BETWEEN THE WARS
The devastation of World War I put an abrupt end to the rise of Trochenbrod’s star, its rapidly diversifying businesses and growing prosperity, its increasing weight as the regional center of economic gravity.
Shaindeleh Gluz was born in Trochenbrod in 1913, but in the informal memoir she wrote in 2002 she remembered life there during the war years vividly:
My paternal forefathers were glass blowers. When the glass factory was gone my grandfather became the mayor, tax collector and postmaster of Trochenbrod. He also had a butcher business. My father Zrulik and his brother Itzak ran it.
Grandma and some of her family left for America in 1914, just as I was starting to crawl. There was a lot of unrest in the world. There were rumors of war, and suddenly it happened; war was declared. All avenues of communication ceased. World War I was for real, it was on. There was no way to escape … no more elaborate plans to migrate. Immigration was stopped, there was no mail, no communication … only pain and suffering.
The invading army confiscated money, jewels, silver and all valuables from the town’s people. When the war was finally over, the fighting ceased in our town. All the plundering and killing was over. The young girls came out of hiding, no more rapes, no more deaths of the innocent. The commanding officers and their entourage withdrew from Trochenbrod. My grandfather’s home had been stripped of all furnishings that had been in the family for generations, but we were alive.
The war had taken its toll on my parents, especially my mother. She was very sick. She was always in bed. Things inside of our house weren’t clean and didn’t shine any more. It didn’t smell sweet and good. The aroma of cooking was also gone. Our clothes were torn and neglected. There was little food in the house. Often we were hungry. Mother was too weak to improvise any meals with the little bits of scraps that we had. Most of the time my little brother Yossel and I stayed in bed with Mother to keep warm, but we were so hungry.
Once in a while, while in bed with Mother, Yossel and I would play a game, “Lets Pretend,” with a large collection of well-worn colorful picture post-cards. The cards were of the Statue of Liberty and the teeming Lower East Side of New York. Mother’s family sent the cards to us when they settled in America. From these pictures, Mother would weave wonderful tales of freedom, peace, happiness and plenty.
Shortly after Mother passed away, many more sad happenings began. My little brother Yossel and my father became very ill. Yossel and I shared a tiny bed. One morning my little brother’s body was cold and stiff. His little life was snuffed out before he had a chance to live. He died of smallpox. I suppose that Yossel’s death really caused father’s complete breakdown, healthwise, and his death.
There came a time when we really didn’t have a piece of bread to eat. We foraged in the woods for berries and sour grass. Our bellies became swollen. We found ourselves too weak from hunger, too sick with festering body sores and lice to give a care anymore. We just couldn’t go on anymore. Make no mistake; we were not alone in this situation. All of Trochenbrod was suffering. We became like animals; we hunted for scraps of food; like animals we fought cunningly to survive.
Just when the struggle became too much to bear, when we were ready to succumb to the unknown, fate intervened and help came. One day Trochenbrod was seething with excitement. Since the war was finally over, the ban on traveling had been lifted. The first person to arrive was a rich American. He had been commissioned by concerned relatives in America to go to our town and seek out their relatives. With him he brought letters and money for some of the people. He was also asked to help some of the townspeople to make their way to America. My brother and I reached the center of town just in time to hear the American call our names.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, also known as the Habsburg Empire, finally collapsed in 1918. But the Treaty of Versailles signed at the end of World War I did not concretely define the border between the reconstituted Poland and the newly constituted Soviet Union. Immediately, Poland and the Soviet Union took up arms over control of the borderlands area that included Trochenbrod. Again the front moved back and forth through the area. Again Trochenbrod was ravaged. When the Polish were the occupying force they expressed their loathing of Jews in the form of beatings, forced labor, looting, raping, and confiscation of food. When the Soviets were the occupying force they preferred to confiscate property from wealthier people, take over businesses, and hunt for imagined Polish spies. The fighting in this secondary war finally ended in 1920, and in 1921 the Treaty of Riga that divided the borderlands between Poland and Soviet Russia was signed. This is when Shaindeleh Gluz heard her name called in the center of Trochenbrod, and then made her way to the United States. Trochenbrod was now in Poland.
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For this period of Trochenbrod’s history there is a great deal of source material—though never enough, and some of it contradictory. I found good maps; hand-written Sofiyovka civic records; directories that included Trochenbrod survey information and descriptions; memoirs; and references to Trochenbrod, usually brief references, in several books. Sources like these made it possible for me to draw the physical, commercial, and human outlines of Trochenbrod in the interwar years, but not the content within those outlines. What did the street look like? How did the people dress? How did the ways Trochenbroders made their living affect community life? What were the relations like between rich and poor? How did the Jewishness of the place express itself? What did the kids do in the summer? In short, what was the feel of the interwar Trochenbrod, this “last” Trochenbrod? What was it like to live there?
I was lucky to fall under Trochenbrod’s spell at a time when a few dozen people who knew Trochenbrod firsthand were still alive. I talked with people born there from 1912 through 1932, and who left as late as 1942. I was able to hear a different perspective, how Trochenbrod and Trochenbroders appeared to Ukrainians and Poles living in other places in the area, from people who still live there and remember well their childhood visits to Trochenbrod. Personal recollections, as unreliable as any one of them might be, collectively made it possible to fill the outlines with the feel of Trochenbrod, with a sense of what was it like to live there. My father left Trochenbrod in 1932; I was capturing things he would have told me.
