The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [65]
I went to the Polish public school in Trochenbrod together with my Jewish friends. I was living in Sofiyovka until winter 1942, until the Shoah1 there took everything. I was twelve years old when we left.
Toward the end of the 1930s, long after my mother and father were separated, my mother was a young, attractive, well-educated woman about thirty-five years old. She was looking for friends of her general age and type, and in Trochenbrod that meant Jewish girls. Jewish girls from Sofiyovka, or later, from elsewhere. When the Russians reorganized the educational system to ten grades instead of seven as it was under the Polish government, they needed more teachers for more classes, so many Jewish teachers arrived from other places to work in the Sofiyovka school. These people were a society for my mother because they were a similar age and education. Many of these teachers lived in our house because when the Russians came they shut down the post office and we had extra space in the house.
Once a rich Russian named Lenko discovered mineral waters at Zuraviche, which was not too far north from Sofiyovka. A small hotel was built there for people who would come for the waters. I heard that later the Soviets organized it into a big resort. There were people from Sofiyovka who worked in that place, at the baths. Because my mother was the head of the post office, she was often invited to big events there, together with the police chief, as a Polish official person. My aunt, my mother’s sister, worked there after the post office was closed. She would steal food from there, and that’s how we ate in those days.
Chaim Veitzblum was one of the teachers that lived in our house, with his wife. He had run away from Olyka. He was a very talented teacher: he could sing, he played an instrument, he painted, and he taught mathematics. My mother and another person created false documents for him, so he became Albin Ostrovsky. A year later, after we left Sofiyovka, he visited us in a village where we stayed for a time. He was driving a farm wagon, and he had a big mustache, and he had changed his character, and he looked and acted just like a rural peasant. The trick saved his life. I wonder if he’s still alive somewhere.
In 1943 the Germans found a way to protect their backs by telling Ukrainians to attack and destroy Polish people in the area around Sofiyovka, because the Polish people living there saw themselves as Polish citizens generally against the Nazis. Little Polish villages spread around the area suffered from armed Ukrainian groups, who destroyed those settlements completely—they burned the houses and killed the people. So Polish people decided to build fort areas that they could defend from the Ukrainians. The fort areas were built from Polish villages, and then people from other villages came inside them. The big number of Polish people in these fort areas could defend themselves from the Ukrainians.
There was a Polish village on the way to Lutsk, Przebradze, which was made into the first fort area. There were about eight hundred people in that village before, and at the end, after it was a fort area, about twenty-five thousand Polish people were there. After all the killing in Sofiyovka some scouts from Przebradze found several Jewish families hiding in the Radziwill forest. They took them and some others who were hiding in a marshy area of the forest