Europa Europa (1991)

Captivating movie !

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The film starts off with two boys underwater. Solomon is about to turn 13 years old and celebrate his bar mitzvah, but Kristallnacht happens. His sister is killed while his family's home and store is vandalized. The rest of the family decides to flee to the father's native Poland. Here they are safe until war breaks out. Solomon and his brother are sent east by their father to flee. Here they are separated, but Solomon ends up in a Russian orphanage. Things go relatively well for Solomon who receives education in the orphanage and joins the Komsomol. When Hitler breaks his pact and invades the USSR, Solomon flees once again, this time with the rest of the orphanage. As he and the orphanage escape he is separated and captured by the Germans. Here he uses his knowledge of Russian, Polish and German to impersonate a Volksdeutscher. Through a stroke of a luck and the protection of another German soldier, he's able to remain safe and learn how to be a soldier in the German army. In a a battle his comrades are killed and, while deserting. it is assumed he is revealing a hidden Russian position. This leads him a captain to adopt him and send him west where he will enroll in an elite Hitler Youth School. Here he mostly deals with being a normal teenager and hiding his identity and circumcision. When he is about to be discovered, the Russians destroy the office where he is to verify his German purity. When the Russians finally advance, he deserts and, with the help of his surviving brother Isaak, is able to give up his hoax and rejoin his Jewish brethren. The film does a good job of showing dreams to help get into the psyche of Solomon, while the whole films feels like a real Greek drama like the Odyssey. Solomon is always off to some new place coming through mainly by luck. I especially like the reference that Hitler was himself a Jew in hiding. This helps bring the analogy that it may be better to die for one's belief, than live and hide them. Certainly it is a debate better conduced by Holocaust survivors than myself, but respecting the fact that the stories of Jews, Poles, Russians and even Germans were all different. It even posits, as Solomon's linguistic skills in battle, that perhaps a Jew is more German than some of the Volksdeutsch who were merely German by blood and not the merit that helped to actually save lives.I was completely mesmerized by all the characters. Each one enabled me to really feel and I go into it. I'd like to move away from WW2 in German cinema, but films of this caliber are hard to ignore.

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.

Welcome to the world of the Holocaust according to Hollywood, or in this case, one of its proxies. The problem with this movie is not the story because Jews did manage to camouflage themselves during the war. In this case, it's the lead actor. There is no way that this character could have passed himself off as a German Nazi. Absolutely out of the question. Yet the movie asks the audience to accept this as a given. Not only does he look and act differently from his Hitler Youth and Wehrmacht associates, he is way too immature to have had the discipline necessary to maintain his cover. Just no way. 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. That the boy does not have papers certifying his identity is glossed over. Yet this is a major omission which undermines the credibility of the story. If there was one country that made documentation into almost a fetish, it was Nazi Germany, and if someone lacked proper documentation, your next stop was the local Gestapo office and "protective detention" until your identity could be confirmed. And what was the Gestapo guarding against? That's right! Jews posing as "Aryan" Germans! Nevertheless, this is good movie containing candid scenes of how the Jews were being mistreated and how Nazi propaganda was effective in transforming young adolescents into anti-Semites. For this reason alone, the movie is worth watching.

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. Separated from his family and captured by German troops, Solomon escaped execution by claiming to be a 'pure bred' German orphan, apparently with enough conviction to be welcomed warmly into the ranks of his captors. The film explains the success of his desperate charade by presenting him as a passive victim of chance and circumstance. In constant jeopardy of being discovered, he is inevitably saved by one miracle of fate after another: in the Wermacht, in a Hitler Youth School, and finally as a prisoner of the Russians, awaiting the firing squad. The fact that the Germans embraced him as a model Aryan only reinforces the total blindness of their 'Master Race' conceit. With a rich sense of irony and Old World ambiguity (helping to explain the double title) veteran writer director Agnieszka Holland shows the German people to be simultaneously capable of uncomplicated affection and irrational hatred.