by Chris Barton
They’ve nabbed you and a bunch of other refugees, just a few days into Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Now they’ve lined you all up in a field as they decide what to do with each of you.
Most of you are Jewish—that’s why you were on the run in the first place—so the Nazis don’t have to think too hard about it. They take groups of refugees ahead of you off into the woods. From the forest come the sounds of shovels and machine guns, shovels and machine guns.
Your wait stretches into hours. That’s plenty of time to consider the papers in your pocket, the ones identifying you not only as a Jew but also as a Communist—a Nazi target twice over.
If you run, you’ll be killed for sure. And so, hoping no one will notice amid the smoke and bombs and hum of German planes, you gouge a hole in the earth with the heel of your shoe. You drop those incriminating papers into the hole and sweep the dirt on top of them. The Germans are sticklers for proper documentation, but now you have none. It’s almost as if you have no identity at all.
Your turn. A soldier orders you to put your trembling hands above your head. He frisks you and asks: “Are you a Jew?”
Calmly, somehow, you reply: “I’m not a Jew.”
You tell him that you’re a Volksdeutscher—a person with German ancestors but not German citizenship. You’re not the first in line to lie. If this soldier doubts you—like he did the others—he’ll pull down your pants, see that you’ve been circumcised, and send you off to the forest.
But he doesn’t. God knows why, but he believes you.
“Sir,” he proudly tells his sergeant, “we found a young German among this human garbage.” What a discovery!
How lucky for him.
1941–1942
ON THE EASTERN FRONT
An anti-tank unit of the 12th Panzer Division takes you in. They give you a meal and a too-big uniform. In return you give them a made-up name: “Josef Perjell.”
You give them a story to match: You’re Lithuanian, and you’ve been an orphan your whole life. Your papers were destroyed in a German bombing. And that’s that.
Here’s your real story:
Your parents, brothers, and sister are Polish, but you—the youngest—were born and raised in the German town of Peine. You grew up hearing Adolf Hitler call your people bloodsuckers and parasites. His Stormtroopers wrote “Don’t buy from Jews!” on the windows of your father’s shoe store. Swastikas appeared everywhere. The Nazis kicked you out of school when you were ten. Your family went back to Poland.
Three years later, the German army invaded. You watched soldiers beat Jews in the streets of Lodz. Every week, the occupiers clamped down harder, and the Führer’s bluster about extermination and annihilation couldn’t just be waved away. “You must stay alive,” your mother pleaded, and your parents sent you farther east, into Belarus. On that rugged December journey, you wore your Bar Mitzvah suit. For a year and a half, you lived in an orphanage. You learned Russian and joined the Communist Party.
Now you’re hiding among the army you fled, translating the interrogations of Russian prisoners. Your sympathies are with the Russians, of course, but you can’t let those feelings show. You learn to think one thing but say another. You have a role to play, and your life depends on playing it flawlessly.
To the soldiers in your unit, you’re sort of a cross between a little brother, a mascot, and a good luck charm. They watch over you so closely that there’s no way you can escape.
One officer, Heinz, watches you more closely than the others. One night, you’re bathing in an abandoned house, and you think you’re alone—until Heinz sneaks up from behind and grabs you. Slipping free from his clinch, you turn to face him. He looks down, and he sees.
Thwarted, embarrassed, and now very, very puzzled, he says nothing for several moments. Finally, he asks, “Are you Jewish?”
The answer is obvious, and you have never felt so vulnerable. “Don’t kill me!” you beg.
Will he turn you in? What price will you pay for his silence? Or, seeing as the Third Reich cares no more for homosexuals than it does for Jews, will you each hold the other in check—your knowledge of his secret vs. his knowledge of yours?
“Don’t cry,” he says. “You know, there is another Germany.”
