The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (19 page)

Our biggest entertainment was going into the forest to pick things. We used to go Saturdays, mostly … they had there blueberries, and they had cranberries in the woods. But God help you if the guard, Radziwill’s forest guard in a uniform, comes. He’d hit you with his big stick; we had a big pot tied on the waist to pick and throw berries in it, and you had to go shhhh, so he wouldn’t hear that we’re there, and sometimes they chased us out. But, you could get a ticket! You paid, like, five zlotys, and you were allowed to pick berries. But who had five zlotys to give them?

In the fall was like here, it was chilly, and leaves were falling, the wind was blowing, and people were getting ready for the winter.

The winter was miserable. There was a lot of snow in the winter. I remember when I was laying in bed I was able to write on the wall because it was snow, it was frozen on the wall, but you could write with your finger.

How we prepared for the winter, you know what they used to do? They used to dig a hole in the ground sometimes, and put in potatoes, and fill it with straw … we had to prepare for our animals; we had a cow, people had horses. You had to have hay, you put it in a little building in back. Our cow stayed in the back part of our house. Because of that, I don’t like milk … it wasn’t very clean. Some people had root cellars. We had that in our house. You’d open up a door in the floor of the house to get to the cellar. We’d have to get the hay in, and put it over the rafters.

I would say it was like, like a whole Jewish town. It was like the forest had wrapped its arms around the town. And I always used to say it had to be a street torn away from some city, and then landed there. Because it was one street, but nothing around it, behind it; just one street all of a sudden, and you call it a town. So I used to say that this street must have been blown away from some city and landed there.

It didn’t have just little shops. It had some pretty nice stores. Nice dry goods stores, clothes, material, two shoe stores, butcher shops, grocery stores a few of them, a dairy—we would give them milk from our cow, and they made butter and cheese; they sold butter in Lutsk once a week. There were tanneries that made leather from the raw skins. Avrum Bass opened up a real bakery shop in town. They were pretty well off, they were doing OK.

There were a few people that were rich, and I’ll tell you why. There was a family by the name Antwarg, and they lived in a very nice big home, that I never was there, I never saw inside it. It had a big fence around it. They had a very beautiful daughter that was very well known in town, and they had money because … some of the families, the husband would go to America, make a little money—some of them never came back to their wives, they found different women in America—and some of them came back with a few dollars. But after a few years, five years, the dollars were gone.

My older sister married a fellow like this. He had no profession, and if he had a profession what would he do with it there in Trochenbrod? She was a poor girl, my mother had six girls, and her husband died when I was eighteen months old. I was born nine years after the last bunch. So he died and left her with lots of kids, but some of them, their husbands came to America, and they made a few dollars, and my sister married one of the sons whose father came back. He was dressed nicely, with a collar and a tie …

I went to Lutsk many many times: not so much to buy, no—I couldn’t afford something like that, it was out of the question. I went to Lutsk a lot when I was trying to get to America; the administrative offices were there. And I had very good friends there, elderly people, through marriage we were related. So I was in Lutsk a lot; I knew the city very well, and made a lot of friends there.

We had our own theater in Trochenbrod; I was in many plays in Yiddish. We had plays around all the holidays. In the Polish school we also had plays, but they were in Polish. I remember Nachman Rotenberg was the wolf when I was Little Red Riding Hood. Tuvia was also one of my friends.

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I
DA
L
ISS

Ida’s story has an unusual twist. She was born in Chicago in 1912 to parents who had immigrated separately from Trochenbrod, and then met and married in the United States. Her father was from the Gilden family and her mother from the Kerman family. They went back to Trochenbrod in 1912 to visit their families and show off their nearly one-year-old child. They stayed on a bit, then were caught there by World War I, and then stayed longer. Ida eventually returned to the United States. with her mother in 1928, when she was sixteen years old. She is the only person to have grown up in Trochenbrod as a U.S. citizen. Ida now lives in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. She says that these days she spends more time in Trochenbrod than anywhere else—she sees it in her dreams most nights and remembers it clearly and with affection in her daydreams.

