Solomon Perel, a German Jew who saved himself from death by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and later felt grateful to the Nazis he pretended to be. lived, passed away on February 2 at his home in Givatayim, Israel, near Tel Aviv. He was 97.
His grandson Amit Brakin confirmed the death.
Mr. Perel, who is also known as Shlomo and Solly, recounted his survival story in a 1990 autobiography. It was adapted into a German film, “Europe Europe,” released in the United States in 1991, won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Like many other Holocaust survivors, Mr. Perel’s story begins with Nazi oppression, which forced his family to move from Peine, Germany to Lodz, Poland in 1936. German invasion on September 1, 1939, they were forced to one ghetto could hold up to 164,000 Jews. He fled later that year with an older brother, Isaac, in hopes of finding relative safety in Soviet-controlled eastern Poland.
In Bialystok, where he parted with Isaac, Solomon was placed in a Soviet orphanage by a Jewish support organization in Grodno (now part of Belarus). He stayed for two years, until Germany Invades the Soviet Union June 22, 1941; he recounted that the Jewish children at the orphanage had been awakened from their sleep and told to flee from the German attack.
Solomon became one of many refugees captured by German troops in an open field near Minsk.
Fearing that his captors would learn he was Jewish and shoot him dead in a nearby forest, he dug a small hole in the soft soil with the heel of his shoe and buried his identification.
After waiting in a long line, Solomon was asked by a German soldier: “Are you a Jew?” Notice his mother’s last words to him, “You must live,” but not his father’s, “Always be a Jew,” he lied: “I am not a Jew.” Thai. I am an ethnic German.”
The Germans didn’t just believe him; they welcomed him into their unit under the name Josef Perjell, and turned him into an interpreter. One interrogation he participated in was that of Yakov Dzhugashvili, son of Joseph Stalin.
“I became a person with two different personalities – a Nazi by day and a Jew by night,” Mr. Perel said. told The Weekan Indian magazine, in 2019. He stayed there until the commanding officer sent him to the Hitler Youth boarding school in Braunschweig, Germany, during the winter of 1941-42.
If anyone found out he was Jewish, “they would treat me like cannibals,” he said in a statement. “Because You Must Live: The Story of Shlomo (Solly) Perel,” a part of Series Testimonies of Survivors produced by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. He was relieved that the school bathroom had separate compartments, preventing anyone from seeing that he was circumcised.
But, he said, “no one suspected me because it was impossible to think that some Jewish boy would sneak into the heart of that protected country.”
To the young Nazis around him, he became a true believer, absorbing lessons in National Socialism, wearing a uniform with a swastika and a German eagle. chest and prepare to go to military service.
“I am totally the Hitler Youth,” he says in the film Yad Vashem. “I started saying to myself, ‘Wow, I’m part of a force that’s conquering the world.’”
But he couldn’t completely turn off his true self. In 1943, during the Christmas holidays, he received his holiday pass and took the train back to Lodz. For 12 days, wearing the black winter uniform of the Hitler Youth, he searched for his parents in the slums.
He drove a tram that Jews couldn’t get on, going back and forth. He walked the streets of the city. He saw men rolling carts full of dead Jews.
But he did not find his mother, father or sister Bertha, whom he would never see again. His brothers, Isaac and David, survived.
Solomon Perel was born in Peine on April 21, 1925. His father, Azriel, owned a shoe store. His mother, Rebecca Perel, is a homemaker.
Solomon was almost eight years old when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, but his life did not change significantly until two years later, when anti-Semitic law deprived the Jews of their rights and citizenship. He was expelled from school.
“It was my most traumatic childhood experience,” he said on “Because You Must Live,” “it was the brutal expulsion because someone considered me different.”
The family moved to Lodz after his father was forced by the Nazis to sell his shop for almost nothing. Solomon attended a Polish public school for Jews. It was after the Germans invaded Poland and Jewish families were ordered into the Lodz ghetto that he began on the path to his life-saving disguise as a Nazi.
Simmy Allen, a spokesman for Yad Vashem, said Mr. Perel’s life as a Jew in the Hitler Youth was more than unusual.
“We are aware of Jews using fake documents and presenting themselves as non-Jewish, even Aryans, during the Holocaust in different parts of the world,” Mr. Allen said in an email. throughout Europe, including in Berlin. “But being right in the heart of the lions’ den, always under surveillance to that extent and in a sense part of the ideology of the ‘enemy’, like Shlomo, is a very unique position and rare.”
Mr. Perel recalled how he was invested in Nazi philosophy even during the war against Germany.
In his memoirs, published in English and French under the title “Europa, Europa,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I was drawn so deeply into a world in which I was forced, that my reasoning abilities were finally exhausted. completely mesmerized. obscured that no ray of reality can penetrate. I keep feeling like one of them.
As the war neared its end, Mr. Perel was sent to the Western Front, assigned to a unit guarding the bridges. When American soldiers captured him and his team and held him briefly in a prisoner of war camp, his war was over. You are no longer Josef Perjell. I’m Shlomo Perel again.
Mr. Perel moved to Munich, where he worked as a translator for the Soviet Army during Nazi war crimes interrogations. He emigrated to British-mandated Palestine, fought in the Israeli war of independence, and managed a zipper factory.
In 1959, he married Dvora Morezky. She died in 2021. He is survived by one son, Uziel, and three grandchildren. Another son, Ronen, died in 2019.
For years, Mr. Perel pushed aside memories of the Holocaust. But in the late 1980s, after a near-fatal heart attack, he began discussing his past and writing memoirs.
Film adaptation, written and directed by Dutch Agnieszka, which stars Marco Hofschneider as Mr. Perel. It earned Ms. Holland an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.
In addition to winning the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the film was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the National Board of Critics. But the German Export Film Federation refused to choose it as the entry for the Academy Award for best foreign film — a decision that has spurred many of Germany’s top filmmakers, including Wolfgang Petersen and Werner Herzog, to sign a protest letter published in the Daily Variety.
Mr. Perel attended the film’s premiere in Lodz.
In 1992, he reunited with some of his former Hitler Youth comrades and revealed to them that he was Jewish. Several years earlier, he had met surviving members of the Wehrmacht unit who had accepted him as German.
He has presented about his experiences in Israel and around the world.
Mr Brakin, his nephew, said in a text message: “He insists on including, in each of his lectures or talks, a message of acceptance of the other, including a message. difference and an anti-racist message. in any way it can happen.
But Mr. Perel never completely wiped out the Nazi identity he had adopted.
“To this day, I have a mess of two souls in one body,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “By this, I would like to say that the road to Josef, the Hitler Youth in which I joined for four years, was short and easy. But the way back to the Jew in me, Shlomo or Solly, is much more difficult.”
“I love him,” he said, referring to Josef, “because he saved my life.”
