The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

by Avrom Bendavid-Val

  One day months later there came a decision from the high command that we should move to the Carpathian Mountains to conduct certain operations there. On the way, we passed through the Radziwill forest. The Jews in Trochenbrod and Lozisht had all been murdered by then. We made up a unit of four hundred raiders to hunt down the Schutsmen and Ukrainian Nationalists who helped the Nazis in their work. We killed many of them and burned their houses.

  We decided to burn everything we could that was left in Trochenbrod because we didn’t want the Nazis or the Ukrainians to use any of the houses, to benefit from any of the buildings. Jews had owned the flour mill. After they killed the Jews, Ukrainians took over the flour mill. We didn’t want them to have it, so we burned it. We took some straw and spread it around, and we spilled fuel all around—there had been fuel there to run the machinery. Then we lit the fire and burned down the flour mill. I tell you that it was sad, but the feeling of revenge was very strong, very strong and very satisfying.

  Ryszard Lubinski, postmistress Janina Lubinski’s son, was not only the sole non-Jew born in Trochenbrod, he went to school there, all his friends were there, and he grew to the age of twelve there; although he’s Catholic, Ryszard thinks of Trochenbrod as his hometown. Ryszard and his mother remained in their home, the post office that was closed down by the Soviets, until the winter of 1942. They were the only ones who lived in Trochenbrod before, during, and after the Holocaust there. He remembers Trochenbrod with deep affection, and he remembers the days of Trochenbrod’s descending darkness with great clarity.

  Because of Jews, we were in Sofiyovka. Jews made Sofiyovka and developed it into a town that needed a post office, instead of letting it remain a little farming village. My mother came from a town with a lot of Jews and was comfortable among them, and that’s why she took the job there.

  Also probably because of Sofiyovka Jews, we stayed alive, and I am alive today. Why? When the Russians took over in 1939 they wanted to send us to Siberia because they saw my mother as a Polish official. But the Jews of Sofiyovka said no, and they begged the Russians to let us stay. The Russians talked to the people in Sofiyovka, and then told my mother, “Everyone says that you are a good person and can be trusted, so we will not send you to Siberia, you can stay.”

  And Trochenbrod’s Jews were good to her. For example, she couldn’t even get water. Every time she would go out to get water—we had to walk a little bit to bring water from a well—some Sofiyovka man would see her and stop her and say, “No, no, I’ll bring the water for you,” and they would go to the well, and fill up her bucket, and bring it back to our house. So they respected her and wanted to help her.

  The children were learning at the cheder every day. All my friends were there in the cheder. I had no one to play with, so I’d go and listen under the window of the cheder, especially in the summer when the windows were open and I could hear what happened inside. They would learn in Hebrew by memorizing. Since I was standing there listening I would learn by memorizing also, even though I couldn’t read and didn’t know what it meant. I would just repeat the sounds over and over. One time the teacher called on one of the boys to say several lines. He began reciting the lines, and at one point he made a mistake. That made the teacher very angry, and in the usual way at this school the teacher gave him physical punishment and yelled at him, “Why do you say it wrong?” Sometimes the teacher would hit the pupil’s hand with a stick, and sometimes he would hold his mouth open and spit into it for saying a wrong answer. So the boy answered, “Ryszard told me.”

  But it wasn’t true. I knew Yiddish as well as all my friends—I can still speak Yiddish today, especially after some vodka—and from listening at the cheder window I knew the Hebrew words better than some of my friends. Sometimes as I was walking in the street, people said, “Look, this is the one who helps the Jewish boys in the cheder,” because I really did whisper the answers sometimes to help my friends—but always the correct answer. I still remember Hebrew words. Listen: Baruch atoh adoinoi eiloiheinu melech haoilom …1

  I remember two oil factories in Sofiyovka, oil presses. One was right after Ellie Potash’s house, the other was owned by the Szames family. They were face to face on opposite sides of the street. They had very complicated machinery; it would be in a museum today. Ellie Potash had another house, which was his workshop, next to the post office where we lived. The Jewish school, the cheder, was across the street from us, and down a little bit. There was a synagogue a few houses further down, with a very strange rabbi—he was very loud; when he prayed you could hear him everywhere in Trochenbrod.

