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

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