Trochenbroders usually went to Lutsk, about 20 miles and the better part of a day’s journey away, for studio photographs, or had photographs made by itinerant photographers who from time to time set up temporary studios in Trochenbrod. This explains why you can look through hundreds of photographs from Trochenbrod and see the faces of its people, most often stiff and posed, and nothing of the town’s physical appearance. By the 1930s box cameras and 35mm cameras were readily available, and at least some people who visited Trochenbrod, usually immigrants returning to visit their families, snapped outdoor photos. Some Trochenbroders had cameras also, but their photographs were lost in the Holocaust. The one Trochenbroder who was technologically attuned, who photographed outdoor scenes, and survived the Holocaust with her photographs and other personal belongings was the Polish Catholic postmistress of the town, Janina Lubinski. I met her son, Ryszard Lubinski, in the city of Radom, two hours south of Warsaw, and with happiness he gave me most of the photos of 1930s Trochenbrod that appear in this book. They add a layer of concreteness to Trochenbrod like nothing else can; they allowed me to see the town my father grew up in.
When my father marked his bar mitzvah in the early 1920s, the combined population of Trochenbrod and Lozisht was the same as it had been twenty years earlier, about sixteen hundred people. Emigration, disease, and war privation had offset any natural growth. The first few years after the wars were a period of harsh life and recovery. In the early days of full Polish administration, local commandants imposed forced labor on the Jews of Trochenbrod—building roads, administration buildings, and warehouses in the region; supplying the Polish army with food, clothes, and leather goods; hauling construction materials and army supplies; building furnishings for government offices. That hardship was soon replaced with higher-level official discrimination. Government jobs were denied to Jews. Some trades that Jews had been prominent in, such as vodka and salt, were made state monopolies and turned over to Polish Catholic war veterans to operate. Systematic repression of Jews steadily increased throughout the interwar period. So did regular outbreaks of violence against Jews, and these were ignored if not encouraged by Polish officials. Despite this, and because people in the rural areas tended to get along better than in the cities—Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews each having their own social and economic niches—Trochenbrod’s economy again began to grow and diversify.
Although increased contact with the outside world and a measure of political awareness had come about in Trochenbrod to some extent during the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, World War I and the Polish-Soviet war pushed the town on a faster path to modernity—technological, commercial, cultural, social, and political. During the wars Trochenbrod had rubbed up against Russian, Austrian, Polish, and Soviet troops. Some young men had fled to distant cities to avoid the troubles in Trochenbrod or to attend yeshiva, and they returned more worldly wise; some had been taken into the military and were exposed to a secular world and nonkosher food. This all laid the groundwork for a Trochenbrod that during the interwar period had growing ranks of secularists, political movements from the far left to the far right, and businessmen whose enterprises reached out to the larger world.
This is not to overstate the case. Trochenbrod remained surrounded by forests, far from any reliable transportation route for motorized vehicles, and completely and somewhat insularly Jewish. It continued to be a town, a complete town, governed by Jewish custom: always observing the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, always strictly kosher and following Jewish dictates, always filling up its synagogues, and always greeting visiting Jewish scholars with celebrations. For Jews who knew about the town and for most who lived there, this, together with its farming character, lent Trochenbrod an out-of-place and out-of-time almost magical quality.
As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, Trochenbrod was thriving again. Its economy was increasingly becoming the center of trade, artisans, agroprocessing, and light manufacturing for a region stretching in a radius of more than ten miles. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the uniqueness of Trochenbrod’s Jewish farmers at that time. One of the most eloquent expressions of the wonder of this was written by the Israeli writer Jacob Banai in his 1978 book Anonymous Soldiers:
Sofiyovka is the name of a small Volyn town in which in the fall of 1938 the first Etzel1course took place, in which I participated. The Jews led their lives in Sofiyovka as if it was their kingdom. That is where I first encountered Jews who worked in agriculture. In Sofiyovka I saw Jews walking behind their plows; a Jew who takes his cows to the field, and when the time for prayer has arrived he stands in his field and prays as if he is standing in a synagogue.
That picture deeply ingrained itself in my memory, and it was the first taste I had of our vision of a Jew in his homeland. I also saw children there, not organized in any activities, but actually small children playing in the fields, dancing and singing Hebrew songs. What a magical place was this Sofiyovka!!!
Memories like this, perhaps reinforced by what lingered in the minds of children who left Trochenbrod at a very young age, and also the memoirs of people who left Trochenbrod well before World War I, have given many today the notion that Trochenbrod was essentially a farming village. In fact, by the 1930s, and perhaps well before that, no one in Trochenbrod actually made their living from farming. Although everyone worked their land to some degree, the livelihoods of most Trochenbrod families, or by far the larger part of them, now came from retail shops, leather-related businesses, construction trades, small-scale manufacturing, and trading.
By now, growing numbers of Ukrainians and Poles from surrounding villages were employed in the town’s fields, houses, and sometimes even businesses. It became more and more common for people from surrounding villages not only to shop in Trochenbrod but also to sell things there house to house or from their wagons. Trochenbrod was, as before, one long street with houses, shops, workshops, small factories, and synagogues, but now also with public buildings like schools, a cultural center, the post office, and the constable’s office lined up along it. Many houses had already been rebuilt or were now being rebuilt, improved, and enlarged; and now most shops had their own storefronts and carried an ever-increasing variety of goods. As it embarked on the 1930s, Trochenbrod had become truly a regional town.
One sign that this was happening is the town’s appearance in Poland’s first official “Illustrated Directory of Volyn,” published in 1929. The directory listed only places that were economically or touristically significant, and Trochenbrod was considered one of those. The entry for Sofiyovka reads,
Eleven kilometers east of Trostjanetz is Sofiyovka. It is an industrial town.… The easiest access route by rail is through the Kivertzy station (22 kilometers). The main industry is leather-working, and there are over 20 small leather workshops. In addition there are many Jews there; they are farmers. The town is built on pilings on swampy land, and during the spring snow-melt the water rises to the floors of the houses. There is a new and sizeable wooden church, built with pine and oak, funded by the Radziwills.
Yes, a church! More on this later.
