The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (8 page)

There was also a slaughterhouse and a bathhouse, although not on the main street.

The heads of many families in Trochenbrod were professional traders who regularly frequented regional markets by horse-drawn wagon. They took their products to places like Olyka, Kolki, and Kivertzy, where there were fixed weekly market days for different kinds of products. Some were produce traders—they sold produce like potatoes and cabbage from the fields of Trochenbrod families and bought produce and food products like flour and sugar to sell in Trochenbrod. Others sold Trochenbrod-made goods, especially leather goods, at these markets. Still others traded in livestock.

Trochenbrod supplied artisans—glaziers, house builders, carpenters, builders of cooking and heating systems, painters, bricklayers, roofers, and other specialists—to villagers as far as fifteen miles away. Fifteen miles was the distance a man could walk from Trochenbrod in a day, and then return to Trochenbrod in a day after the job was completed, and avoid night travel made dangerous by robbers, hooligans, and wild animals.

The commercial breadth of Trochenbrod—the almost dizzying array of economic activities in a relatively small and isolated town, the far-flung trading and artisan connections with other places, and the magnetic pull on buyers and sellers from surrounding villages—often came to mind second after family and friends in the reminiscences of Trochenbroders I interviewed. But it tended to be first in the memories of Ukrainians still living in the area today. For example, the first time I visited, as we were trying to locate the site of Trochenbrod we saw an aged woman bent over, working, in the fields of the neighboring village of Domashiv. We asked if she could point us toward the site of Sofiyovka. She slowly straightened up from her hoeing and looked at us stern-faced for a moment, as if to say, “Who is this asking me such things?” Then, as if thinking,
Oh, I see you’re foreigners looking for that place … what a place!
a huge grin broke out across her weathered face and she twisted and pointed. “There,” she said, “Keep walking in that direction through the fields on the other side of that grove and you’ll see a small black monument that marks the north end of Sofiyovka. If there had been no Germans you wouldn’t need to ask, because you’d see it: it would be a city today, bigger than Lutsk.”

A fascinating idea to contemplate. If there had been no World War II, what would have been? Could Trochenbrod really have become a city—big stone buildings, a tram system, a network of paved streets with sidewalks, cars everywhere, perhaps a railroad spur at last, fancy restaurants and upscale shops—a completely Jewish city, a Tel Aviv in Poland or Ukraine?

As a thriving town that was rapidly growing by the late 1930s, Trochenbrod now had its own post office, constable station, and other government offices. For a while, not only the constable but also the office of the chief of police for villages in the area was located in Sofiyovka. As the Polish government continued to rationalize its administration in its new eastern lands, it established a formal district headquarters in the village of Silno, a few miles away through the Radziwill forest—a village much smaller than Trochenbrod. The chief of police relocated there with all other district offices. Local officials reached out to Trochenbrod, the most prosperous settlement in the Silno district, in many ways, especially when it came to taxes.

The Polish government imposed a variety of taxes. For businesses there were permit and turnover taxes. A shop owner, for example, bought and annually renewed a business permit, and then paid taxes on the turnover of the business. Households had to pay into a compulsory government fire insurance program that supposedly covered the costs of fire protection as well as rebuilding. There were excise taxes on matches, liquor, tobacco, kerosene, and other nonfood basics. And then there was the chief of police. In the late 1930s this was a big man: one Trochenbroder described him as over six feet tall and three feet wide. He regularly came from Silno to visit the Sofiyovka part of his domain. He would stop into Trochenbrod shops, reach out his hand to the shopkeeper, and say a friendly “Shalom aleichem.” He had come for the police tax: you knew that when you reached out your hand to shake his, there needed to be a few zlotys in it that would not be there when your hand came back. Trochenbrod had all the trappings of a vibrant commercial town.

There was a lot of agriculture in addition to commercial enterprises. Most Trochenbrod families not only drew a good portion of their food from the farm fields behind their houses, they earned a little extra money from their farming. Behind each house was a shed and perhaps a barn and other outbuildings, and then a vegetable garden. Beyond the vegetable garden Trochenbrod families grew beans, potatoes, cabbage, corn, and other fruits and vegetables, and beyond that was a field reaching back as far as the forest to pasture the cows and other animals. This was a pattern similar to the one that had been practiced in Trochenbrod for a hundred years.

Many Trochenbrod families kept cows, and most also kept chickens and other livestock like geese, goats, and horses. Workers of the three dairies in town circulated among the homes each day to buy milk, one of the multiple small sources of income for many Trochenbrod families.

