The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [59]
On August 18, 2009, three Trochenbrod natives—two who survived in the forest and one who slipped away during the Russian occupation—and seventy-five descendants of Trochenbroders, the youngest among them teenagers, gathered in the Ukrainian village of Domashiv. They had come from Brazil, Canada, Israel, Ukraine, and the United States. They made their way in a procession of fifteen horse-drawn wagons through Domashiv farm fields and then through abandoned acreage to the site of Trochenbrod. They deliberately traveled using the same means of transportation that their ancestors had used.
One who survived in the forest was Betty Gold, Basia-Ruchel Potash, who told her story of survival in Chapter 4 of this book. Another was Evgenia Shvardovskaya, whose story is summarized on page 182. Evgenia is frail, but her grandson, who heads the small Jewish community in Lutsk, came back to Trochenbrod with her and helped her. The one who slipped away before the Germans came was Shmulik Potash, whose story of escape is told in Chapter 3. With their first-person stories, these people were able to bring Trochenbrod alive for the rapt descendants visiting Trochenbrod. Shmulik strolled the entire length of Trochenbrod’s street pointing out the locations of shops, public buildings, and the homes of individual families. People scooped up soil that had been beneath the houses of their forebears, and searched in the ground for signs of their families’ lives. They conducted a ceremony at the black marble monument at the north end of Trochenbrod, and then an even more moving one, with songs, stories, and prayers, at the black marble monument at the mass grave. They discovered a visceral connection to this place, a sense of identity with this vast field somewhere in Ukraine that they had never seen before. They discovered within the group relatives from other countries that they had never met, and in some cases had not known existed. They felt a kinship with each other that left them singing and laughing together as family.
The proceedings were in English and Hebrew. The Ukrainian wagon drivers, who brought their horses and wagons from neighboring villages, and some Ukrainian friends and well-wishers from Domashiv and Lutsk, watched respectfully, though they understood nothing. Yet the looks on many of their faces said they understood everything; some had tears in their eyes. Later they told me that the idea that people came from all over the world to meet each other, make family connections, visit the graves of their ancestors, and recapture the history of the place moved them deeply, and was a lesson for them. Now they wanted to know more about the history of the area, not just the history of Ukrainians. It was the first time they fully understood—or remembered—that many different types of people had lived in the area and made up its history. Imagine, there was a Jewish town here! They wanted to know more about those people and how they lived.
1. This poem, originally in Hebrew, was found among newspaper clippings that Yonteleh Beider had saved. It was written by his brother and probably published around 1939 in HaKochav (The Star), a Hebrew-language monthly published in Poland. HaKochav published many Hebrew poems by Yisrael Beider.
WITNESSES REMEMBER
Some recollections of people in this appendix appeared earlier. What follows are additional memories that further enrich one’s sense of what Trochenbrod was and what took place there.