Also in 1929 there was an entry for Sofiyovka in Ksiȩga adresowa Polski, a privately published Polish business directory. The entry listed about ninety nonfarm businesses in Sofiyovka in a wide variety of sectors that included shops, workshops, small factories, and traders. Next to each type of enterprise appear the names of the proprietors of those businesses. Many prominent Trochenbrod family names show up there—names that today are spread throughout North and South America and Israel, and also throughout this book: Antwarg; Blitzstein; Bulmash; Burak; Drossner; Fishfader; Gelman; Gilden; Gluz; Halperin; Kerman; Kessler; Potash; Roitenberg; Safran; Schuster; Shpielman; Shwartz; Szames; Wainer. In this Ksiȩga adresowa Polski entry the only distinctly Polish names in the long list of Sofiyovka business proprietors are those who run the government-monopoly vodka and tobacco shops.
The breadth of enterprises in this town as early as 1929 may be surprising at first, considering the extent of physical and personal devastation suffered there in the wars. But after having recovered in basic physical terms, stabilized in human terms, and settled into the idiosyncrasies of the Polish administration, around the mid 1920s Trochenbrod had begun to reclaim its place as a regional commercial center with renewed energy. And while some Trochenbrod families never recovered the economic well-being they enjoyed before World War I, and some now even scraped along mostly with the help of money sent by relatives who lived abroad, as the 1930s got under way, many Trochenbrod families were beginning to do relatively well and saw that a comfortable future might be possible in their town.
It’s a safe guess that a policy of economic diversification in order to promote growth and stability in Trochenbrod never crossed the mind of anyone who lived there. But, willy-nilly, that is what happened. Diversification of economic activity is a time-honored family strategy, especially among rural families, to pin down a dependable stream of income. Add to that the unusual range of economic opportunities presented by involvement of Trochenbrod families in both agriculture and town businesses, an entrepreneurial heritage handed down from urban roots, and a potential market that included a dozen or more villages in the area, not to mention three cities, and you have the formula for a community of people who would discover and seize a wide variety of economic opportunities. And once they seized one they immediately began to build on it.
A good example of this was Moishe Sheinberg. Moishe was somehow involved in the butcher business in Trochenbrod when he noticed that, like Jews, Polish people for some reason did not eat the hind quarters of cows. He figured that there must be lots of castoff cow rumps he could sell to Ukrainians. Indeed there was. He was able to buy these parts relatively cheaply and then sell them at market in Kivertzy. Moishe was, of course, strictly kosher: he would never eat the nonkosher meat he sold.
Then there was Avrum Bass. Avrum was a farmer who sold his produce at market, and had a horse and wagon to transport his goods. He would often bring produce back from the market in his wagon to sell in Trochenbrod, so he became both a farmer and a produce trader. His familiarity with horses led him to sell the one he had and buy another, and before long he was also a horse trader. Sometimes he brought bread back from the market to sell in Trochenbrod. Why not bake it here and offer fresher bread that people from the nearby villages might also come to buy? Soon enough, Avrum Bass was a relatively well-to-do businessman who grew and traded produce, was a trader in horses, and owned a bakery in Trochenbrod.
Dairy owners in Trochenbrod took their milk and butter to Lutsk, Rovno, and Kolki to sell. Why come back with empty wagons? They began bringing back sugar, cooking oil, and eventually a wide variety of other goods from the cities to sell in Trochenbrod. They expanded their dairy shops into grocery stores and thought of themselves not just as dairymen but also as grocery shopkeepers and traders in city goods.
Ellie Potash started out making shoes and selling them in his small Trochenbrod shop like so many others. To get an edge on the competition he bought a horse and wagon and made rounds in the villages to take orders from customers and sell shoes directly to them. People would ask him for other leather goods, especially boots, belts, and bridles. Steadily he expanded his “export” business, and by the mid-1930s had a workshop in its own building (next to the post office) making a wide variety of leather goods for a steady market of customers in the villages around Trochenbrod. He made a good living from this and was able to build a very nice new house. He could not have imagined that just a few years later his house would be selected by the Germans as one of the places to store the belongings of their victims, and then to quarter themselves, while Ellie and his family struggled to survive the winter hiding in the Radziwill forest.
As the entry in the 1929 “Illustrated Directory of Volyn” implied, if there was a single dominant industry in Trochenbrod, it was leather. The leather business included buying skins and buying cows for their skins; tanning; working leather into a wide variety of products, especially boots and shoes; leather goods shops; shoe shops; shoe repair; and exporting leather and leather goods to cities in the area, trading at regional markets, selling from wagons of leather merchandise village by village, and wholesaling to small shops in other villages. The biggest tannery, possibly the biggest business, in Trochenbrod was owned by the Shwartz family and employed seven Trochenbrod workers. David Shwartz, who wrote the memoir from which passages are quoted in the first chapter of this book, was one of the Shwartz family children.
Trochenbrod tanners were known for making regular rounds of the surrounding villages looking for and buying cows with skin that would meet their high standards. Sofiyovka boots were considered the highest quality available anywhere for many miles around because of both the leather and the craftsmanship. The steady demand for boots spawned a large number of shoemakers and shoe shops in Trochenbrod to serve people who came from villages and even towns all around to buy shoes, and especially boots, which were so important in the muddy rural area. There were about forty thriving leather-related enterprises in Trochenbrod by the late 1930s. The town’s fame as a center for footwear drew so many customers that eventually even a Bata2 store was established there, a store where people could buy relatively low-cost ready-made shoes that were brought to Trochenbrod from Bata factories elsewhere.
