away also and were in a bunker about two miles away. So my father went out to visit that family to beg them to let us in their bunker because we had to leave our bunker because they were coming to kill us, and we’d freeze to death if we were outside a bunker. They said no, we couldn’t stay there because there was no room, and there really wasn’t any room there. My father came back and told us the news.

  He said we can’t run, enough is enough, whatever will happen will happen. He sat us down, and he said, “Look, when they come here to kill us, here’s what we’re going to do: don’t wait; get out and run. You’ll get shot, but at least you’ll be shot on the run. If they find us alive, they’ll cut us to pieces.” That’s what they used to do, the Ukrainans. They used to find women and men in the woods, they’d cut their breasts off, their tongues out, their legs off, and hang them on the trees.

  So we stayed there, and we waited, and we were ready to run when they came to kill us. We lay there, and waited, and nobody’s coming! All of a sudden we hear shooting. Grenades, and gunshots, terrible terrible sounds. What happened? It was the other bunker that they discovered, the one that had no room for us, and they killed all those people. If they had they taken us in, if they would have had room for us …

  That was our luck. Go figure it out. A miracle that we survived. We were ready. We were so ready to die that we had all kissed each other good-bye. A funny thing, when my father kissed my mother good-bye he said in Yiddish, “Stay well.” We laughed, we really giggled when he said that. If not for a sense of humor I don’t think we would have survived, because that’s the only thing that kept us going. We laughed at ourselves and cried at ourselves, because we just ran out of emotions.