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By Root 825 0

be as careful. But now the Jews knew what was going to happen so they were better prepared, and more escaped. The beans in the fields behind the houses in Trochenbrod were on tall frames. When running from the Germans, people would sometimes run among the beans because that would hide them, and then they would run in the drainage canals. The second time, one of the young people in the ghetto hid behind the door with an ax, and when a Schutsman entered to call the people out, he chopped him in the neck and almost cut his head off. People felt good that someone showed resistance.

I thought about Trochenbrod often all these years. I still miss it. I remember eating gefilte fish in Trochenbrod. Since then I’ve tried it sometimes, but nothing came close to the way it tasted in Sofiyovka. Even when my mother made it, after we came here to Radom, it was not as good as it was when the mothers of my friends gave it to me in Sofiyovka, because that was really in the Jewish style. Whenever I walk in the street and smell cooking of a food like there was in Trochenbrod, I think “Oh, that smells like Sofiyovka,” and pictures of Sofiyovka come to my mind. I remember latkes—ahh, latkes—and chulunt in the oven for Shabbos, I can smell it now, I can almost taste it. When I think of Sofiyovka I don’t think of the slaughter; I think of the life. Laughter, wonderful food, games, happiness, friends, weddings, holidays, warm families.

But I can never forget what it felt like as a child when everybody in Sofiyovka was murdered. When I went for water I saw dead bodies everywhere. Looking down the street of Trochenbrod I saw only empty houses where the families of my friends lived. Where my friends lived, now there was only quiet. The doors and windows of the empty houses were swinging this way and that way in the wind, once in a while hitting the sill with a soft bang, and then with hinges squeaking they starting to swing again. Where are my friends? Where are their families? What happened to my Trochenbrod?

1. The opening phrase of many Hebrew blessings.

Epilogue

THE STORY CONTINUES

LIGHT1

by Yisrael Beider

Don’t despair my brother dear,

If in the west day’s end seems near.

I beg hold fast these words of mine,

After this darkness a light will shine.

Trochenbrod, the town that some thought would be a thriving city today, is gone. In the nearly seven decades since its annihilation, what happened to the physical space that Trochenbrod occupied? What happened to the land that might have borne the roads, houses, parks, and buildings of an urban center named Trochenbrod, or Sofiyovka?

After the people of Trochenbrod were murdered, the German army put the land of Trochenbrod and its satellite villages to use supplying food for its soldiers. A Sonderführer (an army specialist with a nonmilitary skill) who knew how to run a large farm was brought in, and he established a forced-labor system for people from the surrounding villages to work on the former land of Trochenbrod, now his farm. He had the villagers build him a house near where the last synagogue had been, at the north end of town where today the black marble monument stands. For the house and for several other new farm buildings he had them use materials from dismantled Trochenbrod houses. The Sonderführer’s farm had horses, goats, cows, and chickens, and the villagers cultivated potatoes, beans, corn, cabbage, and other local crops for the German army there.

The Germans’ Trochenbrod farm did not survive more than one growing season. In the fall of 1943, fighters from Kovpak’s partisan detachment surrounded the Trochenbrod area and set fire to as many buildings as they could. The Sonderführer is said to have escaped to German units near Rovno (Rivne).

Following the war, no one made use of Trochenbrod’s land for about ten years. The reasons it was unused before the first Jews settled there 130 years earlier were the reasons it was unused now: relatively poor-quality soil, a marshy lowland, and considerable distance from transportation routes in the region. In addition to