DARKNESS
In the early morning hours of Sunday, August 9, 1942, twenty men of Einsatzgruppe C, one of the German extermination units, rode into Trochenbrod on motorcycles. In their wake were eleven German army trucks carrying about one hundred Schutsmen. The Schutsmen spread out and ordered everyone to go immediately to the center of town for a meeting where they would be issued labor cards. While pushing everyone, the Schutsmen freely shot people, tens of them, as they moved bewildered to the designated location.
After a long and frightening wait, the German commander arrived and informed the townspeople that henceforth they would have to live in a ghetto in the area where they were standing, in the middle of Trochenbrod. He told about fifty leather workers and some professionals, ones the Germans wanted to continue working for them, that they must move with their families into a cluster of houses just beyond the north end of town, in the vicinity of the flour mill. Then Einsatzgruppe troops lined everyone up in ranks to count them and determine, according to a formula they used, the depth of pit they would need at a given width and length. People were allowed to return to their homes to gather clothing and other small things for the ghetto, whatever they could carry, but had to be back in the ghetto within two hours.
The Schutsmen lined up along the sides of the street. As long lines of men, women, and children trudged down the street carrying sacks of belongings on their backs, the Schutsmen opened fire from time to time, murdering randomly. They also looked in the houses and dragged anyone they found outside and shot them. Trochenbrod’s street echoed with gunshots and the cries of dying people. The goal was now to escape the bullets and get to the ghetto as fast as possible. The ghetto became a longed-for objective. A large number of people dropped their sacks and raced to the forest, using drainage canals for cover whenever they could. Many escaped this way, but many were shot as they tried. For the rest of the day and that night gunfire and cries were heard as the Schutsmen went from house to house hunting Jews and killing them when they found one, and incidentally pillaging. The next morning, Trochenbrod’s street was littered with bodies.
That day, August 10, was quiet. There was no life in Trochenbrod except in the ghetto in the center of town and in the barracks of Germans and Schutsmen. People hiding in the forest saw that the Germans and their helpers were searching for them and killing anyone they found. Many calculated that their situation in the forest was hopeless and decided to sneak back into the ghetto at night and take their chances with their fellow Trochenbroders. Many still believed, or convinced themselves, that it was possible that they would be assigned to forced labor crews, and nothing more.
The following day Trochenbrod’s Jews were called out of the ghetto houses and were told to prepare for transport: they should bring food for three days with them. They were piled into trucks and taken, group after group, two hundred at a time, to the killing pit in the Yaromel forest about two miles away that Schutsmen had prepared several days earlier—actually several pits, each meant to accommodate single rows of victims one on top of the other. The Trochenbrod Jews were ordered down from the trucks a short distance from the pits, and they approached their destinies on foot in loose ranks. The Germans demanded that everyone undress. One of Trochenbrod’s prominent rabbis was in the first row of people that would be shot. He assured the hopeless Trochenbroders that it was acceptable for them to obey the German masters, and he undressed: the Germans immediately shot him, and his naked body collapsed into the pit.
Each few rows of people saw clearly what happened to the rows before, and many became hysterical with terror and despair. Sometimes, as a row of Trochenbrod Jews was pushed toward the edge of the pit, one of them would jump a guard and scream for everyone to run, and others in the row would bolt. Most who bolted were shot, but often a few evaded the bullets and escaped into the forest. Their deaths were only delayed. They were hunted by everyone—Germans, Schutsmen, Banderovtsi, and local villagers. Most were soon found and cut down.
As each row of people approached the pit they had to deposit their rings and money in buckets and place their clothes on steadily growing piles. They were ordered to lie down in the pit, on top of the bodies of those who went before them. Then Schutsmen and Einzatsgruppe soldiers walked up and down the edge of the pit shooting bullets into the backs of the heads of their Trochenbrod victims, just as they had moments before into the heads of the preceding row of the brothers and sisters of those victims. The murderers stepped on the squirming bodies of little children and shot them in the head as well. Late in the afternoon, the first Aktion (literally, military operation, but in this case mass murder) was completed. The trucks made a final trip back to Trochenbrod carrying the clothing and other things taken from those who were slaughtered, for temporary storage in the empty Trochenbrod houses.
On that day, August 11, 1942, over forty-five hundred people from Trochenbrod and Lozisht were murdered at the Yaromel mass grave pits. Over three thousand more Jewish people, some from Trochenbrod-Lozisht and many from other settlements in the region, were slaughtered in the forest near Yaromel over the next few weeks.
Tuvia Drori had made his way to Palestine by the time the Nazis murdered his family at the Yaromel pits. In discussing what he heard had happened, Tuvia wondered:
My mother was a smart woman, hardworking, never complaining, and I don’t recall her ever crying or screaming. Did she cry to heaven then?
We heard from a survivor that as the town’s head rabbi was led, wearing his prayer shawl, accompanied by his family to the pits, he raised his hands to the sky and cried, “Where is the God who is all-merciful, the supreme justice, the father of widows and orphans? Could it be that the heavens are really empty?”
When I first heard what happened, I also wondered if maybe, after all, the heavens are empty.
Somehow between five hundred and a thousand people remained alive in Trochenbrod’s ghetto, and the slave laborers, primarily leather workers, also remained in their small ghetto. At least for the moment the killing stopped. Over the next few weeks the Trochenbrod remnants in the ghetto in the center of town were joined by a steady flow of others who had escaped into the forest, were hungry and exhausted, were being hunted and saw no hope for themselves in the wild, and so returned to the ghetto to share the fate of the friends and relatives they grew up with. In time, the population of the Trochenbrod ghetto after the first Aktion grew to about fifteen hundred people. Fifty or more people would sleep in one house. They could not go out. They had no idea what the future held, but they knew well that each day could be their last. They ate the vegetables that still grew in the gardens of ghetto houses and other scraps they somehow gathered. Most were preoccupied grieving for wives and children, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, and all the other family members who had been murdered.
