The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (15 page)

We formed a committee and handed out jobs: acquire weapons; convince Trochenbrod young men to join us; make a plan to move Trochenbrod people to the forest; make contact with Russian soldiers who were separated from their units during the big retreat of the Russian army; figure out the best way to get food in the forest; try to contact the Ukrainian Communists. It’s very important to find the Ukrainian Communists because they were probably in contact with the Red Army and maybe they get supplies from them; and also we heard their leader is operating in the Radziwill forest and maybe he could tell us how to get weapons.

The name of the Ukrainian Communist partisan leader was Alexander Felyuk. We knew he was from the village of Klubochin a few kilometers through the forest from Trochenbrod. We talked to his mother there, and then met him in the Radziwill Forest. Radziwill had armed forest rangers to protect his property. So Felyuk said, “If you’re brave, let’s go take the guns from those forest rangers.” Alexander Felyuk worked with us for several months and made us into partisans. He was a wonderful man. He died recently, but we stayed in touch with him all these years; we sent him money and packages.

One day one of our boys found a pistol in the Ignatovka cemetery. It was a new pistol, with bullets—it had been left behind when the Soviet soldiers ran away. With this pistol we began to learn how to use guns, and with this pistol we went to a forest ranger, waited until he had to come down from his tower, and then took his rifle.

With one rifle we went into the forest and began to arm ourselves; we got another one and then another one and then another one. We got more rifles and ammunition and even grenades. We became a big enough group of armed partisans. I was the commander and Gad Rosenblatt was my second-in-command. Eventually, including the six Soviet saboteurs we met, we had thirty people.

And so we began to operate. For example, a Jew came to us; he said that a certain Ukrainian found a Jew and turned him over to the Germans. This Ukrainian was called Gapon. Immediately four of us went to Gapon’s village and we took him to the forest and shot him.

Another operation: we heard that the Germans arranged to send the animals that were left from Trochenbrod to Germany. We found the herd, ready for transfer to the train station, and we went in and set them free and scattered them all.

Another operation: A very terrible Schutsman who had done horrible things to Jews lived in a small village called Yaromel near Trochenbrod, a Ukrainian village, with mostly straw-covered houses. We pounded on his window: “We are Schutsmen. We have an important message for you. Glory to Ukraine. Open up.” The man came and we drank with him. He bragged about all the Jews he killed—this included women and children—and others he gave to the Nazis. Then we showed who we were. His wife screamed and we took him away in a horse wagon that we hired from a Polish man who drove it. We took him to the forest and shot him. The Polish man was happy to be a part of the operation; he was a good man and he had a good time. Revenge felt sweet, revenge for the blood of all the children, women, and men that the Schutsman had murdered.

That’s how we started. We didn’t know anything about how to fight battles yet, so we started with operations like that.

The Nazis were able to fool so many people. Of course, the nationalist Ukrainians were the biggest fools. They thought they should help the Nazis get rid of the Jewish people and then the Polish people. So they did the work of the Germans with happiness, and when the Soviets drove out the Germans they treated these Ukrainian nationalists as enemies. What is funny, the Nazis saw the Ukrainians as sub-human, good for nothing more than slaves. If the Germans won the war they would take the Ukrainians off the land and shoot them or kill them in slave labor camps.

The Jews also were fooled a lot. Many of them believed the Germans would not kill them even though they saw death in front of them. Once we were planning to attack Trochenbrod and kill the Germans and Schutsmen. We planned to throw grenades into the houses where the Germans and Schutsmen lived, then open fire and kill anybody left. Another group would set fires in different places, burning anything the Germans wanted to have. We sent word to the ghetto to all the Jews saying to sneak away to the forest. Soon one of the Jews from the ghetto showed up and said he was sent to beg that we do nothing. The Jews would not leave. They believed the German promises that there would be no more killings, so they did not want to leave Trochenbrod. We begged them, but they would not listen. Those Jews, they saved the lives of the Germans and Schutsmen. Soon they were murdered by them.

Some Trochenbrod Jews escaped to the forest and stayed there. They did their best in that hard situation. But they suffered. They dug their shelters deep into the ground in hidden parts of the forest. They camouflaged their shelters with loose dirt, tree limbs and leaves. Some shelters they actually built right in the swamps. We helped the families as much as we could. After every raid we brought them food, clothing, and boots. Also we often visited and instructed them how to live better in the forest. That’s how far we had come in a month or two—now we were teaching other people how to live in the forest!

