Captured by the German army when it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Solomon Perel—a Jew born in the German town of Peine—hid his identification papers and told his captors he was one of the many ethnic Germans living in the region. Perel was first given a job as a military translator, and then sent to a Hitler Youth boarding school inside the Reich. In his memoir Europa, Europa, which was turned into a film of the same name, he told his unusual and dramatic story. He died on February 7 at the age of ninety-seven. Richard Sandomir writes:
“I became a split personality—a Nazi by day and a Jew by night,” Mr. Perel told The Week, an Indian magazine, in 2019. . . . If anyone discovered he was Jewish, “they’d deal with me like cannibals,” he said in [an interview]. As the war neared its end, Mr. Perel was sent to the Western Front, assigned to a unit guarding bridges. When American soldiers arrested him and his squad and briefly held him in a prisoner-of-war camp, his war was over.
Mr. Perel moved to Munich, where he was a translator for the Soviet Army during interrogations of Nazi war criminals. He emigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, fought in the Israeli War of Independence, and managed a zipper factory. In 1959, he married Dvora Morezky. She died in 2021. He is survived by a son, Uziel, and three grandchildren. Another son, Ronen, died in 2019.
Read more on New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/world/europe/solomon-perel-dead.html