The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [31]
One elderly woman in Horodiche, a Ukranian village about four miles southeast of Trochenbrod through the forest, told me that as a child she would beg her father to take her with him on his shopping excursions to Sofiyovka because for her it was like going to the big city. A Ukrainian from the village of Yaromel about two miles away remembered “beautiful stores there, lots of different kinds of stores.” He also remembered Trochenbrod shopkeepers as gentle and kind people:
We bought things there: fabrics, clothes, shoes, and other things. If we needed to buy something but we didn’t have the money, the Jewish shopkeepers would say, “Don’t worry, it’s OK; when you’ll have the money, you’ll pay me.” They were good people. They trusted everyone.
An old-timer from the nearby village of Domashiv reminisced:
They hired Ukrainians from nearby villages to work in their fields. Ukrainians from the surrounding villages would go there to try to find something to do to earn money. They could get two zlotys for helping in the fields, and the Trochenbroders would give them a cup of tea. They would even hire Ukrainians to cut their grasses for their cattle because the Trochenbrod people were busy trading. They were selling all sorts of leather goods, and they were buying animals for hides to make leather to make those goods.
Before the war everyone was friendly. The Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles all had different professions and did business with each other. People from different villages went around to other villages. They might sew clothes, or repair something in someone’s house. Everyone had his own job, so it was peaceful and friendly, and everyone had his own piece of land and worked on it.
A woman in a formerly Polish village, Przebradze, on what used to be the principal road from Trochenbrod to Kivertzy and Lutsk, knew Trochenbrod and many of its people well:
My parents used to take me to Sofiyovka because there were a lot of shops there where we could by a lot of things. The people from all the villages around Sofiyovka went there to get everything they needed.
We had bees, and we sold honey there in the summer. We took the honey there by horse wagon. People came with jars or whatever containers they had, and my grandfather poured the honey into it. We brought the honey in a bucket, and strawberries also, to sell along the street.
In the final years of the 1930s, modern technology began to find its way to Trochenbrod. The first electricity, radios, bicycles, even movies—Basia-Ruchel Potash remembers one of the 1930s Gold Diggers series—made their appearances. The Yiddish newspaper Forward was delivered regularly. The district administration office in the village of Silno, not far from Horodiche, acquired an automobile that enabled local officials to visit villages and towns in the district when the dirt roads were passable. Trochenbrod’s post office now also offered telephone and telegraph service. Improved (but not paved) roads made travel to the train station at Kivertzy and to Lutsk routine, though it was still problematic after a rain.
November 10, 1938: Kristallnacht. Most of Trochenbrod’s more than five thousand Jews could not imagine that Hitler’s storm was really as bad as people said—or in any case that it would blow on their pleasant, friendly, and industrious town whose people served everyone in the region well and caused trouble to no one.
Because Trochenbrod was a consequential regional trading and production center, the district administration planted more trees; installed bollards to keep traffic out of the drainage ditches along Trochenbrod’s only street; and even began to upgrade the street, which often became muddy and impassable for wagons, with paving stones—a sort of downtown renewal project. The project to pave Trochenbrod’s street was begun in 1938.