Stories You Never Expected

On July 23, 1939, Mahatma Gandhi was said to write a letter to Adolph Hitler. Strange but true.

Gandhi, who fought for India's independence from Great Britain, had done many things the world wouldn't know. The letter was one of those, after German forces were advancing through Europe. The letter read, in part:

"It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?"

No one had a clue if that letter ever reached Hitler, and if it were, he took Gandhi's words seriously. But historians were certain that the Führer would have ignored it. World War II inevitably happened, where millions lost their lives. Inspirating accounts of bravery and heroism also came out, along with survivors' unbelievable stories. The most remarkable was “I Was Hitler Youth Salomon”, a harrowing autobiography by Solomon Perel.

In 1935, the persecution of Germany's Jewish citizens began. Perel's family relocated to Łódź, Poland after their shoe store was pillaged and the young boy, who was ten years of age, was expelled from school. Four years later, Nazi forces invaded the eastern European nation. Solomon and Isaac, his brother, thought of going to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. Unforeseen circumstances separated the sibling, with Solomon ending up in a Komsonol-run orphanage in Grodno, now Hrodna, a city in Belarus, while Isaac made it to Vilna, the modern-day Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Solomon fled when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, only to be captured by a German army unit.

Solomon was a native German speaker, so it wasn't hard for him to convince his captors that he was a German citizen living outside of Germany. The teenage boy hid his Jewish identity under the name of Josef Perjell. He was a Russian-German interpreter in his unit, playing an important role in the capture of Joseph Stalin's son, Yakov Dzhugashvili. He didn't stay long after being told that he was too young to partake in the action. So he was sent to a Hitler Youth school in Braunschweig. He embraced Judaism, Communism, and Nazism all at the same time, his instinct on survival keeping him sane and alive. After the war, Solomon went to Haifa. He lived long to tell his bizarre experience, not a few doubting him.

"She asked about morality," Perel recalled a radio reporter during a round-table discussion many years ago. "What is there in this situation about morality? You think only about how to survive. If I had shot others, that would be different. When the Russian Army came near Berlin and the SS officers took off their uniforms and changed into the clothes of death camp inmates, now that was immoral."

Luck played a part in Solomon's fate, which was no less extraordinary.