Other businesses that lined Trochenbrod’s bustling street by the late 1930s were:
| • | Bakeries |
| • | Barber shops |
| • | Beer house |
| • | Building materials |
| • | Butchers—the fattier the meat the more it cost! |
| • | Candy store |
| • | Carpenters |
| • | Cattle traders |
| • | Clothes, ready-made |
| • | Dairies, which bought milk from Trochenbrod families and sold dairy products in local shops and in Lutsk, Rovno, and Kolki |
| • | Dressmakers |
| • | Fabric shops, very popular throughout the region because few people bought ready-made clothes |
| • | General store |
| • | Glaziers |
| • | Grain mills, the largest of which was located on the east side of the street in the far north end of town. It had a motor with different attachments for chopping or grinding a variety of raw inputs. Farmers from throughout the region went there to have their grain milled or their hay chopped into more edible feed for their animals. |
| • | Food, other than produce |
| • | Furniture makers |
| • | Haberdashery |
| • | Hat maker |
| • | Heating system builders |
| • | Herbal remedies |
| • | Horse traders |
| • | House builders |
| • | Ice—the ice was cut from a pond at the far north end of town. |
| • | Inn |
| • | Iron-working |
| • | Lumber mills |
| • | Matzah-making (in season) |
| • | Metal products like nails and other small items |
| • | Midwifery |
| • | Oil presses, to which farmers from all around brought their oil seeds to be crushed, and pressed to produce cooking oil |
| • | Pharmacies, called aptekas, run by the local feltchers, paramedics who treated minor ailments and injuries. When someone was seriously ill they had to be taken to a hospital in Lutsk or Rovno or even Kiev—lengthy, arduous, and potentially dangerous journeys. |
| • | Produce shops |
| • | Restaurant |
| • | Kosher slaughterer |
| • | Tailors |
There was also a slaughterhouse and a bathhouse, although not on the main street.
The heads of many families in Trochenbrod were professional traders who regularly frequented regional markets by horse-drawn wagon. They took their products to places like Olyka, Kolki, and Kivertzy, where there were fixed weekly market days for different kinds of products. Some were produce traders—they sold produce like potatoes and cabbage from the fields of Trochenbrod families and bought produce and food products like flour and sugar to sell in Trochenbrod. Others sold Trochenbrod-made goods, especially leather goods, at these markets. Still others traded in livestock.
Trochenbrod supplied artisans—glaziers, house builders, carpenters, builders of cooking and heating systems, painters, bricklayers, roofers, and other specialists—to villagers as far as fifteen miles away. Fifteen miles was the distance a man could walk from Trochenbrod in a day, and then return to Trochenbrod in a day after the job was completed, and avoid night travel made dangerous by robbers, hooligans, and wild animals.
The commercial breadth of Trochenbrod—the almost dizzying array of economic activities in a relatively small and isolated town, the far-flung trading and artisan connections with other places, and the magnetic pull on buyers and sellers from surrounding villages—often came to mind second after family and friends in the reminiscences of Trochenbroders I interviewed. But it tended to be first in the memories of Ukrainians still living in the area today. For example, the first time I visited, as we were trying to locate the site of Trochenbrod we saw an aged woman bent over, working, in the fields of the neighboring village of Domashiv. We asked if she could point us toward the site of Sofiyovka. She slowly straightened up from her hoeing and looked at us stern-faced for a moment, as if to say, “Who is this asking me such things?” Then, as if thinking, Oh, I see you’re foreigners looking for that place … what a place! a huge grin broke out across her weathered face and she twisted and pointed. “There,” she said, “Keep walking in that direction through the fields on the other side of that grove and you’ll see a small black monument that marks the north end of Sofiyovka. If there had been no Germans you wouldn’t need to ask, because you’d see it: it would be a city today, bigger than Lutsk.”
A fascinating idea to contemplate. If there had been no World War II, what would have been? Could Trochenbrod really have become a city—big stone buildings, a tram system, a network of paved streets with sidewalks, cars everywhere, perhaps a railroad spur at last, fancy restaurants and upscale shops—a completely Jewish city, a Tel Aviv in Poland or Ukraine?
As a thriving town that was rapidly growing by the late 1930s, Trochenbrod now had its own post office, constable station, and other government offices. For a while, not only the constable but also the office of the chief of police for villages in the area was located in Sofiyovka. As the Polish government continued to rationalize its administration in its new eastern lands, it established a formal district headquarters in the village of Silno, a few miles away through the Radziwill forest—a village much smaller than Trochenbrod. The chief of police relocated there with all other district offices. Local officials reached out to Trochenbrod, the most prosperous settlement in the Silno district, in many ways, especially when it came to taxes.
The Polish government imposed a variety of taxes. For businesses there were permit and turnover taxes. A shop owner, for example, bought and annually renewed a business permit, and then paid taxes on the turnover of the business. Households had to pay into a compulsory government fire insurance program that supposedly covered the costs of fire protection as well as rebuilding. There were excise taxes on matches, liquor, tobacco, kerosene, and other nonfood basics. And then there was the chief of police. In the late 1930s this was a big man: one Trochenbroder described him as over six feet tall and three feet wide. He regularly came from Silno to visit the Sofiyovka part of his domain. He would stop into Trochenbrod shops, reach out his hand to the shopkeeper, and say a friendly “Shalom aleichem.” He had come for the police tax: you knew that when you reached out your hand to shake his, there needed to be a few zlotys in it that would not be there when your hand came back. Trochenbrod had all the trappings of a vibrant commercial town.
There was a lot of agriculture in addition to commercial enterprises. Most Trochenbrod families not only drew a good portion of their food from the farm fields behind their houses, they earned a little extra money from their farming. Behind each house was a shed and perhaps a barn and other outbuildings, and then a vegetable garden. Beyond the vegetable garden Trochenbrod families grew beans, potatoes, cabbage, corn, and other fruits and vegetables, and beyond that was a field reaching back as far as the forest to pasture the cows and other animals. This was a pattern similar to the one that had been practiced in Trochenbrod for a hundred years.
Many Trochenbrod families kept cows, and most also kept chickens and other livestock like geese, goats, and horses. Workers of the three dairies in town circulated among the homes each day to buy milk, one of the multiple small sources of income for many Trochenbrod families.
