The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod by Avrom Bendavid-Val

Author:Avrom Bendavid-Val
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, History
ISBN: 9781453226087
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

1. The opening phrase of many Hebrew blessings.

Epilogue

THE STORY CONTINUES

LIGHT1

by Yisrael Beider

Don’t despair my brother dear,

If in the west day’s end seems near.

I beg hold fast these words of mine,

After this darkness a light will shine.

Trochenbrod, the town that some thought would be a thriving city today, is gone. In the nearly seven decades since its annihilation, what happened to the physical space that Trochenbrod occupied? What happened to the land that might have borne the roads, houses, parks, and buildings of an urban center named Trochenbrod, or Sofiyovka?

After the people of Trochenbrod were murdered, the German army put the land of Trochenbrod and its satellite villages to use supplying food for its soldiers. A Sonderführer (an army specialist with a nonmilitary skill) who knew how to run a large farm was brought in, and he established a forced-labor system for people from the surrounding villages to work on the former land of Trochenbrod, now his farm. He had the villagers build him a house near where the last synagogue had been, at the north end of town where today the black marble monument stands. For the house and for several other new farm buildings he had them use materials from dismantled Trochenbrod houses. The Sonderführer’s farm had horses, goats, cows, and chickens, and the villagers cultivated potatoes, beans, corn, cabbage, and other local crops for the German army there.

The Germans’ Trochenbrod farm did not survive more than one growing season. In the fall of 1943, fighters from Kovpak’s partisan detachment surrounded the Trochenbrod area and set fire to as many buildings as they could. The Sonderführer is said to have escaped to German units near Rovno (Rivne).

Following the war, no one made use of Trochenbrod’s land for about ten years. The reasons it was unused before the first Jews settled there 130 years earlier were the reasons it was unused now: relatively poor-quality soil, a marshy lowland, and considerable distance from transportation routes in the region. In addition to that, local villagers already had garden plots near their homes; markets were disrupted by Communist rule; and people were generally without horses or tractors. In short, local people had no incentive—and really no capability—to cultivate Trochenbrod’s land.

In the mid-1950s, the Soviets decided they could not leave uncultivated such a large parcel of what had once been farmland. They made modest improvements to prepare the land for farming, and in 1957 assigned the area that had been Trochenbrod and its satellite villages to a collective farm named Nove Zhyttia, New Life. All villages in western Ukraine had undergone forced collectivization by this time, and Nove Zhyttia was headquartered in Domashiv. As Soviet rule lumbered on, a generation was being born in Domashiv and other villages of the area that did not know any life but Soviet life, and had no idea that a town, a Jewish town, had not long ago pulsed where now were only vast hay fields of the New Life collective farm.

In 1971, the Soviet government decided to make some major improvements so Trochenbrod’s land could be farmed more intensively.

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