  You know Tevye the dairyman, from Sholom Aleichem’s stories? In the introduction to one of his books there is some information that Sholom Aleichem was a tutor of Jewish studies for the daughter of a very wealthy Jew from Sofiyovka who had a lot of land. Sholom Aleichem later married this girl, and the property came into his hands. But he divided it into smaller parts, and finally sold off everything. I always wondered if it’s the same Sofiyovka.

  I think Sholom Aleichem was in Trochenbrod because behind the house that was the post office where I lived, there was a large field that belonged to one family, that later was divided into small sections. One row of sections belonged to Potash people: Potash, Potash, Potash, one after the other. Another row belonged to Szames people, who were related to Potash: Szames, Szames, Szames, one after the other. So maybe that was the big Sholom Aleichem field divided into smaller parts. What do you think? Is it possible? It could be, because Sholom Aleichem’s stories describe the way life was exactly in Sofiyovka.

  One time, after the Germans arrived, a strange person appeared in Sofiyovka: Dr. Klinger. He was about fifty years old when he came. To me as a child he seemed very old. He had a lot of scars around his face and on his hands, and some of his fingers were missing. He arrived in Sofiyovka as a German. He dressed in a very elegant way. He seemed to be an important person. The Germans showed him very great respect. He seemed to be a high-level German of some sort, so we wondered where he came from, and where he got his scars and lost his fingers. Was he a veteran from World War I?

  He was very often a guest in our house. So we became friendly, and he began to trust us as friends, and he told us he is a Jew. He told us how he got the scars on his face and hands: he was studying somewhere in Germany at the time of Kristallnacht, and Germans attacked him with knives. He protected his face with his hands, and as a result he lost some fingers and has scars all over. The scars let him pretend he was a war veteran, and his wounds brought him a lot of honor among the Germans.

  Dr. Klinger convinced the Germans that he needed some of the Jews for something, and protected a lot of them for a while that way. But some of the Schutsmen, Ukrainians, were suspicious about him. They insisted he should come with them for a drink at the end the day once. They got him very drunk. When he was so drunk he was helpless they took down his pants and saw he was circumcised. Then they dragged him to the street and shot him. His body stayed there overnight until Jews came and took him away to bury him the next day.

  Before the Germans had the first liquidation they did a preparation of the townspeople. A big-shot German came and gave a speech that no one would be hurt if they followed orders and did not behave wrongly. The Germans were in charge of the town for a long time, and there had been murders, yes, but no mass killing. One day the special liquidation unit of German soldiers arrived in Sofiyovka with assistants of Ukrainian Schutsmen who surrounded the town. No one suspected that they would be killed. They thought, “Oh, another one of the German big-shots will give a speech, and that will be that.” So there was no big resistance.

  During the first Aktion my mother hid sixty people in the attic of the post office. One of my mother’s friends, a Jewish woman, and her son were hiding in our house. The boy caught tuberculosis. The Schutsmen went from house to house looking for Jews, but by some miracle they didn’t come to our house, so this woman and her son escaped the roundup. But the son got worse and wo
rse. Eventually he started coughing very hard, coughing up blood, got very weak and died. His mother became hysterical. She didn’t eat or drink, she just cried. My mother tried to get her to go hide in the attic, but she said she didn’t want to live. Then she just walked out the door and started walking up the street. Soon we heard the shot that killed her.

  When Russians were in control, the Volksdeutsch [Germans] were allowed to leave under a clause of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement. So a nearby Volksdeutsch village called Yosefin was emptied of Volksdeutsch, and Poles and Ukrainians were moved in there. There was a Polish man in Yosefin, a veteran of war under Pilsudski, a man who knew how to use weapons, a very strong man, and a very commanding person. He was working in his fields on the day of the first Aktion. He saw and he heard what was happening. Something snapped in his head, and he became a completely different person, walking around in a daze, mumbling words no one could understand. The next day he put on a coat and told people he was going to search for Free Poland. No one ever saw him again.

