The Jew who survived the Holocaust by posing as a Nazi

TEL AVIV: A Nazi during the day, a Jew by night. That was the bizarre predicament of Solomon Perel in the years Europe was reeling under Nazi terror. The terror claimed Perel’s parents and sister. He may have died too, but his instincts and luck ensured that he lived to tell his remarkable tale of surviving the Holocaust.

Perel, now 94, recounted his journey at an interaction with visiting Indian journalists in Tel Aviv. Originally from Germany, his family fortunes dipped the day Hitler came to power. In 1935, when the Nazis passed the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, the Perels decided to relocate to Lodz in Poland.

Four years later, Germany invaded Poland. Perel’s parents decided to send him and his brother to a Polish area under Soviet occupation. “My father Azriel was a rabbi. He asked me never to stop being a Jew. But my mother, Rywka (Rebecca), said, ‘Shlomo, do whatever it takes to stay alive.’ I remembered her words all my life,” Perel said.

Perel was taken in by an orphanage for Jews run by the Komsomol (a Soviet youth organisation) while his brother Yitzhak went further ahead to Vilnius in the Lithuanian SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic). “I got a communist education at the orphanage where I learnt Marxism and Leninism. Stalin was my god,” Perel said with a smile.

Then, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Perel fled, but was captured in Minsk in the Byelorussian SSR.

“In the Soviet Union, the Nazis just took people into the woods and shot them. I was also in such a group. I hid my identification papers in a hole I made with my shoe heel. When a German soldier came and asked me if I were a Jew, I remembered what my mother had advised, so I lied and said that my name was Josef and I was a Deutschen Volk (a German). And he believed me,” said Perel, whose life was the subject of a 1990 film called Europa Europa. Perel was brought to the German camp, and was lucky that nobody asked him to remove his pants. “They would have found out that I was circumcised.”

Perel soon became a favourite among the German soldiers. He accompanied the Wehrmacht all the way to Moscow. It was during that stint that Perel met Stalin’s eldest son. Yakov Dzhugashvili, a young lieutenant in the Red Army, had been captured. Perel was made his interpreter. “I tried to help him as much as I could. But the Germans treated him very badly,” Perel recalled.

Later, after the German disaster at Stalingrad, Hitler offered to trade Yakov for Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, but Stalin refused, saying he was no fool to exchange a field marshal for a lieutenant. Yakov was later executed.

Though Perel was careful to hide his identity, a German doctor found out. “He took a fancy to me and would often touch me inappropriately. One day, as I got ready to shower, he tried to rape me and discovered that I was circumcised. But he never told anyone as the Nazis also hated homosexuals. He died in Leningrad, taking my secret to his grave.”

The commandant of the camp adopted the teenaged Perel and sent him to a boarding school at Brunswick, Germany, run by the Hitler Jugend (Youth). “Those were the most agonising four years of my life. I lived every moment with the fear of being discovered. I did weird things to survive, and even tried to regrow my foreskin by pulling at my penis. I lived like a Nazi during the day. It was only at nights that I explored my Jewish identity.”

Perel never saw his parents and sister again. But in those tumultuous years, he found some solace in love. His girlfriend Leni was a Nazi.

In 1945, Perel was drafted into the Volkssturm militia and sent to fight the Americans. Rescue came in the form of capture. His brother Yitzhak was also rescued from the Dachau concentration camp. The two remained together until Yitzhak’s death 30 years later.

“After the war, I came to Israel. My girlfriend wanted to marry me. But I said we couldn’t because a Jew couldn’t have married a Nazi without causing a scandal.” Their bond didn’t end though. “Leni lives in Canada and they meet every year,” said Nurit Tinari of the Israeli foreign ministry, Perel’s interpreter.

But the Holocaust changed his life. “I lost faith in god. Was god there in Auschwitz? No, god and Auschwitz cannot co-exist.”

The Israeli government plans to bring Perel to India in April.

(The writer was recently in Israel on the invitation of its ministry of foreign affairs)