Parallel Journeys

In a jeep, Rinus drives Helen to Doris, but Helen worries about what her daughter will think of her. She looks like a “skeleton” and hasn’t seen her in three years. Rinus tells Helen Doris has been with Stein DeBoer, Jo Vis’s sister. Jo survived Dachau and stayed in the camp after its liberation to help care for the prisoners.

Helen reunites with Doris during lunch, and Doris asks Helen if she’s her mom, and Helen says she is. Helen wants to hug her but doesn’t want to scare Doris. Doris has to go back to school, and she wants to ride in the jeep.

Helen lives for Doris, and she takes her away from her comfortable home, and they move into an attic, where Doris cries and throws up. She’s unhappy, and she tells her mom she wishes she never came back.

The mother and daughter return to their old neighborhood and visit the “little woman,” who has all of Helen and Siegfried’s things—the SS gave them to her. Helen learns that the Nazis paid people for every hiding Jew they turned in, and Helen wonders if the “little woman” told the Nazis about her and her husband, but she doesn’t dwell on such a scenario.