The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (2 page)

An immigrant from Lutsk that my brother found in New York had given us the name and phone number of a Lutsk acquaintance. The acquaintance (Vladislav was his name) turned out to be an ardent Communist who had not yet come to terms with his demotion from party apparatchik to virtual irrelevance—he ranted on and on about how much better off everyone was in Communist days. As Vladislav put it, he had been a Jew before he was an Internationalist. He knew about Trochenbrod, and with pleasure showed us its approximate location on a large regional map in the one-room Lutsk Communist Party Headquarters. He also introduced us to a woman, Evgenia, who was born in Trochenbrod and as a sixteen-year-old had survived the Holocaust by hiding with her parents in the forest. They eventually were found and protected by partisans. She fell in love with one of the Ukrainian partisans and stayed with him in Lutsk after the war. She told us that a group from the Israeli Trochenbrod organization had set up a monument at the site of Trochenbrod five years earlier. Evgenia asked to come with us on our excursion to Trochenbrod the next day.

The following morning Alex’s Lada carried the four of us another twenty-five miles northeast, first on a paved road, then a dirt road, then on a tractor trail through the forest. In a village called Yaromel, near where we knew Trochenbrod’s mass graves were located, we found an older man who remembered Trochenbrod. His name was Mikhailo. He wore high boots, a heavy black coat, and a Russian-style winter hat. He stood straight but held a cane. His face was lined with age but filled out and handsome, and he seemed robust, like a peasant who had been both well-worn and well-exercised by a life of hard work. Mikhailo remarked that Trochenbrod’s people were Jewish and gentle and trusting, and he remembered well the horrors of the Nazi occupation. He had been waiting over fifty years for someone to ask him about it. I fought back tears that took me by surprise when he said that, and for a few moments I couldn’t speak. Walking was hard for Mikhailo—he limped and kept his balance with the cane—but he insisted on going with us into the forest to show us Trochenbrod’s mass graves. Mikhailo and Evgenia—two who experienced different sides of the Holocaust in Trochenbrod—walked ahead, side by side, chatting in Ukrainian.

A few hours later, after visiting the mass grave site, we found ourselves wading through knee-high grasses looking for the site of Trochenbrod itself. Eventually we saw in the far distance first a black speck barely visible against the tree line, and then clearly the Trochenbrod monument, an upright slab of black marble. We ran toward it whooping, arms spread wide as if to embrace a lost relative. The monument had been set up at the north end of town, at the spot where Trochenbrod’s largest synagogue was sent up in flame by Nazis after they murdered the last of Trochenbrod’s people. Near the monument I noticed a triangle of intersecting trails. That same triangular intersection was prominent on the old Russian map. One of those trails had been Trochenbrod’s only street. I looked down a double row of scraggly trees and bushes, and felt a shiver: this had been Trochenbrod. There had been people working, families eating, children playing—a place full of life here. My father was born and raised here. And this place didn’t slowly come undone, first one family leaving, and then another: it was cut down.

Alex’s Lada was about a mile way, where we had left it as the trail we were driving on began deteriorating into an impassable muddy track. When we got there we found the car hopelessly sunk in mud. Evgenia was tired, so Marvin stayed with her by the car while Alex and I hiked back to Domashiv, the closest village to Trochenbrod, to hunt for a tractor to pull us out. Next to one villager’s house we saw a tractor that still had markings of the now-defunct Soviet collective farm that gave it up. We knocked on the door and were welcomed warmly by the present tractor owner, who readily agreed to give us a hand. As he was bringing up buckets of water from the well in his front yard and pouring them into the radiator of his tractor to prepare it for the task ahead, an old toothless man, his father, came running out of the house waving his cane in the air and screaming, “Amerikanski! Amerikanski!” He declared that Ukraine had the richest soil in the world and would be a great nation today, greater than America, if those stinking Communists hadn’t ruined everything, forced the villagers to have passports so they couldn’t leave the villages, and taken their sons for the army and to work in factories so that now none of them know how to farm. Alex translated, and we smiled and nodded our heads as we backed toward the tractor and hopped on. While the son drove us away, the old man continued his tirade standing in the middle of the village street waving his cane, shrinking into the vanishing point.

