D-Day and Beyond

The cover photo shows Clint Gardner’s helmet, split open by a mortar fragment on Omaha Beach at 5 p.m on June 6, 1944. (An officer from the Imperial War Museum told Gardner that the hole in his helmet was the largest on record, for a survivor, in either World War I or II.) Gardner went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge and to take command of the Buchenwald concentration camp, just a week after its liberation. In this book, Gardner relates his wartime experiences but also explores how those events set him on a journey of spiritual exploration,  an all-out effort to understand what we can still say about God after the Holocaust.

Meeting the Russian prisoners at Buchenwald, and hearing that Stalin had set up camps that were all too similar, made Gardner decide to take on the challenge of Russia’s problems as his own. (That decision led him to initiate citizen exchanges between the US and what was then the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War and eventually took him to the Kremlin, where he met both Gorbachev and Sakharov.) Throughout this book, he connects his experiences to his discovery of “a down-to-earth spirituality,” one that offers a new hope for the reconciliation of science and religion.

A free sample may be found here.

Xlibris, 2004. Hardcover, 261 pages.