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most important day on the Jewish calendar, fell on September 21 that year. As the date grew closer, more and more people came in from the forest to spend what they knew was likely to be their last Yom Kippur praying with their Trochenbrod friends and relatives. About two weeks earlier, thirty of the leather workers were marched to the Yaromel forest to dig a second set of mass grave pits near the first. While digging the pits, one of them, reportedly the tanner Moshe Shwartz, suddenly rose up and attacked three of the guards with his shovel while screaming to the others to save themselves. Many began to flee into the forest, but most them, like Moshe Shwartz, were killed by German and Schutsmen gunfire.
On Yom Kippur the second Aktion was completed: almost everyone in the Trochenbrod ghetto was taken to the second mass grave pit and slaughtered the same way the first group had been slaughtered nearly six weeks earlier. Again, a few remained alive in the ghetto somehow. The remaining leather workers were moved into the largest synagogue, at the north end of Trochenbrod, and continued to work as slave laborers. In December all remaining Jews were taken to the pits and shot. To mark completion of Trochenbrod’s eradication in Jewish measure, in human measure, the Nazis set fire to the synagogue where the leather workers had been held—the spot now marked by a modest black marble monument.
Many of Trochenbrod’s houses disappeared soon after the families who had lived in them were murdered. The Germans demanded at least one laborer for five days from every household in the surrounding villages to work on dismantling many of Trochenbrod’s houses and other buildings. All remaining furniture was removed from the houses and then the buildings were dismantled into building materials. Clothes and furniture were sold to local villagers. Some of the building material was used for local military construction, and the rest was loaded onto trucks and taken to Kivertzy for shipment to Germany to offset shortages there. Later, partisans set fire to some buildings and houses that were left, in order to deny their use to Germans, Schutsmen, or Banderovtsi. After the Germans were driven out by the Red Army in 1944, Ukrainians from the surrounding villages took anything remaining that could be moved, including the paving stones from Trochenbrod’s street.
Trochenbrod had vanished.
– –
Of the more than six thousand people in Trochenbrod and Lozisht when the Nazis invaded, possibly as many as sixty survived. These were people who retreated with the Soviets or escaped later across the Soviet border; or people who got hold of false documents and disappeared from Trochenbrod, like the red-haired friend of the woman from Przebradze; or people like Label Safran who were hidden by Polish or Ukrainian families or in some cases protected by an entire village; or people like Basia-Ruchel Potash and her family who fled into the forest and somehow survived there; or people like Chaim Votchin who became partisans before the Nazis could trap them, and did not die as partisans. Many more Trochenbroders initially escaped the mass slaughters, perhaps several hundred, but most of them did not survive the war.
This story of Trochenbrod will end with the voices of three who did survive those last awful days: Basia-Ruchel Potash, Chaim Votchin, and Ryszard Lubinski. They are among the few from Trochenbrod who have stories to tell about that period. Others who witnessed those days were silenced in their witnessing.
The Nazis skillfully took advantage of Ukrainian nationalist sentiments to first turn Ukrainians against Jews and other Ukrainians, and then set Ukrainians and Poles against each other. They stirred up a cauldron of Ukrainian Banderovtsi, Schutsmen, and Communists; Polish self-defense groups and partisans; German army officers of many ranks and units and ordinary German soldiers; and stoked the flames so that innocent Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews—Jews above all—would be consumed in its boiling waters. It is against this background that you should read the following accounts. Every act of defiance or revenge against the murderers and their partners, every help to those defying or taking revenge, every bold move to try to survive, every help given so that some might survive, all these were acts of great risk and heroism.
Basia-Ruchel Potash now lives as Betty Gold in University Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. She was born in Trochenbrod in 1930 and speaks of a delightful childhood there surrounded by a warm extended family, lots of friends, wonderful experiences, rural freedom, and a rich community life. Her childhood suddenly took a downward turn at the age of nine, when the Soviets arrived in Trochenbrod. It turned far more severely and threateningly downward when the Germans took over. But nothing came close to what she and her family endured hiding in the Radziwill forest from the murder and madness the Nazis brought to Trochenbrod. Her story of triumph begins at age twelve:
My father and his cousin had a big wooden shed in back, it was long and narrow; they would store wood and tools and other things in there. Because of what they heard from refugees from western Poland, they decided—just in case—to build a false wall in the shed, so that if the Nazis come to get us we could go behind the wall and hide. They built it secretly at night.
Later—I remember it was a hot summer day—the Germans and Ukrainians surrounded the shtetl, and they took everybody out of their homes. We all had to shlep whatever we could carry, and we had to go to certain houses in the middle of town. This was the Trochenbrod ghetto. I was with my immediate family—my father, my mother, my two brothers, and my father’s mother, who lived with us at that time. My other grandmother, she lived across the street, didn’t want to go to the ghetto, so she hid; we saw before we left, that they found her and took her out and shot her. They led us to the ghetto, everyone in Trochenbrod I think.
Once we got to the ghetto my family and my father’s cousin’s family went back to the house, because you were allowed to go back to get some things if you came right back to the ghetto. They left me with my grandmother in the ghetto to watch our belongings. And I sat there with her, and I saw that nobody came back from my family. Right away I thought they must be hiding behind the false wall. And I got scared, and I got angry why they left me. And I was so torn. My grandmother’s sitting there with her belongings, and I’m sitting next to her, and all the other Jews were there. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to live, I wanted to go back; she couldn’t go back, so I left her. That was a very tough day in my life.
I started running back to our house at the south end of town. As I ran down the street, all the people were walking toward the ghetto, and I was running the other way, and there were the Nazis and Ukrainians with their guns. One of the Germans was busy looking up at something, so I crawled right between his legs, he happened to be standing that way. As I got close to my house I saw there were soldiers in the distance, so I crawled on the ground between the twigs and the bushes along the side of my house.
