Orchards on the Steppes

While based on historical facts about my family, my book Orchards on the Steppes must be classified as Historical Fiction, as I've created fictional characters and events within the framework of a historical timeline. A shout out to James Michener, one of my favorite authors,  for the inspiration his novels provided as excellent examples of historical fiction:

The epic story of the Rheinhart family begins in 1809, when a group of Germans from the Phaltz region of eastern France decided to leave their homes behind and cast their luck on the barren steppes of southern Russia, now Ukraine. Georg Rheinhart wanted a better life for his wife and five children, a life where they would be free from heavy taxation, where they could freely practice their religion, and his boys would not have to fight in Napoleon's armies. Tsar Alexander of Russia had promised settlers free land, freedom from taxes for thirty years, freedom to practice their own religion, and their sons would not be asked to join the Russian army. It was a chance to build a better life for themselves and their children.

That spring, a caravan of over 150 people started out, first crossing over the Rhine River, then through the Black forest and to the city of Ulm, hoping to board houseboats to float them down the Danube River through Austria, Hungary and Romania, where they would disembark and take another overland journey east to Odessa, a journey lasting several months, often fraught with disease and river pirates.

Plans changed when they reached Ulm, as they discovered that the river was closed to traffic through Vienna, the scene of heavy fighting between the French army of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Austrians and Prussians. A few decided to turn back, but the rest decided to take an overland route to the north, taking them through Bavaria, Bohemia (today the Czech Republic), Poland, and finally southward to Odessa. The trip took longer than the river route and their arrival was too late to get settled in Rohrbach, so they wintered in temporary army barracks outside of Odessa. The next spring they set out to find their land and started to build their village. They named it Rohrbach, after the village they had left back in France.

After decades of struggle, they had become successful farmers and were an important part of the local economy. Under Tsar Alexander II, things were steadily improving in Russia as a result of his reforms. Things started to go downhill when the Tsar was assassinated in 1881. His son Alexander III reversed many of the reforms that his father had put into place and placed power back into the hands of the large landowners. He forced the various ethnic groups, including the Germans, to assimilate into Russian society and adopt the Russian Orthodox religion. Language instruction other than Russian was banned. Many Germans decided to emigrate to America. Jacob Rheinhart was one of them.

Jacob's brother Johannes was a Volost mayor, a strong and respected member of the community. By the standards of the times, he was rich and successful. Johannes lost his first wife, who had borne him a son which he named Johann. Johann lived a troubled youth, was disrespectful to his new mother, and treated his siblings and the hired help at the farm poorly. Having gotten into numerous scrapes which brought shame to his family, and, upon finding out that he had fathered an illegitimate child, his father decided to send him to America to join his brother Jacob. The child's mother, Katherina, unable to travel with the infant, followed the next year with her brother, who posed as her husband. When they arrived in America, Johann and Katerina immediately went to the local county offices to get married. 

Everyone else stayed in Rohrbach.

Wilhelm, the next oldest son of Johannes, was conscripted into the Russian army to fight in World War I against the Germans. He was captured by the Germans, released at the end of the war, arrested by the Russian government, bribed his way out of prison and, after a few years on the run, finally made it back to Rohrbach to rejoin his wife there.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was followed by a civil war that destroyed the Russian economy and led to wide-spread famine. Things improved after the end of the civil war, when Vladimir Lenin instituted the New Economic Plan, or N.E.P., which allowed the farmers to once again sell their goods on the open market. After Lenin's death in 1929, Joseph Stalin halted the N.E.P. and started full collectivization, meaning that all of the farmers' lands, their animals and their tools would now become the property of the state. Large collective farms, called kolkholzes, were established, and everyone went to work as employees of the government.

This did not set well with the farmers. Many were arrested and sentenced to years of hard labor in Siberia or the frozen north of Russia. Johannes and his son Eduard (Wilhelm's younger brother) were both arrested in 1932. Eduard was given a five year sentence and sent to a penal colony on the Moscow Volga canal project. Johannes languished in the local jail awaiting sentencing for about six months, then was offered a furlough so that he could train students in managing his orchards. College students from the Komsomol, the communist youth organization, were sent from the cities to help manage the kolkholzes and to learn farming techniques. These students had no clue as to how to tend the orchards, thus  Johannes was released from jail so that he could impart his knowledge onto the young students.

