Solomon Perel, Staying Alive Among The Nazis

This was first published on October 1, 2010. I ever so slightly edited it on December 5, 2014, but now, October 29, 2021, I thought I'd expand it to the end of the movie, but I have not covered the movie thoroughly, and it is well worth seeing this great film.

 

Thanks to the Bee Gees for, "And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Ah, ha, ha, ha, Stayin' alive. Stayin' alive.Ah, ha, ha, ha, Stayin' alive;" and to the Moody Blues for "Survival nothing more than survival." You might now guess that this must be something about "stayin' alive" and "survival." You have guessed correctly.

I can't recall when I first saw the movie "Europa, Europa," but I believe it was on that international film channel, with the interesting and unique name, "The International Film Channel." haha

If you haven't seen this movie, I highly recommend it. This film is in German, with English subtitles, with excellent translation. Its original title for release in Europe was "Hitlerjunge Salomon" ("Hitler Youth Solomon")*, and it was released there in 1990. The title was changed to "Europa Europa" for release in the United States, although I'm not sure just why that was done. The original title tells the basic story just in the title, since a boy with the name "Solomon," a common Jewish name, being in the Hitler Youth, just doesn't match. So the title also arouses some curiosity.

The story is based on the true story of Solomon Perel, a German Jew (played by German actor Marco Hofschneider) who was able to use some creative thinking to save himself from death at the hands of the Nazis. The movie is not, and doesn't claim to be, a re-enactment of Perel's story, but it is rather something of a historical novel, with many parts of Perel's actual biography providing the framework of the film. It begins with infant Solomon Perel's circumcision. Solomon is also known by the shortened form of his name, "Solek." That the movie would basically open with a young child's circumcision may seem a bit strange to you, but it is very important, because German males tend not to be circumcised, and that was especially true in those times. Jewish males, at least those born to observant Jewish parents, are always circumcised.** This will become important to the story, and at one point later, Solek asks himself if this small piece of skin is what makes one person so different from another.

The movie fast forwards to when Solek is a young teenager, and the Perel family decides to leave Germany for eastern Poland when their little shoe shop, attached to their home, is vandalized by Nazi thugs and Solek's sister is killed. Unfortunately, moving to Poland was not a good choice, since within a few years Germany invaded Poland from the west, and their ally at that time, the Soviet Union, invaded Poland from the east. The father decides to send his two youngest sons (Solomon and Isaak) further east toward the Russians to escape the advancing Nazi armies.*** The two brothers become separated, and Solomon is taken by the Soviets and placed in a Communist Youth orphanage and school in Grodno, an area of Poland that was annexed by the Soviet Union. Solek now becomes fluent in Russian.

In June 1941, here come the Nazis again, as Hitler sends his armies into the Soviet Union. Solek is captured by the Germans, but his native German language makes the officers ask how he knows German so well. As the German troops question him, executions of Jews and certain Russian captives are being carried out right nearby, and we hear the almost constant machine gun fire. Thinking quickly, Solek tells them he is German, an ethnic German (called Volksdeutsche, a person of German ancestry living outside the borders of Germany and Austria) who was forced into a Soviet orphanage. He uses a German sounding name, "Josef Peters," for his own. The Germans hear what they want to hear, believing that since he was in an orphanage, that the Soviets had murdered the boy's parents, and they promise him revenge for their deaths. Since he is now fluent in Russian, he becomes a translator for this German military unit. In order to conceal his identity, he has to be sure that no one sees that he's circumcised, so he always goes off into the bushes to relieve himself. A gay German soldier sees Solek exposed, and he knows that he is a Jew, but he befriends Solek and he never betrays him. It gives the boy some comfort to have someone to talk with without having to worry about his identity, but unfortunately, this soldier is killed in the fighting. The other soldiers all like him, but many of them also have a "Nazi side," and the boy wonders how various Germans can be so nice and kind to him because they believe him to be German, yet how these same Germans can be so nasty and hateful toward Russians and Jews.