I got to the false wall, and they wouldn’t let me in! They were afraid that the Nazis were using me to find them, so they wouldn’t answer when I called to them. I finally started crying, and I said, “There’s nobody with me, I’m just alone, there’s nobody with me, I’m just alone.” I convinced them to open the secret door, and they let me in.
There were seventeen people in that hiding space behind the false wall. Three small children. My cousin’s youngest baby was crying. The mother choked her to death; she wanted to save her two boys and the rest of us. We weren’t allowed to cough, or even breathe loudly, because Nazis were all over the place. We were holding our mouths; the grownups were stuffing rags and things in our mouths, not to sneeze, not to cough, not to talk.
The false wall was vertical boards. I looked through a crack between the boards at one point, and I saw they had a truck full of babies. An open truck. Two soldiers that I saw through the crack, they were still leading people to the ghetto, but they were grabbing babies and throwing them by the arm, by the leg, into the truck. And the mothers were reaching for their babies, and screaming. I saw that, and I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t understand what it was all about, I couldn’t believe it. I saw my little cousin thrown on the truck like a sack of meat … how does a child control herself, and not scream and cry when she sees a thing like that? I knew those faces, I knew those babies, I saw them every day of my life. When you’re told to be quiet and keep your mouth shut, and you watch that … there’s nothing we could have done; if I had gone out they would have thrown me in the truck too. I thought, “Maybe they’ll just take them to the ghetto, they don’t want them to walk, they don’t have the patience to wait until babies and toddlers and little kids will get there, so they took them in the truck, and that’s how they’re transporting them just to the ghetto, and then they’ll give them to the parents.” No, nothing like that.
A day passed. The next day we heard a lot of shooting. We were still hiding behind the false wall. I did not see what happened, but we heard the shooting clearly, maybe a mile or two away, so we heard it real loud. We found out from a survivor afterward, someone who ran away from the shooting, that they took the rabbi, the parents, the children to a big pit to shoot them. Some ran away, some were shot trying to run away. Some made it to the forest, and when we met them in the forest, sometimes months later, they told us about it.
We couldn’t get out from our hiding place the next day because they picked our house to store valuables and clothes they took from the houses and from people they killed. There were so many soldiers there, unloading and packing and moving things, that we couldn’t escape. We had to wait through another night and day. The next night, in the middle of the night, we crawled out into a garden that was next to that building. It was raining, we were so grateful it was raining, we hoped nobody would hear us. We crawled to the canals that drained the water: they were long, maybe half a mile. In the canals we crawled to the Radziwill forest, and that’s where we ended up.
After a short while things seemed to calm down, and we went back to the ghetto. Almost everybody had come back for Yom Kippur. The Germans and Ukrainians surrounded the ghetto, took everyone from their houses and killed them all. How did we get out of it? My father threw us out the window, and yelled, “Run, and we’ll meet there and there in the forest.” They were the last to get out of the window, after the children were thrown out. My cousin and her husband had two children there—she had choked her third back in the wall; my parents had three children. Her two boys were gunned down: we survived. She was left with none. My parents survived with all three.
Running to the woods through the drainage canal I stepped over my uncle’s body, bleeding to death, I stepped over my cousin’s bodies, I stepped over my girlfriend’s body, I stepped over a rabbi’s body. Not just me, but everyone running was jumping over these dead and bleeding bodies of their friends and relatives, some of them screaming for help. My father was yelling, “Run, run, run, don’t stop,” and we were jumping over dead, half-dead, wounded people we knew, our own flesh and blood, while we were running to save our lives. Can you imagine how we felt, how your heart aches with guilt and pain?
We could still stay in the forest because there were still trees with plenty of leaves. While we stayed there my father and his cousin and a couple of other men who were with us decided they would build bunkers in different spots in the forest to prepare for the winter … so if they find us in one spot we’ll have someplace else to run to. They dug nine bunkers over a few months. They covered them up with twigs and tree limbs; they would leave a very small entrance where you could just crawl in. So the roofs of the bunkers would look like the forest floor.
While it was warm we stayed outside. At one point my father and the other men decided we should stay in a nearby marshy area where the trees were thick; that would be the safest place. They built a platform from tree limbs over the water, and we lived there day and night. To survive we would go out at night—mostly I would go out, because my brother was circumcised, and if he was caught they could pull down his pants and see he was Jewish. I had a little babushka, and I would go out and find as much food as I could in the yards and orchards of villagers.
In order for me to get back to the family, to find my way back, I’d clap my hands—it could have been some forest animal noise. When I clapped, they’d clap back to me, and that’s how they directed me to the platform with the food—apples, or a piece of bread, or whatever I could get. That’s how we lived, that’s what we ate. For water we used rain water that we caught in a little pot, or sometimes we drank from the swamp even, if it got bad—we could get so thirsty we didn’t have a choice. And we just sat there with nothing to do.
At that time there was a Gentile family that my father told about our hiding. We were so hungry, we didn’t have what to wear, what to eat anymore, that he figured what have we got to lose, we’ve got to tell this Gentile family—customers they were, actually—where we were, maybe they’ll help us. And they did. When my mother ran away she took with her a few Russian gold coins—she stuffed them in her bosom. In fact, when she fled from the house she had to bribe a Nazi soldier with a gold coin: he took it and let her run, and then he shot at her as she ran. Maybe he missed on purpose, who knows.
So we gave them all the gold we had left—there wasn’t much—and they did help us out with a little bread, they would drop off a few packages here and there. We were extremely grateful. It was a life saver for us. And they did not report us, they were loyal and righteous people.
