Judge’s Commentary:

Stock up on Kleenex before reading A GARLAND FOR ASHES. When little Hannelore Zack left Germany in 1939, she was bound for London. Her parents told her she was going on a trip; she began to get the first inkling that something was seriously amiss when she saw them crying on the train platform. That was her last contact with them; she spent a good deal of the rest of her life not only unraveling the specifics of their deaths in a crematorium in Chelmno, Poland in 1942 but in learning how to forgive “and even love” the German people in her hometown of Gemünd.

The story is made even more amazing by the fact that the author started writing it at age 75. Rather than playing golf or being retired, author Hanna Zack Miley travelled back and forth between Germany, England and elsewhere, reaching out and contacting other former children of the Kindertransport (as it was known) as well as people from her hometown who might have knowledge of her parents’ past. Her extensive research and interviews unearthed details of the most chilling kind, such as when a Nazi official told a local villager in Chelmno that the trees would grow better because, “The Jews will make good fertilizer”. It doesn’t get any more evil or real — than that.

What resulted is a complex and intricate tapestry that gradually reveals itself through various insights. Nor is it all grim and sorrowful the author recounts her relatively carefree youth and growing-up years as well as her travels and meeting her husband. But an undercurrent of inevitability runs throughout, pulling the story to its inevitable and inspiring end.

Like the Holocaust itself, this book should be remembered as a lesson to humanity.