Parallel Journeys

Helen is in Czechoslovakia at a camp called Kratzau. The camp’s commander assures them this is a work camp—there are no gas chambers. The barracks are clean, and so are the bunks. Each woman receives a pin, and Helen puts it at the neck of her dress to keep the cold out.

With Russian soldiers approaching, the Nazis don’t want to leave evidence of their genocide, so SS leader Himmler has the gas chambers destroyed, and, in the middle of winter, the Nazis march the prisoners, who have no coats or boots, to other camps closer to Germany.

Helen works from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. making small cylinders of metal. For dinner, she eats soup, and then, guarded by four soldiers, she walks to the factory. The prisoners don’t help one another. They steal each other’s blankets and food. One night, a woman tries to steal Helen’s straw mattress, and Helen repels her by threatening her with a loose board.

The Germans pick one prisoner to control the barracks and the other prisoners. They’re the Kapo, and Helen’s Kapo is a Hungarian woman, Violet, who hits Helen after she drops hot potatoes on the floor.

Lice takes over Kratzau, and the Nazis make the women take a two-day trip in the middle of winter in open boxcars to a delousing station. They return to empty barracks, so the women have nothing to keep them warm. The International Red Cross arrives, but they don’t interact with the woman and quickly leave. Clothes arrive, and Helen gets new shoes: One is black, and one is brown.

As most of Europe deals with shortages, Helen and the factory workers don’t get much food. Some women lose hope and die. During one roll call, Helen collapses. She has hepatitis and stays in the hospital, which lacks medicine but supplies warmth, water, food, and sleep.

Near the end of January 1945, the Russians liberate Auschwitz, but the hardship continues. The prisoners must eat food in small amounts, and many, traumatized by the Nazi horrors, hide bread under their mattresses and refuse to take showers or medicine.

The rumors at Kratzau say that the Nazis will kill the woman instead of letting the Allies free them. When the women go on another delousing trip, they think they’re heading toward death. The women receive a medical examination, and their stomachs swell with hunger. A doctor says Helen is pregnant, and Helen jokes that’d be a “miracle.” The Nazis don’t kill the women but return them to Kratzau, which isn’t clean but still covered with their hunger-induced diarrhea. Nevertheless, they’re alive.

The Luftwaffe wants Alfons to come to Frankfurt, and Alfons doesn’t care about flying anymore, but he wants to get out of Wittlich, as the Americans will capture it soon. Alfons still has hopes the Nazis will win, and on the drive toward Frankfurt, they pass many checkpoints to ensure they’re not deserters. Alfons sees two German soldiers around his age hanged from a branch—they were deserters. He also sees soldiers looking dirty and defeated, but the Luftwaffe airbase is clean and has plenty of food.

An officer, amazed at Alfons’s young age, sends him to Spang, which is near Wittlich, to retrieve valuable radar equipment before the Americans get it, and then he orders him to take four days’ leave. Alfons completes his mission and wanders around the empty and wrecked Wittlich.

Aunt Tilly is still in Wittlich, and she and Alfons eat dinner in her kitchen. He says he’s scared of the Amis—they won’t “kiss” him when they discover he was a top Hitler Youth member. Aunt Tilly says no one will tell them, and she burned his uniform.

The next morning, the Americans arrive, but they think Alfons is another child, and they call him a “Kraut” and ask him about wine. Due to school, Alfons can speak some English, so he becomes a translator for the American Army. He helps them capture 17 German soldiers. The lieutenant tells them they’ll go to a prisoner of war camp, but Alfons think the Americans might shoot them—no one would care.

The officer asks Alfons if he’s one of the “young Nazi werewolves,” and Alfons tells him he’s on leave from the Luftwaffe. The officer takes him to the city hall and gives him a blanket, wine, and meat. In the morning, he gives Alfons a piece of paper and orders him to hand himself to the next American unit.

Alfons thinks about destroying the order, but if they catch him, he might die. He remembers what Leiwitz told him about choosing life. The Gestapo killed Leiwitz because his name appeared on some of the papers of the colonel who plotted to kill Hitler.

Alfons reunites with his grandma. He thinks it’s the end of Germany and himself. His grandma thinks that’s ridiculous. Germany lost wars before, and Alfons will survive.

The Germans surrender on May 7, 1945, and Hitler spent the last days of the war in a bunker in Berlin. At the end of April, he married his longtime partner Eva Braun before they killed themselves and aides burned their bodies.

On May 9, Russians free Helen and the women from Kratzau, and Helen kisses a field of lilies before she goes to find food. A butcher turns her away, but a Russian soldier gives her so much food she becomes sick. Though she doesn’t know where she is, she heads home, and Becky, a 16-year-old from Amsterdam who was in Kratzau with her, comes along.

Becky and Helen go from one train to another and then to a crowded displaced persons (DP) camp in Pilsen, a city in Czechoslovakia. They sleep on the gym floor, and, starving, the doctor doubles their food portions, causing others in the camp to shower them with antisemitic slurs. People continue to target and kill Jews, like Polish police officers.

As Helen enters the German city of Leipzig and notices how few Jews there are—she doesn’t know the Nazis purposefully killed six million of them. After a long train ride, Becky and Helen reach the Dutch border. They go to a DP center, and Becky suddenly calls Helen a “Moff”—a slur the Dutch use for Germans. The Dutch put Helen in jail, but a rabbi frees her, and she goes to a gymnasium where the Dutch send women back to Germany.

Helen can leave the gym during the day, and she finds a truck that leaves for Amsterdam each morning. Helen lacks the papers, and men try to get her off the truck, but Helen announces her determination to find her daughter. If they use force, she’ll scream. The officials leave her alone.

Like other survivors, Helen doesn’t get a “hero’s welcome.” Helen must pay a man on a three-wheeled cycle to take her to Reusink’s house, where she discovers Doris is alive.

Alfons hears about Hitler’s death, and he thinks he died fighting the Russians. When he learns Hitler killed himself, he still thinks highly of him. Hitler stayed alive till the end. Now that he’s dead, Alfons’s Germany is gone.

As instructed, Alfons hands himself over to the next unit of American troops, and they make him work in a hospital as a translator. To get on the Americans’ good side, Germans claim to hate Nazis and accuse others of being Nazis. Someone tells the Americans about Alfons’s past, and he loses his job, but, due to his age, the Americans don’t punish him harshly, and he helps his family clean their farm.

Alfons has to report to a lieutenant from Minnesota. The lieutenant doesn’t hate all Germans but doesn’t understand why they fell for Hitler and his genocidal policies. Alfons doubts the veracity of the Holocaust, but the lieutenant says the pictures are real.

Many Germans question the extent of the Nazi atrocities, so General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who is in charge of all Allied troops, and General George Patton force the Germans to go to the camps and see the emaciated prisoners and the piles of corpses.

By July 1945, the French replace the Americans in Wittlich, and they put Alfons in jail. A captain comes and tells Alfons and the prisoners that a firing squad will execute them. Alfons asks the prisoners if the French can do this, and a prisoner laughs: No one can stop them. Alfons feels sorry for himself and that Hitler betrayed him.

Alfons asks a German-speaking French soldier to see a priest before the execution, but the soldier tells him not to worry—the captain was just messing with them. The French tell Alfons he can’t leave town for two years and must wait six months before returning to school (if it reopens). He also has to do a month of hard labor, which means digging up a mass grave of French POWs and digging new graves for them. Alfons throws up several times. The French make Alfons and the others watch films of the death camps, but the Germans still think they’re fake.