The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [74]
And I Still See Their Faces: Images of Polish Jews. Published by the American-Polish-Israeli Shalom Foundation, located in Warsaw, Poland, 1997. In 1994, the Shalom Foundation appealed throughout Poland for photographs of Jewish friends and neighbors before the Holocaust. More than seven thousand photos came in, accompanied by notes telling what the submitters knew about the people in them. A jury selected photos, editors refined the notes, and the result is this beautiful and moving book. As I explain in the Epilogue, And I Still See Their Faces ultimately brought Basia-Ruchel Potash and Ryszard Lubinski back together; this in turn led me to most of the photographs of Trochenbrod in the 1930s that appear in this book.
Ani Ma’amin: Eidut V’Hagot (I Believe: Testimony and Meditations). By Tuvia Drori; published in Hebrew by Yair Publications, Tel Aviv, Israel, 1994. The author gave me an original edition of this book in 1997. Joseph Blau translated the manuscript to English, and a copy of that translation was given to me in 1998 by Marvin Perlman, a Trochenbrod descendant living in Potomac, Maryland. I have edited the English translation of quotations that appear in this book. It was in Ani Ma’amin that I found a reference to Jacob Banai’s book, “Anonymous Soldiers” (Hebrew, Friends Publishing, Tel Aviv, 1978) in which he records his impressions of Trochenbrod while on the 1938 Etzel officers training course.
Esh Achazah B’ya’ar (A Forest Ablaze). By Gad Rosenblatt; published by HaKibbutz HaMeuchad Publishing House, Ltd., Kibbutz Lochamei Haghettaot, Israel, first published in 1957, corrected second edition published in 1976. In 2008, Burt and Ellen Singerman provided me with an informal translation into English.
Findings of the [Soviet] Commission Documenting Fascist Atrocities. Report of a local commission set up by Soviet authorities, February 1945. This report, which is based on witness testimony, describes Holocaust events in the Sofiyovka area and provides some interesting insights into the Soviet view of what transpired. The report, housed in the State Archive of Volyn Region in Lutsk, Ukraine, was translated for me by Alexander Dunai of Lviv, Ukraine.
Hailan V’shoreshav (The Tree and Its Roots: The History of T.L., Sofiyovka-Ignatovka). Edited by Y. Vainer, T. Drori, G. Rosenblatt, A. Shpielman; published primarily in Hebrew and Yiddish by Bet TAL, Givatayim, Israel, 1988. Bet TAL is the organization of people from Trochenbrod and the neighboring village of Lozisht and people descended from them; Hailan is the “official” memorial book for Trochenbrod: it can be viewed on the Bet Tal Web site, http://bet-tal.com.
The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. By Father Patrick Desbois; Published by Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008. In this book, Father Desbois describes his mission to document the murder of the Jews of Ukraine, particularly western and southern Ukraine, by German killing units (Einzatsgruppen). Some of the details of his findings helped me sort through disparate reports of what actually happened in Trochenbrod and arrive at the probable facts of that case. Father Desbois’s organization is Yahad-In Unum, www.yahadinunum.org.
Ilustrowany Przewodnik po Wolyniu (Illustrated Directory of Volyn), 1929. I have an excerpt of pages from this document—including a photo of a Volyn landscape—that describes Sofiyovka, Kivertzy, Rozische, and other towns in the Trochenbrod area. I have no record of how this came into my hands.
Ksiȩga adresowa Polski (Polish Address