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

The ghetto became a longed-for objective. A large number of people dropped their sacks and raced to the forest, using drainage canals for cover whenever they could. Many escaped this way, but many were shot as they tried. For the rest of the day and that night gunfire and cries were heard as the Schutsmen went from house to house hunting Jews and killing them when they found one, and incidentally pillaging. The next morning, Trochenbrod’s street was littered with bodies.
    That day, August 10, was quiet. There was no life in Trochenbrod except in the ghetto in the center of town and in the barracks of Germans and Schutsmen. People hiding in the forest saw that the Germans and their helpers were searching for them and killing anyone they found. Many calculated that their situation in the forest was hopeless and decided to sneak back into the ghetto at night and take their chances with their fellow Trochenbroders. Many still believed, or convinced themselves, that it was possible that they would be assigned to forced labor crews, and nothing more.
    The following day Trochenbrod’s Jews were called out of the ghetto houses and were told to prepare for transport: they should bring food for three days with them. They were piled into trucks and taken, group after group, two hundred at a time, to the killing pit in the Yaromel forest about two miles away that Schutsmen had prepared several days earlier—actually several pits, each meant to accommodate single rows of victims one on top of the other. The Trochenbrod Jews were ordered down from the trucks a short distance from the pits, and they approached their destinies on foot in loose ranks. The Germans demanded that everyone undress. One of Trochenbrod’s prominent rabbis was in the first row of people that would be shot. He assured the hopeless Trochenbroders that it was acceptable for them to obey the German masters, and he undressed: the Germans immediately shot him, and his naked body collapsed into the pit.
    Each few rows of people saw clearly what happened to the rows before, and many became hysterical with terror and despair. Sometimes, as a row of Trochenbrod Jews was pushed toward the edge of the pit, one of them would jump a guard and scream for everyone to run, and others in the row would bolt. Most who bolted were shot, but often a few evaded the bullets and escaped into the forest. Their deaths were only delayed. They were hunted by everyone—Germans, Schutsmen, Banderovtsi, and local villagers. Most were soon found and cut down.
    As each row of people approached the pit they had to deposit their rings and money in buckets and place their clothes on steadily growing piles. They were ordered to lie down in the pit, on top of the bodies of those who went before them. Then Schutsmen and Einzatsgruppe soldiers walked up and down the edge of the pit shooting bullets into the backs of the heads of their Trochenbrod victims, just as they had moments before into the heads of the preceding row of the brothers and sisters of those victims. The murderers stepped on the squirming bodies of little children and shot them in the head as well. Late in the afternoon, the first Aktion (literally, military operation, but in this case mass murder) was completed. The trucks made a final trip back to Trochenbrod carrying the clothing and other things taken from those who were slaughtered, for temporary storage in the empty Trochenbrod houses.
    On that day, August 11, 1942, over forty-five hundred people from Trochenbrod and Lozisht were murdered at the Yaromel mass grave pits. Over three thousand more Jewish people, some from Trochenbrod-Lozisht and many from other settlements in the region, were slaughtered in the forest near Yaromel over the next few weeks.
    Tuvia Drori had made his way to Palestine by the time the Nazis murdered his family at the Yaromel pits. In discussing what he heard had happened, Tuvia wondered:
    My mother was a smart woman, hardworking, never complaining, and