The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [61]
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TUVIA DRORI
Tuvia Drori was born to Trochenbrod’s Antwarg family in 1918 and fled for Palestine in the autumn of 1939. He now lives in Givatayim, just east of Tel Aviv, Israel.
When the Polish came back for good in 1921 and 1922 they took Jews for forced work. They came to take my father on Shabbat, and he refused to go. My father work on Shabbat? So they beat him, and I remember well as a child the horror of watching my father being beaten—that’s stayed with me all my life; I can see the image clearly before my eyes today. My father would never work on Shabbat. My father went to America, but found he had to work on Shabbat, so he came back, and stayed in Trochenbrod to the end.
In 1988, when I went back to Trochenbrod the first time, I found the two mass graves. I saw a small monument with a fence around it. On the monument was written that here were buried the people murdered by Nazis, from Trochenbrod and Lozisht. It was very emotional for me: I fell to the ground and cried.
When I returned to Israel, no one believed what I had seen; and anyway, they were afraid to go to Russia. A year passed. Then a few of them went, and it opened up, and then people started to go from other towns in the area—Lutsk, Kolki, Olyka—to visit and set up monuments. We arranged for the monuments to be built there in Ukraine, working with the head of the local council. It was a joint undertaking. I was the chairman of Bet TAL at that time. A committee of people organized it here in Israel: Anshel Shpielman, Gad Rosenblatt, others … not me alone.
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BETTY GOLD
Betty was born Basia-Ruchel Potash in Trochenbrod in 1930, and spent the first twelve years of her life there. She fled into the forest with her family during the mass murders in August and September 1942. Betty now lives in University Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.
Everyone in Trochenbrod was Jewish except the postmistress, the gentleman who sold schnapps, and another gentleman who was busy doing things for the Jewish people they were not allowed to do on Shabbos. We were surrounded by Polish and Ukrainian villages. It was a one-street shtetl. Everyone knew everyone and everyone was related to everyone, and we all lived very close to our aunts and uncles, just crossing the street or walking next door to them.
I remember my grandparents on my father’s side very well. But my mother’s mother lived alone across the street—her husband died many years earlier. We used to love to go there, to my grandmother’s house, and sleep there and live with her, and so on. I had two brothers, Shimon and Baruch, both older than me.
My mother had a very nice life. They considered her the society lady in Trochenbrod. She was involved in Beitar, she was involved in Jewish organizations, and she would write some plays, and she was always very very well groomed. She was very beautiful, and she always took a great deal of pride in how she presented herself to the people in the shtetl. She never worked, because my father really provided well for her, she didn’t have to. I don’t remember any women working in the shtetl when I was a little girl, at all—unless they helped their husbands a little bit in his business.
My father worked in his business. I loved my dad a lot. We used to go together on the way to school, and he’d go to the shop, and I’d continue on to the school—and stop in the bakery on the way and buy a kichel [sweet cracker] and put it on my father’s bill. We had a pretty decent life until the war started.
The best part of course, was when all the families would be together, and visit, and go to the park on Shabbos afternoons, and sing the Shabbos songs. The house would light up on Friday night, before Shabbos. Everybody would be bathed, and dressed, and candles were shining.
I used to sing at the weddings when I was a little girl. They would be outside, and the whole shtetl would come. I don’t know why they picked me to sing a song or read a poem for the bride and groom. I really loved the weddings. I also participated with my brother in a lot of children’s plays at school