The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [32]
To me Trochenbrod looked like a street that had been picked up from a city and plopped down somewhere in the wilderness, except that the street was mud. Seeing the street being paved convinced me that what we all expected was starting to happen—Trochenbrod was going to become a city, a Jewish city. Why would I leave it?
The ribbon-cutting for the first small paved section of Trochenbrod’s street was held in the spring of 1939. That was the last section paved.
On August 23, 1939, Germany and the U.S.S.R. signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland from the west, and two weeks later the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, taking territory it had failed to keep in its war with Poland twenty years earlier. Trochenbrod came under Soviet rule once again. The Second World War had begun.
At that moment everything began to change. So this is a good time to let Shmulik Potash remind us what the essence of Trochenbrod was before dusk:
Although there were plenty of poor people in Trochenbrod, they were all wealthy. Why? Because they felt their lives were rich and they were satisfied. There’s a saying, “Want what you have, and then you’ll have what you want.” Ninety-five percent of Trochenbrod people were like that. They were salt of the earth, as they say. The very concept of stealing was unknown to them—take something that belongs to someone else, what’s that?
The people who read your book, I want to tell them that there once was a Jewish town of worthy people, hard-working people, honest people, trusting people. All they wanted was to raise children who would also be good people. That’s what Trochenbrod was.
OPPOSITE: Between the wars. A paved road runs from the city of Lutsk, in the lower left corner, about 8 miles northeast to the Kivertzy railroad station. From there the road continues unpaved about 20 miles northeast to the much smaller city of Kolki. Following that road from the Kivertzy railroad station, just past the village of Ozero you would have turned right to Przebradze on your way to Trochenbrod. Passing by the entrance to Kol. Yosefin on the left, you would have entered Trochenbrod from the south. To Trochenbrod’s southeast is Horodiche. Silno, the administrative center, is slightly northeast of that. In the southeast corner of the map is the town of Olyka. Northeast of Trochenbrod is Klubochin, a village from which Ukrainian partisans cooperated with those from Trochenbrod during the German occupation. Northeast of Klubochin is Lopaten, where Medvedev had his partisan headquarters. Immediately northwest of Trochenbrod is its sister village of Lozisht. Just northwest of Lozisht is the village of Domashiv, and southwest of that is the village of Yaromel. Due west of Domashiv is Trostjanets, where you would turn left to get to Trochenbrod-Lozisht if you were coming from Kolki. The paved road eastward from Lutsk connects it to the city of Rovno.
1. Jewish paramilitary organization fighting for a Jewish state in Palestine.
2. Bata is a manufacturer of relatively inexpensive ready-made footwear that it retails through its own international chain of Bata retail stores, a business that thrives even today.
3. “Sabbath Gentile,” who performed functions like stoking fires for Jews on the Sabbath because religious law prohibits Jews from doing acts of “work” on that day.
Chapter Three
DUSK
In October 1939, Trochenbrod came under Soviet rule once again. But this time there was a well-organized cell of Communists in Trochenbrod to greet and work with Soviet officials. Trochenbrod Communists had been underground during Polish rule, and now they were joined by Communist comrades, both Jewish and Gentile, freed by the Soviets from Polish prisons. The transition to Communist ways started immediately.
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For this brief era in Trochenbrod’s history, I was able to gather most of the information