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

need to ask, because you’d see it: it would be a city today, bigger than Lutsk.”
    A fascinating idea to contemplate. If there had been no World War II, what would have been? Could Trochenbrod really have become a city—big stone buildings, a tram system, a network of paved streets with sidewalks, cars everywhere, perhaps a railroad spur at last, fancy restaurants and upscale shops—a completely Jewish city, a Tel Aviv in Poland or Ukraine?
    As a thriving town that was rapidly growing by the late 1930s, Trochenbrod now had its own post office, constable station, and other government offices. For a while, not only the constable but also the office of the chief of police for villages in the area was located in Sofiyovka. As the Polish government continued to rationalize its administration in its new eastern lands, it established a formal district headquarters in the village of Silno, a few miles away through the Radziwill forest—a village much smaller than Trochenbrod. The chief of police relocated there with all other district offices. Local officials reached out to Trochenbrod, the most prosperous settlement in the Silno district, in many ways, especially when it came to taxes.
    The Polish government imposed a variety of taxes. For businesses there were permit and turnover taxes. A shop owner, for example, bought and annually renewed a business permit, and then paid taxes on the turnover of the business. Households had to pay into a compulsory government fire insurance program that supposedly covered the costs of fire protection as well as rebuilding. There were excise taxes on matches, liquor, tobacco, kerosene, and other nonfood basics. And then there was the chief of police. In the late 1930s this was a big man: one Trochenbroder described him as over six feet tall and three feet wide. He regularly came from Silno to visit the Sofiyovka part of his domain. He would stop into Trochenbrod shops, reach out his hand to the shopkeeper, and say a friendly “Shalom aleichem.” He had come for the police tax: you knew that when you reached out your hand to shake his, there needed to be a few zlotys in it that would not be there when your hand came back. Trochenbrod had all the trappings of a vibrant commercial town.
    There was a lot of agriculture in addition to commercial enterprises. Most Trochenbrod families not only drew a good portion of their food from the farm fields behind their houses, they earned a little extra money from their farming. Behind each house was a shed and perhaps a barn and other outbuildings, and then a vegetable garden. Beyond the vegetable garden Trochenbrod families grew beans, potatoes, cabbage, corn, and other fruits and vegetables, and beyond that was a field reaching back as far as the forest to pasture the cows and other animals. This was a pattern similar to the one that had been practiced in Trochenbrod for a hundred years.
    Many Trochenbrod families kept cows, and most also kept chickens and other livestock like geese, goats, and horses. Workers of the three dairies in town circulated among the homes each day to buy milk, one of the multiple small sources of income for many Trochenbrod families.

    Larger Settlements, Trochenbrod Region
    People had close commercial relations with the surrounding towns, and many also had relatives in Lutsk, Rovno, or Kolki. Transportation was improving—the road from the Kivertzy railroad station to Lutsk was now paved, there was limited bus service between Kolki and Lutsk, and both train and bus service were available between Lutsk and Rovno—and many Trochenbroders now frequently traveled to the cities of the region. Basia-Ruchel Potash, Ellie’s daughter, was a child growing up in Trochenbrod in the 1930s. She remembers feelings like those of country girls everywhere when they set eyes on the big city:
    I liked to go with my father when he went to the big city, Lutsk, when he went to buy leather and things. He would take me along. I’d look at the