The swastika saved me, says Holocaust survivor

MIRAH LANGER

“I’m happy I was able to carry out my mother’s instruction to stay alive,” he says.

Yet, he continues to grapple with the complexity of his experience. “I [still] live with this dual identity. I was a Jew, and I was a Nazi. I was a victim, but I was also a perpetrator. The Hitler Youth is still a part of me today. It was the swastika that saved me.”

Perel was speaking at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre last week as part of an educational tour of South Africa as a guest of the Sylt Foundation. Perel’s memoir, ‎I Was Hitler Youth Salomon was turned into the Oscar-nominated film, Europa, Europa.

His story began when he was an eight-year-old boy, growing up in the north German town of Peine when Hitler came to power. At 10, he was thrown out of school because of the Nuremberg race laws, and shortly afterwards, his family, including two brothers and a sister, left for Poland.

Within four months of the German occupation in 1939, the ghetto was created in Lodz, and his family were told to move. At this point, Perel’s parents decided that Perel, then aged 14, along with his older brother Izaak, should flee to eastern Poland.

Perel’s father was a rabbi. In parting from his son, he said a prayer, and told him, “You must always remember that you are a Jew, and must always believe in G-d.” His mother told him, “Go my son. You must live.” This, said Perel, was “an order and an instruction”.

Perel spent the next two years in a children’s home in the town of Grodno. When he was 16, the Germans invaded the area, and the orphanage tried to relocate to Minsk.

On the way, Perel along with thousands of other refugees were caught by the German forces and taken to a field. “The Jews were sorted from the rest, and immediately taken to a forest and shot.”

“Then, it was my turn. A German soldier stood in front of me, ordering me to put up my hands. Immediately, he asked if I was a Jew. My first reaction was to remember my father who had said never to forget that I was a Jew or G-d would leave me.

“But then immediately, I realised that if I said that, I [would be] dead in five minutes. Here I was on the spot, what do I say?”

Perel then thought about what his mother had said, “She had said to live … What I thought then is what I still believe today: the most important [thing] of all is life. There is no ideology, no Kaiser, no king, and no set of ideas for which you should sacrifice young lives.

“To this day, I believe that it was essentially my duty to stay alive.”

Perel said he stopped shaking with fear, and in a clear voice, told the German officer that he was not a Jew, but in fact was an ethnic German.

The officer accepted his claim in spite of his story that he had lost his documents on a train. He told them his name was Josef to hide his Jewish origins.

“I was given a German Wehrmacht uniform, and put into a unit as a translator of German and Russian. The other officers were very proud because they had the youngest soldier in their unit.”

His commander even sent him back to Germany to attend an elite boarding school for Hitler Youth. “I was quickly subjected to indoctrination in the school, and I felt great pride in being part of the young generation which was going to build the thousand-year Reich for the furher, Adolf Hitler,” he said, noting the dark irony.

It was a protective mechanism. “Basically, I said to myself that I have to forget who I am. I have to be one of the boys.”

One of the greatest dangers for Perel was the fact that he was circumcised. “I stand in awe at how creative I was in hiding this fact.” At one point, Perel even attempted to perform an operation on himself.

During a school holiday in 1943, Perel went to the Lodz ghetto to see if he could find his family. “I had a real longing to be there, just to be with them.”

He remembers his arrival at the ghetto, dressed in the school’s black swastika winter uniform.

“I found myself standing at the fence around the ghetto. I saw things for which my vocabulary today is simply inadequate to describe. I saw frozen corpses lying on the street, and I realised any one of these could be my mother or father.”

He spent 12 days looking for his family.

“There’s a tram that goes through the ghetto. I used to sit on the tram and go through the ghetto in the hope that my mother would see me. Since then, I have nightmares that I am going on this tram through the ghetto. I wake up from this nightmare to this day.”

Finally the end of the war came with the arrival of American troops. Perel was arrested along with his Hitler Youth classmates. “It was surreal: here was the Jewish kid, ‘Sally’, in a Nazi uniform and now an American prisoner of war.”

Eventually released, Perel began to come to terms with the disjuncture between his reality and that of other Jewish survivors.

“I discovered that just 30km away from my elite boarding school was the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. That was my first real collision between ‘Josef’ and ‘Sally’. I realised that in my neighbourhood, at a time when I was able to flirt with girls, have a good time, and get through these years quite comfortably, my contemporaries, Jewish children, had ended up being exterminated in Bergen-Belsen.

“I immediately went to Bergen-Belsen, and saw what had become of my people.”

Perel also soon discovered that his brothers had survived.

He said that even though he had seen the film of his life a hundred times, when he watched the scene where he is reunited with his brother Izaak at Dachau Concentration Camp, with him still dressed in his Hitler youth uniform and his brother in prisoner garb, “the tears still come every time”.

Perel’s parents had died years earlier in the ghetto. His sister had been shot by a German guard when her feet froze while travelling to a concentration camp near Danzig.

Later, Perel and his brothers emigrated to Israel. He served in the War of Independence, and for two further years. He married a Polish Holocaust survivor, and started a family.

Perel said that until about 40 years later, when he decided to write his memoir, his family didn’t know his story. “I wrote down my story in Hebrew, but because I had never learnt it at school, I didn’t know the grammar. So I had to give it to my sons to correct. That’s how they learnt my story.

“At one point, my youngest son said to me, ‘Papa, why didn’t you tell us your story before? Then, we would have known earlier that we have a hero for a father.”