Trains to Nowhere is the story of a modern man who searches to uncover his connection to the Holocaust after experiencing waking dreams and nightmares of the fictional Senbruch concentration camp. Also featured in this volume are two short stories set against the chaotic backdrop of World War II. 'Barbarossa Diary' is the story of a young man going off to fight on the Eastern Front and 'Haarth the Hunter' depicts the struggle between an American recon squadron and a Nazi biological super-weapon.
Excerpt
The Senbruch Concentration Camp never sleeps. There are always trains coming and going, always the motion and sounds of loading and unloading, always guards passing, always spotlights sweeping, always dog barking, always smoke of human fat frying, frying in eternal ovens.
In rare quiet times, one can hear the wind wash through the barbed-wire fences like a slow moan.
Inside the barracks there is always needing needing, hunger hunger, spit and blood and aching bones. The corrugated tin roofs shed no starlight but if one is a dreamer one can still see them shine in the night sky. Occasionally there is the distant rumble of bombers in the distance but even if one is a dreamer a bomb is too much to wish for.
Across the camp young lovers embrace. There is no time here for ceremony, no time for religion. God is outside of the camp, or dead. There is only time for a rushed embrace, hastened words, and the almost painful promise: "When this is all over, we shall marry and buy a home. We shall have many children and worship in God's temple."
Outside, dawn is approaching. The guards change shifts and the spotlights dim their fevered glances.
It is tomorrow at Senbruch, but it is also today, and the yesterday before. It is last night.
The small book, Trains to Nowhere, looms large in historical fiction as three forgotten stories of World War II that will delight and amaze you with their authenticity and irony. I have provided a vignette of each below:
Trains to Nowhere is a novella by R. David Fulcher of a deeply troubled man, Chris Burton, who is losing everything…his marriage, his job, and, his son. Burton is sinking into a drunken depression, when he is assaulted by savage dreams of another life—a soldier in the Third Reich---triggered by a war movie that played in the background of the poker game where he got blind drunk the night before. Chris confides in George Kushner, his best friend, and a Jew, trying to get to the bottom of his dreams, and comes up with a mysterious scroll, in German that neither of them can read. The scroll, somehow, is a link to that soldier, Chris as Hans, sentenced to a hell called Stenbruch Concentration Camp as a guard to sanction SS atrocities.
You don’t have to be a believer in reincarnation to love the way that David Fulcher weaves this revelation from the past into current day life using flashbacks that slowly but surely tell the whole story. You don’t want to miss the end. There was no stopping the trains, but a few leaked out.
The Nazis were rumored to have secret weapons like an atomic bomb, a jet plane, and the power of the Ark of the Covenant—some of which were true. In Haarth the Hunter, R. David Fulcher conjures up the supernatural, hidden in the ancient history of the Black Forest, to release a killing machine of mythic proportions. Sergeant Drake is ordered to take his 5th Recon Squadron across enemy lines into a forward position and relieve the 7th Recon. What he finds isn’t pretty, but it will give nightmares to the reader long after the tale is read.
Fulcher’s short story, Barbarossa Diary, is set in Russia, the Soviet Union, a few years after World War II. Waiting for the spring thaw has given Fredrich, a former German foot soldier, the opportunity to reveal to his son the truth. Like any child Michael’s age at that time, stories were a way to pass the time and learn. Michael always loved his father’s stories, and begged for more.
David Fulcher has revealed a little-known result of the killing machine Blitzkrieg war that tore Europe apart and killed most of the men. Especially on the Eastern Front, where Hitler drafted many who questioned his sanity to certain death in the winter of 1943-44. On the Russian side, even more died. With more young women left alive than men, finding a husband in the wreckage knew no ideological or national boundaries.
Hence, Fulcher weaves a fascinating tale of revelation through a bedtime story. You will be as enchanted—and horrified—as I was.
Ronald W. Hull, author of The Kaleidoscope Effect, Alone?, two other novels, and It's in the Water and Other Stories
8/25/12
Available Now! Rated 5 ***** by readers and listeners.
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