The burning of the forests was so huge a thing that it could be painted only by a powerful imagination. Such an imagination is not mine, therefore there was nothing left for me to do but to sketch it roughly with the worn pencil of memory.
After the cold mists of autumn came the snow. That winter from our windows we saw more white spaces than black. When spring came, then we realized what the great fire had done. Every where black ground, rust hued stones, roots that looked like coals, and tall, black trunks towering over all.
Workmen came. They plowed the blackened soil. They sowed grain. The early fall brought splendor. No one in all our forest land had ever seen such a magnificent harvest as covered the mountain sides. I recall what the village pastor said: “The Lord God strikes wounds, but he sends the balsam that heals. Praised be His name!”
From the Filnbaum Forest to our very door were fields, and for thirty years the burned woodland gave our people bread. Since then our people are scattered; they have moved away, and a fresh, new, forest is beginning to grow upon the mountain sides.
