**How long can a child keep believing that someone will come home?**

Thirteen-year-old Leni Adler lives with her mother, Ruth, in the quiet borderland village of Nebeldorf, where the fields still grow wheat and ordinary life struggles to continue beneath the gathering shadow of war.

Her father, Abram, is missing.

While the adults around her speak in half-sentences and carefully guarded silences, Leni refuses to believe that he is simply gone. She searches for him in familiar roads, forgotten places, old memories, and the pages he left behind. But beyond the walls of her small cottage, the world is changing. Names are being written down. Doors are being marked. Neighbours are disappearing. And silence is becoming a means of survival.

As Nazi persecution reaches deeper into ordinary lives, Leni is forced into a world where a piece of bread can become an act of courage, a name on a page can become dangerous, and the smallest decision can determine who survives.

Through forests, hidden rooms, frightened streets and the memories of those she loves, Leni must confront a truth far greater than the war around her: that people can be taken away, homes can disappear, and childhood itself can be lost—yet something human can remain.

*Ashes in Her Footsteps* is a historical-fiction novel about **memory, persecution, courage, loss, family and the fragile acts of kindness that survive even in humanity's darkest hours.**

Some footsteps disappear.

**Others remain long after the person who made them is gone.**