The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (6 page)

Trochenbrod immigrants went to the United States and settled in larger cities like New York; Boston; Baltimore; Cleveland; Pittsburgh; Detroit; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Columbus; and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In South America, some went to Argentina and some to Brazil, but also to Venezuela and Cuba. In Argentina, the German Jew Baron de Hirsch established a Jewish colony called Rivera not far from Buenos Aires, to which he sent many Russian Jews, including a number of Trochenbrod families, for a better life. Some Trochenbrod immigrants went first to places in South America, to where their travel was paid by sponsors or where they had relatives, and after a period moved to the United States.

In 1910, a rabbi born Moshe David Plesser, who after a child or two had changed his name to Moshe David Pearlmutter to help his sons evade conscription, accepted a position as the Berezner Rabbi in Trochenbrod. He came from the town of Verba, about forty-five miles south of Trochenbrod, where his father was a rabbi and scholar descended from a long line of rabbis well-known in the Volyn region. A follower of the Berezner Hasidic sect, Moshe David jumped at the chance to relocate to the town that was now known among Volyn Jews as a place where, incredibly, being a Jew meant being what everyone else was. The Berezner synagogue was located toward the southern end of Trochenbrod on the west side of the street, and Rabbi Moshe David Pearlmutter moved into the house next door with his wife Bella and their eight children. In 1912 Bella gave birth to their ninth and last child, a son they named YomTov—holiday, a day of happiness. In order to have this child, too, recorded as a first-born ineligible for conscription, Moshe David, my grandfather, again changed the family name, this time to Beider.

In an article written in 1945 in Palestine by an immigrant from Trochenbrod, Moshe David Beider is remembered as the Chief Rabbi of Trochenbrod, though there was no such formal title, highly regarded by the townspeople. He was “a great scholar and very educated in matters of the wider world,” and was an ardent Zionist. He was known as a very personable man who was attentive to the needs of the people of Trochenbrod and had a special affection for its children.

World War I brought devastation and hardship to Trochenbrod, as it did to much of Europe. As the front between the Habsburg Austrian troops and Russian troops shifted back and forth through the area around Trochenbrod there was intense fighting and widespread destruction. The glass factory and several other small factories were destroyed, livestock were confiscated, homes and shops were looted, and remittances stopped arriving from relatives who had emigrated abroad. The economy of Trochenbrod was decimated; the people were terrorized and brutalized.

In late 1915, Habsburg Austrian troops pushed out the Russians, under whom Cossacks had been allowed to ransack Trochenbrod, pillaging, raping, and murdering. When the Austrians occupied Trochenbrod they at first requisitioned all food to feed their troops, returning only scraps to the townspeople, and they imposed forced labor, requiring everyone to cook or wash or sew or make leather goods or tend horses or in some other way support the army, even on the Sabbath. During the nine months of Austrian occupation Rabbi Beider continued his teaching programs for the children in order to give them structure and routine and purpose as best he could. At the same time he cultivated a good relationship with the Austrian commandant, with whom he was able to converse in German and discuss world events. He convinced the commandant that productivity would increase if he allowed the people of Trochenbrod to observe the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, have a more reasonable workload at other times, and improve their nutrition. As a result of Rabbi Beider’s diplomacy and the relative civility of the Austrian troops, the Jews of Trochenbrod considered that they had been treated better under the “Germans” than the Russians. The memory of this later served them poorly during World War II.

As the war wound down and Trochenbrod began the long process of recovering and rebuilding, the town was left in the hands of the Russians. In 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the typhus epidemic rippling through Eastern Europe struck Trochenbrod. After suffering years of hardship during the war, the people of Trochenbrod yielded easily to the disease and were strained to their limits to care for their ill family members. Terror and despair were in everyone’s eyes. Anguished parents looked on helplessly as rashes spread over their children’s skin, they began violently coughing and vomiting and crying out in agony, and finally coughed up blood and surrendered their exhausted bodies. Authorities boarded up the homes of families where typhus struck, believing that would help check the disease. Rabbi Moshe David Beider, too, was struck by the infection. On a damp fall night, as an early light snow fell and he was stumbling home from the house of an ailing family, my grandfather collapsed in the street and died.

