Parallel Journeys

The Allies are the group of countries fighting Nazi Germany. They include England, France, Russia, and the United States. Though the U.S. didn’t officially join the war until Pearl Harbor, they supported the Allies by giving them weapons and supplies through the Lend-Lease Act (1941).

Eleanor Ayer doesn’t go into much detail about the Allies or their leaders. President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States, putting Japanese people on the West Coast into internment camps. Roosevelt died in 1945, and Harry Truman became president and dropped two atomic bombs on Japan after the Japanese rejected unconditional surrender. Russia’s leader was the communist dictator Josef Stalin. He put millions of people in deadly gulags (labor camps). Winston Churchill was England’s Prime Minister, and his policies brutalized India. Though it’s common to depict the Allies versus the Axis as good versus evil, the Allies were not a paragon of virtue.

Antisemitism is hatred for Jewish people like Helen. As Ayer notes, the Nazis didn’t invent antisemitism. Violent, deadly prejudice has been around for centuries. Before Hitler called Jews Germany’s enemies, Martin Luther, the creator of Protestantism in the 1500s, referred to them as enemies of Christianity. Antisemitism continues to exist, though some Jewish scholars argue Jews use antisemitism to deflect criticism of the Jewish homeland, Israel, and its treatment of Palestinians.