NYC; Executed At Sundown, 50 Years Ago

THE young landscaper stood yesterday over the graves of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and decided that the shrubbery needed a trim. He would definitely get to it, he said. People might visit, and he wanted everything to look right.

He understood that the Rosenbergs were somehow important, the man said in his Spanish-accented English. What exactly they had done in life to make them famous, he had no idea. He knew them only in death. Even then, they were not much more than a name on a broad headstone: Rosenberg. One more name out of thousands, representing all those souls on their journey through forever at Wellwood Cemetery, along the border between Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

The Rosenbergs' first names were engraved on separate stone markers at the foot of the graves. There was some other writing, too, but the landscaper could not read it. It was the Hebrew rendering of the couple's names. His was Yonah, hers Etel.

From the dates of their births and deaths, the man could tell that she had been the elder, 37 to his 35. Very young, he said. That is so, he was told. Look, he said, they both died on the same day: June 19, 1953. Was there, he asked, an accident? Not quite, he was told.

Across the language barrier, it was not so easy to explain why it was a gross oversimplification to say that the Rosenbergs died.

They were executed. Fifty years ago yesterday, having been found guilty of conspiring to pass American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, they went to the electric chair at Sing Sing -- first Julius, then Ethel. They died as the sun was setting.