The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [39]
Trochenbroders who survived the war, or their children, tell of a somewhat mysterious “Dr. Klinger.” Late in 1941, not long before the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war in early December, this Dr. Klinger, a German Jew living in Lutsk, passed himself off as a Gentile. No one seems to know for certain what Dr. Klinger was a doctor of, or for that matter if he was really a doctor at all. He made contact with the Nazi leadership and arranged to employ the Jewish leather workers of Trochenbrod to produce leather goods, especially boots, for the German army. The production was done in Trochenbrod, so the people he could keep engaged as leather workers—as many as possible—were saved from being sent on forced labor crews.
A number of Schutsmen had suspicions about Dr. Klinger, since no one had ever seen him or heard of him before, and some of them had noticed friendly behavior between the German Dr. Klinger and his Jewish laborers. One night in mid-1942, drunken laughter and then shouting was heard from a drinking party Schutsmen were having, and then a single gunshot was heard. In the morning Dr. Klinger’s body was found in the street with a bullet through his head. The townspeople buried him as a Jew in Trochenbrod’s cemetery.
As winter turned into spring in 1942, it became increasingly clear to many Trochenbrod townspeople that the Germans intended ultimately to kill them all, by slave labor, by starvation, or by outright murder. Some built false walls in their houses or farm buildings and prepared hiding places behind them; some prepared bunkers in the forest; some found ways to obtain false identity papers and began to slip away; and some young Trochenbrod men fled into the forest, as did Nahum Kohn, and began training themselves to be partisans. Most, however—because they would not believe what could no longer be denied, because they clung to hope that their usefulness to the Germans would protect them, because they were certain that God would intervene and save them, or because they could not imagine what they could do about it—struggled to survive, suffered under a heavier and heavier burden of despair, and awaited their fate.
One of the things that is striking in the stories of what took place in and around Trochenbrod as its sun was setting is the degree of barbarism displayed toward the townspeople by Ukrainians, and to a lesser extent Poles, from neighboring villages—and with that, the extraordinary degree of kindness and readiness to put themselves at risk to help their Jewish neighbors shown by quite a few Ukrainian and Polish families. A Ukrainian in the nearby village of Yaromel, for example, told me of his father hiding “a very good person named Itzik” from Trochenbrod in their house for a few days. Then the Germans began searching all the houses very carefully looking for Jews, and it became a matter of mortal risk, so they had no choice but “to say good-bye” to Itzik.
One Trochenbrod survivor told me of a Polish family that hid her family, and later brought food to them where they hid in the forest; and also of Ukrainians who during the winter let Jews hiding in the forest warm themselves in their houses, fed them, and offered food from their gardens. A Ukrainian from the Polish village of Przebradze described a family friend, a red-haired Trochenbroder, who had obtained a false passport that identified him as non-Jewish. He stopped at their house to say good-bye, hid with them for a day, and then continued on to Lutsk to lose himself among the crowds. When the family of Basia-Ruchel Potash hid in the forest, a Polish man who had been her father’s customer sometimes brought food to them, and alerted them to dangers. People in the nearby Ukrainian village of Klubochin helped Trochenbrod families survive in the forest and gave support to