Trochenbrod or Trohinbrod, also in
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles
Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...
: ''Zofiówka'', or in russian: Софиевка (Sofievka), in uk, Трохимбрід (Trokhymbrid), he, טרוכנברוד, was an exclusively Jewish
shtetl
A shtetl or shtetel (; yi, שטעטל, translit=shtetl (singular); שטעטלעך, romanized: ''shtetlekh'' (plural)) is a Yiddish term for the small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before ...
– a small town, with an area of – located in the
gmina Silno,
powiat
A ''powiat'' (pronounced ; Polish plural: ''powiaty'') is the second-level unit of local government and administration in Poland, equivalent to a county, district or prefecture ( LAU-1, formerly NUTS-4) in other countries. The term "''powiat ...
Łuck
Lutsk ( uk, Луцьк, translit=Lutsk}, ; pl, Łuck ; yi, לוצק, Lutzk) is a city on the Styr River in northwestern Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Volyn Oblast (province) and the administrative center of the surrounding L ...
of the
Wołyń Voivodeship, in the
Second Polish Republic and would now be located in
Kivertsi Raion
Kivertsi Raion ( uk, Ківерцівський район) was a raion in Volyn Oblast in western Ukraine. Its administrative center was the ton of Kivertsi. The raion was abolished and its territory was merged into Lutsk Raion on 18 July 2020 a ...
of
Volyn Oblast
Volyn Oblast ( uk, Воли́нська о́бласть, translit=Volýnsʹka óblastʹ; also referred to as Volyn or Lodomeria) is an oblast (province) in northwestern Ukraine. Its administrative centre is Lutsk. Kovel is the westernmost town ...
in
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
.
[ See also: ] Following the
invasion of Poland
The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939) was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week aft ...
by Nazi Germany and the
Soviet invasion of Poland
The Soviet invasion of Poland was a military operation by the Soviet Union without a formal declaration of war. On 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, 16 days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west. Subs ...
in September 1939, Zofiówka (official Polish name) was renamed in Russian and incorporated into the new
Volyn Oblast
Volyn Oblast ( uk, Воли́нська о́бласть, translit=Volýnsʹka óblastʹ; also referred to as Volyn or Lodomeria) is an oblast (province) in northwestern Ukraine. Its administrative centre is Lutsk. Kovel is the westernmost town ...
of the
UkSSR. Two years later, at the start of
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa (german: link=no, Unternehmen Barbarossa; ) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. The operation, code-named after ...
in 1941, it was annexed by Nazi Germany into the ''
Reichskommissariat Ukraine
During World War II, (abbreviated as RKU) was the civilian occupation regime () of much of Nazi German-occupied Ukraine (which included adjacent areas of modern-day Belarus and pre-war Second Polish Republic). It was governed by the Reich Min ...
'' under a new Germanized name.
Trochenbrod (Zofiówka) was completely eradicated in the course of German occupation and the ensuing
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
.
The town used to be situated about northeast of
Lutsk
Lutsk ( uk, Луцьк, translit=Lutsk}, ; pl, Łuck ; yi, לוצק, Lutzk) is a city on the Styr River in northwestern Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Volyn Oblast (province) and the administrative center of the surrounding Lu ...
.
The nearest villages of today are Yaromel (Яромель) and Klubochyn (Клубочин).
The original settlement inhabited entirely by Jews, was named after
Sophie, a Württemberg princess (1759–1828) married to the Tsar of Russia
Paul I Paul I may refer to:
*Paul of Samosata (200–275), Bishop of Antioch
* Paul I of Constantinople (died c. 350), Archbishop of Constantinople
*Pope Paul I (700–767)
*Paul I Šubić of Bribir (c. 1245–1312), Ban of Croatia and Lord of Bosnia
*Pau ...
(hence ''Sofievka'' or ''Zofiówka''). She donated a parcel of land for the Jewish settlement in the
Russian Partition
The Russian Partition ( pl, zabór rosyjski), sometimes called Russian Poland, constituted the former territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that were annexed by the Russian Empire in the course of late-18th-century Partitions of Po ...
after the conquest of the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, formally known as the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and, after 1791, as the Commonwealth of Poland, was a bi- confederal state, sometimes called a federation, of Poland and Lithuania ru ...
(''see'' new
Pale of Settlement
The Pale of Settlement (russian: Черта́ осе́длости, '; yi, דער תּחום-המושבֿ, '; he, תְּחוּם הַמּוֹשָב, ') was a western region of the Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 19 ...
district).
History
Sofievka (Trochenbrod) was founded in 1835, after the
November Uprising, initially as a farming colony for the dispossessed Jews, and with time developed into a small town. The population grew from around 1,200 inhabitants (235 families) in 1889, to 1,580 in 1897 according to Jewish archives. In the
Second Polish Republic, the number of inhabitants reached 4,000.
