Along the road from Kiwery to Kołki there was a town called Trochenbrod by the Jews of Volhynia, and Zofiówka by Poles. The former owner of that territory was an unknown Trochim. The vicinity of the village was swampy, with a stream that had to be crossed by all travellers to Omelno, Trościaniec and Jaromel. Hence, Yiddish speakers called it Trochenbrod – “Trochim’s ford”. Unfortunately, the Polish origin of the name Zofiówka is unknown.

Before the war, the town had a population of about 6,000. inhabitants, almost exclusively Jews, who formed an important center of the local economy, dealing with tanning and dairy farming, delivered mainly to Łuck and Równe. In addition, the manufacturer of high-quality shoes, Eli Potasz, known as the “Volynian Bata”, founded his company in Trochenbrod. An interesting fact is that the town was surrounded on all sides by forests owned by prince Janusz Radziwiłł, who lived in nearby Ołyka. The dense forests were the reason why in Zofiówka in 1938 Ecel activists (Zionists) organized their first military training camp in Poland, attended by Menachem Begin – later Prime Minister of Israel.

The German occupation put an end to this thriving town in the Second Polish Republic. In August 1942, about 20 German soldiers from Eisatzgruppe C and about 100 Ukrainian policemen from Schutzmannschaftsbataillone killed the local Jews. Several thousand people were murdered within three days. The execution took place in the Jaromel Forest, 3 km away. The extermination was total; the town turned to ruins and from July 1943 was uninhabited. For some time, it was the starting point for the squads of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The rest of the buildings were burnt by the Soviet squad of Sidor Kowpak with Jewish partisans from Zofiówka.

Currently, Trochenbrod does not exist. In its place, there are mainly arable fields. The town and its inhabitants are commemorated by two monuments erected in 1990. Nevertheless, the memory of this place has probably survived in literature and film. Many local Jews claimed that the action of ” Tevye the Dairyman”, and thus the post-war musical “Fiddler on the Roof”, took place in Zofiówka. This was evidenced by the fact that the author of the above-mentioned novel – Sholem Aleichem had been a private teacher there and managed to get to know it very well for many years, carefully observing the lives of the most characteristic inhabitants of Trochenbrod that he then described in the novel.