The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [55]
In the mid-1950s, the Soviets decided they could not leave uncultivated such a large parcel of what had once been farmland. They made modest improvements to prepare the land for farming, and in 1957 assigned the area that had been Trochenbrod and its satellite villages to a collective farm named Nove Zhyttia, New Life. All villages in western Ukraine had undergone forced collectivization by this time, and Nove Zhyttia was headquartered in Domashiv. As Soviet rule lumbered on, a generation was being born in Domashiv and other villages of the area that did not know any life but Soviet life, and had no idea that a town, a Jewish town, had not long ago pulsed where now were only vast hay fields of the New Life collective farm.
In 1971, the Soviet government decided to make some major improvements so Trochenbrod’s land could be farmed more intensively. Thirty years had passed since Trochenbrod’s disappearance. By this time, few people—and probably no Soviet authorities of substantial rank—knew that a town once stood on this land. One of the major improvements was to build a regional system of drainage canals that included water conduits along what once had been the street through Trochenbrod. That street had shriveled to a scraggly trail among the fields. Because of the drainage system, Trochenbrod’s soil was now firmer and the whole area much less sodden, and the collective farm raised rye, corn, wheat, barley, peas, potatoes, and beets, and also grazed livestock there.
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant suffered its well-documented catastrophe. The Chernobyl plant is about two hundred miles east and a bit to the north of Trochenbrod. All the stories I’ve been told are variants on the same idea, that the Soviet government was committed to supply electricity to Poland from the Chernobyl nuclear plant; in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster the government built high-tension lines that transmitted electricity from a power station about thirty-five miles north of Rivne (Rovno) to the Polish market. These lines cut through the area that had been Trochenbrod, and ran parallel to what had been its only street. This infrastructure can be seen in the first photo of the first page of the image gallery.
Ukraine became an independent country in 1991, and that put an end to collective farms. Cultivation on Trochenbrod land stopped then because, despite its good drainage, the land still was not particularly fertile—people in the area refer to the soil there as “black sand”—and it still was not in ready reach of transportation routes to markets. When you go there today you may find some local people grazing their horses, and sometimes you’ll see one or two fields sown in grass or clover for animals. But Trochenbrod’s land today remains essentially unused and in government hands. Neither the local nor national government has plans for it. The Trochenbrod area looks today as it does in recent photographs in this book. Few people in the surrounding villages have any idea what used to be there.
And yet Trochenbrod—Sofiyovka—sometimes has a mysterious fleeting presence for local people, almost like the ghost of an unknown soul that still hovers in the air from time to time. Once I was standing in a Trochenbrod field when my Ukrainian friend from Domashiv asked if I’d like to find a keepsake from the town. He said you could often find things at Leah’s house. Leah’s house? We drove by tractor to what would have been the southern reaches of Trochenbrod and started rooting in the soil near a big fruit tree. This spot is known as Leah’s house; no one today knows exactly why. I once walked by a farmer’s yard in the area and noticed, snug against the wall of his house, a pile of paving stones that reminded me of the ones I had seen in the photograph of the ribbon-cutting