At this time there came what is known as the “Holodomor” (Man-made famine). The government felt that the people were hoarding grain, and decided to crack down. Grain quotas were set at an unreasonably high level, and when they were not met, soldiers went door-to-door to collect all of the grain they could find. They used metal rods to probe under the floorboards and into the walls,  confiscating everything they could find. Anyone trying to steal grain from the local granaries, or even seen venturing into the fields, was shot on site. Many people starved to death that winter.

Eduard had three sons. Willi, the oldest, was from his first wife, who died when Willi was only four. He had two more sons with his second wife. When he was arrested and sent to the Volga canal project, Willi went to live with his Uncle Wilhelm, Wilhelm's wife Magdalena, and their daughter Amalie, while his stepmother and his half-brothers went to live with relatives in nearby Worms. To help his family survive, Willi, who was thirteen and working in the collective dairy, concocted a scheme to steal  the rich cream from the cows milk - a potential death sentence if caught. Magdalena, Wilhelm's wife, worked as a cook at the kolkholz, cooking for high-ranking government officials. These folks had plenty of food, and Magdalena was able to sneak away with a few morsels now and then, just enough to keep everyone from starving.

Eduard was released from the penal colony after four and one-half years and returned to Rohrbach, where he set about putting his family back together – only to be arrested a second time – this time along with Willi, who was only seventeen. Many of the farmers in Rohrbach were arrested as kulaks and sent to penal colonies in Siberia, or were simply executed. Luckily, Willi was released, presumably because of his age. His father Eduard was sentenced to death, taken to Mykolaiv, where he was executed in November of 1937. Johannes, the former Volost mayor, after finding his orchards had been destroyed, was found frozen to death in the fields.

World War II marked the beginning of the end for the village of Rohrbach. The southern region of Ukraine was invaded by the German-allied Romanian army, and the region became known as Transnistria. The Romanian army raided the villages and helped themselves to the crops, livestock and whatever else they felt that they needed. The villagers formed a militia to protect themselves against the invaders. At long last, the German Einsatzgruppen (a branch of the SS) set up shop in the villages and offered some protection from the Romanians, and began the process of the Nazification of the Black Sea Germans, to prepare them for their destiny of ruling over the Ukrainian peasantry. But first there would be some ethnic cleansing. Jews, Gypsies, and suspected communist sympathizers were rounded up and sent to faraway places or simply executed.

Willi and his two brothers joined the German army to fight against their Russian homeland. During the battle of Poltava, Willi was injured by a grenade fragment and returned to Rohrbach. After his recovery, he was told to report to Vienna, Austria, where he was assigned to a brigade which was tasked with repairing the railroads which were being destroyed by bombing raids or by sabotage. He never again made it back to Rohrbach. When the war ended, he surrendered to American forces and held as a POW.

In 1944, when the Russian army began to push its way westward through Ukraine, the German army was ordered to evacuate the German villages. They moved them westward into Romania, then onward to Poland. The Warthegau region was already home to Germans from Bessarabia, who were relocated there by the German army in 1940 after the Poles were driven out. Until more housing could be built, the Germans from Ukraine would have to live in tents. Meanwhile, they had to provide documentation to prove their German heritage, so they could move from being merely Volksdeutsch to become full citizens of the Third Reich.

The Soviet army continued their advance through Poland on their way westward into Germany, and the Germans of the Warthegau region were forced to evacuate again, lest they fall into Russian hands. Women and children were selected to be evacuated by train to Germany. Wilhelm was allowed on, as caretaker for his wife and daughter, along with his sister Emma and her daughter. The other families continued on with their wagons and were never to reach Germany. When they reached the Oder River that crossed into Germany, they found that it had been destroyed by the German army in an effort to slow down the pursuing Russians. The Russian army soon arrived to take ownership of the refugees. The following months saw them living in tents and rail cars, traveling through Belarus, Russia, until they were finally settled in Kazakhstan.

By the time Willi was released from the POW camp, he had found out through the Red Cross that Uncle Wilhelm and his family had been sent to an UNNRA camp in Bavaria. He decided to set out on foot to find them, a journey of nearly a hundred miles. By this time he knew his way around Germany. It was near closing time when he arrived at the bakery where his cousin had told him he could find her. He was told that she had left for the day but that he may find her in the flour mill just down the street. When he arrived at the flour mill, he saw a man who was just closing up. After a brief exchange, Willi found to his amazement that the man was his cousin's husband Peter. They had been recently married in the refugee camp.