After that, winter set in, and we started to hide in the bunkers. It got to be really very cold. We had with us a coat lined with fur. Don’t ask me how or why, but my parents, when they ran from the house in the ghetto, they took with them the gold coins and the fur-lined coat. A man’s coat, my father’s coat. That was our only protection from the cold, in addition to any clothing we had that hadn’t fallen apart yet, and we treasured it. When winter set in it really became disastrous because you couldn’t go out for food—your footprints in the snow would lead the villagers to us. If you didn’t eat for three days you just didn’t eat for three days. You had to wait to walk in a snowstorm or until the snow melted.
One time a really wonderful thing happened: my oldest brother got hold of seven loaves of bread. He stole them from a Polish home. They were baking bread, and he stole them. When he came we almost attacked him, everybody wanted the bread. My dad dug a little shelf inside the bunker, and he stored the breads there. He gave us a speech that it’s winter, we can’t go out for food now, so this bread’s going to have to last as long as possible. Nobody gets more than one piece a day. He showed us the size of the piece for each day with his fingers. In the bunker I was the one lying next to the shelf. I couldn’t help myself; I’d pick little pieces of the bread and suck it like a lollypop. I picked and I picked and I picked. The next day they discovered the picking and decided there must be a mouse in the bunker. But then they got me to admit that I was the mouse. So the next day they had me sleep on the other side of the bunker. That bread lasted about a month.
There were nine people in the bunker. We would lie side by side, and if one person turned around everybody had to turn, we were packed that close. It was a shallow dugout: we could sit up, but we couldn’t stand up. We were just lying there day and night, looking at each other, hardly talking. And eventually the coat with fur lining got full of lice, so we had to get rid of it. The lice got into our hair—I had very long hair, long pigtails, and my father and cousin both had knives, and they sat down, and they cut my hair off. One strand at a time, they would hold it out and cut it off.
We were cold and we were hungry and we were desperate. We had a little tiny stove of some sort; I don’t know where it came from. You could make a little fire. If my brother found potato peelings, you could lick it and stick it to the outside of the little stove, and you could cook the potato peelings that way and eat them. Of course we got so sick afterwards because they were garbage, we got them out of the garbage or a pig sty and they were smelly, and they were rotten, and then we would throw it all up anyway. But it filled us up momentarily, so we did it anyway.
At one point one of the Gentile people came and we thought it was the Germans or the Ukrainians that had found us, and nobody wanted to go to see who it is. We heard the footsteps right outside the opening. If they’d take one more step they’d fall in on top of us. My younger brother was asleep, and they woke him up and said, “Go see who’s there.” He didn’t know what was going on, so he went to see. He called back, “Oh it’s Yuzef.” That was our Polish friend. Yuzef came to tell us that he heard in his village that there’s a bunker of Jews hiding in the forest, and the Germans are going to come to get them tonight. He came to warn us that they found out about us.
We knew about another group from Trochenbrod who ran away also and were in a bunker about two miles away. So my father went out to visit that family to beg them to let us in their bunker because we had to leave our bunker because they were coming to kill us, and we’d freeze to death if we were outside a bunker. They said no, we couldn’t stay there because there was no room, and there really wasn’t any room there. My father came back and told us the news.
He said we can’t run, enough is enough, whatever will happen will happen. He sat us down, and he said, “Look, when they come here to kill us, here’s what we’re going to do: don’t wait; get out and run. You’ll get shot, but at least you’ll be shot on the run. If they find us alive, they’ll cut us to pieces.” That’s what they used to do, the Ukrainans. They used to find women and men in the woods, they’d cut their breasts off, their tongues out, their legs off, and hang them on the trees.
So we stayed there, and we waited, and we were ready to run when they came to kill us. We lay there, and waited, and nobody’s coming! All of a sudden we hear shooting. Grenades, and gunshots, terrible terrible sounds. What happened? It was the other bunker that they discovered, the one that had no room for us, and they killed all those people. If they had they taken us in, if they would have had room for us …
That was our luck. Go figure it out. A miracle that we survived. We were ready. We were so ready to die that we had all kissed each other good-bye. A funny thing, when my father kissed my mother good-bye he said in Yiddish, “Stay well.” We laughed, we really giggled when he said that. If not for a sense of humor I don’t think we would have survived, because that’s the only thing that kept us going. We laughed at ourselves and cried at ourselves, because we just ran out of emotions.
After that it was so bad, there was so much snow, we couldn’t go out. We stayed there because they didn’t find us, but we needed food, we needed food. The Polish people couldn’t come either because of the snow. We were so hungry, and so cold, so desperate, we had no clothes, our feet were wrapped in leaves. I still suffer because my toes were frozen. My mother would put my feet between her breasts to try to warm them up. My father would blow through his cupped hands on my hands and my feet to warm them. We thought there was still a ghetto in the shtetl, and we decided we were going to go; whatever happens to everybody else will happen to us also. That’s enough. We can’t handle it anymore. No clothes, no food, nothing.
So we get up and we start to go. All nine of us were born in Trochenbrod and knew our way around blindfolded. We were moving toward the shtetl and the ghetto through the night. We walked around all night, for hours and hours and hours. My father couldn’t understand why he was getting lost, why he couldn’t find his way back to Trochenbrod. It wasn’t that far; it was only a few miles. First we walked one way, then another way. “I think it’s this way; no, it’s that way.”
We were so exhausted and confused; we were frail from starving and couldn’t walk any more. So we decided we’ll just sit down in a trench and rest for a while, and when the sun comes up we’ll see where we are. While we were sitting there we heard shooting, a lot of shooting. We didn’t know what it was. When daylight came we could see the fields behind Trochenbrod houses. We had been close to Trochenbrod and didn’t realize it. The men went to find people. They crawled to a house and climbed in through the window, and there was nobody there. They went to another house, and there was nobody there either. We found out later that all the people in the ghetto had been killed before, and the shots we heard were the killings of last leather workers who had been held in the synagogue. Another miracle. We got lost; if we had found our way we would be killed with the leather workers.
