The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [73]
1914 The First World War places Trochenbrod on the front between Austro-Hungarian and Russian troops, where it suffers pillage, rape, murder, famine, forced labor, and disease.
1917 The October Revolution establishes Soviet rule in Russian lands.
1918 The First World War ends; the newly constituted Soviet Union immediately embarks on a territorial struggle with Poland. Trochenbrod is further ravaged in the conflict.
1921 Trochenbrod is now located in eastern Poland. Its population is again roughly sixteen hundred Jews.
1925 Prince Radziwill begins building a Catholic church at the edge of Trochenbrod to serve Polish people living in villages in the area.
Trochenbrod begins to recover and reassert itself with vigor as a regional commercial center.
1929 Sofiyovka is described in the Illustrated Directory of Volhyn and the Polish Address Business Directory in a way that suggests it has begun to reclaim its role as a robust regional commercial center.
1933 In this year and the next, many Trochenbroders who had settled in the United States return to visit their relatives in Trochenbrod.
1934 Hitler, as both chancellor and Führer in Germany, emerges as a major political figure in Europe. A Polish-German nonaggression pact allows for unrestricted Nazi propaganda in Poland. From 1934 on, Poland’s pogroms and repression of Jews are lesser echoes of those in Germany.
1938 The first military training course for Etzel officers is conducted in Trochenbrod.
November 10: Kristallnacht.
1939 Spring: A ribbon-cutting ceremony is conducted for the first paved segment of Trochenbrod’s street. Trochenbrod has some electricity, telegraph and telephone, newspapers from Warsaw, bicycles, movies, and even an occasional visit by a motorized vehicle; the town is rapidly expanding and modernizing.
August: Germany and the U.S.S.R. sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact.
September: Germany and the U.S.S.R. invade and divide Poland between them. The Second World War begins. Trochenbrod comes under Soviet rule.
1941 The population of Trochenbrod and Lozisht has swelled to over six thousand people as a result of economic growth in the interwar years and an influx of refugees from western Poland in the wake of the German invasion.
June 22: Germany invades and the Soviets withdraw from eastern Poland, leaving Trochenbrod in Nazi hands. Trochenbrod is terrorized and brutalized by the Germans and their Ukrainian auxiliary police. December: Pearl Harbor is attacked; America enters the Second World War.
1942 August 11: The first Aktion. Most of the Jews of Trochenbrod and Lozisht are taken to pits prepared near Yaromel and slaughtered.
September 21: The second Aktion. On Yom Kippur, everyone remaining in Trochenbrod’s ghetto, including many that had fled from the first Aktion and then returned to pray with their brothers on Yom Kippur, is taken to the Yaromel pits and murdered.
December: The third Aktion. The last of Trochenbrod’s people, about twenty leather workers, are shot.
1950 A Trochenbrod survivor living in the nearby city of Lutsk reports having visited the site of the town and finding no remaining physical evidence of it.
SOURCES
A Grandfather’s Memories. Memoir of Morris Wolfson, as told to his grandaughter, Geri Wolfson Fuhrmann, in November, 1974; submitted by Geri Wolfson Fuhrmann as a term paper to Sol Gittleman, Professor of Yiddish Literature, Tufts University, in December, 1974. The manuscript was given to me in 2008 by Laura Praglin, cousin of Geri Wolfson Fuhrmann; Laura and Geri subsequently provided a tape and CD of the full interview and related material. Morris (Moshe) Wolfson was the son of Wolf Schuster, a shoemaker in Trochenbrod. Wolf immigrated to the United States, and in 1912 brought over his son Moshe. When during immigration processing Moshe was asked his father’s name in order to establish the surname, Moshe said he was Wolf’s son: duly recorded as Wolfson, and that remained Moshe’s legal family name forever after.
A Voice from the Forest: Memoirs of a Jewish Partisan.