The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

by Avrom Bendavid-Val

  For its children and their descendants, Trochenbrod, though it disappeared physically, has flourished in certain ways—lasting community connections and individual prosperity, for example. One cannot say as much for other small towns in the Volyn region, like Olyka, which did not disappear. Olyka had been a vibrant and important administrative and commercial center, where one of the area’s principal markets was held each week. Trochenbrod traders were there in force on Olyka market days. It was the seat of the Radziwill family, which had large holdings in the region; I’ve heard many times the story of the road into Olyka being strewn with rose petals when the prince’s son drove into town with his new bride. When I visited Olyka not long ago it was a forlorn and forgotten place of muddy streets and ancient houses. It lacked any but the occasional small rundown shop left over from the Soviet era. Its once glorious brick church stood crumbled like an ancient ruin, and Prince Radziwill’s palace had been converted to an insane asylum from which inmates occasionally wandered out onto the street to hunt for cigarette butts in the gutters. It was a place without past or present, and since any new houses in the area were being built closer to the Lutsk-Rivne highway a bit to the north, it appeared to have no future either.

  Trochenbrod has lived on through the power of collective memory. It remained alive first in the form of active groups of émigrés and survivors who identified strongly with their hometown and celebrated the community that it was. Wherever there were large numbers of people from Trochenbrod, they and their families generally flourished. Most of the original Trochenbroders were gone by the end of the 1970s, but after a lull of two or three decades, remarkably, strong ties with Trochenbrod and with each other began flowering again among the children of Trochenbroders, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren.

  When the war ended, most Trochenbrod survivors found their ways to Displaced Persons camps like Bindermichl, in Lintz, Austria, or Föhrenwald, near Munich, where the photograph at the bottom of page 22 of the image gallery was taken. From there survivors went primarily to the United States, Palestine/Israel, Brazil, or Argentina, where there were already large Trochenbrod communities and often even family relatives. There was no sustained contact among Trochenbroders in different countries, though Israeli Trochenbroders did reach out to overseas Trochenbroders during the decade or so after the war. And in 2009 they reached out again.

  In Brazil and Argentina there were many Trochenbrod immigrants—in Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro, and in Argentina, especially in Buenos Aires and in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe—but no formal Trochenbrod organizations. Still, in both countries there was a strong sense of Trochenbrod community. Many immigrants from Trochenbrod were connected by birth or marriage to a small number of Trochenbrod families; they saw each other and helped each other and kept in close contact, as they do to this day, in the context of family interactions and gatherings, and Trochenbrod is always in the room. In the United States and Israel the story was different.

  American Trochenbrod families have given me photos, membership lists, bank records, and firsthand accounts of Trochenbrod émigré organizations that existed in Montreal, Canada, and in Baltimore–Washington, D.C., Boston–Worcester, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York–New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Toledo. As Trochenbroders traveled around the country, they would often stay with other Trochenbrod families and participate in local Trochenbrod organization events. These organizations typically got their start ten to twenty years before World War II. They were social organizations where families could reminisce about Trochenbrod and update each other on the latest news from their hometown, but they all devoted themselves as well to raising money for Trochenbrod institutions and families. Most of these organizations fell inactive during or soon after the war, as the letters stopped arriving; some small groups continued gathering into the 1970s.

  The Trochenbrod-Lozisht group in Palestine started as an informal community around 1930, and has operated continuously and fairly robustly since then. The center of gravity of the Israeli Trochenbrod community in the early years was Eliezer Burak, who changed his family name to Barkai in Palestine. Eliezer wrote the 1945 article about Trochenbrod quoted on page 69. All new arrivals from Trochenbrod, including my father, stayed with Eliezer and his family until they found a job and a place to live in Palestine. When survivors arrived after the war, Eliezer quizzed them about what happened to different Trochenbrod families, and then passed information about survivors to Jewish soldiers operating in Europe. In that way, a number of survivors were tracked down, including those in D.P. camps and children whose doomed parents had paid Ukrainian families to protect them, and arrangements were made to bring them to the Trochenbrod community in Palestine. Eliezer also wrote to Trochenbroders in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States for money to help support and integrate survivors who arrived in Palestine. Later he was instrumental in organizing construction of the Trochenbrod and Lozisht synagogue and community center in Israel, known in Hebrew as Bet Tal. Eliezer Barkai served as the contact point for Trochenbroders worldwide, and for years maintained regular contact with many of them.

