street look like? How did the people dress? How did the ways Trochenbroders made their living affect community life? What were the relations like between rich and poor? How did the Jewishness of the place express itself? What did the kids do in the summer? In short, what was the feel of the interwar Trochenbrod, this “last” Trochenbrod? What was it like to live there?
I was lucky to fall under Trochenbrod’s spell at a time when a few dozen people who knew Trochenbrod firsthand were still alive. I talked with people born there from 1912 through 1932, and who left as late as 1942. I was able to hear a different perspective, how Trochenbrod and Trochenbroders appeared to Ukrainians and Poles living in other places in the area, from people who still live there and remember well their childhood visits to Trochenbrod. Personal recollections, as unreliable as any one of them might be, collectively made it possible to fill the outlines with the feel of Trochenbrod, with a sense of what was it like to live there. My father left Trochenbrod in 1932; I was capturing things he would have told me.
Trochenbroders usually went to Lutsk, about 20 miles and the better part of a day’s journey away, for studio photographs, or had photographs made by itinerant photographers who from time to time set up temporary studios in Trochenbrod. This explains why you can look through hundreds of photographs from Trochenbrod and see the faces of its people, most often stiff and posed, and nothing of the town’s physical appearance. By the 1930s box cameras and 35mm cameras were readily available, and at least some people who visited Trochenbrod, usually immigrants returning to visit their families, snapped outdoor photos. Some Trochenbroders had cameras also, but their photographs were lost in the Holocaust. The one Trochenbroder who was technologically attuned, who photographed outdoor scenes, and survived the Holocaust with her photographs and other personal belongings was the Polish Catholic postmistress of the town, Janina Lubinski. I met her son, Ryszard Lubinski, in the city of Radom, two hours south of Warsaw, and with happiness he gave me most of the photos of 1930s Trochenbrod that appear in this book. They add a layer of concreteness to Trochenbrod like nothing else can; they allowed me to see the town my father grew up in.
When my father marked his bar mitzvah in the early 1920s, the combined population of Trochenbrod and Lozisht was the same as it had been twenty years earlier, about sixteen hundred people. Emigration, disease, and war privation had offset any natural growth. The first few years after the wars were a period of harsh life and recovery. In the early days of full Polish administration, local commandants imposed forced labor on the Jews of Trochenbrod—building roads, administration buildings, and warehouses in the region; supplying the Polish army with food, clothes, and leather goods; hauling construction materials and army supplies; building furnishings for government offices. That hardship was soon replaced with higher-level official discrimination. Government jobs were denied to Jews. Some trades that Jews had been prominent in, such as vodka and salt, were made state monopolies and turned over to Polish Catholic war veterans to operate. Systematic repression of Jews steadily increased throughout the interwar period. So did regular outbreaks of violence against Jews, and these were ignored if not encouraged by Polish officials. Despite this, and because people in the rural areas tended to get along better than in the cities—Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews each having their own social and economic niches—Trochenbrod’s economy again began to grow and diversify.
Although increased contact with the outside world and a measure of political awareness had come about in Trochenbrod to some extent during the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, World War I and the Polish-Soviet war pushed the