  More people escaped into the forest from the second killing because it was not so well organized as before—for the Germans it looked easier because so many fewer people meant they didn’t have to be as careful. But now the Jews knew what was going to happen so they were better prepared, and more escaped. The beans in the fields behind the houses in Trochenbrod were on tall frames. When running from the Germans, people would sometimes run among the beans because that would hide them, and then they would run in the drainage canals. The second time, one of the young people in the ghetto hid behind the door with an ax, and when a Schutsman entered to call the people out, he chopped him in the neck and almost cut his head off. People felt good that someone showed resistance.

  I thought about Trochenbrod often all these years. I still miss it. I remember eating gefilte fish in Trochenbrod. Since then I’ve tried it sometimes, but nothing came close to the way it tasted in Sofiyovka. Even when my mother made it, after we came here to Radom, it was not as good as it was when the mothers of my friends gave it to me in Sofiyovka, because that was really in the Jewish style. Whenever I walk in the street and smell cooking of a food like there was in Trochenbrod, I think “Oh, that smells like Sofiyovka,” and pictures of Sofiyovka come to my mind. I remember latkes—ahh, latkes—and chulunt in the oven for Shabbos, I can smell it now, I can almost taste it. When I think of Sofiyovka I don’t think of the slaughter; I think of the life. Laughter, wonderful food, games, happiness, friends, weddings, holidays, warm families.

  But I can never forget what it felt like as a child when everybody in Sofiyovka was murdered. When I went for water I saw dead bodies everywhere. Looking down the street of Trochenbrod I saw only empty houses where the families of my friends lived. Where my friends lived, now there was only quiet. The doors and windows of the empty houses were swinging this way and that way in the wind, once in a while hitting the sill with a soft bang, and then with hinges squeaking they starting to swing again. Where are my friends? Where are their families? What happened to my Trochenbrod?

  1. The opening phrase of many Hebrew blessings.

  Epilogue

  THE STORY CONTINUES

  LIGHT1

  by Yisrael Beider

  Don’t despair my brother dear,

  If in the west day’s end seems near.

  I beg hold fast these words of mine,

  After this darkness a light will shine.

  Trochenbrod, the town that some thought would be a thriving city today, is gone. In the nearly seven decades since its annihilation, what happened to the physical space that Trochenbrod occupied? What happened to the land that might have borne the roads, houses, parks, and buildings of an urban center named Trochenbrod, or Sofiyovka?

  After the people of Trochenbrod were murdered, the German army put the land of Trochenbrod and its satellite villages to use supplying food for its soldiers. A Sonderführer (an army specialist with a nonmilitary skill) who knew how to run a large farm was brought in, and he established a forced-labor system for people from the surrounding villages to work on the former land of Trochenbrod, now his farm. He had the villagers build him a house near where the last synagogue had been, at the north end of town where today the black marble monument stands. For the house and for several other new farm buildings he had them use materials from dismantled Trochenbrod houses. The Sonderführer’s farm had horses, goats, cows, and chickens, and the villagers cultivated potatoes, beans, corn, cabbage, and other local crops for the German army there.

  The Germans’ Trochenbrod farm did not survive more than one growing season. In the fall of 1943, fighters from Kovpak’s partisan detachment surrounded the Trochenbrod area and set fire to as many buildings as they could. The Sonderführer is said to have escaped to German units near Rovno (Rivne).

  Following the war, no one made use of Trochenbrod’s land for about ten years. The reasons it was unused before the first Jews settled there 130 years earlier were the reasons it was unused now: relatively poor-quality soil, a marshy lowland, and considerable distance from transportation routes in the region. In addition to that, local villagers already had garden plots near their homes; markets were disrupted by Communist rule; and people were generally without horses or tractors. In short, local people had no incentive—and really no capability—to cultivate Trochenbrod’s land.

