Shlomo Perel, who survived the Holocaust through a surreal subterfuge and an extraordinary odyssey that inspired his own writing and an internationally renowned film, died Thursday in central Israel. He was 98.
Perel was born in 1925 to a Jewish family in Brunswick, Germany, just several years before the Nazis came to power. He and his family fled to Lodz, Poland, after his father’s store was destroyed and he was expelled from school. But when the Nazis entered Poland, he and his brother, Isaac, left their parents and fled further east. Upon landing in the Soviet Union, Perel and Isaac took refuge in a children’s home in what is now Belarus.
When the Germans invaded in 1941, Perel found himself again caught up in the shifting front lines of World War II, this time captured by the German army. To avoid execution from him, Perel concealed his Jewish identity from him, assumed a new name, and posed as a Russian-born ethnic German.
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He successfully passed, becoming the translator of the German army unit for prisoners of war, including Stalin’s son. When the war ended, Perel returned to Germany to join the paramilitary ranks of the Hitler Youth and was recruited into the Nazi armed forces.
Shlomo Perel appears at his home in Givatayim, Israel. Perel, a Holocaust survivor, recently died at the age of 98.
(Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial via AP)
After the surrender of Germany and the liberation of the concentration camps, Perel and Isaac, who survived the Dachau camp in southern Germany, reunited. Perel became a translator for the Soviet Army before emigrating to what is now Israel and joining the war that surrounded his creation in 1948. His life regained some semblance of normalcy when he settled in a Tel Aviv suburb with his wife born in Poland and became a manufacturer of zippers.
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“Perel remained silent for many years,” Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, said in a statement, “mainly because he felt his was not a Holocaust story.”
But by the late 1980s, Perel could no longer keep silent about the story of his savage tactic. He wrote an autobiography that later inspired the 1991 Oscar-nominated film “Europa Europa.”
As the film captivated audiences, Perel became a public speaker. He traveled to tell the world what he witnessed during the tumult of the Holocaust, in which the Nazis massacred 6 million Jews, and to reflect on the painful paradoxes of his identity.
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“Shlomo Perel’s desire to live life to the fullest and tell his story to the world was an inspiration to all who knew him and had the opportunity to work with him,” said Simmy Allen, Yad Vashem spokesperson.
Perel died surrounded by his family at his home in Givatayim, Israel.
