Circumstances of geography and history placed Erich Eipert’s parents on the losing side in World War II. Their grueling experiences left each holding a lifelong personal secret and a story begging to be told. The telling, coalesced from an accumulation of interviews, memoirs, on-site research, and historical context, is a narrative that weaves its way through the chronology of Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s postwar reign of terror. This saga of ordinary people attempting to cope in an extraordinarily dangerous time not only recounts a compelling story, it also provides a fresh perspective of life on the enemy side.

World War narrative history

In The Secret She Carried: My Mother in the Perilous Time of Hitler and Stalin, a young woman and her tiny Sudetenland German community grapple with survival in the period encompassing the world wars but find the apocalyptic peace that follows the Nazi defeat even more ruinous. The Secret She Carried will be available from online booksellers soon.

A companion volume will relate the story of the author’s father, a man who by guile and luck survived the Eastern Front, the Allied onslaught on Germany, and American bombs when very few others in his German Panzergrenadier division did. Like his wife-to-be, he emerged from the war bearing a secret.

Fiction by Erich Eipert

Books for young or not-so-young adults who relish adventure, youthful heroes, wry humor, a real plot, and a pinch of romance. Guy Going Under. Guy just wanted to win a girl a little beyond his reach. He didn’t plan to get himself, and a too-smart girl he couldn’t stand, trapped in a cave with a gruesome historical secret. Kindle version or paperback. Butterfly Powder and the Mountains of Iowa. In 1960s rural Iowa, meet underachiever and improbable hero Gilbert Perles, the train he comes to call his own, an alluring girl named Alice, and the rival he would later re-encounter in a new and unexpected setting—war-torn Vietnam. Kindle version or paperback.