Apricot Trees and Vanished Graves

(CNN) -- Poland has been firmly in Ukraine's corner in recent years, which is quite a shift given that the two nations were historically rivals. It seems odd to cheer for a nation whose ancestors tried to kill my mother and destroyed my father's house, but I do. That's because like Poles, Ukrainians suffered greatly under Moscow's oppression, so nothing would please me more than to see Ukraine shake the Kremlin's grip to enjoy freedom and prosperity.

Last summer, I visited Rivne and Lviv, Ukraine, hometowns of my mother and father. They were Polish towns, Rowne and Lwow, in 1939 before Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and changed the map. The word Ukraine means "borderland," as this area changed hands many times among Austria, Poland and Russia before an independent Ukraine was established in 1991.

In the battles over these fertile lands, Ukrainians, Jews, Poles and others faced the horrors of the Stalin-engineered Holodomor famine, the Holocaust, the Volhynia massacre and other bloodbaths.

Both sides of my family endured these atrocities and their estates were destroyed. My mother was 11 in 1939 when she watched from a hilltop cemetery in Rowne as German fighter planes bombed her house to the ground....