In his third book,
Children of Death,
critically-acclaimed award-winning author Robert Leo Heilman pursues three unanswered questions from his childhood. Growing up in a family in which his German-speaking grandparents had migrated to the United States from Russia during the first decade of the Twentieth Century he found himself wondering: Where had the Heilmans lived before they migrated to Russia? Why did they leave their home to settle there? And, most poignantly, what happened to the relatives who stayed behind in Russia?
Here, in this book-length meditation, he takes us along on his journeys retracing the migrations of his family from Alsace, France to Russia in 1810 and on to Kazakhstan and the American Midwest. Along the way he brings us a history of the times and of the fates of a farming family in search of land, freedom and security through troubled times ranging from the Reign of Terror in eighteenth century France, the Russian Revolution, Stalin's purges and World War II. The effects of his German-Russian ethnic group's migrations still linger today sparking controversy in modern day Germany.