Europa Europa

Plot synopsis:
=== Nazi Germany ===
Solek (a nickname for Solomon, also called "Solly") and his family live in Nazi Germany. On the eve of Solek's bar mitzvah, Kristallnacht occurs. He escapes, naked, then hiding in a barrel. At night, he calls his acquaintance to bring him clothes from his house. She refuses, but throws him a leather jacket with a swastika band on its arm. He comes back home. His family is together at home, but his sister is killed by Nazis. The father, who was born in Łódź, Poland, decides to go back there.
=== Poland ===
The Perel family (Solek, his parents, his two brothers, David and Isaak) decides to move to Łódź, central Poland, where the family believes it will be safe. Solly causes criminal damage and the police are called. Living in Łódź, Solly meets Kasia, a cashier working in a cinema. Thanks to her, Solly can go to the cinema without paying for tickets. Later, they establish a romantic relationship. However, less than a year later, World War II begins with Germany invading the western Polish borders. Solly is happy that the criminal case will be forgotten, since the police will have more important issues to solve. Solek's family decides he and his brother should leave for the European East. Solek meets hysterically upset Kasia, but his brother separates them. Isaak and Solek flee, towards the eastern border of Poland, which soon has been invaded by the Soviet Union. (In an ironic scene, as Solek and other Jewish refugees cross a river in a small boat, while a boat carrying Polish refugees fleeing the Soviets passes in the opposite direction, Solomon explains in an internal monologue that the Jews, fearing Nazi persecution, fled toward the Soviets, while the Poles, who feared the Soviets more, fled toward the Germans.) The brothers are separated and Solek is placed in a Soviet orphanage in Grodno with other Polish refugee children.
=== Soviet Union ===
Solek lives in the orphanage for two years, where he joins the Komsomol and receives Communist education. Being a teenager, he has a romantic interest in Inna, a young and attractive instructor who defends him when the authorities at school discover that his class origin is bourgeois. He even climbs outside the building to watch her in her bedroom. One scene features a Russian version of the German Communist song Dem Morgenrot Entgegen ("Towards The Dawn") before mail call, where Solek receives a letter from his parents who have been re-settled in a ghetto.
=== Nazi-occupied Soviet Union ===
Then, with the crash of a bomb, Germany invades the Soviet Union. The orphanage is evacuated, but Solek is left behind, to be found by German soldiers. Solek gets rid of his identity papers, and tells the Germans he is "Josef Peters", a Volksdeutscher (ethnic German) from a Baltic German family in Latvia. Although he does not respond to his made up name, the soldiers deduce that he was in the orphanage because his parents were killed by the Soviets, and promise him vengeance. When the unit captures Yakov Dzhugashvili, the son of Joseph Stalin, with Solly's help translating Russian, they declare "Jupp" to be their "good-luck charm", and adopt him as an auxiliary. Thanks to his fluent German and Russian, he becomes their cultural guide and interpreter. He accompanies the unit for several weeks, and sees all the horrors of war, including murdered civilians, as the Germans seek to crush Soviet resistance.
Nonetheless, Solek is still in danger. He cannot let anyone see him bathing, because his circumcised penis would expose "Jupp" as a Jew. Robert, one of the soldiers who is homosexual, sneaks in on "Jupp" when he finally manages a private bath. Solek rejects Robert's advances but knowing that both of them have secrets the Nazis would kill them for, they become close friends.
Then a bizarre combat incident occurs. Robert is killed and Solek, left alone, tries to get to the Soviet lines. As he crosses a bridge, the unit charges across behind him, and the Soviet troops there surrender. "Jupp" is hailed as a hero.
The company commander decides that "such a fine young German" should be properly educated. He is childless himself, so he tells "Jupp" that he will adopt him and that "Jupp" will be sent to the elite Hitler Youth Academy in Berlin where he is to receive Nazi education. (This is much to Solek's consternation but of course he cannot refuse.)
He is escorted for much of the trip by Rosemarie, a middle-aged female Nazi official. Rosemarie thinks "Jupp" resembles Hitler and observes that he even has the same birthday. On the train, she makes "Jupp" have sex with her, crying out "Mein Führer!" as they have intercourse.
=== Nazi Germany ===
At the school, "Peters" is introduced to the other boys as a heroic combat veteran. The problem of concealing his circumcision continues, and Solek uses string and rubber bands in various painful ways to simulate a foreskin. He evades a medical examination by pretending to have a violent toothache, and then must endure having the dentist pull it without anesthetic.