  By 1959 Bet Tal had been built near Tel Aviv, and the Trochenbrod community established a formal nonprofit organization, the Bet Tal Association. In 1988, one of the Bet Tal leaders, a Trochenbrod native named Tuvia Drori (quoted on page 81), finally managed to travel to the site of Trochenbrod, in Soviet territory. He couldn’t relate to the terrain of the region and had trouble finding someone who knew the site, but he did eventually find a villager who took him there on his horse-drawn wagon. Tuvia returned to Israel shaken by the experience of seeing nothing but an empty field where his town had been and nothing marking the mass grave. In 1992, the Bet Tal Association installed black marble monuments at the site of Trochenbrod and at the site of the mass grave. Over the next fifteen years they organized three visits to the site of Trochenbrod and worked hard to include as many young descendants as possible. In 2007 they established a Web site (http://Bet-Tal.com); in that same year the Israeli Bet Tal Association decided to work toward becoming an international organization, a focal point for Trochenbrod descendants worldwide. They kicked off this effort with an international gathering of Trochenbrod natives and descendants, at the site of Trochenbrod, in August 2009—over sixty-five years after Trochenbrod and its people perished.

  Before telling you about that remarkable event I want to turn the clock back a bit to catch up with Basia-Ruchel Potash, the young Trochenbrod girl who survived by hiding in the forest with her family, and her friend Ryszard Lubinski, son of Trochenbrod’s postmistress. They are pictured together in the photograph on page 16 of the image insert. Basia-Ruchel and her family ended up at the Bindermichl D.P. camp, and in 1946 immigrated to the United States, to Cleveland, where they had family. In due course she married, raised a family, and had a successful professional life as Betty Gold. Ryszard and his mother left the ruins of Trochenbrod to work in another town in the region, and then made their way to Radom, Poland. Ryszard eventually became a construction engineer in Communist Poland, and today is retired in Radom, not far from his children. It never crossed the mind of either that the other might still be alive.

  In 1996, the Shalom Foundation, in Warsaw, published And I Still See Their Faces: Images of Polish Jews. This is a book of beautifully printed photographs of Polish Jews before the Holocaust. The photos were selected from thousands sent in by Poles who in many cases had known the people in the photographs. Often they attached comments about their photograph. The book was not distributed in the United States at that time, but an exhibit of photographs from it was mounted in Detroit two years after the book was published. By chance, the Cleveland Jewish News reported on the Detroit exhibit. Betty Gold always read the Cleveland Jewish News. Ryszard Lubinski had sent in one of the photos taken by his mother, the one that appears on the top of page 12 of the image gallery in this book. Although Ryszard’s photo was selected for And I Still See Their Faces, it did not ap
pear in the article. Yet, one might think miraculously, the comment that Ryszard sent along with the photo did appear in the article. It read:

  I was born in 1929 and, for 12 years, was brought up in Zofiówka in Volhynia. The town had a population of about five thousand residents, almost all of them Jewish. Yiddish language and Jewish customs also became part of my everyday life. After the Soviet invasion, when the Jewish language became the language of instruction at the local school, it did not hinder me, a Pole, in my studies. Afterwards, the Germans came. In August of 1942, almost the entire population was murdered in the nearby forest … Zofiówka suddenly ceased to exist.