[ The name Trochenbrod in ]Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...
stands for "Dry Bread" or "Bread without Butter" (german: Trockenbrot).
Towards the end of World War I, Trochymbrid briefly became a part of the Western Ukrainian National Republic and subsequently the Ukrainian National Peoples Republic after unification on January 22, 1919. However, during the Polish–Soviet War
The Polish–Soviet War (Polish–Bolshevik War, Polish–Soviet War, Polish–Russian War 1919–1921)
* russian: Советско-польская война (''Sovetsko-polskaya voyna'', Soviet-Polish War), Польский фронт (' ...
, the forces of the re-emerging sovereign Poland and the Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, afte ...
fought over the town. It was ceded to Poland in the Peace of Riga
The Peace of Riga, also known as the Treaty of Riga ( pl, Traktat Ryski), was signed in Riga on 18 March 1921, among Poland, Soviet Russia (acting also on behalf of Soviet Belarus) and Soviet Ukraine. The treaty ended the Polish–Soviet Wa ...
signed with Vladimir Lenin, and it became part of the Wołyń Voivodeship in the Kresy
Eastern Borderlands ( pl, Kresy Wschodnie) or simply Borderlands ( pl, Kresy, ) was a term coined for the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic during the History of Poland (1918–1939), interwar period (1918–1939). Largely agricultural ...
Borderlands. Most of the population were engaged in agriculture, dairy farming and tanning
Tanning may refer to:
*Tanning (leather), treating animal skins to produce leather
*Sun tanning, using the sun to darken pale skin
**Indoor tanning, the use of artificial light in place of the sun
**Sunless tanning, application of a stain or dye t ...
.
There were seven synagogues in Trochenbrod, including three big ones. In 1939, the town, along with the rest of Kresy, was invaded by the Soviet Union (see Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that enabled those powers to partition Poland between them. The pact was signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939 by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ri ...
). The rabbi
A rabbi () is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. One becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbi – known as ''semikha'' – following a course of study of Jewish history and texts such as the Talmud. The basic form of ...
at that time was Rabbi Gershon Weissmann. The Communists exiled him to Siberia
Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive region, geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a ...
after accusing him of being involved in underground salt trading.
The Holocaust
After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the new German administration established a Nazi ghetto
Beginning with the invasion of Poland during World War II, the Nazi regime set up ghettos across German-occupied Eastern Europe in order to segregate and confine Jews, and sometimes Romani people, into small sections of towns and cities furtheri ...
at Trochenbrod, confining there also Jews from nearby villages and towns. The Ghetto was liquidated in August and September 1942 in a series of massacres by Order Police battalions
The Order Police battalions were militarised formations of the German Order Police (uniformed police) during the Nazi era. During World War II, they were subordinated to the SS and deployed in German-occupied areas, specifically the Army Grou ...
. Most of the Jews of Trochenbrod as well as of the neighboring village Lozisht
Ignatówka, also Lozisht, was a Jewish shtetl (village) located in what is now western Ukraine but which used to be part of the Second Polish Republic before the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. Ignatówka was bordering a Jewish shtetl in Z ...
(Ignatówka in Polish) were murdered by the Nazis. According to ''Virtual Shtetl
The Virtual Shtetl ( pl, Wirtualny Sztetl) is a bilingual Polish-English portal of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, devoted to the Jewish history of Poland.
History
The Virtual Shtetl website was officially launched on June ...
'', over 5,000 Jews were massacred, including 3,500 from Trochenbrod and 1,200 from Lozisht among other nearby settlements.
Fewer than 200 Jews managed to escape death by fleeing into the forest. The Soviet partisans hiding in the nearby village of Klubochyn assisted some 150 survivors. Some Jews joined the resistance in the region and took up partisan actions against the Nazis. The village was totally destroyed and burnt down in 1942, and subsequently leveled out after World War II in Soviet Ukraine. Now only fields and a forest can be found there, and an ominous flatland with an aimless country road running through it.[''The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod''](_blank)
by Avrom Bendavid-Val. ''A Lost History'', official website. Internet Archive.
On November 4, 1942, the Nazis executed 137 inhabitants of the nearby Ukrainian settlement of Klubochyn and burnt it as a reprisal for the actions of local Ukrainian partisans fighting against the Nazis. The partisans from Klubochyn and the surrounding vicinity took up arms against the Nazis and supplied weapons to a local Jewish resistance group. Local nationalist and Ukrainian Soviet partisans also accepted Jewish partisans into their own units and provided protection to more than 150 Jewish families that survived the ghetto at Trochymbrid and nearby Jewish settlements that were hiding in the forest. Vasily Matsuyk, an elderly survivor of a Nazi massacre and director of Klubochyn District Museum recalled the story of one Ukrainian family in Klubochyn executed for assisting Jews.
