The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [33]
Local Jewish Communists were installed as mayor, police, and other local officials in Trochenbrod. The Polish post office was closed. The Soviets took over much of the economic property in Trochenbrod—small factories, workshops, even some shops. Typically they put the workers, whether one or a half dozen, in charge, and turned the owner into a worker. Most family enterprises without workers were allowed to continue, but a few were taken over “for the people” by upper-level Communists. People were being driven into poverty, and at the same time, shortages were developing. Food was rationed through a cooperative store. People hid property, including their stocks of food, and a black market for basic necessities developed. The town was pushed steadily in the direction of people having little money, but in any case, there was little to buy.
The Soviets were not particularly anti-Jewish, and when they took over the public school they allowed the language of instruction for Trochenbrod pupils to be Yiddish, though of course all students also had to study Russian. Consistent with Communist ideology, the Soviets strongly discouraged religious observance—they interfered with synagogue prayers and tried to impose labor on the Sabbath. But in the end, because on a day-to-day basis things were run mostly by local people, ways could often be found to circumvent Communist doctrine. The flavor of this is captured in the memories of Tuvia Drori as he told them to me and also as he wrote about them in his book Ani Ma’amin (I Believe):
Everybody knew everybody in our small town. Together we played, and as we grew up we talked and argued. We Beitar people knew the secrets of the Communist underground (and sometimes we helped them against the Polish police), and they were aware of our Etzel courses held in town (the last one was at the beginning of 1939). They knew we had weapons and that we were using live ammunition during the drills because they heard the gunshots.
When the Soviets arrived in October 1939, at first they tried to pull us into Communist activity and convince us to become Communists, which would also be good for our work and social situations; they tried to draw us to their assemblies, social activities, and theatrical shows, but we did not oblige.
Then they decided (probably because of pressures from above) to arrest us. In my case it was one of my former pupils who came to arrest me. In the first interrogation we were asked about the weapons we had and whether the Beitar youth organization was still active. We didn’t take those interrogations too seriously. The social closeness among us was too strong for them to do us any harm.
Eventually we were released and returned home, but it was obvious we could not sit idly waiting for the next arrest. The hopes that maybe the war would cease and we would be able to continue our Zionist activities were diminishing. Contacts with the outside world were cut off completely, and we could not bear staying citizens under Stalin’s regime.
At the end of autumn a group of us from Beitar decided to start moving out, to find a way to Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel]. We knew we would have to steal borders, and who knew where we would end up, as we would be going only on uncharted routes.
Soon after arrival of the Soviets, between twenty and thirty Trochenbrod young people, like Tuvia and his Beitar friends, began sneaking away with the aim of finding a path to Palestine. They usually left at night and suffered tearful and tragic separations from their families, or slipped out without a face-to-face good-bye because their parents did not want them to leave. None of them ever saw their families again.
Most made their way to Vilna (Vilnius), where a shelter, the “Internat,