Girls from the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth) serve meals at the Academy. Leni, one of these girls, becomes infatuated with "Jupp", but he dares not take advantage - Leni is a fervent Nazi and even speaks of wanting to kill Jews. Leni strongly hints that she would happily bear "Jupp"'s child, but after a particularly venomous anti-Jewish remark he refuses any intimacy. She calls him a Schlappschwanz ("limp-dick"), and they break off.
A less serious threat is the visit to the Academy of a Nazi "expert" in "racial science", who claims particular skill in detecting Jews. The Nazi selects "Jupp" as his subject for a demonstration, and carefully measures his head and face. He then calculates "Jupp"'s anthropometric indexes, and pronounces him mixed but "pure Aryan stock", to Jupp's relieved surprise. Soon after, while working in a factory for the war effort, Jupp and his classmates learn that the Sixth Army has fallen at Stalingrad.
After several months without seeing Leni, Solek visits Leni's mother, who does not sympathize with the Nazis. She tells him Leni is pregnant and intends to "give the child to the Führer", in the Lebensborn program. Solek realizes that the child's father is his best friend and classmate Gerd. When Leni's mother presses Josef on his identity, he breaks down and confesses that he is a Jew; she tells him that she suspected that and promises not to betray him. Leni never finds out.
Solek's pretense is nearly exposed when the Gestapo investigates "Jupp"'s supposed parentage. He is summoned to Gestapo offices, but cannot show a Certificate of Racial Purity, which he claims is in Grodno. The Gestapo official says he will send for it, and then rants about how the war will be won by Hitler's Wunderwaffen ("wonder weapons"). As Solek leaves, the building is destroyed by Allied bombs. Solek's relief is tempered by Gerd's death in the bombing.
=== Soviet-occupied Nazi Germany ===
As Soviet troops close in on Berlin, the Hitler Youth at the school are sent to the front. There Solek manages to surrender. His captors refuse to believe that he is a Jew. "If you're a Jew, why don't you look like this? Look!" demands a Soviet officer as he shows Solek photos of murdered Jews from the death camps they had liberated. Jupp had not been aware this was going on. They are about to have Solek shot by an elderly Communist political prisoner (wearing a red triangle on his camp uniform) when Solek's brother Isaak, just released from a concentration camp, identifies Solek and saves him. Before leaving the camp, Isaak tells Solek to never reveal his story to anyone, saying it would never be believed. He is released shortly thereafter and emigrates to the British Mandate of Palestine, the future state of Israel, where he embraces his Jewish heritage. The films ends with the real Solomon Perel, as an old man, singing a Jewish folk song taken from the Book of Psalms ("Hine Ma Tov," Psalm 133:1).

Tags: romantic, avant garde, murder

Review:
Having been to all the places and delved into the culture and history of all the nationalities that comprise its background, I am also convinced that much if not all of the story is correct at a level that goes well beyond whether this or that small factual detail is rooted in what actually happened to the real Perel.Moreover, "Hitlerjunge Salomon" (better known in English-speaking countries as "Europa, Europa") is a masterful piece of cinema, beautifully produced and directed, and bearing a cachet of authenticity that few cross-cultural films achieve.
Anyway comparisons to Schindler's List and other movies are inevitable.But I was so intrigued by Solomon Perel's story that I checked the book "Europa, Europa" out of the library and read it for myself.
What sets this movie apart is that this a true story and the person that is depicted in this film is still alive.
I have seen many foreign films but Europa Europa ranks really high.It is the real-life story of a young Jewish man who escapes persecution from the Nazis by masquerading as one.
He even wins the hearts of some women who fall hard for the likable Josef Peters( the name he takes to pass as a non-Jew Aryan) He becomes so well liked that even his commander wants to adopt him .He goes on to excel in a school for the Hitler Youth and again becomes popular among both his fellow students and teachers.
He goes to great lengths to pass as a non-Jew , and many of his methods to achieve that end truly are unorthodox.The beautiful Julie Delpy plays a young German girl who's taken by this young man.
They identify with the central character of Saloman Perel, a German-Jewish boy who survives the Holocaust by hiding his identity in ever more difficult circumstances.
