“Hitlerjunge Salomon” Sally Perel died

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Holocaust survivor Sally Perel is dead. He died in Israel at the age of 97. He fought against anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism into old age. His main audiences were children and young people.

Holocaust survivor Sally Perel, whose life story was filmed in “Hitlerjunge Salomon” (recording from 2019)

As the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem announced, Sally Perel died this Thursday in Israel, where he lived since 1948. According to the Norddeutscher Rundfunk, his family was with him.

Perel was born in 1925 in the Lower Saxony town of Peine near Braunschweig, the son of a rabbi. He became known through his autobiography “I was Hitlerjunge Salomon”, which was filmed under the title “Hitlerjunge Salomon” by Agnieszka Holland in 1991 and received numerous awards. In the book, Sally (actually Salomon) Perel describes how he survived persecution by the Nazis.

Nazis tricked

After his family fled from the Nazis to Poland, Perel escaped being shot by German troops at the age of 14 only because he claimed to be an “ethnic German”. He then served for some time as an interpreter in the Wehrmacht under the name Josef “Jupp” Perjell. Later, as a member of the Hitler Youth, he trained as a toolmaker in Braunschweig.

After a year on the Eastern Front, he was sent to a Hitler Youth school. There he feared being exposed every day until the end of the war. After the Second World War, Perel emigrated to today's Israel.

40 years until the autobiography

It took Perel 40 years to process what he had experienced. After a heart operation in 1985, he decided to write a book with his story – in German. In an interview with the magazine “Der Spiegel” in 1992, Perel said that he had the feeling that the Hitler Youth (who had been hidden for decades) Jupp “wanted to get out of him”.

Movie scene from “Hitlerjunge Salomon”

Despite this, the book first appeared in French in 1990 (“Europa, Europa”), a year later in Hebrew and a year later in German. However, it had already been filmed under the title “Hitlerjunge Salomon”.

Indefatigable ambassador for peace and international understanding

Sally Perel repeatedly shared his experiences during the Nazi era with young people further. In 1999 he was honored with the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts to promote German-Israeli understanding, and in 2020 he was made an honorary citizen of Braunschweig.

Ambassador for peace and international understanding well into old age: Sally Perel (2019)

The Prime Minister of the federal state of Lower Saxony, Stephan Weil, condoled the relatives with the words: “We are all infinitely grateful to him for this , that he reported about this time, wrote and repeatedly sought contact with children and young people.”

According to the latest figures, 150,600 contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust still live in Israel. More than a thousand of them are already over 100 years old.

mak/AR (KNA, dpa)