The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [58]
In 1996, the Shalom Foundation, in Warsaw, published And I Still See Their Faces: Images of Polish Jews. This is a book of beautifully printed photographs of Polish Jews before the Holocaust. The photos were selected from thousands sent in by Poles who in many cases had known the people in the photographs. Often they attached comments about their photograph. The book was not distributed in the United States at that time, but an exhibit of photographs from it was mounted in Detroit two years after the book was published. By chance, the Cleveland Jewish News reported on the Detroit exhibit. Betty Gold always read the Cleveland Jewish News. Ryszard Lubinski had sent in one of the photos taken by his mother, the one that appears on the top of page 12 of the image gallery in this book. Although Ryszard’s photo was selected for And I Still See Their Faces, it did not appear in the article. Yet, one might think miraculously, the comment that Ryszard sent along with the photo did appear in the article. It read:
I was born in 1929 and, for 12 years, was brought up in Zofiówka in Volhynia. The town had a population of about five thousand residents, almost all of them Jewish. Yiddish language and Jewish customs also became part of my everyday life. After the Soviet invasion, when the Jewish language became the language of instruction at the local school, it did not hinder me, a Pole, in my studies. Afterwards, the Germans came. In August of 1942, almost the entire population was murdered in the nearby forest … Zofiówka suddenly ceased to exist.
—Ryszard Lubinski, Radom
Betty Gold read this on Mother’s Day 1998. She read it again, and again, and again. Her eyes blurred over with tears and she felt happiness, intense excitement, and a sense of miracle in one overwhelming emotion; she couldn’t contain herself. I know this because she called me to declare that she had just received the most wonderful Mother’s Day gift ever. She tracked down Ryszard’s phone number and called him. They talked excitedly in Yiddish and Polish, and a few months later they met again, in Radom, after more than half a century had passed. They have been in regular contact ever since, and that led me to Radom to ask Ryzsard for his recollections for this book. While interviewing him I asked if he would like to join the group planning to visit Trochenbrod in August 2009. He said no: he has wonderful childhood memories of Trochenbrod, and he would not like to upset those memories by seeing nothing there but the mass grave.
In 2002, Jonathan Safran Foer published his novel Everything Is Illuminated. That book and the movie with the same title kept Trochenbrod’s name current for several years. Even though the book and movie use the variant “Trachimbrod,” people descended from Trochenbrod knew what it was. Many of them had known of Trochenbrod only as family legend, sometimes handed down with diminishing clarity over several generations. They were amazed to learn that other people knew of Trochenbrod, they were excited by its new fame, and they wanted to know more about the town and connect with other Trochenbrod descendants. Their interest in reconnecting stirred for two or three years and then, one might again think miraculously, bumped up against the Israeli Bet Tal Association’s wish to reach out to Trochenbroders worldwide.
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