Inescapable nonfiction and escape fiction
World War II narrative history
The circumstances of geography that placed East European ethnic Germans Maria Hajek and Fidel Eipert on the losing side during World War II produced painful and emotional experiences that etched themselves into their souls. The traumas would never be forgotten by either—not in postwar shattered Germany where they met, nor on the Iowa farm where they rebuilt their lives in America. The eventful and brutal things they and others in their respective lost homelands endured would have gone with them to the grave had not their stories vigorously cried out to be told
A multi-decade accumulation of interviews, site visits, and historical research notes by the author, their son, eventually coalesced into two companion narratives, By Accident of Geography and The Secret She Carried. These books follow the lives of Fidel and Maria both before and after they were involuntarily bound to the Hitler’s Third Reich in their formerly Austrian regions of Romania and the Czech Sudetenland. Their lives and those of people close to them changed radically as they were forced to live amidst the savagery instead of merely following it by newspaper and radio. Their chronicles recall the extraordinary survival resilience these ordinary soldiers and civilians summoned to negotiate those frightening years of Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s postwar occupation.
Fiction
Books for young or not-so-young adults who relish adventure, youthful heroes, wry humor, a real plot, and a pinch of romance.paperbacks or ebooks through bookstores, Amazon or other outlets.
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.
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.