The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [41]
Each few rows of people saw clearly what happened to the rows before, and many became hysterical with terror and despair. Sometimes, as a row of Trochenbrod Jews was pushed toward the edge of the pit, one of them would jump a guard and scream for everyone to run, and others in the row would bolt. Most who bolted were shot, but often a few evaded the bullets and escaped into the forest. Their deaths were only delayed. They were hunted by everyone—Germans, Schutsmen, Banderovtsi, and local villagers. Most were soon found and cut down.
As each row of people approached the pit they had to deposit their rings and money in buckets and place their clothes on steadily growing piles. They were ordered to lie down in the pit, on top of the bodies of those who went before them. Then Schutsmen and Einzatsgruppe soldiers walked up and down the edge of the pit shooting bullets into the backs of the heads of their Trochenbrod victims, just as they had moments before into the heads of the preceding row of the brothers and sisters of those victims. The murderers stepped on the squirming bodies of little children and shot them in the head as well. Late in the afternoon, the first Aktion (literally, military operation, but in this case mass murder) was completed. The trucks made a final trip back to Trochenbrod carrying the clothing and other things taken from those who were slaughtered, for temporary storage in the empty Trochenbrod houses.
On that day, August 11, 1942, over forty-five hundred people from Trochenbrod and Lozisht were murdered at the Yaromel mass grave pits. Over three thousand more Jewish people, some from Trochenbrod-Lozisht and many from other settlements in the region, were slaughtered in the forest near Yaromel over the next few weeks.
Tuvia Drori had made his way to Palestine by the time the Nazis murdered his family at the Yaromel pits. In discussing what he heard had happened, Tuvia wondered:
My mother was a smart woman, hardworking, never complaining, and I don’t recall her ever crying or screaming. Did she cry to heaven then?
We heard from a survivor that as the town’s head rabbi was led, wearing his prayer shawl, accompanied by his family to the pits, he raised his hands to the sky and cried, “Where is the God who is all-merciful, the supreme justice, the father of widows and orphans? Could it be that the heavens are really empty?”
When I first heard what happened, I also wondered if maybe, after all, the heavens are empty.
Somehow between five hundred and a thousand people remained alive in Trochenbrod’s ghetto, and the slave laborers, primarily leather workers, also remained in their small ghetto. At least for the moment the killing stopped. Over the next few weeks the Trochenbrod remnants in the ghetto in the center of town were joined by a steady flow of others who had escaped into the forest, were hungry and exhausted, were being hunted and saw no hope for themselves in the wild, and so returned to the ghetto to share the fate of the friends and relatives they grew up with. In time, the population of the Trochenbrod ghetto after the first Aktion grew to about fifteen hundred people. Fifty or more people would sleep in one house. They could not go out. They had no idea what the future held, but they knew well that each day