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It doesn't matter what the world says about Israel, it matters what we do. David Ben Gurion |
Solomon Perel (also Shlomo Perel or Solly Perel) is an author and motivational speaker. He was born 21 April, 1925 in Peine, Lower Saxony, Germany to a German Jewish family. He escaped persecution by the Nazis by masquerading as an ethnic German. His life story is told in the 1990 film Europa Europa based on his autobiography Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon (I Was Hitler Youth Salomon).
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The Perels were harshly persecuted when the Nazis came to power, and Solomon's father eventually moved the family to Łódź, Poland in 1935 after their shoe shop was vandalised by German Nazi sympathisers.
When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Solomon and his brother Isaak attempted to escape to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. Solomon joined a Komsomol-run orphanage in Grodno whilst his brother travelled elsewhere.
Solomon fled from the orphanage when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and was captured by a German army unit. Since he was a native German and spoke the language perfectly, Solomon was able to convince his captors that he was a Volksdeutscher (an ethnic German living outside Germany) and was subsequently accepted into his captors' unit as a Russian-German interpreter. He played a key role in the capture of Joseph Stalin's son, a Red Army officer, and thereafter became endeared to his German army unit. As a circumcised Jew, Perel was constantly in danger of being discovered by his German unit, and attempted on several occasions to flee back to the Soviets, each time without success.
Since he was still a minor, Solomon was sent to a Hitler Youth school in Braunschweig, where he continued to hide his Jewish identity under the name of Josef Perjell. At that time he had a girlfriend by the name of Leni. She was a fervent Nazi so although Solomon loved Leni he dared not tell her that he was Jewish for fear of her informing the authorities. Later, Leni's mother discovered Solomon was Jewish but did not reveal his secret.
Close to the end of the war Solomon was captured by a US-Army unit, but released the next day. After traveling back to his home town, and making dozens of written inquiries, he finally located his brother Isaak. Solomon learned that his father had died of starvation in the Łódź ghetto, his mother was killed in a gassing truck and his sister was shot while on a death march.
In 1948 Perel resettled in the newly independent Israel where he joined the army to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He later left the Israeli army to become a businessman. Solomon did not return to Germany until 1985 at the invitation of the Mayor of Peine in a commemoration of the destruction of the Peine synagogue.
He later wrote a book about his exploits entitled Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon (I Was Hitler Youth Salomon). The book was later adapted into the 1990 film Europa Europa. Solomon often tours and gives talks throughout Europe about his wartime experiences.
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