The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a farmer who sold his produce at market, and had a horse and wagon to transport his goods. He would often bring produce back from the market in his wagon to sell in Trochenbrod, so he became both a farmer and a produce trader. His familiarity with horses led him to sell the one he had and buy another, and before long he was also a horse trader. Sometimes he brought bread back from the market to sell in Trochenbrod. Why not bake it here and offer fresher bread that people from the nearby villages might also come to buy? Soon enough, Avrum Bass was a relatively well-to-do businessman who grew and traded produce, was a trader in horses, and owned a bakery in Trochenbrod.
    Dairy owners in Trochenbrod took their milk and butter to Lutsk, Rovno, and Kolki to sell. Why come back with empty wagons? They began bringing back sugar, cooking oil, and eventually a wide variety of other goods from the cities to sell in Trochenbrod. They expanded their dairy shops into grocery stores and thought of themselves not just as dairymen but also as grocery shopkeepers and traders in city goods.
    Ellie Potash started out making shoes and selling them in his small Trochenbrod shop like so many others. To get an edge on the competition he bought a horse and wagon and made rounds in the villages to take orders from customers and sell shoes directly to them. People would ask him for other leather goods, especially boots, belts, and bridles. Steadily he expanded his “export” business, and by the mid-1930s had a workshop in its own building (next to the post office) making a wide variety of leather goods for a steady market of customers in the villages around Trochenbrod. He made a good living from this and was able to build a very nice new house. He could not have imagined that just a few years later his house would be selected by the Germans as one of the places to store the belongings of their victims, and then to quarter themselves, while Ellie and his family struggled to survive the winter hiding in the Radziwill forest.
    As the entry in the 1929 “Illustrated Directory of Volyn” implied, if there was a single dominant industry in Trochenbrod, it was leather. The leather business included buying skins and buying cows for their skins; tanning; working leather into a wide variety of products, especially boots and shoes; leather goods shops; shoe shops; shoe repair; and exporting leather and leather goods to cities in the area, trading at regional markets, selling from wagons of leather merchandise village by village, and wholesaling to small shops in other villages. The biggest tannery, possibly the biggest business, in Trochenbrod was owned by the Shwartz family and employed seven Trochenbrod workers. David Shwartz, who wrote the memoir from which passages are quoted in the first chapter of this book, was one of the Shwartz family children.
    Trochenbrod tanners were known for making regular rounds of the surrounding villages looking for and buying cows with skin that would meet their high standards. Sofiyovka boots were considered the highest quality available anywhere for many miles around because of both the leather and the craftsmanship. The steady demand for boots spawned a large number of shoemakers and shoe shops in Trochenbrod to serve people who came from villages and even towns all around to buy shoes, and especially boots, which were so important in the muddy rural area. There were about forty thriving leather-related enterprises in Trochenbrod by the late 1930s. The town’s fame as a center for footwear drew so many customers that eventually even a Bata 2 store was established there, a store where people could buy relatively low-cost ready-made shoes that were brought to Trochenbrod from Bata factories elsewhere.
    Other businesses that lined Trochenbrod’s bustling street by the late 1930s were:
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Bakeries
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Barber shops
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Beer house
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Building materials
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Butchers—the fattier the meat the more