The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [42]
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most important day on the Jewish calendar, fell on September 21 that year. As the date grew closer, more and more people came in from the forest to spend what they knew was likely to be their last Yom Kippur praying with their Trochenbrod friends and relatives. About two weeks earlier, thirty of the leather workers were marched to the Yaromel forest to dig a second set of mass grave pits near the first. While digging the pits, one of them, reportedly the tanner Moshe Shwartz, suddenly rose up and attacked three of the guards with his shovel while screaming to the others to save themselves. Many began to flee into the forest, but most them, like Moshe Shwartz, were killed by German and Schutsmen gunfire.
On Yom Kippur the second Aktion was completed: almost everyone in the Trochenbrod ghetto was taken to the second mass grave pit and slaughtered the same way the first group had been slaughtered nearly six weeks earlier. Again, a few remained alive in the ghetto somehow. The remaining leather workers were moved into the largest synagogue, at the north end of Trochenbrod, and continued to work as slave laborers. In December all remaining Jews were taken to the pits and shot. To mark completion of Trochenbrod’s eradication in Jewish measure, in human measure, the Nazis set fire to the synagogue where the leather workers had been held—the spot now marked by a modest black marble monument.
Many of Trochenbrod’s houses disappeared soon after the families who had lived in them were murdered. The Germans demanded at least one laborer for five days from every household in the surrounding villages to work on dismantling many of Trochenbrod’s houses and other buildings. All remaining furniture was removed from the houses and then the buildings were dismantled into building materials. Clothes and furniture were sold to local villagers. Some of the building material was used for local military construction, and the rest was loaded onto trucks and taken to Kivertzy for shipment to Germany to offset shortages there. Later, partisans set fire to some buildings and houses that were left, in order to deny their use to Germans, Schutsmen, or Banderovtsi. After the Germans were driven out by the Red Army in 1944, Ukrainians from the surrounding villages took anything remaining that could be moved, including the paving stones from Trochenbrod’s street.
Trochenbrod had vanished.
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Of the more than six thousand people in Trochenbrod and Lozisht when the Nazis invaded, possibly as many as sixty survived. These were people who retreated with the Soviets or escaped later across the Soviet border; or people who got hold of false documents and disappeared from Trochenbrod, like the red-haired friend of the woman from Przebradze; or people like Label Safran who were hidden by Polish or Ukrainian families or in some cases protected by an entire village; or people like Basia-Ruchel Potash and her family who fled into the forest and somehow survived there; or people like Chaim Votchin who became partisans before the Nazis could trap them, and did not die as partisans. Many more Trochenbroders initially escaped the mass slaughters, perhaps several hundred, but most of them did not survive the war.
This story of Trochenbrod will end with the voices of three who did survive those last awful days: Basia-Ruchel Potash, Chaim Votchin, and Ryszard Lubinski. They are among the few from Trochenbrod who have stories to tell about that period. Others who witnessed those days were silenced in their witnessing.
The Nazis skillfully took advantage of Ukrainian nationalist sentiments to first turn Ukrainians against Jews and other Ukrainians, and then set Ukrainians and Poles against each other. They stirred up a cauldron of Ukrainian Banderovtsi,