The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [66]
Generally, Jews didn’t drink alcohol much. Of course, in all of Sofiyovka and Ignatovka I’m sure there were a few who got drunk from time to time—for example I remember the barber liked to drink a good bit—but generally you didn’t see drunk people on the street. Even on Jewish holidays … and this was unusual because on Christian holidays, especially Ukrainian holidays, everyone would be drunk—they’d drink a lot of vodka and be drunk in the street. And the Jews, maybe they drank on their holidays, but you never saw them drunk.
There were very few other Polish people in sofiyovka. Those who were there were good people—not influenced by any ideology or philosophy or anti-Jewish politics. These people, like the constable, had decided to live among Jews, so they lived among Jews. Everyone had good relations with Jews, but I was the only non-Jewish child, the only one who ran around with other children, with the Jewish children.
Even though I was like one of them, things looked different to me than the other children in Sofiyovka. For example, when Christmas came around we’d have a Christmas tree, and we’d invite all the kids to our house to see it because they had no other opportunity to see a thing like that, to touch it, to smell it. It was a real attraction for a lot of them. To them, I was something different; but to me, they were the way normal children were.
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PANAS MUDRAK
Panas was born in the village of Domashiv, close to Trochenbrod, in 1926 and lives there with his family today.
When I was eleven or twelve years old, I went to Sofiyovka with my father to sell and buy things. Then, during the war, after the killing, of course I had to go there because at least one man from each household had to work five days in that place, removing things from the buildings and dismantling the buildings, and I went with my father.
Before the war there was one street; they were paving the street. There were a lot of trades, a lot of shops, so people could buy anything. There was one very rich guy, Shwartz, who made leather for making boots, shoes, clothes.
I remember the post office, a factory that made dairy products like butter, and a factory that made leather. They would take their products to special markets on different days of the week for different kinds of products. Most people in Sofiyovka were buying and selling things—it was rare for someone to have fields and be working on the soil and making money from it—so they had to go to Olyka and the other places because it was their business.
In 1942, I remember when the Germans came, and they started killing the people near Yaromel. I was a small kid and it was far, and my parents were afraid for our lives. The Jews had to wear a special yellow circle on the front and back of their clothes so that they could be easily identified. People called them “Yud.”
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VIRA SHULIAK
Vira was born in 1928. Her parents died when she was very young, and she was raised by her grandparents. Her grandfather was a forest ranger, and she spent her first years living in a house in the forest. Later they moved to Yosefin, and then, with a Ukrainian uncle married to a Polish woman, she moved to Przebradze, a Polish village. The Soviets changed the name of the village to Gayove, and Vira lives there still.
I was eleven when the war began. They killed the Jewish people first. The Germans destroyed Sofiyovka.
My grandparents used to take me to Sofiyovka because there were a lot of shops there where we could by a lot of things: different leather goods, even with fur. The people who made those things, leather goods, the Germans let them live longer. First they killed those people who couldn’t do such things that they valued, but in the end they were all killed anyway.
You could buy everything there: shoes, clothes, different products; there was even a restaurant there. So the people from all the villages around Sofiyovka went