JERUSALEM (AP) — Shlomo Perel, who survived the Holocaust through surreal subterfuge and an extraordinary odyssey that inspired his own writing and an internationally renowned film, has died. He was 98.

Perel was born in 1925 to a Jewish family in Brunswick, Germany, just several years before the Nazis came to power. He and his family fled to Lodz, Poland, after his father’s store was destroyed and he was kicked out of school.

A few years later, to avoid execution after being captured by the German army in Russia, Perel disguised his Jewish identity, assumed a new name and posed as an ethnic German born in Russia.

He wrote an autobiography that later inspired the 1991 Oscar-nominated film “Europa Europa.”