The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [60]
SHOIL BURAK
One thing many Trochenbrod natives remember clearly about Trochenbrod is mud. Because Trochenbrod was established in a marshy lowland area, the street through town became impassible to wagons after a rain. Shoil Burak was born in Trochenbrod in the late 1870s; he immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. He reminisced to his family a sentiment, as captured by his granddaughter Alyn Levin-Hadar, that other Trochenbrod families reported hearing from their immigrant forebears as well:
When it rained, I’d be up to my knees in mud. Mud and dirt—these are my most vivid memories of Trochenbrod. We found excuses to take baths because of the mud. You ask would I would want to return to the old country? Not to all that mud and dirt—I’m an American now.
In America, Shoil used to tell his children made-up bedtime stories set in Trochenbrod. Although the stories were made up, they nevertheless somehow always included in them a reference to “blota,” Yiddish for mud.
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MIKHAILO DEMCHUK
Mikhailo was born in the village of Yaromel, near Trochenbrod, in 1932. He lives there with his family even today. I spoke with him in 1997, and again on several of the later trips I took to the area. Mikhailo had clear memories of Trochenbrod and the war years.
A lot of people used to go to Sofiyovka because they wanted to buy different things for their houses, and clothes. There were shops selling shoes, clothes, a bakery—they baked a lot of kinds of bread—leather, mills. The merchants in Sofiyovka really trusted us: they gave us things without money, because they knew we’d give it to them when we had money. If Sofiyovka had survived, it would be a big city by now.
There were good house-builders, good painters, and very good specialists of all kinds, especially related to construction and house repair, that would work in all the villages around here.
There was a Jewish family that that we knew in Sofiyovka, and they had kids, and I was friends with them. We used to play together: a girl, Esther, and two boys, Yoshko and Itzik.
In Sofiyovka there were a lot of geese, and the people had good houses, mostly new ones but some older ones. Wealthy people there had better houses, people with less money had simpler houses. On the whole, it was more or less like our houses—not exactly the same, but similar. There were trees along the street. Also, a lot of the houses had fruit trees on their land: cherries, pears, apples.… Everybody had a piece of land there, and they worked on it. It was a nice town.
To make some money young girls and ladies from villages like Yaromel would go to Sofiyovka to help people with the fruit, with their gardens, and around the house. Everyone was happy with that arrangement. It was a good time, but then it changed.
Before the war there were really good relationships between the Polish people, the Jews, and the Ukrainians. Relations between the Jews and Ukrainians were probably better than the relations between the Poles and the Ukrainians. But everybody was friendly with everybody. For example, there were lots of Polish houses in Yaromel. But after the war started, something happened: Polish and Ukrainian people attacked each other; everybody became enemies.
Of course, I was very young during the war, but I remember seeing trucks filled with people being driven past our house into the woods, hearing shots, and later seeing empty trucks return. Day after day they drove past my house. When things began to heat up for us we prepared to run away. We ran away to the nearby village, Mikove. But my father was killed by Polish people there. They saw we were running away so they attacked us, and only I and my two brothers survived, with nothing. We came back and found Yaromel burned down: only two houses left, and the little lake. So we were really very poor.
Ukrainians and Poles attacked each other and Jews. There were three armies, German, Ukrainian, and Polish, and they were attacking each other. Those Polish people who attacked us came from Przebradze, a Polish village not far from here.