I don’t know why we didn’t commit suicide. Really, nobody wanted to live anymore. We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t have any strength anymore. We waited till nighttime, and we turned around and went to another bunker. We went there, and we had absolutely nothing to eat. It was already three days. We were starving, literally starving. Our tongues were hanging out, we were pale, we were … it’s a miracle we didn’t eat each other. We picked any leaves we could find, and we ate them, and we usually threw up. We ate snow.
I was twelve years old. I got my period. I didn’t know what it was all about. I was lying next to my dad; we were all lying close to each other in the bunker. I woke up, and I was such a bloody mess from my neck to my knees, and my father was also a bloody mess from his neck to his knees. I didn’t know if he was bleeding, I didn’t know if I was bleeding. Where did it come from? Did somebody choke him? Did somebody kill him? I got hysterical, I started screaming and crying. My mother took me out with my cousin, a lady cousin. They took me under a tree. There was a puddle of water. They washed me up, and they told me about the birds and the bees. I didn’t have any social life out there, but they started to warn me about getting pregnant and so on.
There was another bunker not far from us. There was a father, a child, and a few other people, all from Trochenbrod. The little girl wasn’t more than three years old. The little girl got very very sick, and she died. They had to leave their bunker because somebody spotted them. And they spotted us. So we all left our bunkers and we left the little girl under a pile of leaves, and we figured maybe the next night, when it all calms down, we’ll go and bury her. When we came back to bury her, she was breathing! Just barely. My mother put her on her bosom, and my father was breathing in her mouth, and her father was … I mean, it was a scene like not even the movies, it was like animals in a jungle. All the adults gave her drops of water in her mouth, sometimes even spitting in her mouth, and held her close to their bodies to give her warmth, and found pieces of food for her, and … and gave her new life. They all together gave her back her life. She survived the war with her father: two out of seven in her family, and she had a wonderful life after the war.
Warm weather finally came again, and we moved to a different part of the forest, because we were afraid that with spring coming shepherds or other people from the villages would be going into the woods and would spot us. We were hearing too many noises, so we were afraid. We went to a bunker about three or four miles away. When the leaves came out we started living out in the open more, and we built a little fire one time. We had no idea, none at all, what was going on outside, even if the war was over or not.
Once we were near a sort of orchard, and the trees were beginning to produce fruit, just the beginnings of the apples, very far from ripe. My brother went out to get those. We were outside the bunker because as I said, there were leaves on the trees already and they were sheltering us. We were looking and waiting for him to come back, and all of a sudden we see horses. There’s a soldier on one horse, and on another someone in civilian clothes but with a rifle, and on a third horse another soldier with a rifle. One of them is holding my brother. They caught him stealing the apples. They told him to lead them to where he came from. He was a little boy, and he led them to our bunker. When we saw the Germans, Ukrainians, whatever they were coming toward us with my brother on one of the horses with the soldier, we knew it was the end. We decided as soon as they come with my brother, we’re all going to start running. Again we all said good-bye to each other, kissed each other good-bye. We were glad it was over. We didn’t even really care anymore.
But it turned out to be the partisans! Russian partisans! Liberation had come! A third miracle! I have never seen such tears and laughter and screaming, and hysterics. There was such mixed emotions, happiness that the worst of our hardships was over, that we had survived, and deep deep sadness about all those who were lost, who didn’t get this far. I looked up at my father and asked “How did this happen? How did we survive?” Even as a child, at that time, I couldn’t believe it. It made no sense. We had been living like animals on the run, like starving animals on the run. Why were we alive?
Chaim Votchin, who now lives in Haifa, Israel, was born in a village in the vicinity of Rovno. His father died when he was very young, and his mother remarried and moved to Lozisht in 1920, when Chaim was six years old. He was an athletic and strong-willed youngster, one who tended not to follow traditional paths. He was also very good with mathematics and languages, and from a relatively young age used these talents as a professional teacher. He had the right set of inclinations and abilities to be a partisan leader.
One day in 1942, a German soldier ordered Chaim to catch one of his chickens for the soldier’s dinner, and then “… stood there with his chest pushed out and his thumbs in his belt exploding in laughter” as Chaim chased after the chicken in his yard. This humiliation cemented Chaim’s determination to prepare for partisan activity. He knew nothing about fighting or guns or living in the forest, but he began making plans.
Then others came to me, like Gad Rosenblatt, who was a Beitar commander, and we began to discuss how we could be partisans, where we could get weapons, how we could live in the forest, how we could learn to be fighters, with what could we carry out our fight, how could we get started without the Germans or Ukrainians finding out, and so on. This was much before August 1942. But we didn’t go into the forest yet.
We formed a committee and handed out jobs: acquire weapons; convince Trochenbrod young men to join us; make a plan to move Trochenbrod people to the forest; make contact with Russian soldiers who were separated from their units during the big retreat of the Russian army; figure out the best way to get food in the forest; try to contact the Ukrainian Communists. It’s very important to find the Ukrainian Communists because they were probably in contact with the Red Army and maybe they get supplies from them; and also we heard their leader is operating in the Radziwill forest and maybe he could tell us how to get weapons.
The name of the Ukrainian Communist partisan leader was Alexander Felyuk. We knew he was from the village of Klubochin a few kilometers through the forest from Trochenbrod. We talked to his mother there, and then met him in the Radziwill Forest. Radziwill had armed forest rangers to protect his property. So Felyuk said, “If you’re brave, let’s go take the guns from those forest rangers.” Alexander Felyuk worked with us for several months and made us into partisans. He was a wonderful man. He died recently, but we stayed in touch with him all these years; we sent him money and packages.
One day one of our boys found a pistol in the Ignatovka cemetery. It was a new pistol, with bullets—it had been left behind when the Soviet soldiers ran away. With this pistol we began to learn how to use guns, and with this pistol we went to a forest ranger, waited until he had to come down from his tower, and then took his rifle.
