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

brought to the Kivertzy train station for shipment to Germany. Schutsmen on horses gleefully rounded up the cattle and shipped them off. This basically ended any means for most Jews to support themselves. They were not allowed to leave the town, work the fields, or trade with people outside the town. Again a black market developed, this time more extensive and also more risky than under the Soviets. Milk, grain, flour, potatoes, and fat were smuggled into Trochenbrod in exchange for clothing, valuables, or money. The trade was carried on at night; being caught meant immediate death. Blacksmiths, shoemakers, and some others were still able to make a living, but many Trochenbroders began starving, trying to stay alive on rotten food and scavenged scraps.
    Within four months of the start of German control the recently proud and thriving town of Trochenbrod was reduced to abject poverty, hunger, terror, slavery, extortion, beatings, humiliation, and misery of every other kind—and over this wretchedness hovered the prospect of death consuming anyone anywhere at any time for any reason or no reason. This was the life of the Jews of Trochenbrod, the people of Trochenbrod, until the end of their days.
    Trochenbroders who survived the war, or their children, tell of a somewhat mysterious “Dr. Klinger.” Late in 1941, not long before the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war in early December, this Dr. Klinger, a German Jew living in Lutsk, passed himself off as a Gentile. No one seems to know for certain what Dr. Klinger was a doctor of, or for that matter if he was really a doctor at all. He made contact with the Nazi leadership and arranged to employ the Jewish leather workers of Trochenbrod to produce leather goods, especially boots, for the German army. The production was done in Trochenbrod, so the people he could keep engaged as leather workers—as many as possible—were saved from being sent on forced labor crews.
    A number of Schutsmen had suspicions about Dr. Klinger, since no one had ever seen him or heard of him before, and some of them had noticed friendly behavior between the German Dr. Klinger and his Jewish laborers. One night in mid-1942, drunken laughter and then shouting was heard from a drinking party Schutsmen were having, and then a single gunshot was heard. In the morning Dr. Klinger’s body was found in the street with a bullet through his head. The townspeople buried him as a Jew in Trochenbrod’s cemetery.
    As winter turned into spring in 1942, it became increasingly clear to many Trochenbrod townspeople that the Germans intended ultimately to kill them all, by slave labor, by starvation, or by outright murder. Some built false walls in their houses or farm buildings and prepared hiding places behind them; some prepared bunkers in the forest; some found ways to obtain false identity papers and began to slip away; and some young Trochenbrod men fled into the forest, as did Nahum Kohn, and began training themselves to be partisans. Most, however—because they would not believe what could no longer be denied, because they clung to hope that their usefulness to the Germans would protect them, because they were certain that God would intervene and save them, or because they could not imagine what they could do about it—struggled to survive, suffered under a heavier and heavier burden of despair, and awaited their fate.
    One of the things that is striking in the stories of what took place in and around Trochenbrod as its sun was setting is the degree of barbarism displayed toward the townspeople by Ukrainians, and to a lesser extent Poles, from neighboring villages—and with that, the extraordinary degree of kindness and readiness to put themselves at risk to help their Jewish neighbors shown by quite a few Ukrainian and Polish families. A Ukrainian in the nearby village of Yaromel, for example, told me of his father hiding “a very good person named Itzik” from Trochenbrod in