Larger Settlements, Trochenbrod Region
People had close commercial relations with the surrounding towns, and many also had relatives in Lutsk, Rovno, or Kolki. Transportation was improving—the road from the Kivertzy railroad station to Lutsk was now paved, there was limited bus service between Kolki and Lutsk, and both train and bus service were available between Lutsk and Rovno—and many Trochenbroders now frequently traveled to the cities of the region. Basia-Ruchel Potash, Ellie’s daughter, was a child growing up in Trochenbrod in the 1930s. She remembers feelings like those of country girls everywhere when they set eyes on the big city:
I liked to go with my father when he went to the big city, Lutsk, when he went to buy leather and things. He would take me along. I’d look at the buildings and the people and the shop windows and the cars; it was so exciting! I dreamt that when I grow up that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to live in the big city.
Trochenbrod’s economic expansion and diversification and extension of its market reach continued at a brisk pace until late 1939, bringing with it more than a doubling of Trochenbrod’s population, from sixteen hundred people to over five thousand in Trochenbrod and Lozisht, in the interwar period.
Some of that population growth resulted from people moving to Trochenbrod from surrounding cities because they married into Trochenbrod families; or because it was a uniquely desirable place where one could earn a living, enjoy a rural environment with many city conveniences, and live in a Jewish town; or both. Some of the population growth happened because more people stayed in Trochenbrod than before: it had become more difficult to gain entry as an immigrant to many destination countries, including the United States, and now as more of a commercial center than an agricultural settlement the fixed acreage of Trochenbrod did not limit livelihood opportunities the way it had in earlier generations. And some of the population growth was caused by a minor baby boom spurred by economic recovery, a measure of stability, and the prospect of a decent, possibly even prosperous long-term future in Trochenbrod.
A rapid expansion of social initiative also started in the mid-1920s and continued into early 1939, with political, spiritual, educational, and cultural expressions. Zionism took strong hold in Trochenbrod, as it did elsewhere in Eastern Europe in this period. Virtually all young people were organized into Zionist movements that spanned the political spectrum from far left to far right. The most robust Zionist youth movement in Trochenbrod was Beitar, which had a strong self-defense orientation. Even Ryszard Lubinski, the only Gentile born in Trochenbrod, was close to Beitar:
There were Jewish organizations in Trochenbrod, and sometimes they fought among themselves. Do you know of an organization called Beitar? I was close to the people in that organization. The head of it was someone named Anshel Shpielman. That organization wanted to fight for Palestine, for a Jewish state in Palestine. The other organizations wanted to negotiate for land, and that caused some conflict among them.
The Zionist groups met regularly. Sometimes separately and sometimes in cooperation, they had educational programs; put on plays; held evenings of Hebrew music and dance; conducted special holiday events; promoted the use of modern conversational Hebrew; and sent more than a hundred Jewish “pioneers,” to Palestine. A return to the Hebrew language, which was to be the language of the new Jewish state, was one of the basic principles of Zionist youth groups. By the mid-1930s, the language of Trochenbrod, Yiddish, was joined by widespread use of modern Hebrew in homes and at some public meetings. Formal and informal Hebrew language classes proliferated. Trochenbrod, that little isolated town in the midst of Ukrainian villages and forests, even produced poets and essayists who published their work in both Hebrew and Yiddish.
A point of pride among many native Trochenbroders is that in 1938 the first training course outside Palestine for Etzel officers was conducted in Trochenbrod. Etzel was an early Jewish nationalist organization associated with the Beitar Zionist youth movement. Etzel members believed in the use of military force to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Menachim Begin, who fought the British in Palestine as a Jewish terrorist and later became prime minister of Israel, was an Etzel leader. Trochenbrod offered the nationalist Zionist leaders of Etzel a unique set of circumstances for their military training: relative remoteness from the eyes of disapproving Polish authorities; a rural environment with both open land and forest land; a concentration of sympathetic Zionist youth; and a Jewish town that could supply provisions and fraternally accommodate the training.
Alongside the secular Zionist fervor in Trochenbrod, Jewish religious observance, tradition, and scholarship were only slightly diminished there. All the Trochenbroders I spoke with who were young men and women in Trochenbrod in the 1930s had been ardent Zionists, but the men also had been yeshiva students in places like Olyka, Rovno, Mezerich, Lublin, and Warsaw. Many synagogues flourished in Trochenbrod in the mid-1930s—some Trochenbroders told me that as many as nine functioned simultaneously in this small town. Everyone in Trochenbrod followed Orthodox Jewish law and customs. As one Trochenbroder put it, “You were either an Orthodox Jew or they called you a goy [Gentile].” Trochenbroders continued to govern their lives and the life of the town by Jewish custom, observe Sabbath prohibitions scrupulously, celebrate all the Jewish holidays robustly as community events, and pray three times each day.
A “Talmud Torah,” a Jewish day school for boys that had a number of teachers and taught the classic Jewish religious texts, thrived in Trochenbrod in the mid-1930s, as did many smaller cheders. Most children went to Jewish school for a few hours each day after Polish public school. Families that could afford it also hired private teachers for additional Jewish or Hebrew instruction at home.
Trochenbroders who were youngsters in the 1930s reminisce about the Sabbath using the same words as those who experienced Sabbaths in Trochenbrod two or three generations earlier. It was a day for which everyone prepared by baking chalah [braided egg bread] and special chulunt dishes that would cook all day over a low fire; cleaning themselves and their houses; sending the children door to door collecting baked goods to give to the poor; and dressing in a manner appropriate for greeting and being in the company of “the Sabbath Queen,” an affectionate moniker for the special Sabbath day. There were always guests for the Sabbath, often merchants visiting Trochenbrod who could not get home before the start of the holy day, on which travel is forbidden. Everyone who was able happily brought someone home from Friday night prayers to share dinner and their home for the Sabbath.