1
. More precisely, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

2
. There were some rare exceptions, where Jews farmed land they had purchased in the name of a non-Jewish collaborator. Jews generally had not been farmers for nearly two thousand years. The explanations scholars give for this include government prohibitions on Jews owning land, government or local cultural occupational restrictions, the higher return to Jewish literacy investment that could be obtained from urban trades and professions than from farming, and conflict between Jewish religious practice and the demands of agriculture.

3
. Also known as “Volhyn” and “Volhynia.”

4
. Some of these Mennonite families immigrated to the United States in 1874.

5
. The few remnants of Jewish farming colonies that still operated in this area after the Soviet Union was created were absorbed into Soviet collective farms and not heard from again. I found no record of any operating in what became eastern Poland between the wars.

6
. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, in response to pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, the German-French philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch and his Jewish Colonization Association supported transportation of Jews from Russia to new Jewish agricultural settlements they established in Argentina, Canada, and elsewhere in North and South America (also in Palestine). On the whole, these settlements did not survive very long; most of the immigrants or their children moved to urban centers. In one case, however, a settlement named Rivera, in Argentina, does survive today—not as a Jewish town, but as a multi-ethnic town substantially smaller than Trochenbrod was.

7
. Hasidic Judaism, or Hasidism, is a subset of Orthodox Judaism that originated in the mid-1700s in a town just southeast of Volyn province. Hasidism emphasized spirituality and joy as key elements of Judaism, in contrast with the typical emphasis at that time on religious scholarship. Different Hasidic sects organized around specific rabbinic leaders, called Rebbes. Hasidic men usually wore dark kaftans, white shirts, and dark fedoras or large round fur hats. Hasidism gradually became a worldwide subset of Orthodox Judaism, but by the early 1800s it was already the rule among Jews in Volyn and neighboring provinces.

8
. Ritual slaughterer for kosher meat.

9
. “Peace upon you,” a traditional Jewish greeting.

10
. A kaftan worn for Sabbath and holiday services.

11
. Tassels on the corners of prayer shawls.

12
. A prayer sanctifying the Sabbath.

13
. Slow-cooked stew, a Sabbath specialty.

14
. Baked dish of mixed ingredients.

15
. Coins given to children during the Hanukah holiday.

16
. Spinning top used for Hanukah games.

17
. Potato pancakes, a traditional Hanukah dish.

18
. Festival of Lots, a happy holiday that falls about a month before Passover.

Chapter Two

BETWEEN THE WARS

T
he devastation of World War I put an abrupt end to the rise of Trochenbrod’s star, its rapidly diversifying businesses and growing prosperity, its increasing weight as the regional center of economic gravity.

Shaindeleh Gluz was born in Trochenbrod in 1913, but in the informal memoir she wrote in 2002 she remembered life there during the war years vividly:

My paternal forefathers were glass blowers. When the glass factory was gone my grandfather became the mayor, tax collector and postmaster of Trochenbrod. He also had a butcher business. My father Zrulik and his brother Itzak ran it.

Grandma and some of her family left for America in 1914, just as I was starting to crawl. There was a lot of unrest in the world. There were rumors of war, and suddenly it happened; war was declared. All avenues of communication ceased. World War I was for real, it was on. There was no way to escape … no more elaborate plans to migrate. Immigration was stopped, there was no mail, no communication … only pain and suffering.

The invading army confiscated money, jewels, silver and all valuables from the town’s people. When the war was finally over, the fighting ceased in our town. All the plundering and killing was over. The young girls came out of hiding, no more rapes, no more deaths of the innocent. The commanding officers and their entourage withdrew from Trochenbrod. My grandfather’s home had been stripped of all furnishings that had been in the family for generations, but we were alive.

