What can you infer about Alfons and Helen, as adults, from their responses to the events described in Parallel Journeys by Eleanor Ayer? Use the informational text elements in this biographical account, including facts, opinions, historical details, and descriptive language to support your inferences. How can contributing to and reading historical accounts like this be useful for people today? Support your response with evidence from the text.

In Parallel Journeys, Eleanor Ayer tells the true story of two very different people who lived through World War II. Helen Waterford was already a young woman, married with a child, when she went into hiding in Amsterdam because she was Jewish. Alfons Heck was just a boy when the war began. By the war's end, he was a high-ranking officer in the Hitler Youth. Although Helen was able to find a safe home for her daughter during the war, Nazis discovered Helen and her husband in their hiding place. They were separated at a concentration camp, and she never saw him again.

Because Alfons was just a young boy, he was easily brainwashed by the power and the flash of Hitler and his promise for a new Germany. He eagerly participated in youth rallies, and was chosen to lead groups of young boys into war. As Germany's forces were depleted, Hitler depended more and more on the Hitler Youth. When he was just 15, Alfons became a top-ranked glider pilot. At sixteen, he became a Bannfuhrer, equivalent to the rank of a major general in the U. S., with 6,000 troops under his command. By the end of the war Alfons had lost many friends and found his hometown reduced to rubble. He could only hope that the occupying forces of the United States and France would not deal with him too harshly.

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