With one rifle we went into the forest and began to arm ourselves; we got another one and then another one and then another one. We got more rifles and ammunition and even grenades. We became a big enough group of armed partisans. I was the commander and Gad Rosenblatt was my second-in-command. Eventually, including the six Soviet saboteurs we met, we had thirty people.
And so we began to operate. For example, a Jew came to us; he said that a certain Ukrainian found a Jew and turned him over to the Germans. This Ukrainian was called Gapon. Immediately four of us went to Gapon’s village and we took him to the forest and shot him.
Another operation: we heard that the Germans arranged to send the animals that were left from Trochenbrod to Germany. We found the herd, ready for transfer to the train station, and we went in and set them free and scattered them all.
Another operation: A very terrible Schutsman who had done horrible things to Jews lived in a small village called Yaromel near Trochenbrod, a Ukrainian village, with mostly straw-covered houses. We pounded on his window: “We are Schutsmen. We have an important message for you. Glory to Ukraine. Open up.” The man came and we drank with him. He bragged about all the Jews he killed—this included women and children—and others he gave to the Nazis. Then we showed who we were. His wife screamed and we took him away in a horse wagon that we hired from a Polish man who drove it. We took him to the forest and shot him. The Polish man was happy to be a part of the operation; he was a good man and he had a good time. Revenge felt sweet, revenge for the blood of all the children, women, and men that the Schutsman had murdered.
That’s how we started. We didn’t know anything about how to fight battles yet, so we started with operations like that.
The Nazis were able to fool so many people. Of course, the nationalist Ukrainians were the biggest fools. They thought they should help the Nazis get rid of the Jewish people and then the Polish people. So they did the work of the Germans with happiness, and when the Soviets drove out the Germans they treated these Ukrainian nationalists as enemies. What is funny, the Nazis saw the Ukrainians as sub-human, good for nothing more than slaves. If the Germans won the war they would take the Ukrainians off the land and shoot them or kill them in slave labor camps.
The Jews also were fooled a lot. Many of them believed the Germans would not kill them even though they saw death in front of them. Once we were planning to attack Trochenbrod and kill the Germans and Schutsmen. We planned to throw grenades into the houses where the Germans and Schutsmen lived, then open fire and kill anybody left. Another group would set fires in different places, burning anything the Germans wanted to have. We sent word to the ghetto to all the Jews saying to sneak away to the forest. Soon one of the Jews from the ghetto showed up and said he was sent to beg that we do nothing. The Jews would not leave. They believed the German promises that there would be no more killings, so they did not want to leave Trochenbrod. We begged them, but they would not listen. Those Jews, they saved the lives of the Germans and Schutsmen. Soon they were murdered by them.
Some Trochenbrod Jews escaped to the forest and stayed there. They did their best in that hard situation. But they suffered. They dug their shelters deep into the ground in hidden parts of the forest. They camouflaged their shelters with loose dirt, tree limbs and leaves. Some shelters they actually built right in the swamps. We helped the families as much as we could. After every raid we brought them food, clothing, and boots. Also we often visited and instructed them how to live better in the forest. That’s how far we had come in a month or two—now we were teaching other people how to live in the forest!
In October 1942 one of our partisans, Yosef, came back from a forest nearby after he visited Jews hiding there. On the way to our camp he stumbled on a band of Soviet paratroopers that the Red Army parachuted in to blow up Nazi trains. He really stumbled on them. They were hiding in the bushes and he almost tripped on them. Imagine the tension there was until they figured out how much they could talk together. Yosef told them he would bring the leaders of his partisan unit. They were waiting only a kilometer or two away. We went to meet them.
Their two leaders came toward us. One was a short older man, about forty years old. The other one had light hair and was about twenty-five. They had red stars on their hats and brand-new shiny automatic rifles. When just a few steps separated between us we stopped and for a while we just stared at each other, and then we started to talk. They explained that they were Soviet saboteurs sent to blow up German trains. I told them, “We are a small group, but we are well-organized and we’ll be honored to help you destroy the fascists the best we can.” The older man took out a cigarette pack from his pocket and offered us a smoke. We told them about our activities, about our hopes, about our men. They asked us to help them with their sabotage, and we agreed. They began to teach a few of us how to blow up trains, and then some of us went with them on missions to blow up trains. And they agreed to fight together with us when we attacked Trochenbrod.
Fall had started. The storks had migrated, and lots of other birds were flying above us to their winter places. The paratroopers and our men who went to sabotage the railroad were successful. They derailed trains almost every night. How things changed! Just a short time ago the Germans were like gods, and now every night they were terrified, at least on the trains. Then the Germans made local villagers help guard the tracks. Each guard had a piece of track that he walked up and down, and a whistle to blow in case they saw something suspicious. A German detachment stood in the train station, ready to move if there was an alert. This made our jobs more difficult but not impossible. We crawled toward the rails, waited for the guard to walk in the other direction, then crawled the last one or two hundred meters, put the explosives where they should go, and crawled away. When a train passed over we exploded the charge.
Alex went away two weeks ago to try to make contact with a group of partisans that we heard rumors about in the forests much further north. Before he came back to us he stopped at his village, Klubochin, where his mother and family were. He learned that the Germans entered the village and rounded up a large group of men, women, and children. They took them to a pit in the forest and murdered them all, including Alex’s mother, brother, and little daughter. This was Nazi payment for twenty people from Klubochin, including Alex, who were partisans. They were Communists. The other nineteen partisans were in Klubochin when the Germans came, so they were murdered.
In November we had a big battle with German soldiers. We fought them off. That’s how far we had come in two or three months—now we were fighting German detachments and winning! The Germans were surprised that there was an organized group with weapons, and we knew they decided they had to wipe us out. They would come again soon, and this time maybe they would bring Ukrainian militia. What could we do? Should we stay and try to outsmart them? It had begun to snow, and that meant when we went from one of our shelters or storage caves to another one we would leave a trail and “ask” for attack. We also had a problem that we didn’t have enough ammunition. Rifles we had, but not enough ammunition. We saw that we couldn’t keep going like this. So we decided to leave the Trochenbrod area.
