Trochenbrod

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.[2] In the Second Polish Republic, the number of inhabitants reached 4,000.[1] The name Trochenbrod in Yiddish 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 he Ukrainian National Peoples Republic after unification on January 22, 1919.[4][5] However, during the Polish–Soviet War, the forces of the re-emerging sovereign Poland and the Red Army fought over the town. It was ceded to Poland in the Peace of Riga signed with Vladimir Lenin,[6] and it became part of the Wołyń Voivodeship in the Kresy Borderlands. Most of the population were engaged in agriculture, dairy farming and tanning.

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 rabbi at that time was Rabbi Gershon Weissmann. The Communists exiled him to Siberia after accusing him of being involved in underground salt trading.[2]

The Holocaust

Holocaust memorial to Trochenbrod and Lozisht Jewry at the Holon Cemetery in Israel

After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the new German administration established a Nazi ghetto 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.[7] Most of the Jews of Trochenbrod as well as of the neighbouring village Lozisht (Ignatówka in Polish) were murdered by the local collaborators,[2] consisting mostly of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police who rounded up the prisoners in the presence of only a few German SS men. According to Virtual Shtetl, over 5,000 Jews were massacred, including 3,500 from Trochenbrod and 1,200 from Lozisht among other nearby settlements.[8][9]

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.[7] The village was totally destroyed and burnt down in 1942, and subsequently leveled out after World War II in the Soviet Ukraine.[2] Now only fields and a forest can be found there, and an ominous flatland with an aimless country road running through it.[3]

On November 4th 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 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.[7]

After the end of World War II, the Jewish survivors from Trochimbrod, numbering between 33,[2] and 40,[7] lived in the area of nearby Lutsk.[2]

A fictionalized historical portrayal of the shtetl life at Trachimbrod was featured in the 2002 non-fiction novel Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer as well as in the 2005 film based on the novel.[3]

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.[3] 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 online.[7]

• Vainer, Y. (Yakov) (1988). The tree and its roots האילן ושורשיו : ספר קורות ט״ל : זופיובקה־־איגנטובקה (in Hebrew). LCCN 88195445. Archived from the original on 2016-01-21.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link) 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 (1895) (in Polish)

• Lozisht