Willi and Peter, along with their families, waited for a country that would accept them. The break came when they were offered jobs in the coal mines of Belgium. After a few months, Peter realized he could not bring his family to Belgium, so he decided to return to the refugee camp. Willi went with him, and soon was offered another job in the coal mines of England. After a year in England, he managed to again find his way back to Germany, where he met Maria and the two were married.

After four years of waiting, Amalie and Peter were granted permission to immigrate to the Unites States, through the sponsorship of Amalie's Uncle Johann, who had been sent to America by his father forty years earlier, after his troubles in Rohrbach.

Author's Notes – Fact vs. Fiction:

The character of Georg Rheinhart who moved to southern Russia in 1809 is based on Georg Ridinger, who is listed in the work of Dr. Karl Stumpp, a German genealogist who has chronicled the initial settlers of the Steppes of southern Russia. I believe him to be my ancestor. Johannes was my great grandfather, Eduard was my grandfather, and Willi was my father. My grandfather's arrest and execution is listed in the files of Memorial, an organization founded by academics in Russia, where he was shown to have been rehabilitated (pardoned) in 1990. Numerous Ridinger surnames are listed. That organization was recently shut down under Vladimir Putin and the web site is no longer operational.

Through the sponsorship of my dad's cousin Amalie, our family immigrated to the United States in 1960, where he joined his Uncle Wilhelm, his aunt Emma and cousin Irma. I was swimming in a sea of Germans from Russia.

The stories of my father's survival during the holodomor are true, as confirmed by him and by his cousin Amalie – Wilhelm's daughter. The hand injury and war record are confirmed by documents from the German archives. I found his release paper from the American POW camp at Bad Abling after his death. My father never admitted to having served in the German Army, other than to say he worked on the railroads. The scar from where he cut out his tattooed blood type was always visible. I found out about his hand injury from one of his cousins in Germany. He never mentioned it and it was apparently fully healed. Throughout his life he worked as a mechanic, construction worker and in a millwork shop. He confirmed that he had apprenticed as a blacksmith in his youth, and he took incredible pride in his ability with the fruit trees and grape vines he raised in his back yard.

UNNRRA records show that my father listed his Uncle Wilhelm as his father, presumably to increase the chances that they could stay together as a family unit. Relocation to Belgium was confirmed by UNRRA records.  Other than one document found in his papers showing a British entry stamp, little is known about his time in England, although I do know he went there with another cousin, who stayed on and raised a family. I have yet to reach out to his survivors.

When my dad went in search of his two brothers, whom he had not seen since the end of their military training, he found that neither one of them made it out of the Soviet Union. One brother was sent to a labor camp in the northern Ural Mountains, where he was put to work in an iron and copper mine. He was released there after twenty years, moved to Yekaterinberg (then Sverdlovsk), then onto Kazakhstan, where he and his family were eventually granted permission to emigrate to Germany. By this time he had become married and had raised two children, who are my cousins.

The other brother was relocated to Turkmenistan, where he married and started a family. He was arrested in 1957 when someone reported to the police that he had been in the German army in World War II, and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. His family subsequently relocated to Siberia. When the first brother visited them and saw the conditions they lived in, he brought them to live with his family in Kazakhstan. After serving nearly all of his twenty-five year sentence, his brother died in a tragic construction accident one day before his scheduled release. He apparently had known things about the prison officials that may become embarrassing if made public.

Dad stayed in touch with his relatives in the Soviet Union, sending them money and care packages, with the help of the German Red Cross and intermediaries in Germany. To correspond with them directly would have put his brothers and their families in danger, since the Soviet Union took a harsh stance against western contact. When the oldest son of his brother was finally able to immigrate to Germany, which started the chain for his parents and cousins, my dad sent him money to get him on his feet. Finally, in 1983, dad was able to visit his surviving brother in Germany, whom he had not seen in some forty years

Descendants of my dad's two brothers and uncles, my first and second cousins, live throughout the Unites States and Germany. 

I try to visit often.