Heinz keeps your secret, no strings attached. You come to understand that German soldiers aren’t necessarily actual Nazis. Some aren’t fighting because they share Hitler’s hatred, they’re fighting because they were told to fight. A few are pretty cynical about the war. You still fear them—never for a moment are you lulled into thinking you’d be safe among them as Solomon instead of Josef—but you can’t help but like them. They’re your card-playing, beer-drinking buddies—genuine pals. And when Heinz gets hit during a Russian attack, you crawl out from under the tank where he had pulled you to safety just moments before. You hold him as he bleeds to death.
Not long after, the powers that be decide you’re too young to be on the front lines of the war. No person your age should be subjected to such a horrible thing. You’re ordered back to Germany.
1942–1944
BRUNSWICK, GERMANY
They send “Josef Perjell” to a boarding school for the Hitler Youth. They want to mold their splendid Volksdeutscher find from the Eastern Front into a grade-A Nazi. Back with your unit, you were among a bunch of guys who were just doing their jobs. Here, you’re surrounded by Nazi true believers armed with daggers inscribed “Blood and Honor.” And you’re supposed to feel safer?
It gets worse. The school is in Brunswick, not even twenty miles from your hometown of Peine. What if someone recognizes you as that little Jewish boy who left seven years ago?
That’s not the only thing you’re afraid of. What if you talk in your sleep, speaking Yiddish or saying something else revealing? Each morning, the first thing you do is check your roommate’s expression for signs that you’ve betrayed yourself in the night. There’s also your circumcision. You wear your underwear in the shower, but you worry that your schoolmates will suspect you of something more than mere modesty.
You hide your fears behind stiff-armed Nazi salutes and greetings of “Heil Hitler!” You’ve been disqualified from potential membership in the Führer’s all-powerful S.S.—at five two, you’re too short, and you have black hair instead of Aryan blond. But in your swastika-adorned uniform, you look like your fellow students, and you act like they do. They think they’re invincible, destined to rule the world, and their confidence is intoxicating. You can’t help but feel it too.
At the same time, you ache for your family. You long to simply be around other Jews. For all you know, you’re the only one left in Germany. And beyond Germany—who knows? You’ve read of a plan to send all of Europe’s Jews to the African island of Madagascar.
It’s impossible for you to see such a scheme or anything else—any idea, any person, any situation—just one way. There’s the point of view you have to have, no matter how much you despise it, so that you’ll act the way a Hitler Youth is supposed to act. And then there’s the way you really feel: tormented. Torn. Enveloped in layers of hatred: of Solomon for being Jewish, of Josef Perjell for hating Solomon, and of Solomon Perel for being Josef.
You ping-pong between being alarmingly cocky that your deception will last and swimming in anxiety that you’ll be found out. Your schoolmates’ dinnertime sing-alongs don’t help: “We’ll be even better off once Jewish blood spurts from our knives,” goes one song. For your studies, you read and reread Hitler’s rants against Jews. In the classroom you force a smile as you recite the themes.
The teacher in your class on racial theory, Borgdorf, rattles off stereotypical physical traits of Jews. You grow certain that you resemble this one, and that one, and another one too, and that it’s only a matter of time before everyone notices.
One day, Borgdorf calls you to the front of the room.
You tremble as you walk up the aisle.
“Class, take a look at Josef,” he says.
Oh, God.
But then:
“He is a typical descendant of the Eastern Baltic race.”
In other words, an Aryan, like the rest of them.
Fools.
Near the school, there’s a pastry shop with a sign on the door reading “No dogs or Jews allowed”—as if there were any Jews left in Brunswick. You go inside every time you pass by. This little bit of defiance helps relieve a little bit of the pressure you feel building up inside you.
There’s nobody you can tell the truth to—nobody you feel you can trust. Not even Leni, the local girl you’ve begun dating. She’s in the BDM—Hitler Youth for girls. Members of both groups are encouraged to report their parents for opposing the Nazis. There’s no reason to think she’d protect you.
When you go to see Leni one day, she’s not at home, but her mother invites you in. There’s something on her mind.
