The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [37]
I remember in 1939 the Russians came and took over our shtetl. They made us go to the Russian school, and they wanted us all to join their youth organization—they gave us little scarves and called us “Young Pioneers.”
They told us all to report anybody who said things against the Russians. But the influence of our parents at home overrode anything they told us. We knew we had to be quiet, not to say certain things, behave in a certain way. They would send you to Siberia if you made a wrong move. And then you had the left-wingers, a few of them; they could turn you in too. Those Socialists, they were so excited, they thought the Russians would take away from us and give it to them. It didn’t work that way. The Russians kept the businesses and made those people managers or whatever, but they didn’t share with them the wealth of the others. Some of them followed the Russians when they left. They followed them to Russia.
When the war with Germany broke out in 1941, they were going to take my father into the Red Army. My father didn’t want to go to the army. So we had a secret, my dad and I. There was a certain flower, dandelions I think, and he told me that I should go out and pick these flowers, and we would go above, in the attic in our house, and he rubbed the flower on his arm, and he’d wrap it around, and eventually it caused tremendous sores on his arm, really bad—I think they would amputate it here in America. He did it to stay out of the army. I’m the only one who knew about it: not my brothers, nobody. When his arm was ripe and ready at last, that’s just when the Russians left and the Germans, Hitler, took over.
I remember the first thing was that planes flew over and the bombs were dropping. They came out of nowhere, and people started running into the woods. The Radziwill forest was right in back of our shtetl so people began running there, or hiding in their gardens, or lying down wherever they could. I don’t know how many bombs were dropping, but I never heard anything like this, the sounds of the bombs, and screams and hysterics of the mothers and the babies and children. I was hiding next door in the garden, and I saw a bomb drop and kill my brother’s goat. It destroyed our garden and a few homes, and some people were injured. They were flying very very low, just on top of the roofs. We could see the soldiers, the Nazis, inside the plane when we looked up, that’s how low they were flying. It was devastating. What did they bomb for? Obviously they just wanted to kill civilians because there was nothing to bomb in Trochenbrod, just the houses.
In accordance with the terms of its nonaggression pact with Germany, the Kremlin muted the Soviet press about Nazi treatment of Jewish people. While some information arrived with refugees who fled east from Poland, and some radio reports filtered in, the people of Trochenbrod suffered a combination of ignorance and denial about the magnitude of what was happening to Jews under the Nazis. This ignorance and denial kept some from fleeing with the Soviets when Germany invaded. Even after Germany invaded, many Trochenbroders remembered the milder treatment at the hands of “Germans” than at the hands of Russians in World War I and simply did not—could not—believe that the Germans would treat them as terribly as some were saying.
Trochenbrod and its sister village of Lozisht had a combined population of over six thousand Jewish souls when the Germans invaded Soviet-held lands on June 22, 1941. In the first days after their invasion of Trochenbrod the Germans marked the town’s houses with Jewish stars, carried out random murders, and invited destruction and looting of Jewish possessions by rampaging Ukrainian villagers freed from restraint by the departure of the Soviets. The Germans immediately set up a local administration system. This included a Judenrat,