WOW, what a book i would say. It's a very moving book about the memoirs of Helen Waterford and Alfons Heck during WWII.This book should be in high school history not to say only for high schoolers but 12 year olds and up.

This book is not your usual book. It details the lives of Ayran Alfons Heck and Jewish Helen Waterford.

Alfons was a member of the Hitler Youth and fought-and even met Adolf Hitler. After the war he was depressed about the things that he and his countrymen did to the Jews and moved first to Canada and then to the U.S.

Helen is a Jew who spend part of the war hiding with her husband. They were eventually caught. Helen's husband did not survive, but Helen did, eventually moving from Holland to the U.S. with her daughter Doris.

While in the U.S Helen read some of the things Alfons wrote about and contacted him leading to a friendship and career as they travel telling their stories to students all over the place.

A very moving book!

Seriously this book is impossible to stop reading once you pass a certain point. I stayed up 'til seven in the morning reading this book. Mind you I started reading that night around ten or eleven at night. It is seriously that captivating. This book tells some very important and over-all relatively unknown facts about the period surrounding WWII. It is an intriguing and captivating book that I believe every human being high school age and older should read. I also think it should be added to high school curriculums.

This was a very touching and sweet story. It is amazing that someone would be that mean to take thousands of lives and destroy them. It is also amazing that [Hitler] would force kids to join the army. I would hate to serve him.

This book focuses on the lives of two people during the Holocaust. Helen Waterford was a Jewish girl who grew up in Frankfurt, Germany. She married and moved to Amsterdam where she had a child named Doris. Forced into hiding, both her and her husband were found and sent to Birkenau. This was the last time Helen ever saw him. Along with many other women, she was sent to another camp, Krarzau, to work in a factory. When finally freed, her first thought was meeting up with her family she hadn't seen in so long. She reunited with her daughter and later moved to America.
Alfons Heck was a fanatic Hitler Youth member pledged to serve Hitler to death. He looked up to the Nazis because they would make Germany a victorious and prosperous country. A firm believer in Anti-Semitism, he worked hard to "let the Jews know where they belong." He moved through the ranks of the Hitler Youth as the war went on, ending with a Bannfuhrer. When Germany was captured, he became an American translator until the troops found out about his real identity. When news of the concentration camps and the real evil of the Nazis came to him, he was forced to live with guilt for the rest of his life. Trying to forget about his past, he moved to America to start a new life.
Overall, this book was very informational in relation to the Holocaust. By giving two opposite sides of the story, the reader gets the full picture from this major event in history. Although the book is a bit boring in parts, I am amazed at the individual's stories. Theirs is a story of bravery, determination, and wit during this difficult time.