The Bone Orchards

My ancestors planted fruit orchards somewhere near the village of Rohrbach.  The fruit from those orchards may have helped to keep my family alive during the great famine.

The orchards fell into a dismal state during the communist years. There was no ownership. The youth of the Komsomol, who were sent from the cities to the countryside to spread the communist gospel, had no clue as to how to tend to them. My great grandfather was released from prison to teach them, then afterwards fell victim to the famine.

If life in the Southern Ukraine of the 1800's was similar to what we found in the American West (which I have no reason to doubt), we would expect that family burial plots were established on the hillsides. That means that today, if those orchards are still there, they are growing over the bones of these ancestors. The communist government, as a routine matter of policy, periodically razed the cemeteries. People were told to put their energies into the communal state and forget about the past.

During World War II, according to my dad's cousin Amalie, the jews would hide in the orchards, only to be caught and shot by the German soldiers. More bones.

Cemeteries can be razed, but the trees live on. On the road into Rohrbach, there were rows of planted trees on the hillside off in the distance to my right. They could very possibly have been orchards. Leaving Rohrbach that afternoon, there were similar rows on the other side of the road, again off in the distance. Amalie said they were about 5 kilometers from the village. The latter could have qualified. They were way off in the distance. In the village I asked our school teacher guide. "Yes, I have heard some folks talk about times when there were some orchards, but I don't think they exist anymore. They probably weren't tended and ended up dying." That's not what I wanted to hear. While I did see the occasional cherry or apple tree along the side of the road or in someone's yard, there was no sight or further mention of orchards to which we could get to. The ones on the hillsides were clearly out of range of our van and would have taken a horse cart to get to. I had visions of walking in them, picking up the dirt, scraping the bark, touching the leaves. Maybe taking along a few seeds and sneaking them back through customs. And maybe even (gulp) planting them.

Somehow I sense my ancestors' spirit in those trees. My dad showed a lot of expertise in tree trimming and grafting, and I often invited him over when I needed to trim the trees in my yard. The last years before he died, I would come to trim the apple and cherry trees, and the grape vines he had in his backyard. He would tell me precisely where to cut. Where anyone else would have written them off, he nursed his cherry trees back to health after the wet snows had virtually split them in half. Largely as a result of these experiences, I remain an avid "tree nut" to this day.

Are those orchards up on that hill?