Alex said we should go to the Pripyat swamps in the north, in Byelorussia. Because of what he learned on his travels he was sure there we would find large partisan camps which we could join, and they were receiving Soviet support and Soviet weapons. Our Russian paratroopers did not want to go, they wanted to stay and continue their sabotage work. Although it was Alex’s idea to go north, he decided to stay in the Klubochin area, so he went with Medvedev’s partisan detachment. This Soviet detachment was based at Lopaten, not far from Klubochin and Trochenbrod. Their main activity was to sabotage high-level German officers and operations in Rovno, which the Germans used as their central administration center.
As we moved north we came across another group of Jewish partisans from Kolki who were also looking for a larger Soviet partisan detachment. We continued north together, and found village after village and town after town where the Jews there were murdered and their possessions were stolen or destroyed. Although I taught Jewish studies, in my heart I was not really a very religious man. But when I saw what happened to the people in Trochenbrod and when I saw what happened in all those other villages and towns and when I heard about what happened in the cities I knew that never in my life again could I even think about a God who saw and heard all this but just sat there watching.
In Byelorussia we found scouts from a Soviet partisan group, and they took us to the base camp of Kovpak’s partisan detachment. This detachment was commanded by General Mayov Kovpak, a sixty-year-old fighter from World War I where he fought against the Germans and the White Army. We talked with Kovpak and agreed to become part of his group; we would be a unit of Kovpak’s Third Battalion. That night in December 1942, our Jewish partisan group, Trochenbrod’s partisan unit, was no more.
One day months later there came a decision from the high command that we should move to the Carpathian Mountains to conduct certain operations there. On the way, we passed through the Radziwill forest. The Jews in Trochenbrod and Lozisht had all been murdered by then. We made up a unit of four hundred raiders to hunt down the Schutsmen and Ukrainian Nationalists who helped the Nazis in their work. We killed many of them and burned their houses.
We decided to burn everything we could that was left in Trochenbrod because we didn’t want the Nazis or the Ukrainians to use any of the houses, to benefit from any of the buildings. Jews had owned the flour mill. After they killed the Jews, Ukrainians took over the flour mill. We didn’t want them to have it, so we burned it. We took some straw and spread it around, and we spilled fuel all around—there had been fuel there to run the machinery. Then we lit the fire and burned down the flour mill. I tell you that it was sad, but the feeling of revenge was very strong, very strong and very satisfying.
Ryszard Lubinski, postmistress Janina Lubinski’s son, was not only the sole non-Jew born in Trochenbrod, he went to school there, all his friends were there, and he grew to the age of twelve there; although he’s Catholic, Ryszard thinks of Trochenbrod as his hometown. Ryszard and his mother remained in their home, the post office that was closed down by the Soviets, until the winter of 1942. They were the only ones who lived in Trochenbrod before, during, and after the Holocaust there. He remembers Trochenbrod with deep affection, and he remembers the days of Trochenbrod’s descending darkness with great clarity.
Because of Jews, we were in Sofiyovka. Jews made Sofiyovka and developed it into a town that needed a post office, instead of letting it remain a little farming village. My mother came from a town with a lot of Jews and was comfortable among them, and that’s why she took the job there.
Also probably because of Sofiyovka Jews, we stayed alive, and I am alive today. Why? When the Russians took over in 1939 they wanted to send us to Siberia because they saw my mother as a Polish official. But the Jews of Sofiyovka said no, and they begged the Russians to let us stay. The Russians talked to the people in Sofiyovka, and then told my mother, “Everyone says that you are a good person and can be trusted, so we will not send you to Siberia, you can stay.”
And Trochenbrod’s Jews were good to her. For example, she couldn’t even get water. Every time she would go out to get water—we had to walk a little bit to bring water from a well—some Sofiyovka man would see her and stop her and say, “No, no, I’ll bring the water for you,” and they would go to the well, and fill up her bucket, and bring it back to our house. So they respected her and wanted to help her.
The children were learning at the cheder every day. All my friends were there in the cheder. I had no one to play with, so I’d go and listen under the window of the cheder, especially in the summer when the windows were open and I could hear what happened inside. They would learn in Hebrew by memorizing. Since I was standing there listening I would learn by memorizing also, even though I couldn’t read and didn’t know what it meant. I would just repeat the sounds over and over. One time the teacher called on one of the boys to say several lines. He began reciting the lines, and at one point he made a mistake. That made the teacher very angry, and in the usual way at this school the teacher gave him physical punishment and yelled at him, “Why do you say it wrong?” Sometimes the teacher would hit the pupil’s hand with a stick, and sometimes he would hold his mouth open and spit into it for saying a wrong answer. So the boy answered, “Ryszard told me.”
But it wasn’t true. I knew Yiddish as well as all my friends—I can still speak Yiddish today, especially after some vodka—and from listening at the cheder window I knew the Hebrew words better than some of my friends. Sometimes as I was walking in the street, people said, “Look, this is the one who helps the Jewish boys in the cheder,” because I really did whisper the answers sometimes to help my friends—but always the correct answer. I still remember Hebrew words. Listen: Baruch atoh adoinoi eiloiheinu melech haoilom …1
I remember two oil factories in Sofiyovka, oil presses. One was right after Ellie Potash’s house, the other was owned by the Szames family. They were face to face on opposite sides of the street. They had very complicated machinery; it would be in a museum today. Ellie Potash had another house, which was his workshop, next to the post office where we lived. The Jewish school, the cheder, was across the street from us, and down a little bit. There was a synagogue a few houses further down, with a very strange rabbi—he was very loud; when he prayed you could hear him everywhere in Trochenbrod.