A lot of difficult history is made accessible in a very entertaining and often comical way - Nazi and Communist indoctrination of the young, Jews and homosexuals as outsiders in the new Reich, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the events of the Second World War. We have a great sense of the individual being swept along by the most destructive tide that history has yet unleashed.The comic relief is a stark contrast to 'Schindler's List', a copy of which was donated by Spielberg to every British high school.The film is too long, slow and dark to appeal to the age group in question and I have not used it since coming across 'Europa Europa'.Julie Delpy plays the female romantic lead as the delectable Leni, attractive but flawed, a perfect tribute to Nazi teaching methods.
There is a lot going on in this film at many levels, but none of it detracts from the entertainment value.Marco Hofschneider portrays Perel as a vulnerable but resourceful human being, a boy who desperately wishes to be normal in abnormal times.
The schizophrenic implications of being both German and Jewish during the Nazi period are well illustrated.This film has held the attention of hundreds of 14 year-olds, without exception.
Just as the recent film 'Downfall' successfully 'humanises' Hitler by displaying the personal charm which he exercised over so many people, so 'Europa Europa' humanises the Holocaust by its concentration on the survival of one human being.
I really admire Jewish people for enduring this neverending hatred against them; and I admire the Germans who are not afraid to put the magnifying glass on their ancestors' dirty deeds by making such marvellous movies about The Second World War. Nothing much to say about the acting.
There are more convenient plot twists in this movie than in a James Bond film.There are many documented and historical examples of true chameleons living surreptitiously and dangerously in Nazi Germany during WWII.
This was a pretty interesting "true story" about a young man who escaped Jewish persecution by pretending to be a Russian and then being a German.
Marco Hofschneider was very good in the lead as the boyish-looking "Solomon Peters" aka a bunch of alias.Overall, I found it a good movie, one worth watching for sure, but questionable about adding to my fairly-large collection of films.
The general consensus was that the film was a missed opportunity to tell a fascinating story - Solomon Perel's life is a very interesting one, but ludicrous events have been added to the script which, at times, made the film laughable.
Our little hero is a young German Jew who survives the troubled period of WW2 by pretending to be a Communist and later a Nazi Youth.
Other interesting parts of the story are a homosexual German soldier, a girl overly committed to her country and a Polish boy fighting for his catholic religion in communist Poland.The way a part of difficult history books is mixed into the movie deserves to be mentioned, as well as the music.
I'd recommend it to anyone interested In watching a movie about World War Two from a perspective not often portrayed in film..
A boy (Marco Hofschneider) in Nazi Germany, trying to conceal that he is Jewish, joins the Hitler Youth.The film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for the Academy Award: Best Writing Adapted Screenplay, but lost the award to "The Silence of the Lambs".
I think Marco Hofschneider is one of the premier actors of his generation, and I can't understand why he is not getting better parts in better movies.The movie itself, of course, is the true story of a young Jewish boy who has to pass himself off as a pro-Nazi German in order to survive through the darkest days of World War II.
Time and time again, a young Jewish man's life is miraculously saved during the Holocaust and this film is his story.This film begins in Germany just before WWII breaks out.
Europa, Europa France-Germany (1991): War/Historical/BiographyGerman-Jewish teenage boy flees the Nazis and conceals his identity-only to find himself drafted into Hitler's army!
Saloman PerelBased on the autobiography of Saloman Perel, Europa Europa is the story of a young Jewish teenager (played by Marco Hofschneider) who hid his identity as a Jew and first became a member of the Russian Kosmonol, and later a member of the Hitler Youth.
I felt curiously distant from the material and found Hofschneider's performance as Solly to be wooden and uninvolving.Set between 1938 and 1945, the film tells the true story of Salomon Perel (Solly), the son of a Polish shopkeeper in Germany.
Especially relevant are his attempts to hide his circumcision by avoiding the advances of a gay German soldier, his refusal to sleep with a Jew-hating girl friend named Leni, and his failed attempt to reattach his foreskin.What is not at issue here is the tenacity that led Saloman Perel to survive seven years as a Nazi.
Resistance was not an option to most, though many chose to die rather than be subject to Nazi treatment.Yet, I felt the true psychological depths of the character were unexplored and the film presented the circumstances of Solly's period with the Hitler Youth in a very superficial manner.
Europa Europa is the remarkable true story of Salomon Perel, a young teenage Polish Jew, who passed himself off as, not merely German, but also, as a member of the highest order of the Hitler Youth, while all the time sticking to his Judaic roots, in order to survive the war.
