holocaust
“Hitlerjunge Salomon” Sally Perel died at the age of 97
Survived the Holocaust: Sally Perel. He died at his home in Israel at the age of 97. photo
© Marijan Murat/dpa/Archive
Sally Perel was one of those contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust, of whom there are fewer and fewer. As a young boy, the native of Lower Saxony assumed the identity of an ethnic German and thus survived the Nazi era.
The Holocaust survivor Sally Perel – known as “Hitlerjunge Salomon” – is dead. The Israeli died at the age of 97 in his home in Israel, as the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem announced on Thursday evening in Jerusalem. The native German became internationally known through his autobiography “I was Hitler Youth Salomon”. In 1990, the book was also the basis for a multi-award-winning film by director Agnieszka Holland.
Perel was born in Peine near Braunschweig in 1925. Aged only eleven, he fled with his family to Poland and later further east to the Soviet-controlled areas. There he fell into the hands of German troops in 1941 and called himself Josef “Jupp” Perjell. After a year on the Eastern Front, he was sent to a Hitler Youth school. He later did an apprenticeship at Volkswagen. Until the end of the war he feared being exposed every day.
Perel didn’t talk about his story for years
After World War II, Perel emigrated to what is now Israel. Like many other contemporary witnesses, he did not speak about his story for years. He thought this was “not a real Holocaust story,” he later reported. He was very lucky and survived “in the skin of the enemy”. Perel also reported that he struggled with Nazi ideology into old age. As a teenager, their thoughts were “engraved so deeply into the subconscious”.
It was only four decades after the end of the war that he processed what he had experienced in a biography – or as he himself stated in the book: “In order to free myself from it, I literally had to write everything off my chest.” He later traveled to Germany regularly to tell students and young people about his experiences. In 1999, Perel received the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts to promote German-Israeli understanding.
Steinmeier appreciates Perel’s work
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier paid tribute to Perel’s work in a message of condolence to his niece Neomi Brakin and her family. “We will always be grateful to him for reaching out to the Germans and my country for reconciliation, for telling so many young people about his fate on numerous trips to Germany.”
Federal Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil praised Perel as “enlightener and admonisher against forgetting”. He was “a great person with a dramatic life story,” wrote the SPD politician on Twitter. Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD) condoled the family with the words: “We are all infinitely grateful to him for reporting and writing about this time and for repeatedly seeking contact with children and young people”.
Around 150,600 survivors of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of people of Jewish faith by the Nazis, are still living in Israel today. More than a thousand of them are already over 100 years old. At that time, the Nazis and their helpers murdered about six million people.