The Jew who became a Nazi
Carole Angier
EUROPA EUROPA by Solomon Perel Wiley, £15.99, pp. 230 Inever saw Europa Europa, the film based on this book. But it won a Golden Globe; and your literary editor, whose opinion I trust, tells me it was good.
It is of course a cliché that bad books make good movies. I wish it weren't true in this case, but I'm afraid it is. And for the usual reason: a good film only needs a good story; but a good book needs more.
The story of Europa Europa is better than good. When the 12th Panzer Division captured German Jewish Solly Perel in Russia in 1941, he claimed to be Josef Per- jell, non-Jewish Volksdeutscher. They not only believed him; they made him their mascot, and gave him something more pre- cious than gold — official papers identify- ing him as an Aryan German, who at only 16 had already served on the Russian front.
His Junker commanding officer adopted him; and he was sent back to Germany, to `Oh, we all become a little more conservative as we get older.' the elite Hitler Youth school in Brunswick, 12 miles from where he was born. For the rest of the war this Jewish boy lived among fanatical Nazis, like a lamb in the lions' den; or as in a game of Find the Button, in which the safest place to hide it is the last place anyone would look — in full view in the middle of the floor.
Perel clearly had fabulous courage and resource; but he is no writer. He announces the obvious (`The goals of National Social- ism were preached continually at the school'); he writes in clichés (`An icy shiver ran down my spine') and officialese CI will always remember him with high regard'). The story survives. What does not survive is enough reflection.
Perel does tell us a good deal about him- self. In order to lie so successfully for so long he had to avoid 'inner conflicts'; he had to 'forget' Solly and become Josef. Slowly, therefore, he did: believing the doc- trines, cheering for German victory, becoming 'a member of the group, body and soul'. His new personality only broke down when it collided directly with the old; e.g. in Race Education classes, or when in the most extraordinary episode of all he went, as a Hitler Youth, to the Lodz ghetto to look for his parents.
I think we can understand this, and not blame him, as Perel clearly fears. But other questions loom. Why was he happier as a Hitler Youth than in his Jewish orphanage in Russia? Why could he say 'I am a Ger- man' to his German captors in 1941, but not 'I am a Jew' to his American captors in 1945? Why, when it was all over, could he not tell the girl he had met as a German that he was really a Jew? These even hard- er questions about himself — about what power and the powerlessness do to us all he does not raise.
Nor does he raise questions about the others. How was it possible for a teenage boy to fool everyone for three whole years, when they were obsessed with 'Jewish looks', and could simply have made him drop his trousers at any moment?
Some obvious answers emerge: he was unusually brave and clever; he was attrac- tive (several people fall for him); and he was extremely lucky (e.g. when he slips up and gives his real Jewish name, the noise of a plane drowns it; when he is finally asked for a birth certificate, the offices are bombed the next day.) Once he had his papers and his uniform he was safe in Nazi Germany, where nothing much else count- ed. And everyone was slavishly in awe of his military service.
And yet, as he himself says, the way his story was accepted over and over again without checks was unheard of, incompre- hensible. And he did make mistakes; his habit of slipping into the shower with his underpants on did cause comment. When he remet his Race Education teacher after the war and told him he was Jewish, the man said he had known it all along. Perel dismisses this as an obvious lie. Probably it was; God knows, I don't want to defend someone who taught racial hatred to Hitler Youth. But I did wonder. The way those soldiers bent over backwards to believe him; the way no one ever challenged him, then or later: it made me think they didn't want to. Amid all the brutality, perhaps they were relieved to treat one child well, even if it meant stifling some doubts about him. Of course this was only possible, if it was possi- ble at all, because he was one child, alone; even two would have been an alliance, a race, an enemy. But on Perel's own testimo- ny, at least two people did know or suspect, and did not give him away. I think it is not naive but the only way to account for his extraordinary survival, to think that there must have been one or two more.
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