After a long silence, Mrs. Latsch asks, “Are you really German?”
Caught off guard, you tell the truth. “Please don’t report me,” you whisper.
You lucked out. Little things about Josef Perjell’s life’s story just didn’t add up for Mrs. Latsch, but you picked the right person to be careless with. She kisses you on the forehead and tells you that your secret is safe—but she makes you swear not to tell Leni. She doesn’t trust her daughter any more than you do.
DECEMBER 1943
LODZ, POLAND
You hear your classmates making plans to go home to their families for the holidays, and you decide you should be able to do the same. You’ll need the school to provide a travel permit, train tickets, food ration cards, and some cash.
“I would like to go on vacation,” you tell the administrators.
“Oh, and where would you like to go?” one of them asks in surprise, knowing that you’re an orphan.
“To Lodz,” you say. “I want to settle some affairs.”
What you want is to find your parents and to . . . what? What is your plan, exactly? When you get to the walled ghetto your parents wrote to you about when you were in the orphanage, what will you do? What will you do if you find your parents? And what if you don’t? What then?
Your first morning in Lodz, you climb onto a streetcar marked “For Germans Only.” Your black uniform shows that you are a Hitler Youth—who could question you? You travel past streets that the Nazis have renamed since you left, and so you almost miss the stop that you once knew as Freedom Square.
You walk past a heap of rubble—torn-down houses, the better to isolate the ghetto from the rest of the city. You scale one of those piles of debris and look down, beyond the barbed wire, into the ghetto. For the first time in years, you see other Jews.
They’re gray-skinned, shabbily dressed, and wasting away in an urban prison. This is what your disguise has shielded you from. This is what your parents have endured—if they have survived at all.
You approach the gate, only to be stopped by a Volksdeutscher guard. “You must have lost your way,” he tells you, careful not to offend a Hitler Youth and real German. “Only Jews live here. You are not allowed here.” Diseases, you know.
The only way into the ghetto is through it, on a nonstop streetcar locked up tight to keep any Jews from climbing on board to escape. You get on, standing behind the driver. No other passengers seem to notice the dreadful scene outside the windows, but you can’t look away.
And there it is—the apartment house at 18 Franciszkan’ska, the address where you sent your letters years ago. You stare at the decrepit dwelling as if the power of your own yearning could draw Mama and Papa outside to watch the passing streetcar. But there is no sign of them. Where are they? In silence, you pass through to the other side of the ghetto.
During your days in Lodz, you take the streetcar back and forth, back and forth, as often as you think you can get away with without raising suspicions. But you never see your parents—not at the apartment house, not on the footbridges you pass beneath, not among the weary souls trudging along with bundles of scrap wood. Why don’t you try to slip into the ghetto on foot and try to find them? Because you don’t need to sneak inside in order to hear Mama’s words: “You must stay alive.”
APRIL 1945
ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Last October, British bombers did their best to destroy Brunswick. With the Allies closing in, you were sent to the front and taught how to use an anti-tank rocket launcher. Your commanders thought you’d use it to defend the Fatherland. You knew you’d do no such thing. In your hands, that weapon was just a prop for a part you’d play while waiting for the good guys to arrive.
They come into your camp in the earliest hours of your twentieth birthday, on April 21. You’re awoken with a whack from a rifle butt. “Up against the wall, Nazis!” the Americans bellow. If these guys are your liberators, they sure don’t know it. And for some reason, you can’t bring yourself to tell them.
They take your weapons, confiscate your camera, and strip you of all your Nazi badges and emblems. And then, into a land turned upside down, they set your unit free. But freedom for you is not a gate, a quick passage from one state to another. Rather, it’s a long tunnel. You need time for your eyes to adjust to the light. It finally happens when you see a man in a prisoner’s uniform, shaven-headed and starving and with the word “Jew” on his shirt.
A Jew, free, in Germany. At last.
