The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [47]
So we get up and we start to go. All nine of us were born in Trochenbrod and knew our way around blindfolded. We were moving toward the shtetl and the ghetto through the night. We walked around all night, for hours and hours and hours. My father couldn’t understand why he was getting lost, why he couldn’t find his way back to Trochenbrod. It wasn’t that far; it was only a few miles. First we walked one way, then another way. “I think it’s this way; no, it’s that way.”
We were so exhausted and confused; we were frail from starving and couldn’t walk any more. So we decided we’ll just sit down in a trench and rest for a while, and when the sun comes up we’ll see where we are. While we were sitting there we heard shooting, a lot of shooting. We didn’t know what it was. When daylight came we could see the fields behind Trochenbrod houses. We had been close to Trochenbrod and didn’t realize it. The men went to find people. They crawled to a house and climbed in through the window, and there was nobody there. They went to another house, and there was nobody there either. We found out later that all the people in the ghetto had been killed before, and the shots we heard were the killings of last leather workers who had been held in the synagogue. Another miracle. We got lost; if we had found our way we would be killed with the leather workers.
I don’t know why we didn’t commit suicide. Really, nobody wanted to live anymore. We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t have any strength anymore. We waited till nighttime, and we turned around and went to another bunker. We went there, and we had absolutely nothing to eat. It was already three days. We were starving, literally starving. Our tongues were hanging out, we were pale, we were … it’s a miracle we didn’t eat each other. We picked any leaves we could find, and we ate them, and we usually threw up. We ate snow.
I was twelve years old. I got my period. I didn’t know what it was all about. I was lying next to my dad; we were all lying close to each other in the bunker. I woke up, and I was such a bloody mess from my neck to my knees, and my father was also a bloody mess from his neck to his knees. I didn’t know if he was bleeding, I didn’t know if I was bleeding. Where did it come from? Did somebody choke him? Did somebody kill him? I got hysterical, I started screaming and crying. My mother took me out with my cousin, a lady cousin. They took me under a tree. There was a puddle of water. They washed me up, and they told me about the birds and the bees. I didn’t have any social life out there, but they started to warn me about getting pregnant and so on.
There was another bunker not far from us. There was a father, a child, and a few other people, all from Trochenbrod. The little girl wasn’t more than three years old. The little girl got very very sick, and she died. They had to leave their bunker because somebody spotted them. And they spotted us. So we all left our bunkers and we left the little girl under a pile of leaves, and we figured maybe the next night, when it all calms down, we’ll go and bury her. When we came back to bury her, she was breathing! Just barely. My mother put her on her bosom, and my father was breathing in her mouth, and her father was … I mean, it was a scene like not even the movies, it was like animals in a jungle. All the adults gave her drops of water in her mouth, sometimes even spitting in her mouth, and held her close to their bodies to give her warmth, and found pieces of food for her, and … and gave her new life. They all together gave her back her life. She survived the war with her father: two out of seven in her family, and she had a wonderful life after the war.
Warm weather finally came again, and we moved to a different part of the forest, because we were afraid that with spring coming shepherds