The Nazis decide the boy should go to Germany and be placed in a Hitler Youth school.**** He thinks of various ways to avoid anyone seeing that he's circumcised, and he even tries to make it appear that he's not circumcised, which only causes an infection. He meets a girl, a fanatical Nazi, who decides she wants to give a child to the Führer. The boy can't have sex with her, because that would mean she'd know he was circumcised. The Nazis study the boy's facial features and certain physical characteristics, declaring him to be a pretty good "Aryan" specimen, which only shows what a bunch of nonsense Hitler and Himmler espoused. Solek, dressed in his Hitler Youth uniform, travels to Lodz, a Polish city annexed to Germany with a mixed Polish-German population,***** as that is where his parents had been living. Jews have been confined to a ghetto, and the boy uneasily takes a trolley through that ghetto to hopefully get a glimpse of his parents. There is a bit of comic relief when Solek is practicing his heel clicking and Nazi salute in front of a mirror, which causes him to break out into a dance. As the war comes to Germany itself, Solek is sent to the front with other teenagers and he is captured. The Soviet officers are having German prisoners executed, and Solek looks to be doomed, as no one believes his story of being Jewish and the way he survived. Suddenly a voice calls his name from a group of freed concentration camp prisoners. It is his brother, Isaak. The two brothers have survived, but their parents did not.*^ The film ends with the REAL Solomon Perel making an appearance (as of 10-29-21, he is 96 years old!). Even small victories like these against the hatred of the Nazis are always welcome. DON'T EVER LET NAZIS WIN!!!

* Literally, "Hitlerjunge" means "Hitler boy." (See Word History below)

** There is an interesting dream scene in the movie, where the boy's sister hides him from the Nazis in a closet. Who else is in closet? Hitler. He is standing in a common pose of many of the photos of him, with his hands over his crotch. She tells her brother, "Er ist auch Jude, deshalb hält er immer seine Hände davor" ("He's a Jew too, that's why he always holds his hands in front;" a symbolic reference to circumcision and to Hitler's fear of being part Jewish, a claim long tossed about by his political opponents.) See my article about Hitler's DNA, "Hitler The Jew?": http://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2010/10/hitler-jew.html 

*** The Soviets were not as anti-Jewish; after all, part of Nazi ideology was based upon anti-Jewish hate, as well as other racial and ethnic hate nonsense. By the time Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the world had already witnessed Nazi laws and violence directed against German Jews. A fair number of Germany's Jews had left the country (like the Perels) by 1939, but some (also like the Perels) simply moved to adjacent countries, which often proved to be a death sentence when Hitler's armies invaded, and occupied, those countries early in World War Two.

**** The Hitler Youth was fanatical in its Nazi ideology; after all, unlike older Germans, these kids had been brought up under the Nazis and they had never experienced anything else. That's not to say there weren't fanatical adult Nazis, too; as obviously there were.

***** Lodz (Polish: Łódź) is in the middle of modern Poland, and during the World War Two era, the city had a mixed Polish and German population, especially so, because the Nazis resettled a number of Germans there from other parts of Europe. The Nazis renamed the city "Litzmannstadt" after a German World War One general. The city had already had a sizeable Jewish minority and the Nazis forced all Jews to live in an enclosed ghetto and, in order to survive, to produce goods for the German war effort and German citizens. Gradually over time parts of the Jewish population were sent to be murdered in extermination camps, while disease and food shortages were constant threats within the ghetto.  

*^ I have read Solomon Perel's autobiography, "I Was Hitlerjunge Solomon." As I noted above, the movie is only "based" upon Perel's story, and the ending of the movie where the two brothers are reunited was purely written by the scriptwriters for the movie. Also, in real life, Solek's sister was not killed in 1930's Germany, but rather she was killed late in the war while in Nazi captivity. There was also another older brother, and while he is depicted rather briefly in the film, he did survive the war.     

Photo is from the 2003 MGM DVD release.

WORD HISTORY:
Young-This word goes back to the Indo European root "yeu," which had the notion of "vigor, vitality." The Old Germanic offshoot was "jungas," with the same basic meaning. This then gave Old English/Anglo-Saxon "geong," meaning "young," with the soft "g" later becoming "y" (the German, Low German, Dutch and Frisian forms are spelled with a beginning 'j,' but it too is pronounced like English 'y'). In various forms it is quite common in the other Germanic languages: German and Low German have "jung," Dutch has "jong," Frisian "jonk," Danish has "unge," Swedish has "unga," Norwegian and Icelandic have "ung." German and Dutch have used the word as a noun, with the Dutch noun "jong" meaning "child," and German "Junge" meaning "boy, lad."