  In the mid-1950s, the Soviets decided they could not leave uncultivated such a large parcel of what had once been farmland. They made modest improvements to prepare the land for farming, and in 1957 assigned the area that had been Trochenbrod and its satellite villages to a collective farm named Nove Zhyttia, New Life. All villages in western Ukraine had undergone forced collectivization by this time, and Nove Zhyttia was headquartered in Domashiv. As Soviet rule lumbered on, a generation was being born in Domashiv and other villages of the area that did not know any life but Soviet life, and had no idea that a town, a Jewish town, had not long ago pulsed where now were only vast hay fields of the New Life collective farm.

  In 1971, the Soviet government decided to make some major improvements so Trochenbrod’s land could be farmed more intensively. Thirty years had passed since Trochenbrod’s disappearance. By this time, few people—and probably no Soviet authorities of substantial rank—knew that a town once stood on this land. One of the major improvements was to build a regional system of drainage canals that included water conduits along what once had been the street through Trochenbrod. That street had shriveled to a scraggly trail among the fields. Because of the drainage system, Trochenbrod’s soil was now firmer and the whole area much less sodden, and the collective farm raised rye, corn, wheat, barley, peas, potatoes, and beets, and also grazed livestock there.

  On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant suffered its well-documented catastrophe. The Chernobyl plant is about two hundred miles east and a bit to the north of Trochenbrod. All the stories I’ve been told are variants on the same idea, that the Soviet government was committed to supply electricity to Poland from the Chernobyl nuclear plant; in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster the government built high-tension lines that transmitted electricity from a power station about thirty-five miles north of Rivne (Rovno) to the Polish market. These lines cut through the area that had been Trochenbrod, and ran parallel to what had been its only street. This infrastructure can be seen in the first photo of the first page of the image gallery.

  Ukraine became an independent country in 1991, and that put an end to collective farms. Cultivation on Trochenbrod land stopped then because, despite its good drainage, the land still was not particularly fertile—people in the area refer to the soil there as “black sand”—and it still was not in ready reach of transportation routes to markets. When you go there today you may find some local people grazing their horses, and sometimes you’ll see one or two fields sown in grass or clover for animals. But Trochenbrod’s land today remains essentially unused and in government hands. Neither the local nor national government has plans f
or it. The Trochenbrod area looks today as it does in recent photographs in this book. Few people in the surrounding villages have any idea what used to be there.

  And yet Trochenbrod—Sofiyovka—sometimes has a mysterious fleeting presence for local people, almost like the ghost of an unknown soul that still hovers in the air from time to time. Once I was standing in a Trochenbrod field when my Ukrainian friend from Domashiv asked if I’d like to find a keepsake from the town. He said you could often find things at Leah’s house. Leah’s house? We drove by tractor to what would have been the southern reaches of Trochenbrod and started rooting in the soil near a big fruit tree. This spot is known as Leah’s house; no one today knows exactly why. I once walked by a farmer’s yard in the area and noticed, snug against the wall of his house, a pile of paving stones that reminded me of the ones I had seen in the photograph of the ribbon-cutting ceremony that appears on page 15 of the image insert. The farmer was working in his yard, and I asked him where he got the stones. “From Sofiyovka,” he answered, jerking his head in the direction of where Trochenbrod used to be, as if, “In the next village, over there.” A legend circulates that in the first year of this millennium some strangers appeared and dug up a large quantity of gold from the site of Trochenbrod. Children from the surrounding villages who wander out to Trochenbrod’s fields sometimes return with pieces of glass from the pre–World War I glass factory, shards of dinner plates, or tools, utensils, or other household objects that hint of life that once was there. There is an acre of land not far from the black marble monument known to everyone as the Shwartz field. Some village young people have never given a thought to what that name might mean; others vaguely guess someone named Shwartz once lived there; old people sometimes retreat into their memories when you ask about it.