The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [43]
Basia-Ruchel Potash now lives as Betty Gold in University Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. She was born in Trochenbrod in 1930 and speaks of a delightful childhood there surrounded by a warm extended family, lots of friends, wonderful experiences, rural freedom, and a rich community life. Her childhood suddenly took a downward turn at the age of nine, when the Soviets arrived in Trochenbrod. It turned far more severely and threateningly downward when the Germans took over. But nothing came close to what she and her family endured hiding in the Radziwill forest from the murder and madness the Nazis brought to Trochenbrod. Her story of triumph begins at age twelve:
My father and his cousin had a big wooden shed in back, it was long and narrow; they would store wood and tools and other things in there. Because of what they heard from refugees from western Poland, they decided—just in case—to build a false wall in the shed, so that if the Nazis come to get us we could go behind the wall and hide. They built it secretly at night.
Later—I remember it was a hot summer day—the Germans and Ukrainians surrounded the shtetl, and they took everybody out of their homes. We all had to shlep whatever we could carry, and we had to go to certain houses in the middle of town. This was the Trochenbrod ghetto. I was with my immediate family—my father, my mother, my two brothers, and my father’s mother, who lived with us at that time. My other grandmother, she lived across the street, didn’t want to go to the ghetto, so she hid; we saw before we left, that they found her and took her out and shot her. They led us to the ghetto, everyone in Trochenbrod I think.
Once we got to the ghetto my family and my father’s cousin’s family went back to the house, because you were allowed to go back to get some things if you came right back to the ghetto. They left me with my grandmother in the ghetto to watch our belongings. And I sat there with her, and I saw that nobody came back from my family. Right away I thought they must be hiding behind the false wall. And I got scared, and I got angry why they left me. And I was so torn. My grandmother’s sitting there with her belongings, and I’m sitting next to her, and all the other Jews were there. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to live, I wanted to go back; she couldn’t go back, so I left her. That was a very tough day in my life.
I started running back to our house at the south end of town. As I ran down the street, all the people were walking toward the ghetto, and I was running the other way, and there were the Nazis and Ukrainians with their guns. One of the Germans was busy looking up at something, so I crawled right between his legs, he happened to be standing that way. As I got close to my house I saw there were soldiers in the distance, so I crawled on the ground between the twigs and the bushes along the side of my house.
I got to the false wall, and they wouldn’t let me in! They were afraid that the Nazis were using me to find them, so they wouldn’t answer when I called to them. I finally started crying, and I said, “There’s nobody with me, I’m just alone, there’s nobody with me, I’m just alone.” I convinced them to open the secret door, and they let me in.
There were seventeen people in that hiding space behind the false wall. Three small children. My cousin’s youngest baby was crying. The mother choked her to death; she wanted to save her two boys and the rest of us. We weren’t allowed to cough, or even breathe