Hannelore is a precocious, talented, inquisitive six-year-old German girl with shining hazel eyes who tries to make sense of senselessness in a world gone mad.
Hannelore is deciding which toy to take with her on the first day of an epic journey that will see her and her mother walk more than four hundred kilometers west.
They hitch a lift whenever possible and carry their humor with them. The mantra is "The Russians are coming." Death stalks them. Millions of Germans are on the move in the largest, and possibly least known, example of ethnic cleansing in recorded human history.
Two Jewish escapees from a nearby concentration camp complex bring home the horror of what the Nazi machine, and many ordinary Germans, inflicted on the innocent Jewish populations of Europe.
The book is a voyage, both physical and mental, of my protagonists.