The storytelling aspects of the film gives this it drive and purpose and are excellent - based on Perel's extraordinary autobiography it avoids extrapolation and sticks to his tale.It scores very high in two vital aspects - one, the script is superb, (It was Oscar nominated) and two it was shot in German which given it subject matter was no small achievement.The film is well directed, though because of it's use of studio lighting and bright colors it has not aged as well as some of the Holocaust corpus.There are perhaps better films and books that express the absolute evil of the death camps, Weisel and Levi being two prime examples in authorship, but this is a unique perspective as it is not centered on the Shoah but rather on the unique conundrum of daring to survive by living in the heart of the Nazis' twisted dream, and one definitely worth your time - it is a truly fascinating true story with some strong adventure and drama elements..
Europa Europa is based on a true story about a German Jewish kid who pretends to be a Nazi in order to survive.
The ironies mount up as a high ranking German officer who is a particularly rabid Jew hater wants to adopt him and sends him to a Hitler Youth school where he has to sing anti-Semitism songs and bayonet straw dummies wearing the Jewish star.At times the filmmakers seem unsure whether to report the truth or to entertain us.
*Would have liked another 15-20 minutes as the end seemed to come very abruptly.The Bottom Line: This is a WWII film with a very unique point of view; that of a young man who must adopt vastly different (and often abhorrent) cultural paradigms in order to survive the Holocaust.
set against the backdrop of WW2 this movie is really a coming of age story about the WW2 generation and the knowledge of being true to oneself; WW2 and its time period  was the genesis of our modern relationships involving race, politics and class; it brought to life our current geo-political stage and determined it for the last 50 years.
More specifically, this was the epic story of war from the perspective of the Hero, a Jewish 14- year-old teenager caught up in WWII, a Jew living in Germany.
We also get to see the horrors of the war through the eyes of the Germans, the Nazis, the Hitler youth, the Russians, the Poles, the German Jews, the Polish Jews, German army foot soldiers, German society through the eyes of the mother whose daughter gets pregnant to donate the baby to the Fuhrer and make their family roots more Aryan...To pull off the Character Web so brilliantly, the script goes beneath the "skin" of all the players.
The use of subtext in the dialogue, whereby the character never really says what he means leads to an avoidance of conflict, but then an implosion of conflict as the plot moves forward.The Story World was one of the most authentic ever put on the screen: Land, tools, technology, man-made buildings, structures either showing extreme poverty, or suffering, or extreme power, as with the Third Reich symbols and the institutionalization of the human psyche; the dumbing down while ostensibly seeming to educate - The Lodz ghetto, with the dying Jewish populace amidst a Nazi bureaucracy; train protocol; trolly protocol; army protocol, etc., all displayed with an accuracy down to the tableware and the machinery; the clothing; the murders in plain sight.All of the structural beats were spot on: The Inciting Incident; the 12 sequences; the mid-point, all leading to the Climax/Battle scene in Sequence 11, right on the mark.
This international co-production (Germany, France, Poland) unfolds a real story of Solomon Perel, a German Jewish boy whose most teen and youth years remained under the oppression of both Nazis and Soviets, mostly during World War II (1938-1944).
Hence, the movie goes from one contrived scene to another, with the German Jewish boy outsmarting the Nazis who are clueless as to his real identity.
Told beautifully (Considering it a true story), well acted, fine cinematography makes Europa, Europa (1990) a very genuine ,touching and beautiful war drama.The movie looks authentic and there's no content to really criticize on.
The incredible story of Solomon Perel, an Eastern European Jewish teen who escaped the Holocaust by posing as a Nazi, might be difficult to swallow if it wasn't entirely true.
Solomon Perel (Marco Hofschneider) is a young Jewish boy when the war breaks out and as the Jews are being gathered for deportation to the camps, his father makes him promise he will do anything to survive.
He becomes involved with the Hitler's Youth, adopts the life of a Nazi and, despite a few slips with people who discover his identity, he manages to survive the war.
Europa Europa is a filmed account of Solomon Perel's autobiographical experiences during the World War II.
The movie is based on a true story, and Marco Hofschneider does a wonderful job showing the multiple "roles" young Solomon had to take in order to survive.
Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland (writer and director) put together an outstanding film based on a true story about a Jewish boy who pretended to be Russian and German to avoid capture before embracing his Jewishness at the moment his life was about to end.Marco Hofschneider in his first film was absolutely amazing and you could feel the constant tension that he suffered in trying to hide.
