Parallel Journeys

Parallel Journeys takes place during World War Two. It is about the lives of Helen Waterford and Alfons Heck. The book tells both of their stories. Helen Waterford was a Jewish girl from Germany. She lived in Frankfurt with her mother and father. Her mother wanted Waterford to marry a wealthy man early, and become a housewife. Waterford had other plans, she went on to study at a university. After the war began Waterford could not continue her studies.

Eggs, goat milk, and cheese were very helpful back then. That was the dairy products and now I’m going to tell you about the meat. Back then there was roast, pig, squid, sea urchins, fish, shell fish, goat, sheep, deer, hairs and boars. Now can you guess what they used for sweetener? If you said honey than you are right. That is the only sweet thing except for fruits that they could sweeten things with. These are only a little bit of thing that the Greeks used for spicing meat and other things, garlic, herbs and mint. Here are some foods that they ate at parties artichoke hearts, song birds I think that is a bird that sings but I’m not sure, and also some mushrooms.

After Helen Waterford left her home in Germany to move to Holland, she had already realized that Germany was not safe any more and that to keep the safety of her family they would need to go into hiding. This was a result to the actions taken by the Nazi’s on the event of Kristallnacht where many Jewish businesses were destroyed and many Jews were captured and taken as prisoners to concentration camps. Waterford went into hiding with thousands of other Jews in Amsterdam, Holland when finally Nazi officials captured them after Germany had taken over Holland. Separating themselves from their daughter Doris to keep her safe Helen and Siegfried were put onto a boxcar and deported to a concentration camp. There they experienced the terror of the selection process where Helen witnessed Dr. Josef Mengele pick whether prisoners at the concentration camp went back to working or were sent to death. Eleanor Ayer describes the kind of person Dr. Mengele was seen as by prisoners like Helen Waterford as she states, “Of all the concentration camp doctors, Josef Mengele was the most feared. The Angel of Death, prisoners called him. With a simple movement of his hand he sent, Mengele doomed thousands of Jews to…