The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (14 page)

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 Germans 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.

After that it was so bad, there was so much snow, we couldn’t go out. We stayed there because they didn’t find us, but we needed food, we needed food. The Polish people couldn’t come either because of the snow. We were so hungry, and so cold, so desperate, we had no clothes, our feet were wrapped in leaves. I still suffer because my toes were frozen. My mother would put my feet between her breasts to try to warm them up. My father would blow through his cupped hands on my hands and my feet to warm them. We thought there was still a ghetto in the
shtetl
, and we decided we were going to go; whatever happens to everybody else will happen to us also. That’s enough. We can’t handle it anymore. No clothes, no food, nothing.

So we get up and we start to go. All nine of us were born in Trochenbrod and knew our way around blindfolded. We were moving toward the
shtetl
and the ghetto through the night. We walked around all night, for hours and hours and hours. My father couldn’t understand why he was getting lost, why he couldn’t find his way back to Trochenbrod. It wasn’t that far; it was only a few miles. First we walked one way, then another way. “I think it’s this way; no, it’s that way.”

We were so exhausted and confused; we were frail from starving and couldn’t walk any more. So we decided we’ll just sit down in a trench and rest for a while, and when the sun comes up we’ll see where we are. While we were sitting there we heard shooting, a lot of shooting. We didn’t know what it was. When daylight came we could see the fields behind Trochenbrod houses. We had been close to Trochenbrod and didn’t realize it. The men went to find people. They crawled to a house and climbed in through the window, and there was nobody there. They went to another house, and there was nobody there either. We found out later that all the people in the ghetto had been killed before, and the shots we heard were the killings of last leather workers who had been held in the synagogue. Another miracle. We got lost; if we had found our way we would be killed with the leather workers.

I don’t know why we didn’t commit suicide. Really, nobody wanted to live anymore. We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t have any strength anymore. We waited till nighttime, and we turned around and went to another bunker. We went there, and we had absolutely nothing to eat. It was already three days. We were starving, literally starving. Our tongues were hanging out, we were pale, we were … it’s a miracle we didn’t eat each other. We picked any leaves we could find, and we ate them, and we usually threw up. We ate snow.

I was twelve years old. I got my period. I didn’t know what it was all about. I was lying next to my dad; we were all lying close to each other in the bunker. I woke up, and I was such a bloody mess from my neck to my knees, and my father was also a bloody mess from his neck to his knees. I didn’t know if he was bleeding, I didn’t know if I was bleeding. Where did it come from? Did somebody choke him? Did somebody kill him? I got hysterical, I started screaming and crying. My mother took me out with my cousin, a lady cousin. They took me under a tree. There was a puddle of water. They washed me up, and they told me about the birds and the bees. I didn’t have any social life out there, but they started to warn me about getting pregnant and so on.

There was another bunker not far from us. There was a father, a child, and a few other people, all from Trochenbrod. The little girl wasn’t more than three years old. The little girl got very very sick, and she died. They had to leave their bunker because somebody spotted them. And they spotted us. So we all left our bunkers and we left the little girl under a pile of leaves, and we figured maybe the next night, when it all calms down, we’ll go and bury her. When we came back to bury her, she was breathing! Just barely. My mother put her on her bosom, and my father was breathing in her mouth, and her father was … I mean, it was a scene like not even the movies, it was like animals in a jungle. All the adults gave her drops of water in her mouth, sometimes even spitting in her mouth, and held her close to their bodies to give her warmth, and found pieces of food for her, and … and gave her new life. They all together gave her back her life. She survived the war with her father: two out of seven in her family, and she had a wonderful life after the war.

Warm weather finally came again, and we moved to a different part of the forest, because we were afraid that with spring coming shepherds or other people from the villages would be going into the woods and would spot us. We were hearing too many noises, so we were afraid. We went to a bunker about three or four miles away. When the leaves came out we started living out in the open more, and we built a little fire one time. We had no idea, none at all, what was going on outside, even if the war was over or not.

Once we were near a sort of orchard, and the trees were beginning to produce fruit, just the beginnings of the apples, very far from ripe. My brother went out to get those. We were outside the bunker because as I said, there were leaves on the trees already and they were sheltering us. We were looking and waiting for him to come back, and all of a sudden we see horses. There’s a soldier on one horse, and on another someone in civilian clothes but with a rifle, and on a third horse another soldier with a rifle. One of them is holding my brother. They caught him stealing the apples. They told him to lead them to where he came from. He was a little boy, and he led them to our bunker. When we saw the Germans, Ukrainians, whatever they were coming toward us with my brother on one of the horses with the soldier, we knew it was the end. We decided as soon as they come with my brother, we’re all going to start running. Again we all said good-bye to each other, kissed each other good-bye. We were glad it was over. We didn’t even really care anymore.

But it turned out to be the partisans! Russian partisans! Liberation had come! A third miracle! I have never seen such tears and laughter and screaming, and hysterics. There was such mixed emotions, happiness that the worst of our hardships was over, that we had survived, and deep deep sadness about all those who were lost, who didn’t get this far. I looked up at my father and asked “How did this happen? How did we survive?” Even as a child, at that time, I couldn’t believe it. It made no sense. We had been living like animals on the run, like starving animals on the run. Why were we alive?

Chaim Votchin, who now lives in Haifa, Israel, was born in a village in the vicinity of Rovno. His father died when he was very young, and his mother remarried and moved to Lozisht in 1920, when Chaim was six years old. He was an athletic and strong-willed youngster, one who tended not to follow traditional paths. He was also very good with mathematics and languages, and from a relatively young age used these talents as a professional teacher. He had the right set of inclinations and abilities to be a partisan leader.

One day in 1942, a German soldier ordered Chaim to catch one of his chickens for the soldier’s dinner, and then “… stood there with his chest pushed out and his thumbs in his belt exploding in laughter” as Chaim chased after the chicken in his yard. This humiliation cemented Chaim’s determination to prepare for partisan activity. He knew nothing about fighting or guns or living in the forest, but he began making plans.

Then others came to me, like Gad Rosenblatt, who was a
Beitar
commander, and we began to discuss how we could be partisans, where we could get weapons, how we could live in the forest, how we could learn to be fighters, with what could we carry out our fight, how could we get started without the Germans or Ukrainians finding out, and so on. This was much before August 1942. But we didn’t go into the forest yet.