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By Root 794 0

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