The film I watched for this assignment was one that was suggested in the class by several people, it is a true story based on the life of Solomon Perel, a young German Jew who had what can only be described as the strangest and most unique life experience of any Jewish boy during the Nazi period in Europe.  The film was made in 1991 and received critical praise, and for good reason, because it is extremely well made, and has a riveting story.  I found it enthralling even though it was a subtitled movie, and I have a hard time reading because I have a degenerative disease of the retina, but I still found it to be worthwhile viewing.  In my paper I will focus on two areas:  the first concerns the racism of the Nazi's and how it was ridiculed in the film, and finally I will examine why it is virtually impossible to examine this topic objectively at the present time and possibly for a long time to come.

          The film begins by depicting Solomon's life in Germany and the persecution he and his family faced.  In the opening part of the film a pogrom occurs, and although it is not specifically identified as the Kristallnacht (i.e., the Crystal Night, the night of broken glass), I am sure that is the event that is being recounted.  In this one horrible night Jews throughout Germany were terrorized, and Solomon's sister Bertha was killed.  After these horrible events his father decided to take the family to safety in Poland.  Shortly after arriving in Poland the Nazi's invade, and Solomon and his brother Isaac flee to the east.  They get separated and Solomon ends up in Russian occupied Poland, and he is put into an orphanage where he is indoctrinated into Stalinist communism.  Just as he begins to feel comfortable, the Germans attack the Soviet Union and Solomon is captured, he then pretends to be an Aryan German saying that his name it Josef Peters, but he must hide the fact that he is circumcised from the other soldiers.

          He makes friends with one of the soldiers in his unit, and he does so well for his military unit as a translator that he eventually is sent to a special school in Germany that is run by the Hitler Youth.  All through this time he must hide the fact that he is circumcised, because if anyone finds out they will kill him.  As Germany begins to collapse, Josef (a.k.a., Solomon) is fighting with his unit and finally decides to desert the German Army.  He is then captured by the Russians, and they show him the horror of the holocaust and the evil he has helped to perpetrate against the Jewish people, but he claims that he thought the Jews were being sent to Madagascar (cf. Edelheit, 53).  At the very end of the film, just as he is about to be killed as a Nazi, Solomon is recognized by his brother Isaac who just happened to be at that concentration camp and his life is spared.  The story is a powerful one, and it shows  the inhumanity of National Socialism and how it forced many people to do things they ultimately were ashamed of, this fact is highlighted because the movie shows a young Jewish boy as he struggles with his own identity, while he was simultaneously trying to save his life.  It is a powerful film.

          The racism of the Nazi system has no foundation in reality, and is thus a form of pseudo-science.  This fact is highlighted in the film in a scene in which young Josef (a.k.a, Solomon)  is called before his school's class on genetics.  The teacher first makes ridiculous statements about the way Jews walk and gesture, and he then says that a Jewish man's nose is not the same shape as an Aryan man's nose, and that the back of a Jew's head is flat.  After making these and other bizarre comments, he calls Josef  up in front of the class and proceeds to measure the distance between his nose and his chin, next he measures the size of his head, and finally he looks at the color of his eyes.  Then in front of the whole class he states that Josef is an Aryan, not a pure bred one, because he has black hair and thus did not have as much Nordic blood as he should have, but he was an Aryan none the less.

          This very ability to pass for an Aryan instilled a great deal of guilt in Solomon.  The fact that some people did do this is clear,  as the Edelheits point out in their book there were groups, the Armia Krajowa Department of Civil Resistance and the Rada Pomocy Zydom, that attempted to rescue Jews, but ". . . the number of Jews helped by the two organizations was relatively small, never more than a few thousand people" [Edelheit, 122].  Solomon Perel was luckier than most, though he lost the majority of his family, he himself survived.

          The film does a good job in showing the confusion which people experienced at the time, and in particular in the case of Solomon, who at one point attempts to see his family in the ghetto, only to find out that Germans cannot enter the ghetto.  He rides through the ghetto on a trolley car with whitewashed windows, and he cleans a small part of the glass in order to see outside.  And what he sees is a horrible sight; he sees man's inhumanity to man, he sees this in the poor, starving, and hated Jews of the ghetto.  This is when I could really sense the feelings of guilt on his part; guilt because he was not suffering in that way.  He does not witness his own suffering, but the viewer does.  Anyone who carries a secret can understand the terror he must have felt at different times, the fear of being discovered by those around you.  His pain was emotional, but it was still pain.  When the girl he liked said  that Jews were nothing more than lice needing to be squashed, he became angry for the first time in the film.  Up until then he had tried to numb himself to what was going on around him, but he could not take it anymore and so he slapped her.  The racial theories of the Nazi's held that the Jews were sub-human, yet Solomon was looked on as an heroic Aryan youth by the school because of his involvement in combat.  It was truly ironic.

          The next area to examine deals with the objectivity of the film, and of the text for this class.  Neither of them can be said to be truly objective, but I do not see this as a failing; instead, I see this as an inevitable consequence of the scope of the horror inflicted on the Jewish people during the Nazi regime's existence.  I also think that our proximity in time to the events effects the way we view them, although I do not foresee a change in this regard for a long time to come, if it ever changes.  The holocaust was so massive and systematic that I am not sure if the emotionalism connected with it will ever truly die; and I question whether it would be a good thing if it did.  I think that the emotional reaction in relation to this event is connected with an innate sense of morality, a sense that the nature of this event is completely contrary to the truth.  That is why I do not know if one can be dispassionately objective in this case and still retain his humanity.

          In conclusion I would simply state that I recommend this film.  It made the complexity of the situation come alive, a complexity that is often forgotten.  People tend to see the events from the outside and so they are extremely critical of the way that people acted, but when I saw what he went through, I got a glimpse of the pressures that many people were under at that time.  That there were people who wanted to do the right thing, but that the danger to their own lives frightened them and made them turn away from what was happening.  I think this is partially why Solomon accepted the Madagascar story, he really wanted to believe it, and in some sense it freed him from worrying about whether what he was doing would be seen as right or wrong.  I think it is impossible for someone today to really comprehend what was happening in Europe at that time, and the many pressures put on people to conform to the Nazi regime.  Hopefully no one will ever be confronted with this kind of situation again, but time alone will tell.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Text

Abraham J. Edelheit and Hershel Edelheit.  History of the Holocaust.  (San Francisco:  Westview Press, 1994).

Movie

A film by Agnieszka Holland.

          Europa Europa. 

          An MGM Home Entertainment Film (1990).

"Europa Europa" and the History of the Holocaust

by Steven Todd Kaster 

San Francisco State University

Jewish Studies 320:  Jewish Historical Experience

Final Paper

Professor Fred Astren

16 December 1999

Copyright © 1999-2024 Steven Todd Kaster