In October 1942 one of our partisans, Yosef, came back from a forest nearby after he visited Jews hiding there. On the way to our camp he stumbled on a band of Soviet paratroopers that the Red Army parachuted in to blow up Nazi trains. He really stumbled on them. They were hiding in the bushes and he almost tripped on them. Imagine the tension there was until they figured out how much they could talk together. Yosef told them he would bring the leaders of his partisan unit. They were waiting only a kilometer or two away. We went to meet them.

Their two leaders came toward us. One was a short older man, about forty years old. The other one had light hair and was about twenty-five. They had red stars on their hats and brand-new shiny automatic rifles. When just a few steps separated between us we stopped and for a while we just stared at each other, and then we started to talk. They explained that they were Soviet saboteurs sent to blow up German trains. I told them, “We are a small group, but we are well-organized and we’ll be honored to help you destroy the fascists the best we can.” The older man took out a cigarette pack from his pocket and offered us a smoke. We told them about our activities, about our hopes, about our men. They asked us to help them with their sabotage, and we agreed. They began to teach a few of us how to blow up trains, and then some of us went with them on missions to blow up trains. And they agreed to fight together with us when we attacked Trochenbrod.

Fall had started. The storks had migrated, and lots of other birds were flying above us to their winter places. The paratroopers and our men who went to sabotage the railroad were successful. They derailed trains almost every night. How things changed! Just a short time ago the Germans were like gods, and now every night they were terrified, at least on the trains. Then the Germans made local villagers help guard the tracks. Each guard had a piece of track that he walked up and down, and a whistle to blow in case they saw something suspicious. A German detachment stood in the train station, ready to move if there was an alert. This made our jobs more difficult but not impossible. We crawled toward the rails, waited for the guard to walk in the other direction, then crawled the last one or two hundred meters, put the explosives where they should go, and crawled away. When a train passed over we exploded the charge.

Alex went away two weeks ago to try to make contact with a group of partisans that we heard rumors about in the forests much further north. Before he came back to us he stopped at his village, Klubochin, where his mother and family were. He learned that the Germans entered the village and rounded up a large group of men, women, and children. They took them to a pit in the forest and murdered them all, including Alex’s mother, brother, and little daughter. This was Nazi payment for twenty people from Klubochin, including Alex, who were partisans. They were Communists. The other nineteen partisans were in Klubochin when the Germans came, so they were murdered.

In November we had a big battle with German soldiers. We fought them off. That’s how far we had come in two or three months—now we were fighting German detachments and winning! The Germans were surprised that there was an organized group with weapons, and we knew they decided they had to wipe us out. They would come again soon, and this time maybe they would bring Ukrainian militia. What could we do? Should we stay and try to outsmart them? It had begun to snow, and that meant when we went from one of our shelters or storage caves to another one we would leave a trail and “ask” for attack. We also had a problem that we didn’t have enough ammunition. Rifles we had, but not enough ammunition. We saw that we couldn’t keep going like this. So we decided to leave the Trochenbrod area.

Alex said we should go to the Pripyat swamps in the north, in Byelorussia. Because of what he learned on his travels he was sure there we would find large partisan camps which we could join, and they were receiving Soviet support and Soviet weapons. Our Russian paratroopers did not want to go, they wanted to stay and continue their sabotage work. Although it was Alex’s idea to go north, he decided to stay in the Klubochin area, so he went with Medvedev’s partisan detachment. This Soviet detachment was based at Lopaten, not far from Klubochin and Trochenbrod. Their main activity was to sabotage high-level German officers and operations in Rovno, which the Germans used as their central administration center.

As we moved north we came across another group of Jewish partisans from Kolki who were also looking for a larger Soviet partisan detachment. We continued north together, and found village after village and town after town where the Jews there were murdered and their possessions were stolen or destroyed. Although I taught Jewish studies, in my heart I was not really a very religious man. But when I saw what happened to the people in Trochenbrod and when I saw what happened in all those other villages and towns and when I heard about what happened in the cities I knew that never in my life again could I even think about a God who saw and heard all this but just sat there watching.

In Byelorussia we found scouts from a Soviet partisan group, and they took us to the base camp of Kovpak’s partisan detachment. This detachment was commanded by General Mayov Kovpak, a sixty-year-old fighter from World War I where he fought against the Germans and the White Army. We talked with Kovpak and agreed to become part of his group; we would be a unit of Kovpak’s Third Battalion. That night in December 1942, our Jewish partisan group, Trochenbrod’s partisan unit, was no more.

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.”