The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [1]
Trochenbrod will never be redeemed, and we will never, next year, be there. The dead cannot be brought back to life, the buildings cannot rise from the earth. The Diaspora cannot be run backward. And yet here we are, readers of this book, citizens of that place.
Trochenbrod was the most special place ever to have existed. Not was … is.
—JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Brooklyn, New York
Introduction
THE BACK STORY
There once was a town called Trochenbrod in what today is western Ukraine. It had dozens of businesses of all kinds, and people would travel from all around to shop, work, and sell there. Trochenbrod had a post office, a police station, a fire brigade, a cultural center, schools, and everything you’d expect in a small but lively town. It’s gone now. A trail for tractors and horse-drawn wagons through empty land is all that remains of the once bustling street that ran through the town.
My father never described his home town (pronounced TRAW-khen-brawd) to me; and I, growing up in 1950s and ’60s America, never thought to ask. Yet every once in a while my father would happen to mention it, and when he did, he said “Trochenbrod” with a tone that conveyed longing, loving remembrance, and sadness, but he also said it with a slight twist of his mouth, a sort of half smile that hinted at “a funny little place.” After he was gone, all I knew of Trochenbrod was the sense of it that my father had conveyed by his way of saying the name. Relatives told me that Trochenbrod no longer existed, but that had no meaning for me. I had never seen proof that it once existed, any more than I had seen proof that it no longer existed. Trochenbrod was only a vague shadow in my imagination, so how could it no longer exist?
Trochenbrod suddenly stopped being only a shadow in my imagination when for forgotten reasons I found myself in a Mormon family research center, decided to search for Trochenbrod, and discovered my first factual representation of it in print: its coordinates 50º55′21.68″ north, 25º42′07.54″ east. Under the coordinates was an explanation that the town had many Jews; was known by two names, Trochenbrod and Sofiyovka; and was completely destroyed in the Holocaust. Instantly it was real: a place that really once was, and that really is no more. It had two names, so it couldn’t have been just a no-place, I supposed. What might still be there? There had to be at least some signs of buildings that once were there, at those coordinates.
Thoughts like these floated occasionally around the edges of my consciousness as I went about my career in economic development in poor countries, until one day working in Warsaw I realized that where Trochenbrod had been situated was just over the border and a bit south in Ukraine. Visiting it should not be too difficult. Why not do it? The year was 1997. I found my way to the phone number of a young man in Lviv who was beginning to build a business of genealogical research for Jewish families and was willing to serve as a guide, translator, and driver for people like me. We talked over the terms and agreed on date for a trip to find Trochenbrod in November of that year.
The young man’s name was Alexander Dunai. About ten years later Alex was described with great affection by another customer-become-friend, Daniel Mendelsohn, in his book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Alex helped Daniel visit a small town in Ukraine where members of his family had lived and were murdered, and to research what happened there, during some of the time when he was also helping me.
To prepare for the trip I visited the Library of Congress. There I found, among other things, a Russian map from the late 1800s, and with the help of the coordinates I was able to locate Trochenbrod on it. The map was delicately drawn. When I photocopied the area around Trochenbrod in larger scale I could see the town’s outline and the trails running through it; it was almost like having an aerial photograph of Trochenbrod. I quickly walked outside the august building so I could let