The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [36]
Nahum was a trained and experienced watchmaker. He found work for several months with another watchmaker that he had come across who had a little business in Lutsk. Under Soviet rules, a person could work on his own but could not have employees. By early 1940 the Soviets had organized their administration sufficiently to fully enforce their idea of socialism, and Nahum had to go to work for a state-run collective for watchmakers. One day, after many months, Soviet officials rounded up the refugees from western Poland in Lutsk and sent them on their way to Siberia, probably concerned that there were spies for Germany among them. Soon after the train was under way, Nahum and a few others jumped off. The escapees included Nahum’s hometown friend and his older brother and a new friend who was also a watchmaker. They hid in a forest—probably the Radziwill forest—for a few days and then Nahum and his friends walked back to Lutsk.
They found their way to a large livery stable, where they hid with the help of the Jewish owner. They needed to work and earn money, so after a week of hiding Nahum took a chance and went to the local Soviet government office and asked how he could find work. After looking at Nahum’s documents the official understood that Nahum was not supposed to be there, but he was sympathetic. He conspicuously pretended everything was in order and told Nahum that he was not allowed to work in Lutsk but could find work in a small lumbering town twenty-five miles to the east. When Nahum reported this back at the livery stable they all understood that the idea was simply to get away from Lutsk, and the stable owner had a better idea for that.
He told them that not far from Lutsk there were “two villages of Jewish peasants.” A friend of his from there by the name of Schuster would visit him soon, and he would see if “something can be arranged.” It turned out that something could indeed be arranged, and soon Nahum and his friends were looking, wide-eyed, down the street of a now much poorer Trochenbrod.
When we arrived there, it was the first time in my life that I saw Jewish farmers. I could never have imagined this, and I rejoiced when I saw them. Everyone had primitive leather-working equipment at home, and they worked on hides. So they lived from their fields, their cows, their horses, and their hides. They were totally surrounded by forests; the nearest road was twenty or thirty kilometers away. I was curious, so I used to ask old-timers how they came to be there. They told me that the area had been totally unsettled and wild when their ancestors came …
With our watch-repairing skills we could earn something. The people in Trochenbrod-Ignatovka didn’t have wristwatches, but they had ancient clocks on their walls, and before our arrival there had been no watchmaker. So they brought these antiques to us and bartered food in exchange for repairs …
A number of months after Nahum’s arrival in Trochenbrod the German army invaded and took control. Nahum soon went into the forest and put together a small partisan group mostly of Trochenbroders. They dedicated themselves to disrupting German army units and supply trains and taking revenge on Ukrainians who betrayed their neighbors and had tortured and murdered Jews or turned them over to the Germans. The unit was eventually decimated by the Germans and their collaborators. Nahum and two other survivors found and joined a Soviet partisan detachment led by a famous partisan commander, Dmitry Medvedev, headquartered in the Lopaten forest a few miles northeast of Trochenbrod.
Basia-Ruchel Potash had what she remembers as a rich and wonderful childhood in Trochenbrod, despite her brushes with small-time anti-Jewish hooliganism among