MOVIE · 1990

Europa Europa

DramaWar112 min

Separated from his family in the opening years of World War II, teenage German Jew Salomon Perel survives by passing as someone else wherever the front line leaves him. Marco Hofschneider is Salomon, first hiding in a Soviet orphanage, then reinventing himself as a German orphan whose language skills make him useful to the German army. As the lie grows, he is pulled deeper into Nazi society and eventually into the Hitler Youth, forced to conceal his identity in the very institutions built to destroy people like him. Drawn from the experiences of Solomon Perel, the film follows a boy coming of age inside a system that reads his face and name as matters of life and death.