If I was able to go to Trochenbrod now, I’d point out to you where I lived. I can just see my house where I lived. And where my uncles lived: one uncle lived on one side of us and one lived on the other side. One uncle had a granddaughter named Baske. And Baske had a love affair with a Blitzstein; I don’t know if they ever got married or not. But every Saturday he used to come there for lunch; and I used to see, she put powder on, and lipstick, and made herself look beautiful. She was a gorgeous girl, but she used to do all that stuff, and I knew he was coming.

The main street was nothing but a long road of dirt. It wasn’t bricks, or wood, or anything, nothing but mud. And on each side of the street was like a ditch where the soldiers used to hide in there. And they had a board over that; if you walked you walked on the board, not a sidewalk, there was no sidewalk. And in the middle was enough for a horse and wagon to go through; there was no cars, only horse-and-wagons—in the mud.

We lived there in a white stucco house. That was my grandmother’s house. Baba Rivke, it was her house; we lived in her house, a white stucco house. Everybody had a backyard. It was as big as like, maybe 25 by 125. A big-size lot; everybody had a lot that big. And we used to grow potatoes, and vegetables, and everything they could grow in the backyard.

We lived in the middle of Trochenbrod. One side was north Trochenbrod and one side was south Trochenbrod, and we were like in the middle of Trochenbrod. If I was there, I could walk right up to the house and show you which house I lived in.

When I go to sleep, what do you think I do? I don’t watch television, I can’t see it, I don’t even turn it on. So what do you think I do? I dream about things from my life, like Trochenbrod. I can see, I can see … I can see Trochenbrod right in front of me.

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R
YSZARD
L
UBINSKI

Ryszard Lubinski is the son of Trochenbrod’s Polish postmistress. This was a government job that Jews were not permitted to have. Ryszard’s mother took the job because she needed work and because she grew up in a western Polish town with many Jews, knew their ways, and was comfortable among them. After arriving in Trochenbrod she fell in love with the forest ranger of the Lopaten Forest, where during the war Medvedev’s partisan detachment would be based, and married him. The couple separated while Ryszard’s mother was pregnant. His mother was joined by her sister to help run the post office, and she helped also with Ryszard’s birth in 1929. Ryszard grew to age twelve in Trochenbrod, among its Jewish families, Jewish children, Jewish food, Jewish customs, and Jewish languages. Today Ryszard lives in Radom, Poland.

I went to the Polish public school in Trochenbrod together with my Jewish friends. I was living in Sofiyovka until winter 1942, until the
Shoah
¹
there took everything. I was twelve years old when we left.

Toward the end of the 1930s, long after my mother and father were separated, my mother was a young, attractive, well-educated woman about thirty-five years old. She was looking for friends of her general age and type, and in Trochenbrod that meant Jewish girls. Jewish girls from Sofiyovka, or later, from elsewhere. When the Russians reorganized the educational system to ten grades instead of seven as it was under the Polish government, they needed more teachers for more classes, so many Jewish teachers arrived from other places to work in the Sofiyovka school. These people were a society for my mother because they were a similar age and education. Many of these teachers lived in our house because when the Russians came they shut down the post office and we had extra space in the house.

Once a rich Russian named Lenko discovered mineral waters at Zuraviche, which was not too far north from Sofiyovka. A small hotel was built there for people who would come for the waters. I heard that later the Soviets organized it into a big resort. There were people from Sofiyovka who worked in that place, at the baths. Because my mother was the head of the post office, she was often invited to big events there, together with the police chief, as a Polish official person. My aunt, my mother’s sister, worked there after the post office was closed. She would steal food from there, and that’s how we ate in those days.