You know Tevye the dairyman, from Sholom Aleichem’s stories? In the introduction to one of his books there is some information that Sholom Aleichem was a tutor of Jewish studies for the daughter of a very wealthy Jew from Sofiyovka who had a lot of land. Sholom Aleichem later married this girl, and the property came into his hands. But he divided it into smaller parts, and finally sold off everything. I always wondered if it’s the same Sofiyovka.
I think Sholom Aleichem was in Trochenbrod because behind the house that was the post office where I lived, there was a large field that belonged to one family, that later was divided into small sections. One row of sections belonged to Potash people: Potash, Potash, Potash, one after the other. Another row belonged to Szames people, who were related to Potash: Szames, Szames, Szames, one after the other. So maybe that was the big Sholom Aleichem field divided into smaller parts. What do you think? Is it possible? It could be, because Sholom Aleichem’s stories describe the way life was exactly in Sofiyovka.
One time, after the Germans arrived, a strange person appeared in Sofiyovka: Dr. Klinger. He was about fifty years old when he came. To me as a child he seemed very old. He had a lot of scars around his face and on his hands, and some of his fingers were missing. He arrived in Sofiyovka as a German. He dressed in a very elegant way. He seemed to be an important person. The Germans showed him very great respect. He seemed to be a high-level German of some sort, so we wondered where he came from, and where he got his scars and lost his fingers. Was he a veteran from World War I?
He was very often a guest in our house. So we became friendly, and he began to trust us as friends, and he told us he is a Jew. He told us how he got the scars on his face and hands: he was studying somewhere in Germany at the time of Kristallnacht, and Germans attacked him with knives. He protected his face with his hands, and as a result he lost some fingers and has scars all over. The scars let him pretend he was a war veteran, and his wounds brought him a lot of honor among the Germans.
Dr. Klinger convinced the Germans that he needed some of the Jews for something, and protected a lot of them for a while that way. But some of the Schutsmen, Ukrainians, were suspicious about him. They insisted he should come with them for a drink at the end the day once. They got him very drunk. When he was so drunk he was helpless they took down his pants and saw he was circumcised. Then they dragged him to the street and shot him. His body stayed there overnight until Jews came and took him away to bury him the next day.
Before the Germans had the first liquidation they did a preparation of the townspeople. A big-shot German came and gave a speech that no one would be hurt if they followed orders and did not behave wrongly. The Germans were in charge of the town for a long time, and there had been murders, yes, but no mass killing. One day the special liquidation unit of German soldiers arrived in Sofiyovka with assistants of Ukrainian Schutsmen who surrounded the town. No one suspected that they would be killed. They thought, “Oh, another one of the German big-shots will give a speech, and that will be that.” So there was no big resistance.
During the first Aktion my mother hid sixty people in the attic of the post office. One of my mother’s friends, a Jewish woman, and her son were hiding in our house. The boy caught tuberculosis. The Schutsmen went from house to house looking for Jews, but by some miracle they didn’t come to our house, so this woman and her son escaped the roundup. But the son got worse and worse. Eventually he started coughing very hard, coughing up blood, got very weak and died. His mother became hysterical. She didn’t eat or drink, she just cried. My mother tried to get her to go hide in the attic, but she said she didn’t want to live. Then she just walked out the door and started walking up the street. Soon we heard the shot that killed her.
When Russians were in control, the Volksdeutsch [Germans] were allowed to leave under a clause of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement. So a nearby Volksdeutsch village called Yosefin was emptied of Volksdeutsch, and Poles and Ukrainians were moved in there. There was a Polish man in Yosefin, a veteran of war under Pilsudski, a man who knew how to use weapons, a very strong man, and a very commanding person. He was working in his fields on the day of the first Aktion. He saw and he heard what was happening. Something snapped in his head, and he became a completely different person, walking around in a daze, mumbling words no one could understand. The next day he put on a coat and told people he was going to search for Free Poland. No one ever saw him again.
More people escaped into the forest from the second killing because it was not so well organized as before—for the Germans it looked easier because so many fewer people meant they didn’t have to be as careful. But now the Jews knew what was going to happen so they were better prepared, and more escaped. The beans in the fields behind the houses in Trochenbrod were on tall frames. When running from the Germans, people would sometimes run among the beans because that would hide them, and then they would run in the drainage canals. The second time, one of the young people in the ghetto hid behind the door with an ax, and when a Schutsman entered to call the people out, he chopped him in the neck and almost cut his head off. People felt good that someone showed resistance.
I thought about Trochenbrod often all these years. I still miss it. I remember eating gefilte fish in Trochenbrod. Since then I’ve tried it sometimes, but nothing came close to the way it tasted in Sofiyovka. Even when my mother made it, after we came here to Radom, it was not as good as it was when the mothers of my friends gave it to me in Sofiyovka, because that was really in the Jewish style. Whenever I walk in the street and smell cooking of a food like there was in Trochenbrod, I think “Oh, that smells like Sofiyovka,” and pictures of Sofiyovka come to my mind. I remember latkes—ahh, latkes—and chulunt in the oven for Shabbos, I can smell it now, I can almost taste it. When I think of Sofiyovka I don’t think of the slaughter; I think of the life. Laughter, wonderful food, games, happiness, friends, weddings, holidays, warm families.
But I can never forget what it felt like as a child when everybody in Sofiyovka was murdered. When I went for water I saw dead bodies everywhere. Looking down the street of Trochenbrod I saw only empty houses where the families of my friends lived. Where my friends lived, now there was only quiet. The doors and windows of the empty houses were swinging this way and that way in the wind, once in a while hitting the sill with a soft bang, and then with hinges squeaking they starting to swing again. Where are my friends? Where are their families? What happened to my Trochenbrod?
1. The opening phrase of many Hebrew blessings.