Upon the invasion of the Ukrainian SSR and the establishment of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, Erich Koch inspected the old Radziwill holdings that the Bolsheviks had not managed to destroy and with Hitler's permission claimed it for himself. He instructed the ''Kreislandwirt'', the official in charge of Tsuman district, to liquidate all Ukrainian villages on the former Radziwill territory. These included but were not limited to Klubochyn, Sylne and Horodyshche. Koch dispatched the ''Sicherheitsdienst'' Dto facilitate the clearing of his new residence, one of few Polish residents in Klubochyn, a man named Galicki prepared the list handed to the Secret Police, almost all residents of Klubochyn were on the list. In mid 1942 an SD unit arrived in Klubochyn in the night and locked the Ukrainian inhabitants in a barn at dusk. Those in the barn were executed by machine gun fire and the barn was then set on fire.
According to eye-witness Stepan Radion, after the destruction of Klubochyn and its residents, the Kreislandwirt seized the remaining property left in the village and brought them to Tsuman, where Poles were heard rejoicing-"Now you have your Ukraine. We will finish all of you off now".
The Germans then returned to Tsumna, where 150 Ukrainians included from the neighbouring village of Bashlyky were ordered to dig pits into which they fell after being machine-gunned. Also after Klubochyn the residents of Malyntsi were burned alive in the village church whilst "similar pogroms of Ukrainians took place in Mylovtsi and other villages'.
The Polish individual responsible for preparing the list for the Sicherheitsdienst was executed by the Ukrainian nationalist underground. It is alleged that the Ukrainian Insurgents also killed a number of Germans in the surrounding area.
After the end of World War II, the Jewish survivors from Trochenbrod, numbering between 33 and 40, lived in the area of nearby Lutsk.
Trochenbrod in literature
A fictionalized historical portrayal of the shtetl
A shtetl or shtetel (; yi, שטעטל, translit=shtetl (singular); שטעטלעך, romanized: ''shtetlekh'' (plural)) is a Yiddish term for the small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before ...
life at ''Trachimbrod'' was featured in the 2002 non-fiction novel
The non-fiction novel is a literary genre which, broadly speaking, depicts real historical figures and actual events woven together with fictitious conversations and uses the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherw ...
''Everything Is Illuminated
''Everything Is Illuminated'' is the first novel by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002. It was adapted into a film of the same name starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz in 2005.
The book's writing and structure recei ...
'' by Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer (; born February 21, 1977) is an American novelist. He is known for his novels ''Everything Is Illuminated'' (2002), ''Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close'' (2005), ''Here I Am (novel), Here I Am'' (2016), and for his non-fict ...
as well as in the 2005 film
2005 in film is an overview of events, including the highest-grossing films, award ceremonies, festivals, a list of country-specific lists of films released, notable deaths and film debuts.
Evaluation of the year
Renowned American film critic a ...
based on the novel.
Safran Foer, whose father and grandfather came from Trochenbrod, depicts fictionalized events in the village beginning in 1791 – the year in which the shtetl was first named – until 1942, when it was destroyed in the war. Safran Foer's modern-day protagonist (who goes by the author's name and also by the name "Hero", or "the Collector" in the film version) comes to contemporary Ukraine to look for a woman named Augustine, who saved his grandfather in the war. The novel was criticized for omitting numerous historical details and distorting history by a reviewer from Ukraine published by ''The Prague Post
''The Prague Post'' was an English language newspaper covering the Czech Republic and Central and Eastern Europe which published its first weekly issue on October 1, 1991. It published a printed edition weekly until July 2013, when it dropped the ...
'' online.
''Beyond Trochenbrod'', a memoir of a childhood in Trochenbrod disrupted by the Holocaust, was published in 2014. The author, Betty Gold, also gave oral testimonies on the events.
Notes
References
* A book about the combined towns of Trochenbrod and Lozisht.
* Everything is illuminated (2005) - a film about a young Jewish American man endeavors to find the woman who saved his grandfather's life during World War 2 in a Ukrainian village Trochenbrod, that was ultimately razed by the Nazis, with the help of an eccentric local.
Trochenbrod & Lozisht community website
Zofiówka
(8.) in the Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland
The Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and other Slavic Countries ( pl, Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego i innych krajów słowiańskich) is a monumental Polish gazetteer, published 1880–1902 in Warsaw
Warsaw ( p ...
(1895)
See also
*Lozisht
Ignatówka, also Lozisht, was a Jewish shtetl (village) located in what is now western Ukraine but which used to be part of the Second Polish Republic before the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. Ignatówka was bordering a Jewish shtetl in Z ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Trochenbrod
The Holocaust in Ukraine
Einsatzgruppen
History of Volyn Oblast
Former populated places in Ukraine
Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland
Historic Jewish communities in Ukraine
Historic Jewish communities in Poland
Shtetls
Populated places established in 1835
Holocaust locations in Poland
Holocaust locations in Ukraine