The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [69]
We hid for a year and a half in the forest. At night some people, like Vasily, would bring some food. Sometimes people would let us take food from their fields. In spring 1944, the partisans found us and we stayed with them, and they took care of us. We cooked for them, cleaned their clothes. We were good friends with those partisans. They’re all dead now. Alexander Felyuk died recently. Some of the partisans we were with were from Klubochin. Some were Jews, like Chaim Votchin and Gad Rosenblatt, who moved to Israel.
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THREE UKRAINIAN WOMEN
In June 2008, I stumbled across three colorfully dressed elderly women sitting on a bench in front of a house on a side lane in the village of Horodiche. Horodiche is four miles away from Trochenbrod southeast through the Radziwill forest. The women gave only their first names and patronymics, not their surnames: Sofia Panasivna, Ljubov Ivanivna, and Ustyma Denysivna. They became very animated when I began asking questions about Trochenbrod. They spoke as a group, with one completing or affirming the sentence of the other, taking turns commenting on any topic, and talking rapidly over and around each other—they obviously were very old friends. Here’s a summary of what they said.
Sofiyovka people would come here to Horodiche to buy animals for the hides for their leather work. Sometimes they’d come here to sell fabric to make clothes, and other things. One Sofiyovka guy had a store here in Horodiche; Hershko was his name. They would bring … matzah!—that’s what they called it!—that they baked for one of their holidays to share with us; it was good. I always waited for it.
On Saturday—they called it Shabbos—they wouldn’t do any work. So someone else had to milk their cows for them on Shabbos.
My grandparents used to take me to Sofiyovka to go to the bathhouse.
I remember they had nice clothing stores there. But they had all kinds of stores, everything you could want. It was really a very nice place. The stores were mixed in with the houses. We were taken there often.
We all got along well with each other; we went to each other’s villages. If Sofiyovka had survived, it would be bigger than Lutsk today. It was really fun there. They were good people, friendly people.
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HANNA TZIPOREN
Hanna was born in Trochenbrod in 1921. In 1939, at age eighteen, she left for Palestine by way of Vilna and the “Internat” way station there. She arrived in Palestine in 1941. Hana lives in Givatayim, a town just east of Tel Aviv, Israel.
Some people got out into the larger world, but ordinary people like me, when I started school at the age of seven, for us Trochenbrod was the whole world. There was a forest all around; there weren’t dolls or many games for children, but there was always something to do, places to play.
When we were older, ten or twelve, we’d join a Zionist group. I joined Beitar. There we’d have programs, meetings, lectures—lectures mostly about Eretz Yisrael, its geography, the aspiring to it. Anshel Shpielman and Tuvia Drori were leaders.
During the week we were in public school. But our parents wanted us to know Hebrew, Yiddish, how to write a letter in Yiddish. For that we had private teachers. On Shabbat we’d get together. In the summer it was really nice, we’d get together in the forest. We’d have discussions with our leaders, and we’d practice drilling … left, right, left, right. We were training ourselves to be soldiers for Eretz Yisrael.
In our town there was a Talmud Torah, and many boys would study there. And after that, many boys would go to study in a yeshiva, away from the town, in one of the cities. The girls would often go to one of the nearby cities—Lutsk, Rovno—to learn a trade. I went to Lutsk.
My father supplied flour. On Sunday evening he’d go to the flour mill that there was in our town, and he’d fill up his cart with sacks of flour. Large families would buy a bag of flour, and stores also would buy them. My father also made the matzot for Pesach. They used to prepare the matzot by hand. Then my father