EUROPA EUROPA

by Solomon Perel

John Wiley and Sons, #15.99

(in association with the American Holocaust Museum)

EUROPA Europa, or Ich war Hitlerjunge Saloman, is, in its own curious way, one of the key personal narratives of the Nazi era, and is finally available in English. It is a holocaust memoir that is moving, straightforward and quite completely bizarre, unsettling all kinds of assumptions about identity, responsibility, and guilt. But then, it was Primo Levi himself who said that no survivor's memoir of the Shoah can be definitive. It was the Drowned and not the Saved who experienced the full truth of the killing factories. Any tale of survival is by definition an anomaly. And there is no story which more graphically illustrates that truth than that of Solomon Perel, the Jewish boy who became a member of the elite corps of the Hitler Youth, specially selected and trained as one of the future Nordic supermen who would one day rule the Thousand Year Reich.

Born in Germany, he and his family flee to Poland in 1935. (His parents had fled Russia in 1918). In 1939, Perel and his brother are sent by their prescient parents to the Russian-occupied zone across the Bug, where Perel is enrolled in a Young Communist School in Grodno. Already a multiply displaced personality then, he is unusually well equipped when fleeing East again in June 1941. Among hundreds of thousands who share the experience, he falls into the hands of the Wehrmacht. He knows absolutely that if he is exposed, he is dead. So he tries it on, this boy who is already somehow formless, a chameleon in the jungle of ideologies; he claims to be a Lithuanian orphan, ethnic German, whose papers were lost in an air raid. His name is Josef Perjell. There must have been a thousand stories like that. But for some reason, which Perel himself cannot understand, they believe him.

He serves with the Wehrmacht for a year as mascot and interpreter, among other things, helping to interrogate Jacob Djugashvilli, Stalin's tragic older son. After attending the siege of Leningrad, he is adopted as the son of his Commanding Officer and sent back to Germany, to Brunswick, five miles from Peine, which his family fled in 1936, beating off the sexual advances of the lady Welfare Officer who escorts him, lecturing him on his privilege in belonging to the master race.

And so, miraculously evading all medical exams, tortured with fear and no small identity crisis, he becomes someone else, Hitler Junge Josef Perjell, junior war hero, attending classes where he is taught how the true German can always smell the Jew, and singing along with his comrades the appalling doggerels of neurotic, racial hatred. Almost as if he is haunted by his hidden, Jewish self, he begins to court exposure, going back to his home town of Peine, half hoping that the schoolmates he recognises will remember him. Most shockingly of all, he requests leave to look for his parents (supposedly killed by the Russians in Grodno), and travels to Lodz, to the gates of the ghetto. He sees a bent woman through the wire. He almost calls out ''Mama'', till an officer of the ghetto police, yellow star on his jacket, kindly directs this odd little sightseer in the uniform of his enemies back into

the world. So the boy takes the streetcar through the ghetto, again and again, for days on end, his eyes searching, and his mouth tight shut. It's absolutely heart stopping. He must have been in a state of near insanity, and not only because of the risk. His mental state seems to have been a kind of torpid haze of disbelief at himself, tempered by a survival reflex that is never less than acute.

It's difficult to judge. Perel himself, writing more than 40 years later in Tel Aviv, cannot judge it. He is curiously unable to get under his own skin. It seems like a joke, a fairytale. Certainly that's how it was filmed by Agnieska Holland, who cast him as an ingenue, a latter-day Candide. Literary comparisons are inevitably pre-war, I think. He's also a bit like Hasek's Schweik, endlessly accommodating to the insanities of his betters; or like Brecht's Galy Gay, a man taken to pieces like a car and reassembled as a different model of human being. But these pre-war skits on the theme of identity are specifically alien to a world that knows about the holocaust, whose political and moral definitions derive from its memory, and it is perhaps unsurprising that Perel cannot entirely get to grips with his own memory, with who he was then, with who he became.

For what it's worth, to me he stands less for the human agility parodied by Brecht and Hasek, than he does for a much deeper, more difficult human facility: transformation. Aspiring to be ''true Germans'', the Nazis were always haunted creatures. Their defeat in the first war, their own failures, imperfections, their own doubts (what Elias Cannetti called ''the interior traitor''), their own fear - was displaced on to that ''other'', the false German, the Jew, whose extermination became a compulsion, a narcissistic cleansing. Perjell/Perel was haunted by the Jews too. But he was haunted by himself. He is the displaced person par excellence, and stands for a generation dislocated by history, and still somehow lost.

Perhaps it's just that what happened happened, and though obviously blameless, Solomon Perel, a retired businessman in Israel cannot be expected to render us a complete portrait of the scared child caught up in a collective insanity that is still defying whole libraries of elaborate analysis. After all, one can hardly ask him to get himself reborn as Franz Kafka, and go through it all again.