The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [2]
When I think back on that day I find myself smiling—not at how excited and eager I was, but rather at my innocence. I didn’t have the slightest idea that what I would experience and discover on each visit to Trochenbrod and the surrounding area would make me feel I had to return there to dig deeper, and that this would happen again and again for more than a decade. I didn’t have the slightest idea that I was about to fall under the spell of a vanished place, vanished people, a vanished civilization and its rich culture, even vanished nations, and new nations, all intertwined with historic currents and cataclysms. I didn’t have the slightest idea that to know Trochenbrod I would have to learn about many aspects of world history I knew nothing about before, so I was about to commit to the biggest research project of my life. I didn’t have the slightest idea that I was about to embark on an odyssey more enriching than anything I had ever experienced.
My brother Marvin and I, with a copy of the map in hand, landed in the small and quirky Soviet-era airport for the city of Lviv, beautifully modeled after an old-fashioned railroad station. Known as Lvov in earlier days, Lviv is the de facto capital of western Ukraine. We were met by our jovial and slightly rotund Alex with his faithful Lada—the USSR’s version of a 1972 Fiat. We looked around Lviv a bit and then headed off on the ninety-five-mile drive northeast to the city of Lutsk. Ukraine was in its early post-Communist period: no ATMs; no regular gas stations on intercity roads; no reliable hot water; and other than in a few places in the major cities, no decent restaurants and no credit cards accepted. The roads were in terrible condition and the faces of most buildings were heavily scarred by Communist crumble. In the city, signs of poverty could be seen everywhere—signs like little more than the basics for sale in the streets and on nearly barren store shelves; shabbily-clothed people shuffling about in worn-out shoes with mostly struggle and deep worry etched on their faces; and all manner of shysters and thieves swarming about trying to get their hands on your money. The rural areas, with their rudimentary horse-drawn wagons; animals running about; decrepit houses with water wells, outhouses, and wood-and-tar-paper sheds; haystacks everywhere; streets of mud; and people bent over in the fields using primitive farm tools seemed not to have changed since at least the turn of the last century.
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,