We extricated the Lada and started our journey back to Lutsk. By now it was dark. All day I had been captivated by the countryside: gaggles of geese running everywhere in the villages, fields both fallow and flourishing, vast forests, bulrush-bedecked streams weaving back and forth through the low areas, villages and horse wagons and wells and fences that seemed frozen in a long ago time, yellow and green flatlands flowing away to the horizon on one side and ending abruptly at the edge of a forest on another. We were driving slowly along the rough dirt road that led several miles through the forest to the intercity road. No people, no traffic, no lights, no noise except for that made by our Lada. I asked Alex please to stop the car and shut off the engine. We got out and stood for several minutes in awed silence. I looked up and saw a very deep and dark blue sky with billions of shimmering stars and sparkling swirls like no sky I had ever seen before. Tears of happiness began to well up at the wonder of this sight, and I realized that I was looking at the same sky my father had gazed at night after night for the first twenty years of his life.

I was hooked. I had to know more. I had to know more about Trochenbrod. I had to know more about the villages in the area. I had to know more about the land here. I had to know more about the forests. I had to know what life was like in Trochenbrod. Over the next twelve years I returned again and again, usually helped by Alex, and also by Ivan Podziubanchuk, an inquisitive and enterprising farmer in Domashiv who became a good friend. On one trip I studied records in the State Archives in Lutsk; on another I walked the length of Trochenbrod’s street just to feel its reach and also to look in the ground for artifacts; on another I visited villages in the region and collected firsthand Ukrainian and Polish memories of Trochenbrod; on another I explored partisan history in the area. On one trip I sneaked onto a Ukrainian air force base, lubricating the way with bottles of bourbon I had brought with me from home, and was surprised to see jet fighters bunkered along the runway as we took off in a tiny canvas airplane I had hired because I had to see from above how the clearing that Trochenbrod had occupied was set among the surrounding forests.

I also collected documents related to Trochenbrod—books, memoirs, maps, college theses, government documents, and photographs. Ivan began uncovering Trochenbrod artifacts in his village and giving them to me on my visits. Eventually, realizing that the few remaining native Trochenbroders were now very old, I hurried around the United States, Brazil, Poland, Ukraine, and Israel videotaping people who had spent their early years in Trochenbrod and could describe what life there was like.

I began my research as a sort of family project, finding out about the particular Jewish
shtetl
¹
that my father came from; I didn’t know that my father’s home town had historical significance. It wasn’t a village as I had first thought, but a town, a bustling free-standing commercial center of over 5,000 people that grew out of an isolated farming village set up by Jews in the early 1800s. It existed for about 130 years. Trochenbrod was unique in history as a full-fledged “official” town situated in the Gentile world but built, populated, and self-governed entirely by Jews, that thrived as a Jewish town until its destruction in World War II.

To be sure, Trochenbrod had those
shtetl
qualities captured with warmth and appreciation by Jewish artists the likes of Sholom Aleichem and Marc Chagall. But because Trochenbrod was relatively isolated, and because the people in Trochenbrod were farmers as well as shopkeepers and tradesmen, those
shtetl
qualities were undiluted, magnified, and connected with the outdoors and a farming way of life unknown in other
shtetls
. Trochenbrod’s isolation and total Jewishness gave Trochenbroders a feeling that they were largely in control of their own destiny as a town, away from the shifting laws of prevailing governments. It brought about a relaxed Jewish atmosphere where the Sabbath, Jewish holidays, and weddings were celebrated not just in the town but by the town; it opened space for Jewish entrepreneurial freedom and creativity to an uncommon degree; and it led to a powerful sense not only of family but of community, a community somewhat insulated from what was around it, where everyone knew everyone else and shared their lives, their moral values, their religious values, and their traditions. Trochenbrod’s story adds a new dimension to the history of Eastern Europe and Eastern European Jewish life.