The war had taken its toll on my parents, especially my mother. She was very sick. She was always in bed. Things inside of our house weren’t clean and didn’t shine any more. It didn’t smell sweet and good. The aroma of cooking was also gone. Our clothes were torn and neglected. There was little food in the house. Often we were hungry. Mother was too weak to improvise any meals with the little bits of scraps that we had. Most of the time my little brother Yossel and I stayed in bed with Mother to keep warm, but we were so hungry.

Once in a while, while in bed with Mother, Yossel and I would play a game, “Lets Pretend,” with a large collection of well-worn colorful picture post-cards. The cards were of the Statue of Liberty and the teeming Lower East Side of New York. Mother’s family sent the cards to us when they settled in America. From these pictures, Mother would weave wonderful tales of freedom, peace, happiness and plenty.

Shortly after Mother passed away, many more sad happenings began. My little brother Yossel and my father became very ill. Yossel and I shared a tiny bed. One morning my little brother’s body was cold and stiff. His little life was snuffed out before he had a chance to live. He died of smallpox. I suppose that Yossel’s death really caused father’s complete breakdown, healthwise, and his death.

There came a time when we really didn’t have a piece of bread to eat. We foraged in the woods for berries and sour grass. Our bellies became swollen. We found ourselves too weak from hunger, too sick with festering body sores and lice to give a care anymore. We just couldn’t go on anymore. Make no mistake; we were not alone in this situation. All of Trochenbrod was suffering. We became like animals; we hunted for scraps of food; like animals we fought cunningly to survive.

Just when the struggle became too much to bear, when we were ready to succumb to the unknown, fate intervened and help came. One day Trochenbrod was seething with excitement. Since the war was finally over, the ban on traveling had been lifted. The first person to arrive was a rich American. He had been commissioned by concerned relatives in America to go to our town and seek out their relatives. With him he brought letters and money for some of the people. He was also asked to help some of the townspeople to make their way to America. My brother and I reached the center of town just in time to hear the American call our names.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire, also known as the Habsburg Empire, finally collapsed in 1918. But the Treaty of Versailles signed at the end of World War I did not concretely define the border between the reconstituted Poland and the newly constituted Soviet Union. Immediately, Poland and the Soviet Union took up arms over control of the borderlands area that included Trochenbrod. Again the front moved back and forth through the area. Again Trochenbrod was ravaged. When the Polish were the occupying force they expressed their loathing of Jews in the form of beatings, forced labor, looting, raping, and confiscation of food. When the Soviets were the occupying force they preferred to confiscate property from wealthier people, take over businesses, and hunt for imagined Polish spies. The fighting in this secondary war finally ended in 1920, and in 1921 the Treaty of Riga that divided the borderlands between Poland and Soviet Russia was signed. This is when Shaindeleh Gluz heard her name called in the center of Trochenbrod, and then made her way to the United States. Trochenbrod was now in Poland.

– –

For this period of Trochenbrod’s history there is a great deal of source material—though never enough, and some of it contradictory. I found good maps; hand-written Sofiyovka civic records; directories that included Trochenbrod survey information and descriptions; memoirs; and references to Trochenbrod, usually brief references, in several books. Sources like these made it possible for me to draw the physical, commercial, and human outlines of Trochenbrod in the interwar years, but not the content within those outlines. What did the street look like? How did the people dress? How did the ways Trochenbroders made their living affect community life? What were the relations like between rich and poor? How did the Jewishness of the place express itself? What did the kids do in the summer? In short, what was the feel of the interwar Trochenbrod, this “last” Trochenbrod? What was it like to live there?

I was lucky to fall under Trochenbrod’s spell at a time when a few dozen people who knew Trochenbrod firsthand were still alive. I talked with people born there from 1912 through 1932, and who left as late as 1942. I was able to hear a different perspective, how Trochenbrod and Trochenbroders appeared to Ukrainians and Poles living in other places in the area, from people who still live there and remember well their childhood visits to Trochenbrod. Personal recollections, as unreliable as any one of them might be, collectively made it possible to fill the outlines with the feel of Trochenbrod, with a sense of what was it like to live there. My father left Trochenbrod in 1932; I was capturing things he would have told me.