Heavens Are Empty by Avrom Bendavid-Val

Author:Avrom Bendavid-Val
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pegasus Books

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.

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