The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [63]
– –
BETTY HELLMAN
Betty was born Peshia Gotman in Trochenbrod in 1921. She left when she was nearly eighteen years old, in late 1938, after the paving of Trochenbrod’s street was well under way. Betty now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
We would go on the postal wagon to Lutsk. Once there were ten of us. The driver made a few of us get off because the horse couldn’t pull so much. So we took turns, and all the way to Lutsk we were jumping off and on the wagon.
The best thing about spring was that the mud dried up, we didn’t have to deal with the mud. Many times, walking to school, we fell in the mud, with the books even, and we couldn’t get up.
Our biggest entertainment was going into the forest to pick things. We used to go Saturdays, mostly … they had there blueberries, and they had cranberries in the woods. But God help you if the guard, Radziwill’s forest guard in a uniform, comes. He’d hit you with his big stick; we had a big pot tied on the waist to pick and throw berries in it, and you had to go shhhh, so he wouldn’t hear that we’re there, and sometimes they chased us out. But, you could get a ticket! You paid, like, five zlotys, and you were allowed to pick berries. But who had five zlotys to give them?
In the fall was like here, it was chilly, and leaves were falling, the wind was blowing, and people were getting ready for the winter.
The winter was miserable. There was a lot of snow in the winter. I remember when I was laying in bed I was able to write on the wall because it was snow, it was frozen on the wall, but you could write with your finger.
How we prepared for the winter, you know what they used to do? They used to dig a hole in the ground sometimes, and put in potatoes, and fill it with straw … we had to prepare for our animals; we had a cow, people had horses. You had to have hay, you put it in a little building in back. Our cow stayed in the back part of our house. Because of that, I don’t like milk … it wasn’t very clean. Some people had root cellars. We had that in our house. You’d open up a door in the floor of the house to get to the cellar. We’d have to get the hay in, and put it over the rafters.
I would say it was like, like a whole Jewish town. It was like the forest had wrapped its arms around the town. And I always used to say it had to be a street torn away from some city, and then landed there. Because it was one street, but nothing around it, behind it; just one street all of a sudden, and you call it a town. So I used to say that this street must have been blown away from some city and landed there.
It didn’t have just little shops. It had some pretty nice stores. Nice dry goods stores, clothes, material, two shoe stores, butcher shops, grocery stores a few of them, a dairy—we would give them milk from our cow, and they made butter and cheese; they sold butter in Lutsk once a week. There were tanneries that made leather from the raw skins. Avrum Bass opened up a real bakery shop in town. They were pretty well off, they were doing OK.
There were a few people that were rich, and I’ll tell you why. There was a family by the name Antwarg, and they lived in a very nice big home, that I never was there, I never saw inside it. It had a big fence around it. They had a very beautiful daughter that was very well known in town, and they had money because … some of the families, the husband would go to America, make a little money—some of them never came back to their wives, they found different women in America—and some of them came back with a few dollars. But after a few years, five years, the dollars