The women generally left it to their husbands to intercede with God in the synagogue while they, together with their daughters, worked on the special Sabbath meal that was served to the family when the men and boys returned from prayer. Following an after-meal nap, families would go for a stroll, visit relatives, meet in a small park to gossip and talk politics, or perhaps let the children run to find wild blueberries in the Radziwill forest. Sabbath was a day of peace, rest, prayer, family, good eating, socializing, making excursions to the Radziwill forest, singing Sabbath songs and pausing to savor the goodness that God, hard work, and Trochenbrod provided.
Ryszard Lubinski, though he was a Polish Catholic, could not help also being caught up in Trochenbrod’s Sabbath:
There were Shabbos goys3 in Trochenbrod; I helped with that all the time, to light fires for heating and keeping the food warm. We helped our neighbors with that as friends, to keep the fire going. But there were hundreds of houses in Sofiyovka and Ignatovka, so people would come from the villages to tend the fires for the Jews, and made a little money from that. Most of the houses had the same organization: in the kitchen everybody had a stove and an oven to bake bread. I remember that for Shabbos, once everything was made, on Friday they would put it inside the bread oven so it would stay warm for the next day. I remember the smell of that very well.
While a bar mitzvah in Trochenbrod was cause for little more than a piece of sponge cake, some fruit, and a taste of schnapps for the men after prayers, weddings were a different matter altogether. Much of the town showed up for the outdoor ceremony. Children recited poems and sang songs, and one of the women baked a huge challah and danced while holding it before the bride and groom. It was a time to forget everything else and rejoice. The bride and groom performed their rituals under the wedding canopy—sips of wine, wedding ring, reading of the ritual wedding contract, seven blessings, more sips of wine, and smashing a glass underfoot. A wedding feast was rounded out with schnapps and vodka; a toast, another toast, and then another toast; merry singing and dancing, men with men, to the unbridled exuberance of a klezmer band. A klezmer trio was brought from Kolki for every wedding: Tzalik, who beat the symbols and drums; Chaim, whose fingers danced wildly on the clarinet; and Peshi, the fiddler with a big white beard. There was nothing like a Trochenbrod wedding—that’s how it seemed to Trochenbroders.
Under the Polish administration a regional public school was established in Trochenbrod—it was actually located in Shelisht, a hamlet between Trochenbrod and Lozisht that was really a part of Trochenbrod. In this school young Trochenbroders were exposed to Polish-language studies, mathematics, literature, and other secular subjects, and Jewish subjects as well. Ukrainian children from nearby villages also attended this school, and were playmates with their Trochenbrod classmates during the school day. Several Trochenbrod natives to this day have strong memories of participating in Polish-language plays at school, like Little Red Riding Hood, even while they rehearsed Yiddish plays in Trochenbrod’s cultural center or Hebrew plays in their Zionist groups.
Prince Janush Radziwill—of the same Polish Radziwill family that later in the century Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier, married into—owned vast lands in the region of Trochenbrod. These lands included the forest that bordered fields on the east side of town. The Jews of Trochenbrod often grazed their cattle in the Radziwill forest, took Sabbath walks and picked berries there, from time to time would quietly cut down a tree or two for their own use, and in a manner of speaking considered it their forest. This drove a running cat-and-mouse game with Prince Radziwill’s forest rangers, but on the whole the people of Trochenbrod had cordial relations with the prince himself. Prince Radziwill’s palace was in the small town of Olyka, about twelve miles south of Trochenbrod. To this day there is a horse trail heading south from where Trochenbrod used to be that is known as the Olyka trail.
In the late 1920s, Prince Radziwill built a Catholic church at the edge of his forest, just east of the northern end of Trochenbrod, to serve about thirty Polish families that lived southeast of Trochenbrod. No one knows why he built the church exactly in that place, but the result was that on Sundays a large group of Poles walking to and from church passed through Trochenbrod’s muddy street in their go-to-church finery, almost as if promenading in Lutsk, with their priest at the head of the crowd.
Some natives of Trochenbrod recall that young men in these strolling church groups would, as they passed through town, strike at townspeople just to show who was boss. Tuvia Drori, who was born in Trochenbrod and fled to Palestine in 1939, declared, “Yes, they would hit Jews on their way to church; it was a mitzvah [good deed] for them!” But other people who spent their youths in Trochenbrod think the scuffles were incited by young Trochenbrod men who sometimes taunted the Poles on their way to church. Shmulik Potash (not related to Ellie and Basia-Ruchel), who also left for Palestine in 1939, remembers the processions as a good thing for Trochenbrod because while walking through town churchgoers often stopped into a Trochenbrod shop to buy something.
Basia-Ruchel Potash was first exposed to serious anti-Jewish behavior by the church processions.
It was on a Sunday, on the way back from church—they had to pass through our shtetl, the Gentile people—and on the way back from church a bunch of Polish men attacked a bunch of Jewish boys. My uncle was one who was attacked. He was pretty beaten up, black and blue, real real bad. Everyone started to run and close their doors and hide inside because they were afraid for their children and themselves getting beaten up. I saw that with my own eyes. I was screaming, I was hysterical, I was crying. I witnessed other things like that many many times. Mostly it would take place on Sundays, when they would go to or from church through our town. They would call out, “Dirty Jew,” or call us names, or hit us. We tried to stay out of their way. It wasn’t that bad yet. But through a child’s eyes, whatever I saw had an effect on me: I realized that I’m Jewish and I realized that they don’t like us. I realized that I had to be careful and stay out of their way.
Peshia Gotman remembers the church as the object of an adventure more than in connection with the processions:
I remember that church, and how! My mother gave me a good beating because I ran to be at the “otpus”—it’s when they have their services outside, it’s like a big picnic, it’s some kind of ceremony—I was maybe ten years old. I was with a whole bunch of kids. They usually had ice cream, and all kinds of toys; it was like a big picnic, the whole church was having a picnic outside. I got a big spanking for that, because I was not supposed to go to the church.
