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 Peoples 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1432797735
• ISBN13: 9781432797737
• Release Date: November 2012
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Length: 388 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"