  —Ryszard Lubinski, Radom

  Betty Gold read this on Mother’s Day 1998. She read it again, and again, and again. Her eyes blurred over with tears and she felt happiness, intense excitement, and a sense of miracle in one overwhelming emotion; she couldn’t contain herself. I know this because she called me to declare that she had just received the most wonderful Mother’s Day gift ever. She tracked down Ryszard’s phone number and called him. They talked excitedly in Yiddish and Polish, and a few months later they met again, in Radom, after more than half a century had passed. They have been in regular contact ever since, and that led me to Radom to ask Ryzsard for his recollections for this book. While interviewing him I asked if he would like to join the group planning to visit Trochenbrod in August 2009. He said no: he has wonderful childhood memories of Trochenbrod, and he would not like to upset those memories by seeing nothing there but the mass grave.

  In 2002, Jonathan Safran Foer published his novel Everything Is Illuminated. That book and the movie with the same title kept Trochenbrod’s name current for several years. Even though the book and movie use the variant “Trachimbrod,” people descended from Trochenbrod knew what it was. Many of them had known of Trochenbrod only as family legend, sometimes handed down with diminishing clarity over several generations. They were amazed to learn that other people knew of Trochenbrod, they were excited by its new fame, and they wanted to know more about the town and connect with other Trochenbrod descendants. Their interest in reconnecting stirred for two or three years and then, one might again think miraculously, bumped up against the Israeli Bet Tal Association’s wish to reach out to Trochenbroders worldwide.

  An effort to put together a contact list of Trochenbrod families in 2008 quickly made clear that thousands of people in the United States felt connected to the town. What began as an idea for an unadorned gathering of a few Trochenbrod families in Washington, D.C., ended up, as a result of clamor across the country, as a national Trochenbrod reunion. One hundred forty people came from all corners of the United States. Trochenbrod gatherings in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro took place in the following months. The Bet Tal Association began organizing an international gathering at the site of Trochenbrod.

  On August 18, 2009, three Trochenbrod natives—two who survived in the forest and one who slipped away during the Russian occupation—and seventy-five descendants of Trochenbroders, the youngest among them teenagers, gathered in the Ukrainian village of Domashiv. They had come from Brazil, Canada, Israel, Ukraine, and the United States. They made their way in a procession of fifteen horse-drawn wagons through Domashiv farm fields and then through abandoned acreage to the site of Trochenbrod. They deliberately traveled using the same means of transportation that their ancestors had used.

  One who survived in the forest was Betty Gold, Basia-Ruchel Potash, who told her story of survival in Chapter 4 of this book. Another was Evgenia Shvardovskaya, whose story is summarized on page 182. Evgenia is frail, but her grandson, who heads the small Jewish community in Lutsk, came back to Trochenbrod with her and helped her. The one who slipped away before the Germans came was Shmulik Potash, whose story of escape is told in Chapter 3. With their first-person stories, these people were able to bring Trochenbrod alive for the rapt descendants visiting Trochenbrod. Shmulik strolled the entire length of Trochenbrod’s street pointing out the locations of shops, public buildings, and the homes of individual families. People scooped up soil that had been beneath the houses of their forebears, and searched in the ground for signs of their families’ lives. They conducted a ceremony at the black marble monument at the north end of Trochenbrod, and then an even more moving one, with songs, stories, and prayers, at the black marble monument at the mass grave. They discovered a visceral connection to this place, a sense of identity with this vast field somewhere in Ukraine that they had never seen before. They discovered within the group relatives from other countries that they had never met, and in some cases had not known existed. They felt a kinship with each other that left them singing and laughing together as family.

  The proceedings were in English and Hebrew. The Ukrainian wagon drivers, who brought their horses and wagons from neighboring villages, and some Ukrainian friends and well-wishers from Domashiv and Lutsk, watched respectfully, though they understood nothing. Yet the looks on many of their faces said they understood everything; some had tears in their eyes. Later they told me that the idea that people came from all over the world to meet each other, make family connections, visit the graves of their ancestors, and recapture the history of the place moved them deeply, and was a lesson for them. Now they wanted to know more about the history of the area, not just the history of Ukrainians. It was the first time they fully understood—or remembered—that many different types of people had lived in the area and made up its history. Imagine, there was a Jewish town here! They wanted to know more about those people and how they lived.

