Parallel Journeys

School reopens for Alfons, but almost half his classmates are dead or in jail. Former Nazis can’t teach, so Alfons’s classes have up to 80 students, and they avoid topics like history and focus on “neutral” subjects like science and math. No one speaks about the war, even though the students are war veterans, either as Wehrmacht soldiers or Hitler Youth members.

Guilt wracks Alfons, and he takes a train to war-torn Nuremberg to witness the Nuremberg Trials, where the Allies put top Nazi officials on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Many leading Nazis either killed themselves or fled, but Göring arrives at the trials with painted fingernails and toenails, and Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler Youth’s first leader, is also present.

The Allies sentence many Nazis to death, including Göring, but Göring sneaks a cyanide capsule into his cell and kills himself. Schirach gets a 20-year sentence. Alfons thinks about the role he played in the atrocities. Due to his age, he could say he’s a victim, but other teens fought and killed Americans, and Alfons can’t take back his exuberant loyalty to Hitler. He goes to Canada to start over, but his conscience still torments him.

Doris goes from New York to Chicago, where her parents live. As housing is sparse, she and Doris live in a single room with cockroaches, and they must share a bathroom with other people. Doris gets a job, but once the company discovers she’s Jewish, they fire her.

Antisemitism persists, and in 1946, there’s a pogrom in Kielce, Poland. By 1949, looking for security, over 200,000 Jews migrate to Israel, while the U.S. only allows 27,000 Jewish migrants.

Thanks to Juro, Helen gets a job at a dress shop and stays there for 11 years. Doris catches up in school, and the Holocaust remains a fraught subject for Helen and the survivors. She refuses to go to synagogue with her mom and won’t fast. She’s had enough hunger. Her mom wishes she wouldn’t bring up the Holocaust.

With no one wanting to discuss the Holocaust meaningfully, Helen turns to books. She meets Robert Waterford, who admires her reading, and they get married and return to Europe. She almost breaks down when visiting Holland, but she feels mighty when she goes to Kratzau. She’s proud she endured the Holocaust. She’ll never forget her experiences, and she’ll make people aware of what happened to her and millions of others.

In the 1980s, Helen and Alfons are American citizens in San Diego, and Alfons writes about his time as a Hitler Youth member for newspapers. Helen reads the articles and, to Alfons’s surprise, gives him a call. She invites Alfons to attend a meeting of Holocaust survivors, but they scorn him and don’t like Helen’s idea of lecturing with him. Helen wants to speak with whomever she wants, and TV shows and newspapers spotlight their partnership. They agree to be unflinchingly honest, and when a high-school student asks Alfons if he would have killed Helen had the Nazis ordered him to do it, Alfons replies yes.

Skinheads and neo-Nazis threaten Alfons for contaminating the ideas of Adolf Hitler, while Holocaust deniers question Helen’s story, and more Jews reprimand her for speaking with a former Nazi. Helen emphasizes the dangers of hate, and Alfons regularly brings up brainwashing and guilt. A rabbi mentions forgiveness, but Alfons says he’s not asking for forgiveness, and Helen forgives no one.

Aside from writing and lecturing with Helen, Alfons appears in many documentaries, including The Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler (1988) and Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth (1991), and he explains why the “educated” and “cultured” Germans yielded to Hitler’s policies. Meanwhile, Helen’s and Siegfried’s stories become a part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993. A historian at the museum discovers that Siegfried died in December 1944 in the Stuffhof concentration camp in Poland. The information brings Helen some peace.