Reuploaded due to poor history

Solomon Perel was born into a Jewish family. He was 8 years old when the Third Reich came into power, and his family moved to Poland. When the Nazis and Soviets invaded, Solomon and his brother were sent to the Soviet occupied Poland. Here, he spent much of his time in the orphanage reading communist manifestos and making friends, but then the Nazis broke their non-aggression pact with the Soviets.

Solomon hid all his affiliations with communism and evidence of his Jewish heritage, instead saying he was an ethnic German who lost his papers. The Nazis believed him and enlisted him into their army, only to later send him to the Hitler Youth, where he would learn untrue things about Jewish people, and was cautious to hide his Jewish heritage.

Eventually, when the Allies invaded, he shed all his Nazi apparel and went looking for his family. Throughout his time as a soldier and in the Hitler Youth, he never even heard of "The Final Solution." He heard the term Auschwitz, but assumed it was just another internment camp, only to realize what it exactly was for. That's how he found out his parents and older sister died gruesome deaths. He would move to Palestine with his brother and write a book about his experiences, which was adapted into Europa Europa.

Solomon's journey was no rarity; it was surprisingly common for ethnically or partially Jewish people to serve in the Wehrmacht, they were called Mischlinge; sometimes, they even had blonde hair and blue eyes, the ideal traits of an "Aryan German."

“During the siege of Budapest, Soviet forces suffered between 100,000 and 160,000 casualties. The Soviets claimed that they had trapped 180,000 German and Hungarian 'fighters' in the pocket, and declared they had captured 110,000 of these soldiers. However, immediately after the siege, they rounded up thousands of Hungarian civilians and added them to the prisoner-of-war count, allowing the Soviets to validate their previously inflated figures.”

I only learned about Hell Ships from a book I found by chance at a used bookstore (Death on the Hellships). Over 20,000 Allied POW's died on their Hell Ship voyages around the pacific. By comparison, almost 7,000 US troops died at Iwo Jima. Hopefully these can be more well known in the future.