Perhaps Prince Radziwill had devious intent when he set things up so that Trochenbroders would be drawn to their windows and yards by weekly church processions and would have a relatively good view of the church and the goings-on in its yard. While there were many different perspectives on the subject, there’s no escaping the fact that in the 1930s, the Polish Catholic church and the weekly churchgoer processions were prominent in the life of the Jewish town of Trochenbrod.
By the mid-1930s, many Trochenbroders who had emigrated before World War I, particularly to the United States, managed, despite the Depression, to return to Trochenbrod to visit the town and their relatives. David Shwartz was one of those people. His memoir was inspired by a visit he paid to Trochenbrod with his wife in 1934. Basia-Ruchel Potash remembers with great clarity even today a visit by American relatives well over seventy-five years ago:
In 1933 an aunt and uncle of ours came to visit us. Of course we had a big open house, all of Trochenbrod was invited, and everybody came to the party to honor my aunt from America who had been sixteen or seventeen years old when she left for the United States. They were like big celebrities today. It was so much fun. I was asking her stories about America. I was so curious; I remember her telling us about black people in America, and I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. At the party we took a picture of everyone; and what do you think happened in the middle of taking a picture? The cow came and left some droppings. Everybody laughed; that was funny—in our backyard.
Those who visited reported mixed stories. Most remembered their Trochenbrod with fondness and a rich sense of community and Jewish life that was missing for them in America, and felt freshly the pangs of longing for that way of life when they visited. But they were Americans now, and many saw Trochenbrod’s relative prosperity through American eyes as unacceptable poverty, primitiveness, and removal from modern urban living. Visitors from abroad often brought with them envelopes of dollars, some for their own relatives and some for relatives of their Trochenbrod friends in the States. Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the United States were getting increasingly nervous about Hitler’s rise, and many of the visitors came to Trochenbrod with the aim of convincing relatives to leave. One family tells of their grandparents going back carrying extra suitcases for the Trochenbrod family members they had hoped they could persuade to leave.
Despite being the only Jewish town in Europe, Trochenbrod was never widely known, even among Jews. But its unique character meant that neither was it quite as obscure as thousands of other Eastern European shtetls. More than a few Jews sought it out as a place to live and many more as a place to visit, a place where they could see and breathe the air of a Jewish town—and good country air, at that. The special quality of Jewish life in Trochenbrod may have contributed to creating a somewhat outsized share of relative notables in the Jewish world. Eliezer Burak, a Trochenbroder who moved to Palestine as a Jewish pioneer in the 1920s, wrote an article about his beloved Trochenbrod that was published in Hebrew in Tel Aviv in 1945. In it he recalls a handful of Trochenbrod’s “famous people” from just before and during the interwar period, especially those who helped spread Jewish culture.
Rabbi Yehezkel Potash, the permanent “Starusta” [government-appointed “Elder”] of the town in the days of the Czarist government. He was a scholarly and learned man, and served the people of Trochenbrod well with his honesty and intelligence.
Hirsch Kantor, a comedian who was master of his profession and very talented. At weddings and other gatherings he would bring joy to everyone with his rhymes and his cleverness.
Rabbi Moshe Hirsch Roitenberg, the scholar, ran a cheder in the town, and also served as a cantor, and he too had great talent as a comedian. His jokes were published in the newspapers Heint and Moment, which pleased him a great deal. Journalists would come all the way from Warsaw to interview him.
Two high-level Communists: Motel Shwartz who was a well-known Commissar in the Odessa fleet, and Yaakov Burak who was an admiral on a Russian warship and a university graduate. In the period of the Soviet purges Shwartz disappeared, and Burak drowned with his ship near Kronstadt in the war between the Bolsheviks and the Whites. These two had studied many years in the Slobodka yeshiva, and Motel Shwartz was even a certified rabbi.
Yisrael Beider, a son of the Rabbi Moshe David Beider, was a teacher in nearby Olyka, and after that moved to Mezerich near Brisk [Brest-Litovsk] and continued his literary work as a poet and essayist in both Hebrew and Yiddish.
Yitzhak Aronski, a young and talented journalist, a feature writer published widely in Polish Jewish newspapers. He helped establish “The Volyner Shtima,” which was published in Rovno, and founded a library in Trochenbrod as part of his personal mission to encourage widespread reading of newspapers and books.
Hitler goose-stepped onto the scene in Europe, became chancellor of Germany in 1933, and in 1934 signed the German-Polish nonaggression pact. Among other things, the pact essentially left no restrictions on Nazi propaganda in Poland. From 1934 until Hitler’s invasion of western Poland in 1939, Poland’s repression of Jews, along with anti-Jewish hooliganism and actual pogroms, echoed those in Germany with slightly less shrillness. Relatives abroad were urging Trochenbrod families to leave. But Trochenbrod had not been directly affected much by anti-Jewish hooliganism, apart from the occasional Sunday brawl, and was prospering and modernizing like never before. The few who did consider leaving were torn.
By the late 1930s, Trochenbrod had become the place to shop and do business in the region. Many elderly Ukrainians today remember visiting Trochenbrod as children with their parents, and being awestruck at everything that was available for sale there, at the nice houses (“like ours, but bigger, better, nicer, and with nice things in them”), and at the hustle and bustle in the street. The intense regional commercial activity in Trochenbrod meant that during the workday, parts of the town were a Babel of Ukrainian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and sometimes Russian—and when relatives visited from the United States, English too. The commercial hubbub during the workday was such that one almost forgot that this was a Jewish town.
