The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [57]
American Trochenbrod families have given me photos, membership lists, bank records, and firsthand accounts of Trochenbrod émigré organizations that existed in Montreal, Canada, and in Baltimore–Washington, D.C., Boston–Worcester, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York–New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Toledo. As Trochenbroders traveled around the country, they would often stay with other Trochenbrod families and participate in local Trochenbrod organization events. These organizations typically got their start ten to twenty years before World War II. They were social organizations where families could reminisce about Trochenbrod and update each other on the latest news from their hometown, but they all devoted themselves as well to raising money for Trochenbrod institutions and families. Most of these organizations fell inactive during or soon after the war, as the letters stopped arriving; some small groups continued gathering into the 1970s.
The Trochenbrod-Lozisht group in Palestine started as an informal community around 1930, and has operated continuously and fairly robustly since then. The center of gravity of the Israeli Trochenbrod community in the early years was Eliezer Burak, who changed his family name to Barkai in Palestine. Eliezer wrote the 1945 article about Trochenbrod quoted on page 69. All new arrivals from Trochenbrod, including my father, stayed with Eliezer and his family until they found a job and a place to live in Palestine. When survivors arrived after the war, Eliezer quizzed them about what happened to different Trochenbrod families, and then passed information about survivors to Jewish soldiers operating in Europe. In that way, a number of survivors were tracked down, including those in D.P. camps and children whose doomed parents had paid Ukrainian families to protect them, and arrangements were made to bring them to the Trochenbrod community in Palestine. Eliezer also wrote to Trochenbroders in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States for money to help support and integrate survivors who arrived in Palestine. Later he was instrumental in organizing construction of the Trochenbrod and Lozisht synagogue and community center in Israel, known in Hebrew as Bet Tal. Eliezer Barkai served as the contact point for Trochenbroders worldwide, and for years maintained regular contact with many of them.
By 1959 Bet Tal had been built near Tel Aviv, and the Trochenbrod community established a formal nonprofit organization, the Bet Tal Association. In 1988, one of the Bet Tal leaders, a Trochenbrod native named Tuvia Drori (quoted on page 81), finally managed to travel to the site of Trochenbrod, in Soviet territory. He couldn’t relate to the terrain of the region and had trouble finding someone who knew the site, but he did eventually find a villager who took him there on his horse-drawn wagon. Tuvia returned to Israel shaken by the experience of seeing nothing but an empty field where his town had been and nothing marking the mass grave. In 1992, the Bet Tal Association installed black marble monuments at the site of Trochenbrod and at the site of the mass grave. Over the next fifteen years they organized three visits to the site of Trochenbrod and worked hard to include as many young descendants as possible. In 2007 they established a Web site (http://Bet-Tal.com); in that same year the Israeli Bet Tal Association decided to work toward becoming an international organization, a focal point for Trochenbrod descendants worldwide. They kicked off this effort with an international gathering of Trochenbrod natives and descendants, at the site of Trochenbrod, in August 2009—over sixty-five years after Trochenbrod and its people perished.
Before telling you about that remarkable event I want to turn the clock back a bit to catch up with Basia-Ruchel Potash, the young Trochenbrod girl who survived by hiding in the forest