Everything just happens so fast and sticky situations are solved much too easily.I am convinced that the story of Sally Perel is interesting, but Hitlerjunge Salomon, unfortunately, did an ridiculous awful job telling it.I gotta tell, I have seen many WW2 movies, but this was by far the worst.
Just watching this movie made me feel stupid.Some examples for the ridiculous story line: - Salomon, who just escaped from a Russian orphanage, and many others were captured by the SS.
Salomon pass by many complicated situations to hide his Jewish identity,many of them because of his circumcision: he cannot take bath near the other boys, he cannot do a medical examination, and cannot have sex with his girlfriend Leni, a young Nazis German teenager.Spite of all the difficulties,this history ends very well.
Solomon Perel is a German Jewish boy who is trying to escape the Holocaust by masquerading not only as a non-Jew, but as an elite "Aryan" German in Nazi Germany's Poland and a 'communist' student in Soviet Union's Poland.
No matter how hard he tries to change his identity, his circumcision is the one thing that can expose "Jupp" as a Jew. For example, a romance with a German girl, Leni (Julie Delpy), who wants to conceive a child for the Fuhrer, proves dismal; because he can't consummate the relationship due to that fact.
Much of the humor in the film, come with the fact that the Nazis officers have no clue that he is a Jew. It becomes really funny, when one of them quote that 'Jupp' looks like a young Adolf Hitler.
The movie is based on the book Solomon Perel who tells his autobiographic story of how he survived in 1940's Nazi Germany.
I think I'm with a number of other reviewers here in doubting the veracity of this supposedly true story.All the way through it, I found myself thinking "that could happen - yeah right!!" and I was frankly extremely surprised at the end to discover that this movie is supposedly based on Solomon Perel's real life adventures during WWII.
Based on a true story, young Jewish boy Salomon 'Solly' 'Salek' Perel (Marco Hofschneider) and his family, Father (Klaus Abramowsky), Mother (Michèle Gleizer) and brothers Isaak (René Hofschneider) and David (Piotr Kozlowski), move to Lodz, Poland following the death of his sister Bertha (Marta Sandrowicz) who was killed in coordinated attack by the Nazis called Kristallnacht, which occurred on the day of his Bar Mitzvah.
The performance of Hofschneider is absolutely crucial to this film, he is absolutely fantastic as the young forced to hide amongst the Nazis to save his own life, you have to keep in mind that this was a real story, it really is convincing with it's moments of tension, and of course the chilling war sequences full of explosions and gunfire, a most worthwhile Second World War biographical drama.
Europa Europa is an exciting story about a young German Jew (Solly), and his efforts to survive the Nazi Regime and the second World War. Solly's family escapes Nazi Germany and resettles in Poland.
As Solomon is walking away at the end of the movie, he says, "let us not talk about what happened as nobody is likely to believe me." Europa, Europa is a movie about a young Jewish boy caught up in the events in World War II.
Then he inadvertently captures a Russian position and is sent back to Berlin a hero, where he joins the Hitler Youth - all the while denying his Jewish heritage.This is a movie about denial of self, and the struggle to survive in a world where your people are being persecuted.
Europa Europa (1990) was a movie that's based upon a real life story of a Jewish kid who does whatever it takes to survive.
This film is a superbly produced drama about a young Jewish boy who is thrust into the world on his own during the German Nazi WWII era.
As World War II approaches, a teenage Jewish boy (Marco Hofschneider) flees to Soviet-occupied Poland where he later pretends to be a loyal Nazi in order to stay alive, and becomes a hero in the Hitler Youth movement.This story, all the more remarkable for being true, is recounted sensitively, and zeroes in on the young man's dilemma: how young Solomon became Josef Peters before finding himself lost between two identities.
It is also interesting to see that the good Germans in the movie are not, one may think the youngsters, but the adults - the soldier and Leni's mother who both learned that Salomon is a Jew but kept the secret.
Important is how Salomon adapts and survives.Europa, Europa is worth watching not only because it tells an unbelievable but true story.
it's about a sixteen year old Jewish boy who speaks both German and Russian fluently, which enables him to survive the second world war without either visiting or learning knowledge of nazi concentration camps and the 'final solution'.the lad who plays "Solly"/"Jupp" has a very cherubic, expressive face.