The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [50]
Some Trochenbrod Jews escaped to the forest and stayed there. They did their best in that hard situation. But they suffered. They dug their shelters deep into the ground in hidden parts of the forest. They camouflaged their shelters with loose dirt, tree limbs and leaves. Some shelters they actually built right in the swamps. We helped the families as much as we could. After every raid we brought them food, clothing, and boots. Also we often visited and instructed them how to live better in the forest. That’s how far we had come in a month or two—now we were teaching other people how to live in the forest!
In October 1942 one of our partisans, Yosef, came back from a forest nearby after he visited Jews hiding there. On the way to our camp he stumbled on a band of Soviet paratroopers that the Red Army parachuted in to blow up Nazi trains. He really stumbled on them. They were hiding in the bushes and he almost tripped on them. Imagine the tension there was until they figured out how much they could talk together. Yosef told them he would bring the leaders of his partisan unit. They were waiting only a kilometer or two away. We went to meet them.
Their two leaders came toward us. One was a short older man, about forty years old. The other one had light hair and was about twenty-five. They had red stars on their hats and brand-new shiny automatic rifles. When just a few steps separated between us we stopped and for a while we just stared at each other, and then we started to talk. They explained that they were Soviet saboteurs sent to blow up German trains. I told them, “We are a small group, but we are well-organized and we’ll be honored to help you destroy the fascists the best we can.” The older man took out a cigarette pack from his pocket and offered us a smoke. We told them about our activities, about our hopes, about our men. They asked us to help them with their sabotage, and we agreed. They began to teach a few of us how to blow up trains, and then some of us went with them on missions to blow up trains. And they agreed to fight together with us when we attacked Trochenbrod.
Fall had started. The storks had migrated, and lots of other birds were flying above us to their winter places. The paratroopers and our men who went to sabotage the railroad were successful. They derailed trains almost every night. How things changed! Just a short time ago the Germans were like gods, and now every night they were terrified, at least on the trains. Then the Germans made local villagers help guard the tracks. Each guard had a piece of track that he walked up and down, and a whistle to blow in case they saw something suspicious. A German detachment stood in the train station, ready to move if there was an alert. This made our jobs more difficult but not impossible. We crawled toward the rails, waited for the guard to walk in the other direction, then crawled the last one or two hundred meters, put the explosives where they should go, and crawled away. When a train passed over we exploded the charge.
Alex went away two weeks ago to try to make contact with a group of partisans that we heard rumors about in the forests much further north. Before he came back to us he stopped at his village, Klubochin, where his mother and family were. He learned that the Germans entered the village and rounded up a large group of men, women, and children. They took them to a pit in the forest and murdered them all, including Alex’s mother, brother, and little daughter. This was Nazi payment for twenty people from Klubochin, including Alex, who were partisans. They were Communists. The other nineteen partisans were in Klubochin when the Germans came, so they were murdered.
In November we had a big battle with German soldiers. We fought them off. That’s how far we had come in two or three months—now we were fighting German detachments and winning! The Germans were surprised that there was an organized group with weapons, and we knew they decided they had to wipe us out. They would come again soon, and this time