Margaret (Less) McQuillan is a retired school administrator. She has been an elementary school principal in three schools, a curriculum developer, and a K-12 Performing and Fine Arts director for several districts in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees are from the University of California from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in English. She also has an MFA in Dramatic Art. Throughout her educational career, she has designed and led many interdisciplinary programs and projects that emphasized the creative process, the importance of multicultural education, the arts, and global citizenship. She first wrote "An Orange In Winter" to tell the story of her father, Walter Less, and his Jewish family, during the beginning of the Nazi rule in Germany in the 1930s, basing the narrative on a true incident her father told her about a special birthday gift, and on information from an autobiography she asked him to write. She first told this story to her children, Matthew and Jessica, and later, as a principal, expanded it for her upper elementary students to personalize and explain the prejudice, hatred and discrimination that led up to the Holocaust, and to provide an understandable context for other books whey were reading about the Holocaust. The nameless young boy became Hans, whose character and experiences are a composite, but are all authentic descriptions from people in the 1930s. Hans becomes a Hitler Youth and a witness to what happens to Walter's family and others. Because Hans and Walter are close in age, they provide parallel perspectives of how evolving events in one town reflected the national growth of Nazi Socialism from a variety of viewpoints and incidents. She again expanded the story to become a curriculum unit detailing further resources, research, documents and photographs. This included how her father, sponsored by his maternal uncle, was sent to California in 1934 at age 15, and how his parents escaped in 1941. Since her first visit to her father's home in Luneburg in 2009, she has worked collaboratively with the registered association History Workshop Luneburg, who provided extraordinarily valuable research, historical information, photographs and documentation. The book includes a study guide, questions, maps, timelines and a glossary which enables it to be an accessible teaching text. While in Germany, she has presented teacher workshops, led community discussions, and spoke to students at her father's high school. In 2013, the city planted a linden tree to honor and remember her family, and Margaret donated her family's menorah (which was returned to her by a former Luneburg resident in 2006), and her father's tall it to the Luneburg museum, which are now on exhibit. This book is in the libraries of The Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., and the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. It is used in Germany to teach history, social studies, English, and for interdisciplinary teaching . It is also used as an instructional resource for "Facing History and Ourselves."
When Walter joined the American army, he met an English Catholic woman who joined him in California. They had one daughter, Margaret. Her father's family did not speak of their persecution and fear, but Margaret, as she delved deeper into their past, felt an obligation to "tell their story" as a way to personalize the greater moral, ethical and political issues that gave rise to the horror of the Holocaust for students and adults. The questions she has included encourage readers to think critically about this historical time period, issues they may experience in their own lives, national and global conflicts, and to remind readers to "never forget." Margaret currently lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts with her husband, Dr. Mark McQuillan. She serves on The Newburyport Human Rights Commission and continues to lead workshops on "An Orange In Winter."