Solomon Perel

Solomon Perel (also Shlomo Perel or Sally Perel; born 21 April 1925) is an Israeli author and motivational speaker. He was born on 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 loosely based on his autobiography Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon (I Was Hitler Youth Salomon).

When the Nazis came to power, systematic persecution of Germany's Jewish citizens began. In 1935, the Perel family relocated to Łódź, Poland, where Solomon's aunt lived, after their shoe store was deliberately pillaged and Perel was expelled from his school.

After the Germans invaded Poland in September, 1939, Solomon Perel and his brother Isaak attempted to escape to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. Solomon succeeded and was placed in a Komsomol-run orphanage in Grodno while his brother made his way to Vilnius in Lithuania.

Perel fled from the orphanage when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and was captured by a German army unit. 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. He played a key role in the capture of Joseph Stalin's son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, and thereafter became endeared to his German army unit. The unit's commanding officer even made plans to adopt him, providing him with further protection. As a circumcised Jew, Perel was constantly in danger of being discovered by his military unit, and attempted on several occasions to flee back to the Soviets, each time without success.

Since he was still a minor, Perel was told he could not remain with the army. Instead, he was sent to a Hitler Youth school in Braunschweig, where he continued to hide his Jewish identity under the name of Josef Perjell (changed to Josef Peters for the film Europa Europa). At the time he had a girlfriend by the name of Leni Latsch. She was a member of the Nazi-instituted League of German Girls (BDM), so although Perel 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 refused to reveal his secret.

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