Summary

Parallel Journeys is the true story of two people who lived through Hitler's Nazi regime in the 1940s in Europe. The author tells the story of a young Jewish woman, Helen Waterford, and a young German boy, Alfons Heck. Helen and Alfons lived very different lives, Helen as a concentration camp survivor and Alfons as an officer in the Hitler Youth military organization. Many years after the end of World War II, Helen and Alfons met and did lectures on the atrocities of the Third Reich from their individual perspectives.

Chapter 1 begins by emphasizing the importance of the Nazis to young Germans in the 1930s who were indoctrinated with Adolf Hitler's philosophies from the first year of elementary school. For many years, Germany had been recovering from the fallout from World War I but now prosperity had returned and life was good. Hitler...