Educational Media Reviews Online

Inspired by Avrom Bendavid-Val’s The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (Pegasus, 2010), Lost Town brings to life the little Ukraine town of 5,000 Jews who were massacred by the Nazis in 1942, and follows the efforts of its few survivors and their descendants to preserve its memory.

Lost Town traces a brief history of Trochenbrod and, through still photographs, present-day footage, animation, and interviews with survivors, and offers a vision of life there—from weddings and the importance of Shabbat to smells now vividly recalled. Bendavid-Val notes that survivors’ memories aren’t always accurate—one tells him erroneously that Trochenbroders didn’t use money but only bartered—but the town seems to have been genuinely “a joyous place to live,” and is remembered with overwhelming nostalgia and affection.

Bendavid-Val’s father was born in Trochenbrod; as a young man left Ukraine for Israel, and later raised a family in the United States. Avrom and his brother traveled to Western Ukraine for the first time in 1997, to see what was left of the town where there father was born. Accompanied by Evgenia, one of Trochenbrod’s thirty-three original survivors, they found all that remains--a 2-mile stretch of road surrounded by fields. Struck by “The enormity and the power of what was there, and then—what was lost,” Bendavid-Val determines to interview all the surviving 1st-generation residents of Trochenbrod. This would become a lifelong project-- interviewing and uniting survivors and descendants, collecting artifacts, and documenting everything he could learn about the town. Bendavid-Val visited western Ukraine over twelve years, building relationships with local people who shared their stories and helped with his research. He discovered Trochenbroders have a strong urge to stay connected, more so after publication of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated (Houghton, Mifflin, 2002) and its 2005 movie adaptation were released. In 2009 he traveled with 100 survivors and descendants to Trochenbrod; where the onetime milkman’s son led them down the street; Lost Town documents their visit and tearful tribute to the lost people of Trochenbrod.

Central to the film are the photographs taken of Trochenbrod when the survivors were children. Ryszard Lubinski—son of Trochenbrod’s Catholic postmistress and the only non-Jew born there—gave Bendavid-Val access to his mother’s photos of the town and its people. an extensive visual record of Trochenbroders, the photographs survive only because Lubinski’s mother wasn’t Jewish and was therefore allowed to leave with her possessions when the town was destroyed. One picture shows a very young Lubinski standing in the street beside his “girlfriend,” now Betty Gold of Cleveland, Ohio (and Evgenia’s cousin) who routinely lectures about this. An extended, monochromic animation created for this film illustrates Gold’s survival story; her family hid behind a false wall in their home, then in the woods until they were found by Russian resistance fighters.

Interviews and live footage from visits to the site and surrounding communities not only tell the history, but juxtapose the unease, forgiveness, and sometimes unity evident between Jewish and non-Jewish survivors.

A beautifully filmed tribute and journey into the past, Lost Town blends live footage with still photographs and haunting animation to give viewers a sense of place and of life in Trochenbrod. The cinematography and art direction (by Michael Gottschalk, Luis Freddy Morales, and Marcela Perdomo) are extraordinary. Highly Recommended.