One elderly woman in Horodiche, a Ukranian village about four miles southeast of Trochenbrod through the forest, told me that as a child she would beg her father to take her with him on his shopping excursions to Sofiyovka because for her it was like going to the big city. A Ukrainian from the village of Yaromel about two miles away remembered “beautiful stores there, lots of different kinds of stores.” He also remembered Trochenbrod shopkeepers as gentle and kind people:
We bought things there: fabrics, clothes, shoes, and other things. If we needed to buy something but we didn’t have the money, the Jewish shopkeepers would say, “Don’t worry, it’s OK; when you’ll have the money, you’ll pay me.” They were good people. They trusted everyone.
An old-timer from the nearby village of Domashiv reminisced:
They hired Ukrainians from nearby villages to work in their fields. Ukrainians from the surrounding villages would go there to try to find something to do to earn money. They could get two zlotys for helping in the fields, and the Trochenbroders would give them a cup of tea. They would even hire Ukrainians to cut their grasses for their cattle because the Trochenbrod people were busy trading. They were selling all sorts of leather goods, and they were buying animals for hides to make leather to make those goods.
Before the war everyone was friendly. The Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles all had different professions and did business with each other. People from different villages went around to other villages. They might sew clothes, or repair something in someone’s house. Everyone had his own job, so it was peaceful and friendly, and everyone had his own piece of land and worked on it.
A woman in a formerly Polish village, Przebradze, on what used to be the principal road from Trochenbrod to Kivertzy and Lutsk, knew Trochenbrod and many of its people well:
My parents used to take me to Sofiyovka because there were a lot of shops there where we could by a lot of things. The people from all the villages around Sofiyovka went there to get everything they needed.
We had bees, and we sold honey there in the summer. We took the honey there by horse wagon. People came with jars or whatever containers they had, and my grandfather poured the honey into it. We brought the honey in a bucket, and strawberries also, to sell along the street.
In the final years of the 1930s, modern technology began to find its way to Trochenbrod. The first electricity, radios, bicycles, even movies—Basia-Ruchel Potash remembers one of the 1930s Gold Diggers series—made their appearances. The Yiddish newspaper Forward was delivered regularly. The district administration office in the village of Silno, not far from Horodiche, acquired an automobile that enabled local officials to visit villages and towns in the district when the dirt roads were passable. Trochenbrod’s post office now also offered telephone and telegraph service. Improved (but not paved) roads made travel to the train station at Kivertzy and to Lutsk routine, though it was still problematic after a rain.
November 10, 1938: Kristallnacht. Most of Trochenbrod’s more than five thousand Jews could not imagine that Hitler’s storm was really as bad as people said—or in any case that it would blow on their pleasant, friendly, and industrious town whose people served everyone in the region well and caused trouble to no one.
Because Trochenbrod was a consequential regional trading and production center, the district administration planted more trees; installed bollards to keep traffic out of the drainage ditches along Trochenbrod’s only street; and even began to upgrade the street, which often became muddy and impassable for wagons, with paving stones—a sort of downtown renewal project. The project to pave Trochenbrod’s street was begun in 1938. Peshia Gotman watched the paving work as a seventeen-year-old preparing to immigrate to the United States. Though she did leave, she recalls desperately not wanting to.
To me Trochenbrod looked like a street that had been picked up from a city and plopped down somewhere in the wilderness, except that the street was mud. Seeing the street being paved convinced me that what we all expected was starting to happen—Trochenbrod was going to become a city, a Jewish city. Why would I leave it?
The ribbon-cutting for the first small paved section of Trochenbrod’s street was held in the spring of 1939. That was the last section paved.
On August 23, 1939, Germany and the U.S.S.R. signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland from the west, and two weeks later the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, taking territory it had failed to keep in its war with Poland twenty years earlier. Trochenbrod came under Soviet rule once again. The Second World War had begun.
At that moment everything began to change. So this is a good time to let Shmulik Potash remind us what the essence of Trochenbrod was before dusk:
Although there were plenty of poor people in Trochenbrod, they were all wealthy. Why? Because they felt their lives were rich and they were satisfied. There’s a saying, “Want what you have, and then you’ll have what you want.” Ninety-five percent of Trochenbrod people were like that. They were salt of the earth, as they say. The very concept of stealing was unknown to them—take something that belongs to someone else, what’s that?
The people who read your book, I want to tell them that there once was a Jewish town of worthy people, hard-working people, honest people, trusting people. All they wanted was to raise children who would also be good people. That’s what Trochenbrod was.
OPPOSITE: Between the wars. A paved road runs from the city of Lutsk, in the lower left corner, about 8 miles northeast to the Kivertzy railroad station. From there the road continues unpaved about 20 miles northeast to the much smaller city of Kolki. Following that road from the Kivertzy railroad station, just past the village of Ozero you would have turned right to Przebradze on your way to Trochenbrod. Passing by the entrance to Kol. Yosefin on the left, you would have entered Trochenbrod from the south. To Trochenbrod’s southeast is Horodiche. Silno, the administrative center, is slightly northeast of that. In the southeast corner of the map is the town of Olyka. Northeast of Trochenbrod is Klubochin, a village from which Ukrainian partisans cooperated with those from Trochenbrod during the German occupation. Northeast of Klubochin is Lopaten, where Medvedev had his partisan headquarters. Immediately northwest of Trochenbrod is its sister village of Lozisht. Just northwest of Lozisht is the village of Domashiv, and southwest of that is the village of Yaromel. Due west of Domashiv is Trostjanets, where you would turn left to get to Trochenbrod-Lozisht if you were coming from Kolki. The paved road eastward from Lutsk connects it to the city of Rovno.
1. Jewish paramilitary organization fighting for a Jewish state in Palestine.
2. Bata is a manufacturer of relatively inexpensive ready-made footwear that it retails through its own international chain of Bata retail stores, a business that thrives even today.
3. “Sabbath Gentile,” who performed functions like stoking fires for Jews on the Sabbath because religious law prohibits Jews from doing acts of “work” on that day.