When I finally decided to write a book, and gathered together all my notes, taped interviews, historical documents, maps, books, artifacts, and other materials, I was surprised by an outpouring from many families who heard about my project and wanted to help preserve and promulgate Trochenbrod’s story. They offered me family photographs, some going back to the 1800s. They also offered artifacts for me to photograph, and informal memoirs in which forebears long gone described their lives in Trochenbrod.

I’ve been deeply gratified and grateful to the many people from six countries who contributed material and gladly participated in taped interviews. They made it possible for me to walk Trochenbrod’s vanished street and see in my mind’s eye the hustle and bustle of people buying and selling and arguing and greeting each other, while children run and play, secure as if among family wherever they were in the town. I could hear solemn melodies from the synagogues and rousing songs from Zionist youth meetings, and the clatter of horse wagons and the calls of peddlers from the villages advertising the goods in their wagons that awaited their Trochenbrod customers. What a gift from all the people who wanted to help me bring Trochenbrod back to life, and what a gift across the decades from that lost town in Ukraine that was Trochenbrod.

The main text of this book comprises four chapters covering successive periods in Trochenbrod’s history. Readers who want a clear sense of the geographical relationships among places mentioned in the text may want to scan the maps located on pages x, xi, 5, 57, 77, and 83 before reading. Chapter 4 is followed by an epilogue describing what happened to Trochenbrod and its descendants to this day. Photographs and images of many key figures and locations in Trochenbrod’s history are featured in the central photo insert.

I draw heavily on firsthand accounts in the text, but some readers may enjoy reading still more such accounts, so I included them in a section at the end called “Witnesses Remember.” These accounts will add richness to a reader’s sense of what life was like in Trochenbrod and the surrounding villages.

I’ve italicized Yiddish or Hebrew terms in the text. If they are not translated in the text, then the first time they appear they are translated in footnotes. They also appear in the glossary, after the “Witnesses Remember” section, where some translated terms are accompanied by pronunciation help and fuller explanations.

Following the glossary is a chronology that provides the dates for milestones in the history of Trochenbrod and also some contemporary world events for context. After that is a section that lists all the print documents I consulted and tells how those documents came into my hands. It also lists the film, photographic, interview, and other sources that informed my presentation of Trochenbrod’s story. Last is the acknowledgments section, in which I list all the people who helped me carry out research and prepare the manuscript for this book, noting the particular help each person provided. The list is organized geographically.

Because of fluid territorial control and the presence of large numbers of Polish, German, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish speakers in that part of the world, often called the “Borderlands,” any place name can have many variations. To keep things simple I’ve chosen one name to use in the text for each place, and stuck with it. Usually I use the name that was common in Trochenbrod during the interwar period.

1
. The Jewish section of an East European town, which functioned almost like a separate Jewish village. Literally “townlet.”

Chapter One

THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS

H
e lay crumpled in the street, dead, my grandfather. He had been among the determined few who brought comfort and food to families suffering in the epidemic. Soon enough he contracted the disease himself.

As World War I slowly began moving towards its conclusion, a typhus epidemic arrived in Trochenbrod. People had been weakened by years of hardship and suffering brought by the war, and now they were succumbing to the epidemic. The danger of infection kept almost everyone from visiting the miserable households of the sick. My grandfather, Rabbi Moshe David Beider, loved Trochenbrod’s children. He brought treats to them in the stricken households, played with them, and read to them with an air of normalcy that gave them hope.

Trochenbrod’s street was a broad, straight, dirt path running north and south, nearly two miles long. It was lined on both sides with houses, shops, workshops, and synagogues. Behind each house the family’s farm fields stretched back about half a mile to forests on the east and west sides. On wet fall evenings like the one when my grandfather died, Trochenbrod smelled of mud and manure and hay and leather, of potatoes cooking and smoke from woodstoves and pine from the forest. When Rabbi Beider collapsed, an early light snow had begun to fall, a snow that dusted the houses and the people trudging home, and reflected their outlines in the dim light of candle lanterns hanging from trees that lined the street. It was dusk. Except for the sound of a mother calling her child to dinner and the faint murmurs of evening prayer in the synagogues, Trochenbrod was quiet.