Larger Settlements, Trochenbrod Region

People had close commercial relations with the surrounding towns, and many also had relatives in Lutsk, Rovno, or Kolki. Transportation was improving—the road from the Kivertzy railroad station to Lutsk was now paved, there was limited bus service between Kolki and Lutsk, and both train and bus service were available between Lutsk and Rovno—and many Trochenbroders now frequently traveled to the cities of the region. Basia-Ruchel Potash, Ellie’s daughter, was a child growing up in Trochenbrod in the 1930s. She remembers feelings like those of country girls everywhere when they set eyes on the big city:

I liked to go with my father when he went to the big city, Lutsk, when he went to buy leather and things. He would take me along. I’d look at the buildings and the people and the shop windows and the cars; it was so exciting! I dreamt that when I grow up that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to live in the big city.

Trochenbrod’s economic expansion and diversification and extension of its market reach continued at a brisk pace until late 1939, bringing with it more than a doubling of Trochenbrod’s population, from sixteen hundred people to over five thousand in Trochenbrod and Lozisht, in the interwar period.

Some of that population growth resulted from people moving to Trochenbrod from surrounding cities because they married into Trochenbrod families; or because it was a uniquely desirable place where one could earn a living, enjoy a rural environment with many city conveniences, and live in a Jewish town; or both. Some of the population growth happened because more people stayed in Trochenbrod than before: it had become more difficult to gain entry as an immigrant to many destination countries, including the United States, and now as more of a commercial center than an agricultural settlement the fixed acreage of Trochenbrod did not limit livelihood opportunities the way it had in earlier generations. And some of the population growth was caused by a minor baby boom spurred by economic recovery, a measure of stability, and the prospect of a decent, possibly even prosperous long-term future in Trochenbrod.

A rapid expansion of social initiative also started in the mid-1920s and continued into early 1939, with political, spiritual, educational, and cultural expressions. Zionism took strong hold in Trochenbrod, as it did elsewhere in Eastern Europe in this period. Virtually all young people were organized into Zionist movements that spanned the political spectrum from far left to far right. The most robust Zionist youth movement in Trochenbrod was
Beitar
, which had a strong self-defense orientation. Even Ryszard Lubinski, the only Gentile born in Trochenbrod, was close to
Beitar
:

There were Jewish organizations in Trochenbrod, and sometimes they fought among themselves. Do you know of an organization called
Beitar
? I was close to the people in that organization. The head of it was someone named Anshel Shpielman. That organization wanted to fight for Palestine, for a Jewish state in Palestine. The other organizations wanted to negotiate for land, and that caused some conflict among them.

The Zionist groups met regularly. Sometimes separately and sometimes in cooperation, they had educational programs; put on plays; held evenings of Hebrew music and dance; conducted special holiday events; promoted the use of modern conversational Hebrew; and sent more than a hundred Jewish “pioneers,” to Palestine. A return to the Hebrew language, which was to be the language of the new Jewish state, was one of the basic principles of Zionist youth groups. By the mid-1930s, the language of Trochenbrod, Yiddish, was joined by widespread use of modern Hebrew in homes and at some public meetings. Formal and informal Hebrew language classes proliferated. Trochenbrod, that little isolated town in the midst of Ukrainian villages and forests, even produced poets and essayists who published their work in both Hebrew and Yiddish.

A point of pride among many native Trochenbroders is that in 1938 the first training course outside Palestine for
Etzel
officers was conducted in Trochenbrod.
Etzel
was an early Jewish nationalist organization associated with the
Beitar
Zionist youth movement.
Etzel
members believed in the use of military force to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Menachim Begin, who fought the British in Palestine as a Jewish terrorist and later became prime minister of Israel, was an
Etzel
leader. Trochenbrod offered the nationalist Zionist leaders of
Etzel
a unique set of circumstances for their military training: relative remoteness from the eyes of disapproving Polish authorities; a rural environment with both open land and forest land; a concentration of sympathetic Zionist youth; and a Jewish town that could supply provisions and fraternally accommodate the training.

Alongside the secular Zionist fervor in Trochenbrod, Jewish religious observance, tradition, and scholarship were only slightly diminished there. All the Trochenbroders I spoke with who were young men and women in Trochenbrod in the 1930s had been ardent Zionists, but the men also had been yeshiva students in places like Olyka, Rovno, Mezerich, Lublin, and Warsaw. Many synagogues flourished in Trochenbrod in the mid-1930s—some Trochenbroders told me that as many as nine functioned simultaneously in this small town. Everyone in Trochenbrod followed Orthodox Jewish law and customs. As one Trochenbroder put it, “You were either an Orthodox Jew or they called you a
goy
[Gentile].” Trochenbroders continued to govern their lives and the life of the town by Jewish custom, observe Sabbath prohibitions scrupulously, celebrate all the Jewish holidays robustly as community events, and pray three times each day.