By Anatole Kurdsjuk
Published by Printing and Publications, Corp. (2005)
Softcover, 266 pages
This amazing true story of Jacob and Olga Kurdsjuk is lovingly shared by their only surviving child, Anatole Kurdsjuk. What a treasure Mr. Kurdsjuk has given the world in chronicling his family history through Communist Russia as well as Nazi Germany and the tribulations of WWII.
Even though Anatole Kurdsjuk admits in the preface that he lacks “formal writing skills”, I found his work so engaging I could hardly put it down. He generously weaves old photographs, excerpts from diaries, and family documents into the story, which gifts the reader with a wonderful vision of his family’s experience in the early part of the 20th century.
This story is one of love, survival, enduring faith in God against a bleak backdrop of Stalin’s vision for Russia. It’s a story that will make you smile at the innocent love between a young man and woman who labored - with joy - as peasants. But also a story that will leave you in wonderment at the zeal of the human spirit when faced with persecution.
But there’s more. This book belongs alongside The Diary of Anne Frank as required reading for America’s youth. It provides the reader a cross-section of life during WWII by a family who endured imprisonment by both their native land and the occupying German forces. The reader is given a view of America that is, in most American public schools, completely absent. And that’s just it. Our children need to see America through the eyes of those who’ve endured unspeakable hardships...by those who pursued the freedom in America at all costs.
I encourage you to read The Long Walk Home; you can only be enriched by knowing the story of Jacob and Olga Kurdsjuk.
To God be the glory for all things †
