Often reading the blurb on the back cover of a novel is a good indication of whether or not you will enjoy the book. This is very much the case when I picked up "Parallel Journeys" by Eleanor Ayer. The front cover features Adolf Hitler with thousands of his young supporters hailing him during World War Two. Books about the war usually depress me so usually I wouldn't read them, but this book appealed to me because of the faces of two teenagers on the front cover. The lead me to read the back cover which simply said-
             He was an ardent member of the Hitler Youth.
             This is their story of their parallel journey through World War II."
             What a great idea for a book! To compare two people who had completely different experiences of the war and to let them tell their stories side by side.
             When I first started reading this book I noticed how different it was to some of the other novels I have read. Firstly, it is very chilling to realize that while this is in the form of a novel, it is also non-fiction. It isn't based on a true story, it is a true story.
             The Second World War took the lives of fifteen million soldiers around the world, thirty nine million civilians and 12 million Jewish people. These figures shock me when I remember that the population of Australia today is around 20 million, so this means that over three times the population of Australia died in this sad period from 1939-1945.
             The First chapter of the book introduces us to Alfons Heck, a young German boy who grew up in the Rhineland region of Germany. Alfons never knew a Germany without Nazis. In schools they were taught by Nazis and never did they question what they were taught. Alfons was taught to hate Jewish people, communists, gypsies, and Jehovah's witnesses. He was also taught that his own race were to one day rule the world. When you are a child you learn from what adults are teaching you, so if they are teaching you to hate o...