“Excuse me, sir,” you begin. “Are you really Jewish?” You ask this while still dressed in your Hitler Youth uniform. The man does not reply. To be called “sir” by a Hitler Youth must seem as unreal to him as his very presence does to you. He cannot imagine what will happen next.
You wrap your arms around this stranger. You hug him. “I’m a Jew too,” you whisper. “My name is Solomon Perel.”
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
SOLOMON PEREL’S brothers also survived the war, but their sister and parents did not. Perel moved to Israel in 1948 and later opened a zipper factory. After undergoing heart surgery when he was in his fifties, he began writing down his story of wartime survival. His book, Europa, Europa, was published in 1990, and it began a second career for him as a lecturer about the toll of his experiences as Josef Perjell. “I still hate him,” he said of Josef Perjell fifty years later, “but I still love him. He saved my life.”
CHEROKEE AUTHOR?
FORREST CARTER
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1991
Well, Forrest, as authors of best-selling books for children go, you sure are extraordinary.
For one thing, before The Education of Little Tree came along, you were best known for writing a novel that became a violent Clint Eastwood Western.
For another, you’ve been dead twelve years.
Of course, there’s something else too—but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Today, Little Tree is number one on the best seller list for paperback nonfiction. Your Depression-era tale of life with your Cherokee grandparents in the Tennessee hills—“A True Story,” says the cover—has become a book that people love to tell other readers about, like they’re letting them in on a secret.
Maybe they’re reacting to your neat trick of telling your story from a five-year-old’s perspective—matter-of-fact, sweetly naive, yet somehow wise beyond his years. It makes the heartbreaking parts all the more tender and the funny parts all the more laugh-out-loud.
And though The Education of Little Tree is occasionally risqué—what with all the talk of moonshine and fornication—teachers in middle schools and high schools have taken to sharing your book with their students. They say it’s one that these kids really need to read.
That audience may not be one that you had in mind when you wrote the book. But honestly, who could have predicted any of this?
As an author, you seemed to come from out of nowhere around 1973, a middle-aged cowboy drifter with no yarn-spinning past other than the stretch you said you’d to have spent as Storyteller in Council to the Cherokee Nations. You were peddling a self-pub
lished novel about Josey Wales, a pro-Confederate guerrilla after the Civil War. That’s not the sort of thing that big New York City publishers were knocking each other over to get their hands on, but your tale of Wales’s quest for a new life and identity caught the eye of one. And your exotic background and entertainingly rough-around-the-edges personality surely helped seal the deal.
They made the rare decision to republish that shoot’em-up page-turner themselves, and The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales got made into that Clint Eastwood movie in ’76. Along the way, you found your cowboy-hatted, newly mustachioed self on TV in front of millions of viewers one morning, talking with Barbara Walters on the Today show.
You kept working, turning out another Josey Wales book, and one about Geronimo, and The Education of Little Tree. You also generated your share of commotion, especially when you had too much to drink and let loose with eyebrow-raising comments about blacks and Jews.
Eventually, you got drunk and out of hand one time too many, and a fistfight left you dead. Just half a dozen years after becoming an author, it was all over for you. And as so often happens in publishing, The Education of Little Tree faded away too. The publisher figured that pretty much everyone who was ever going to read your story had already bought a copy, so they stopped printing new ones.
But then something else happened that almost never does: Little Tree’s editor found a new publisher for it—in New Mexico, of all places. The book came back into print, and you, in a sense, came back from the dead. It was only the beginning of an incredible new story—a story about a story.
Readers who discovered The Education of Little Tree on its second time around couldn’t stop talking about it. However many copies of Little Tree were sold one year, twice as many were sold the year after that. Booksellers, especially, loved to connect customers with this beautiful little book—so spiritual, and funny—about a Native American boy and his grandparents. Many readers saw an environmental message as the young Cherokee learns of “The Way” and “Mon-o-lah, the Earth mother” from his nature-loving Granma and Granpa. What a wonderful multicultural book to share with students.
