110 EUROPA EUROPA [GerMAn tItLe: HITLERJUNGE SALOMON]
him enormously for Shoah, but he’s an incredibly unpleasant man [and] a megalo-
maniac” (Tong, 1990). As for Solomon Perel, he loved the movie and watched it at
least 200 times.Reel History Versus Real History
For the most part, Agnieszka Holland’s film version of Solomon Perel’s autobiog-
raphy stays close to the self- reported facts of Perel’s life during the war, but Europa
Europa does indulge in cinematic embellishment. For dramatic effect, the movie
depicts Solomon’s sister, Bertha, as being killed by the Nazis during Kristallnacht
in 1938. Actually, she was killed by the Nazis in 1945, during the death march
from Stutthof concentration camp. The perfectly timed bombing of the Rus sian
orphanage, signaling the German invasion of the Soviet Union, did not happen as
such. Nor did the aerial bombing of the Gestapo offices in Braunschweig occur a
second after Solomon Perel left them (though the city was bombed in 42 separate
Allied air raids between 1940 and 1945). Holland also had Perel and his Hitler
Youth comrades fighting the Red Army in Berlin. In actuality, he was captured by
American forces on the Western Front. The film’s more serious distortion, though,
is its failure to represent Perel’s internalized anti- Semitism— passing as a Nazi
among Nazis went on for too long for him not to have fascist attitudes take hold.
As a result, Perel admits that he has been plagued with a dual consciousness that
is both Jewish and anti- Jewish. In a 1992 interview, Perel said, “To this day I have
a tangle of two souls in one body. By this I mean to say that the road to Josef, the
Hitler Youth that I was for four years, was very short and easy. But the way back to
the Jew in me... was much harder” (Diehl, 1992). In her zeal to tell Perel’s story
objectively, Holland suppresses this somber truth.