The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [70]
There were craftsmen who would go out from Trochenbrod to the villages and had all sorts of businesses. They would sleep there if they had a job there, and come back on Friday. For example, there was one who went around to villages in the area and collected hair that could be used for brush bristles. He would bring it to someone in Trochenbrod that would prepare it for bristle-making and then sell it to businesses in Lutsk and Rovno that made brushes.
And we had dairies. Many families had one or two cows. They would milk them, and take the milk to the dairy, and the dairy would make cheese, cream, and even butter. They would sell these products in Lutsk, and even in Rovno. And there were tanneries and leather working. They sold the leather and they made shoes and boots. We also had carpenters. They would work in the surrounding villages, or people would come to the workshops in Trochenbrod and order furniture. There were house builders, and roofers who worked in both wood shakes [shingles] and thatch. There were two or three oil presses; people would bring the seeds from the surrounding villages to be pressed. Oil was also sold in the grocery stores, and people would come from the surrounding villages to buy it.
They were dressed nicely; the men in Western-style suits. No one dressed like Hasidim.2 My father, for example, would go to the synagogue dressed in a suit, like in the city. Whether they were religious or not, everyone went to shul and observed the Jewish holidays. There were a few Communists, and they would go out on Friday night with their cigarettes, and people would pass them and taunt them yelling, “fire, fire.”
We had nothing in common with Poles and Ukrainians. The opposite: they would come and do business, buy and sell … I remember that my father’s grandmother would go out to villages with her husband, and she would bring all sorts of goods to sell, eggs and so on, and later the villagers would come to our house to buy things. There was no sense of hatred, but sometimes … the Gentiles, on Sundays, would walk through Trochenbrod on the way to their church. And sometimes, I remember once in particular, they did a little pogrom on us; maybe we were at fault also. As children maybe we shouted at them or put something in their way in the street. We weren’t friends, but we got along.
We would prepare for winter. People who had root cellars would gather the potatoes, for example, and store them there. Those who didn’t have root cellars would dig a pit in the ground, and put in the potatoes, and cover it with lots and lots of straw and soil. Because as Pesach would approach, people needed lots of potatoes, and potatoes didn’t grow in the winter. It didn’t always work. Sometimes the cold made it so that it was impossible to use them. There was always a great effort to prepare all kinds of foods that would last throughout the winter.
It’s really sad that there’s nothing left of Trochenbrod. I left Trochenbrod in 1939. I would never have believed, until I saw it myself, that there’s nothing left. It hurts a great deal. In Trochenbrod—it’s not just that I grew up there—in Trochenbrod there grew up a wonderful youth, wonderful people. It was a generation of people … there was joy, not bitterness; I think the political youth movements created it; it gave us a sense of purpose and meaning. Among the youth there was idealism. We were a Jewish town. That was unique. That was special.
1. Hebrew for “Holocaust.”
2. Plural of Hasid, Hasidic Jews.
GLOSSARY OF HEBREW AND YIDDISH TERMS
Hebrew and Yiddish words often have a guttural “kh” sound in them, as in “khutzpah.” In English transliterations, that sound is most often denoted with “ch.” Unfortunately, “ch” is also pronounced as in “cheese.” In the text I follow the most common practice and use “ch” for both