The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [34]
Soviet-German Line, 1940
Here is Hanna Tziporen’s story: she was eighteen years old when she left Trochenbrod in 1939.
I was in Beitar, and there was a leader there named Anshel Shpielman. When the war broke out and the Soviets came in we knew there was no way but to try to escape to Eretz Yisrael, to Palestine. When Anshel explored if there was some way we could get there, we heard that if we could find a way to get to Vilna in Lithuania it might be possible to go from there to Palestine. Getting to Vilna was not so easy either, but let’s not dwell on that.
I went with a friend of mine, Machli Schuster. After we arrived in Vilna, we slept together in one bed; there was only one toilet for everyone; one shower for everyone; we had a communal kitchen. There were Jews there who gave work to refugees like us, so that we’d be able to earn some money.
In Vilna there were a number of people from Trochenbrod, and many others, trying to get to Palestine. We had to find a place to go where we could earn some money. A rich Jew named Goldberg owned a commercial farm in Mergaloukus, not too far from Kovno (Kaunus), and he let us go there. The men worked in the fields, in tobacco, and the women helped in the house.
We wanted to get to Moscow, because we heard it was possible to go onward from there to Palestine. One day we were notified that there was a way now to do this. A fellow named Avram, from Pinsk, came to help us for the journey. We needed money for the journey and the visas. Someone was sent to Lutsk, and somehow got the $100 from our parents to get us to Moscow and then maybe a little bit further.
In Moscow people went to the Turkish consulate to request transit permits to Palestine. But at that time there were so many refugees that the British asked the Turks to refuse the laissez-passer requests so that there would not be so many Jews coming into Palestine. We wandered around Moscow not knowing what to do. A Jew there recommended that we go to the Persian embassy. So I went, together with people from all sorts of political parties, not just Beitar. I received a false entry permit for Iran. A group of more than thirty of us got to Iran.
We stayed in Teheran several months. Then we were told we had to leave Teheran, so we went to the city of Meshet. There we waited: what will become of us, how will we get to Eretz Yisrael? At that time Iran was having a war with Iraq, so Iraq wouldn’t let us pass. So we went through the desert by train, and made our way to Suez. While on the train we learned that the Soviet-German war had broken out—that the Germans had invaded eastern Poland, where Trochenbrod was, that had been in Soviet hands.
We went through the Suez Canal by cargo boat, and arrived at Haifa. There the British arrested us and jailed us. We were in the jail for a couple of months, and then the British freed us. They couldn’t send us back to anywhere, and that’s how we arrived in Eretz Yisrael.
Shmulik Potash has a different sort of story to tell. He left Trochenbrod in 1939 to work at a training farm near Lodz, Poland, run by the General Zionist organization. Jewish youngsters went to this place from everywhere in Eastern Europe to prepare themselves, by learning farming skills, to live in a Jewish farming settlement in Palestine. When the Germans invaded Poland, Shmulik quickly decided to return to Trochenbrod by way of Warsaw to say good-bye to family and friends and then make his way to Palestine.
A couple of days after he