Memorie di salomon perel biography

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Then recovering himself, he said he was only trying to protect me.”

The lonely teenager missed his family, and one Christmas break, took the risk of returning to Lodz, only to realise his parents had perished. 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 widowed mother discovered he was Jewish but did not reveal his secret.

Towards the end of the war, Perel was drafted into the army as an infantryman and assigned to guard a bridge armed with a Panzerfaust. He was sent to guard a bridge at Brunswick. “A Jewish boy in a Nazi uniform in American captivity.

He often toured and gave talks throughout Europe about his wartime experiences.

The Dutch playwright Carl Slotboom wrote at the request of Salomon Perel a play based on Perel's story titled Du sollst leben (Dutch: Je zult leven; English: You shall live), which was first staged in Waalwijk, Netherlands, in 2002, which is also Remembrance of the Dead in the Netherlands.

His grandnephew, Amit Brakin.

AMIT BRAKIN: Going through the Holocaust as a member of the enemy's youth movement, identifying with all the songs and with the cheers and everything - I think it's a difficult thing to swallow.

ESTRIN: But Perel was well-known in Germany, where he'd lecture young German students about the dangers of being taught to hate, as he was at their age.

On the night of 20 April 1945, the eve of his 20th birthday, shortly after he had been inducted into the army, Perel was captured by the United States Army, without having engaged in combat. Since he was a native German speaker, Perel 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.

Perel managed to fight him off, but when he turned around, the doctor saw that he was circumcised and realized he was a Jew. The doctor did not inform on Perel, as doing so would have exposed him as a homosexual. 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.

“A German soldier asked me who I was.... I can't get rid of that ideology. “Lying was my only weapon,” says Perel. Perel said his identity as the Nazi Youth Jupp that kept him alive always remained with him.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PEREL: (Speaking Hebrew).

ESTRIN: He said in the video testimony, "whenever I watched documentaries about that time and see a swastika, Jupp awakens.

As if I would.”

He later reunited with his brother, married by then, and they moved to Israel, where he joined the Israel independence war. But, I had to sign a document saying I would not take arms against the Americans. They decided to send Perel and his brother Issac, who was 30, to East Poland, which was then under the Soviet control.

“I recall the last words of my parents,” says Perel.

Maybe it was hard for Israelis to embrace.

Masquerade

Solomon fled from the orphanage when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and was captured by a German army unit. Perel makes the traumatic experiences of his life sound funny in retelling. Then Perel was put in a boarding school of the Hitler Youth, the Nazi youth movement.