Books and Monographs
... LIKE FOOTPRINTS IN THE WIND: A Generation Lost - by Pamela Atherstone.
Few people know about the "Purge of the Kulaks" in Russia, as this is a suppressed
part of history. Based on real stories of people who actually lived through this
terrible time, the fictional Jahnle family is falsely "evacuated" from their farm
in a small village near the Black Sea, and begins their journey north, into the
unknown, with many other German-Russian families like them. It is nearly harvest
season of 1929. Not understanding what is happening to them, the family experiences
adventure at the beginning of their trek, as they traverse the first four hundred miles
by horse and wagon. During this trip they come into contact with the NKVD (The People's
Commissariat of Internal Affairs, which later becomes the foundation of the KGB). They
are loaded into an overcrowded cattle-car on a very long train and taken nearly nine-hundred
miles to the labor camps on the coast of the White Sea, near the town of Onega, in western
Siberia. Here they are exposed to separation, interrogation, starvation, over-work, cruelty
and death. The ever-present love of the family members for one another, combined with the
solid foundation of their faith in God, runs like a fine silk thread holding them together
through the worst of situations, and yet doubt and disbelief often permeate their souls. But
this story is not all doom and gloom. There is hope and the promise of a better life for some
of them. Soft cover - 388 pages.