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ceremony that appears on page 15 of the image insert. The farmer was working in his yard, and I asked him where he got the stones. “From Sofiyovka,” he answered, jerking his head in the direction of where Trochenbrod used to be, as if, “In the next village, over there.” A legend circulates that in the first year of this millennium some strangers appeared and dug up a large quantity of gold from the site of Trochenbrod. Children from the surrounding villages who wander out to Trochenbrod’s fields sometimes return with pieces of glass from the pre–World War I glass factory, shards of dinner plates, or tools, utensils, or other household objects that hint of life that once was there. There is an acre of land not far from the black marble monument known to everyone as the Shwartz field. Some village young people have never given a thought to what that name might mean; others vaguely guess someone named Shwartz once lived there; old people sometimes retreat into their memories when you ask about it.

For its children and their descendants, Trochenbrod, though it disappeared physically, has flourished in certain ways—lasting community connections and individual prosperity, for example. One cannot say as much for other small towns in the Volyn region, like Olyka, which did not disappear. Olyka had been a vibrant and important administrative and commercial center, where one of the area’s principal markets was held each week. Trochenbrod traders were there in force on Olyka market days. It was the seat of the Radziwill family, which had large holdings in the region; I’ve heard many times the story of the road into Olyka being strewn with rose petals when the prince’s son drove into town with his new bride. When I visited Olyka not long ago it was a forlorn and forgotten place of muddy streets and ancient houses. It lacked any but the occasional small rundown shop left over from the Soviet era. Its once glorious brick church stood crumbled like an ancient ruin, and Prince Radziwill’s palace had been converted to an insane asylum from which inmates occasionally wandered out onto the street to hunt for cigarette butts in the gutters. It was a place without past or present, and since any new houses in the area were being built closer to the Lutsk-Rivne highway a bit to the north, it appeared to have no future either.

Trochenbrod has lived on through the power of collective memory. It remained alive first in the form of active groups of émigrés and survivors who identified strongly with their hometown and celebrated the community that it was. Wherever there were large numbers of people from Trochenbrod, they and their families generally flourished. Most of the original Trochenbroders were gone by the end of the 1970s, but after a lull of two or three decades, remarkably, strong ties with Trochenbrod and with each other began flowering again among the children of Trochenbroders, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren.

When the war ended, most Trochenbrod survivors found their ways to Displaced Persons camps like Bindermichl, in Lintz, Austria, or Föhrenwald, near Munich, where the photograph at the bottom of page 22 of the image gallery was taken. From there survivors went primarily to the United States, Palestine/Israel, Brazil, or Argentina, where there were already large Trochenbrod communities and often even family relatives. There was no sustained contact among Trochenbroders in different countries, though Israeli Trochenbroders did reach out to overseas Trochenbroders during the decade or so after the war. And in 2009 they reached out again.

In Brazil and Argentina there were many Trochenbrod immigrants—in Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro, and in Argentina, especially in Buenos Aires and in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe—but no formal Trochenbrod organizations. Still, in both countries there was a strong sense of Trochenbrod community. Many immigrants from Trochenbrod were connected by birth or marriage to a small number of Trochenbrod families; they saw each other and helped each other and kept in