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The early lives of Alfons Heck and Helen Katz and their individual experience of Hitler’s sway are the subject of this book. Alfons was born in1928, in Wittlich, Germany, a town near the French border and in the heart of the Mosel wine country. He was still a young boy when Hitler came to power and knew no other way of life than Nazism. By the time he was old enough to join the Hitler Youth at age 10, he had been fully indoctrinated in and completely accepted Nazi dogma. Helen was older, born in 1909 in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1933, she married Siegfried Wohlfarth. When the first new laws were passed discriminating against Jews, Siegfried lost his job and Helen was forced to leave university.


By 1935, things were considerably worse for Jews in Germany. Helen and Siegfried decided to leave and went to live in Amsterdam, Holland. In 1937, their daughter Doris was born. Less than a year later, Alfons was sworn into the Jungvolk , the junior branch of the Hitler Youth. After Kristallnacht, or the night of the broken glass on November 9, 1939, Helen and Siegfried were able to get Helen’s brother Fred to England and later the US, and their parents to Holland. But other Jews were not so fortunate.

When the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, the Wohlfarths knew their safety would be in jeopardy from then on and they realized that they would have to do something. In July, 1942, they received a letter telling them to report at the train station for “resettlement to the East.” They bought themselves a little more time in Holland by having a doctor remove Siegfried’s healthy appendix. Through the Dutch Resistance, they were able to find a Christian family who was willing to take in Doris and protect her from the Nazis. With Doris safe, Siegfried and Helen decided to go into hiding, again with help of the Dutch resistance. Meanwhile, Alfons had been accepted into the elite Flieger Hitler-Jugend, where he would start training first in glider flying and later as a Luftwaffe pilot. Alfons loved flying and became youngest top-rated glider pilot in all Germany.

Eventually the Wohlfarth’s were discovered in their hiding place. On September 3, 1944 they were put on a train and sent to Auschwitz. Their arrival at this camp was the last time Helen saw Siegfried. It wasn’t until many years later that his death on December 5, 1944 in Stutthof concentration camp was confirmed for her. Helen stayed in Auschwitz for two months and was relocated to Kratzau, a work camp in Poland. She remained there until the Russian Army liberated the camp. She decided to go find her daughter, despite being sick and weak, and, wearing a pair of men’s dress shoes she had been given by the Red Cross, she started walking across Europe to Amsterdam. By the end of the war, Alfrons never made it to the Luftwaffe, but he did achieve the highest rank possible in the Hitler Youth.

Alfons and Helen both ended up living in California, and after reading an article Alfons had written in a newspaper, Helen got in touch with him. In 1979, they formed a partnership, speaking to groups of people about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Their only criterion for their collaboration was complete honesty. I can only imagine how much courage it must have taken for these two people to stand in front of audiences and tell their stories.

In 1985, Alfons Heck published a book about his life called A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika. In 1987, Helen, whose real name was Herta Katz, published a book about her life called Commitment to the Dead:

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When Allison was two year old, I bought her an American Girl doll. At the time, 1990, there weren’t so many to choose from and I picked Molly because her historical period was my area of interest and I liked the idea of a doll from a specific period in history, along with some accurate accessories and novels that entertain and inform. But I also bought Molly because I was afraid the idea of a historical doll wouldn’t catch on. So much for my business sense!

Welcome to Molly’s World 1944 is a companion book to the whole Molly project. However, unlike the novels about Molly, this book is a social history providing a look at life during the war as a young person might have experienced it. The American Girls collection included this same type of book for each of their historical dolls, though much of their historical material and even some dolls have now been retired. These are truly wonderful books for familiarizing young readers with the major components of each period, and in the case of World War II, that also includes a basic introduction to the horrors of that war – the fighting and its resulting casualties, the Holocaust in Europe and the Atomic Bombs in Japan – without overwhelming them or scaring them away from ever wanting to know more. Each section includes a minimal amount of explanatory text and a collage of topical photographs, maps, letters, telegrams and other types of documents to provide a real sense of life at the time.

But words never seem to do real justice to pictorial books and so I am letting some of the pages from Welcome to Molly’s World speak for themselves.

Each chapter looks at a different feature of the war and is divided into a variety of relevant sections. For example, Chapter Three “Taking Charge” covers the wide variety of things adults and children on the home front could do to help support the war. The next section describes the different kinds of jobs women took and the ways in which their daily lives changed because of those jobs – think Rosie the Riveter. There is a section on women in uniform, with a detailed look at the contents of a foot locker issued by the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). This is followed by a section on women in aviation, including an up close look at all the dials and instruments in the cockpit of a B-25 Bomber, which a female pilot in the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS) would have to know all about in order to fly the plane. There is even a section on how pet dogs were volunteered by their owners to work in defense and the different jobs they performed.  Dogs for Defense is a little known facet of the war nowadays, but at the time, there were a number of books written for kids on the topic.

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Most people have heard of Oskar Schindler, the ethnic German who saved 1,200 Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis by employing them in his enamelware/ammunition factory, thanks to Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s List and Steven Spielberg’s movie based on the book. But not many have heard of Varian Fry, the 32 year old American who went to Marseilles, France in August 1940 to help rescue refugees stranded there after France fell to the Nazis. Many of these refugees had fled to France from Hitler’s Germany during the 1930s.

McClafferty details Fry’s mission beginning with a mob attack on Jews that he had witnessed on 15 July 1935 in Berlin, Germany. This left a deeply disturbing impression of Fry, and in 1940, three days after the armistice was signed between Germany and France, he attended a luncheon in NY about the situation of refugees. A collection was made at the luncheon that raised $3,000 and a private organization called the Emergency Rescue Committee or ERC was formed. Its purpose was to rescue Jews and non-Jews who were enemies of the German state and who were also well-known artists, scientists, musicians, and politicians. The list of almost 200 names included people like Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Lion Feuchtwanger. Feuchtwanger was a German writer who had written the first book about the life of a Jewish family in Berlin under the Nazis in 1933 called The Oppermanns (Die Geschwister Oppermann).

Taking the list of names and the $3000 donation money, Fry volunteered to go see what he could do about getting these renowned refugees out of occupied France. The job proved to be more than anyone had thought it would be. First, there was the problem of finding the people on the list, who were more than likely living scattered around the south of France under assumed names or, like Feuchtwanger, were in a French concentration camp awaiting deportation. And there was the problem of everyone having the right papers at the same time. Each family member had to have exit and entrance visas with the same dates, as well as travel visas to go through other countries. A valid passport was required everywhere and since all German Jews had become stateless with the passage of the Nuremburg Laws in 1935, they did not have and could not obtain a valid passport.

McClafferty describes in a very clear easy to understand way the complex problems Fry faced when he arrived in Marseilles and his trials and errors as he learned how to work around all the difficulties, done mostly with the help of very clever people and a lot of deception. And she chronicles the deterioration of Fry’s marriage as he became more involved with what he was doing. Fry began to believe that he was indispensable to the rescue operation, and this led not only to more problems with his wife, but also with the ERC. Fry’s original mission was to last only for a month, but by the end of that time he was too involved with what he was doing, and delayed his departure. Eventually, word go around Marseilles that he was there to help rescue people, and other refugees, ordinary people not on the list, began to show up outside his hotel. These people could only be helped with day to day expenses, not gotten out of France. So many refugees came to Fry that he had to hire some help and ultimately set up a relief organization called the American Relief Center or ARC.

It is unfortunate but in the end Fry was fired by the ERC and finally escorted out of France by the police in 1941. Yet he had accompli

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