Alfons Heck(1928-2005)

ALfons Heck was born in or around 1927 in the Mosel River region of the Rhineland. He was raised by his grandmother and various aunts and uncles with his parents and twin brother coming periodically to visit him. When he was six, in 1933, Hitler came to power and he started school with a teacher who was a full blown Nazi. He grew to admire them and even joined the Hitler Youth. When he was about 10 he went to a meeting in Nuremburg and heard Hitler speak. For the next five years all that he did was be in the Hitler Youth and attend school, periodically going to church to serve as an alter boy.

During the next few years he kept on getting promoted in the Hitler Youth, eventually holding a post similar to a general in the army. Alfons was in the Luftawaffe for a while while the war was looking bad, but then was transfered to the ground and to a wall all along the western boarder of Germany. There he actually met Adolf Hitler and spoke to him. Hitler seamed to be interested in him because they were raised close to each other. After the war, the Allied troups came into his town and because he could speak English and they could not speak much German they had him help get all the former Nazis out of hiding. They discoivered his background, put him in jail and he was almost executed, but was eventually released. After this he could not get the things that went on during the war out of his head so his twin brother told him to go watch the trials going on in Nuremburg. He went and they helped a lot. After this he went back to his hometown and several years later moved to Canada.

Later he moved to the United States and formed a friendship and working relationship with Helen Waterford a Holocaust surviver. They go around the country talking to students about the evil they both witnessed. They even wrote a book about their experiences called Parallel Journeys.