Chaim Veitzblum was one of the teachers that lived in our house, with his wife. He had run away from Olyka. He was a very talented teacher: he could sing, he played an instrument, he painted, and he taught mathematics. My mother and another person created false documents for him, so he became Albin Ostrovsky. A year later, after we left Sofiyovka, he visited us in a village where we stayed for a time. He was driving a farm wagon, and he had a big mustache, and he had changed his character, and he looked and acted just like a rural peasant. The trick saved his life. I wonder if he’s still alive somewhere.

In 1943 the Germans found a way to protect their backs by telling Ukrainians to attack and destroy Polish people in the area around Sofiyovka, because the Polish people living there saw themselves as Polish citizens generally against the Nazis. Little Polish villages spread around the area suffered from armed Ukrainian groups, who destroyed those settlements completely—they burned the houses and killed the people. So Polish people decided to build fort areas that they could defend from the Ukrainians. The fort areas were built from Polish villages, and then people from other villages came inside them. The big number of Polish people in these fort areas could defend themselves from the Ukrainians.

There was a Polish village on the way to Lutsk, Przebradze, which was made into the first fort area. There were about eight hundred people in that village before, and at the end, after it was a fort area, about twenty-five thousand Polish people were there. After all the killing in Sofiyovka some scouts from Przebradze found several Jewish families hiding in the Radziwill forest. They took them and some others who were hiding in a marshy area of the forest back with them to Przebradze. I know one of them was the tailor from Trochenbrod and his family. All these Jews were protected in Przebradze until the Germans left.

Generally, Jews didn’t drink alcohol much. Of course, in all of Sofiyovka and Ignatovka I’m sure there were a few who got drunk from time to time—for example I remember the barber liked to drink a good bit—but generally you didn’t see drunk people on the street. Even on Jewish holidays … and this was unusual because on Christian holidays, especially Ukrainian holidays, everyone would be drunk—they’d drink a lot of vodka and be drunk in the street. And the Jews, maybe they drank on their holidays, but you never saw them drunk.

There were very few other Polish people in sofiyovka. Those who were there were good people—not influenced by any ideology or philosophy or anti-Jewish politics. These people, like the constable, had decided to live among Jews, so they lived among Jews. Everyone had good relations with Jews, but I was the only non-Jewish child, the only one who ran around with other children, with the Jewish children.

Even though I was like one of them, things looked different to me than the other children in Sofiyovka. For example, when Christmas came around we’d have a Christmas tree, and we’d invite all the kids to our house to see it because they had no other opportunity to see a thing like that, to touch it, to smell it. It was a real attraction for a lot of them. To them, I was something different; but to me, they were the way normal children were.

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P
ANAS
M
UDRAK

Panas was born in the village of Domashiv, close to Trochenbrod, in 1926 and lives there with his family today.

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I went to Sofiyovka with my father to sell and buy things. Then, during the war, after the killing, of course I had to go there because at least one man from each household had to work five days in that place, removing things from the buildings and dismantling the buildings, and I went with my father.

Before the war there was one street; they were paving the street. There were a lot of trades, a lot of shops, so people could buy anything. There was one very rich guy, Shwartz, who made leather for making boots, shoes, clothes.

I remember the post office, a factory that made dairy products like butter, and a factory that made leather. They would take their products to special markets on different days of the week for different kinds of products. Most people in Sofiyovka were buying and selling things—it was rare for someone to have fields and be working on the soil and making money from it—so they had to go to Olyka and the other places because it was their business.

In 1942, I remember when the Germans came, and they started killing the people near Yaromel. I was a small kid and it was far, and my parents were afraid for our lives. The Jews had to wear a special yellow circle on the front and back of their clothes so that they could be easily identified. People called them “Yud.”

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V
IRA
S
HULIAK

Vira was born in 1928. Her parents died when she was very young, and she was raised by her grandparents. Her grandfather was a forest ranger, and she spent her first years living in a house in the forest. Later they moved to Yosefin, and then, with a Ukrainian uncle married to a Polish woman, she moved to Przebradze, a Polish village. The Soviets changed the name of the village to Gayove, and Vira lives there still.