Europa, Europa

Solomon Perel's may be one of the strangest wartime memoirs ever committed to print. At the outbreak of World War II Perel, a young Polish Jew, was interned in a Soviet orphanage. Captured by Wehrmacht soldiers, Perel, fluent in Russian and German, passed himself off as an ethnic German and was adopted by the Nazi unit to act as a translator--and as something of a mascot. Sent to Berlin to an all-male military school, Perel managed against all odds to keep his secret (after the war, he revealed his true identity to his disbelieving comrades-in-arms); in the meantime, his family perished. Now available for the first time in English translation, the full book revels in a sharp sense of irony and an ever-unfolding abundance of improbable episodes.