  1. This poem, originally in Hebrew, was found among newspaper clippings that Yonteleh Beider had saved. It was written by his brother and probably published around 1939 in HaKochav (The Star), a Hebrew-language monthly published in Poland. HaKochav published many Hebrew poems by Yisrael Beider.

  WITNESSES REMEMBER

  Some recollections of people in this appendix appeared earlier. What follows are additional memories that further enrich one’s sense of what Trochenbrod was and what took place there.

  SHOIL BURAK

  One thing many Trochenbrod natives remember clearly about Trochenbrod is mud. Because Trochenbrod was established in a marshy lowland area, the street through town became impassible to wagons after a rain. Shoil Burak was born in Trochenbrod in the late 1870s; he immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. He reminisced to his family a sentiment, as captured by his granddaughter Alyn Levin-Hadar, that other Trochenbrod families reported hearing from their immigrant forebears as well:

  When it rained, I’d be up to my knees in mud. Mud and dirt—these are my most vivid memories of Trochenbrod. We found excuses to take baths because of the mud. You ask would I would want to return to the old country? Not to all that mud and dirt—I’m an American now.

  In America, Shoil used to tell his children made-up bedtime stories set in Trochenbrod. Although the stories were made up, they nevertheless somehow always included in them a reference to “blota,” Yiddish for mud.

  – –

  MIKHAILO DEMCHUK

  Mikhailo was born in the village of Yaromel, near Trochenbrod, in 1932. He lives there with his family even today. I spoke with him in 1997, and again on several of the later trips I took to the area. Mikhailo had clear memories of Trochenbrod and the war years.

  A lot of people used to go to Sofiyovka because they wanted to buy different things for their houses, and clothes. There were shops selling shoes, clothes, a bakery—they baked a lot of kinds of bread—leather, mills. The merchants in Sofiyovka really trusted us: they gave us things without money, because they knew we’d give it to them when we had money. If Sofiyovka had survived, it would be a big city by now.

  There were good house-builders, good painters, and very good specialists of all kinds, especially related to construction and house repair, that would work in all the villages around here.

  There was a Jewish family that that we knew in Sofiyovka, and they had kids, and I was friends with them.
We used to play together: a girl, Esther, and two boys, Yoshko and Itzik.

  In Sofiyovka there were a lot of geese, and the people had good houses, mostly new ones but some older ones. Wealthy people there had better houses, people with less money had simpler houses. On the whole, it was more or less like our houses—not exactly the same, but similar. There were trees along the street. Also, a lot of the houses had fruit trees on their land: cherries, pears, apples.… Everybody had a piece of land there, and they worked on it. It was a nice town.

  To make some money young girls and ladies from villages like Yaromel would go to Sofiyovka to help people with the fruit, with their gardens, and around the house. Everyone was happy with that arrangement. It was a good time, but then it changed.

  Before the war there were really good relationships between the Polish people, the Jews, and the Ukrainians. Relations between the Jews and Ukrainians were probably better than the relations between the Poles and the Ukrainians. But everybody was friendly with everybody. For example, there were lots of Polish houses in Yaromel. But after the war started, something happened: Polish and Ukrainian people attacked each other; everybody became enemies.

  Of course, I was very young during the war, but I remember seeing trucks filled with people being driven past our house into the woods, hearing shots, and later seeing empty trucks return. Day after day they drove past my house. When things began to heat up for us we prepared to run away. We ran away to the nearby village, Mikove. But my father was killed by Polish people there. They saw we were running away so they attacked us, and only I and my two brothers survived, with nothing. We came back and found Yaromel burned down: only two houses left, and the little lake. So we were really very poor.

  Ukrainians and Poles attacked each other and Jews. There were three armies, German, Ukrainian, and Polish, and they were attacking each other. Those Polish people who attacked us came from Przebradze, a Polish village not far from here.