Jewish boy became a Nazi mascot

Among the splinters of a memory shattered by the Holocaust is Alex Kurzem’s image of himself as a jolly little boy who liked to climb an apple tree in the family garden, pretending to be a sailor scanning the horizon from the crow’s nest.

Then, at about age 6 or 8, a carefree childhood ends, and life becomes a story of horror and deliverance. Germans massacre his family, and he flees into the woods where he endures a bitter winter. He is captured by Latvian soldiers sent by the Germans to kill Jews. They dress him in uniform, make him their mascot and protect him for the rest of World War II. Apparently only one of them knows he’s Jewish.

After the war he emigrates to Australia. He forgets his mother tongue, hometown and real name and becomes a Melbourne suburbanite. Finally he sets out to rediscover his identity, but finds more pain than answers. Now gray-haired and in his 70s (he is still unsure of his age), he tells his story in a book, “The Mascot,” written by his son and published last month in the United States. But still the search is incomplete.

His quest has led him to Dzerzhinsk, a village in Belarus, which he has visited four times and come to believe is his birthplace. Here lies the mass grave from the 1941 massacre of 1,000 to nearly 2,000 Jews, nearly the entire Jewish population in this small town. It has never been exhumed, but he thinks his mother, brother and sister are buried here.

Kurzem’s story, reconstructed with his son’s help and supplemented by Associated Press research, shows how the Holocaust story transmits itself through the generations. It is also a reminder of the toll it took on children. Only 6% to 11% of Jewish children caught up in the genocide survived, compared with a third of the adults, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

For some children, survival led to a surprising and triumphant rebirth.

Jean-Marie Lustiger -- born Aron Lustiger -- was hidden with Roman Catholics, converted and grew up to be the archbishop of Paris. Aharon Appelfeld fled a concentration camp at age 8, wandered alone or with other abandoned children through central European forests for years, and later became one of Israel’s leading novelists. Thomas Buergenthal survived Auschwitz and a three-day death march at age 10. He is now an American judge on the World Court at The Hague.

Kurzem’s Holocaust story began when German troops stormed his village and herded the Jews into a ghetto. Some time later Kurzem’s mother told the boy that the family would be killed the next day.

“And I said, ‘Mother, but I don’t want to die,’ but she didn’t have an answer for me,” Kurzem told the AP during his visit to Belarus.

That night he woke up, kissed his sleeping mother goodbye and slipped outside to hide behind a knoll on the edge of the village.

The next morning, he says, he was awakened by gunfire and saw hundreds of people, including his mother, siblings and aunt, being shot on a grassy field and dumped in a mass grave. He bit his hands to stifle his cries.

Archival records show that Nazi troops murdered 1,000 to 1,920 Jews in Dzerzhinsk on Oct. 21, 1941.

Kurzem says he spent the next several months hiding in the woods, begging villagers for food and sleeping in trees to be safe from wolves. He pulled a coat and boots off a dead German soldier to keep warm.

Eventually, he says, he was caught and taken to a schoolyard. He was handed over to the Latvian battalion deployed by the German occupiers of Belarus, then part of the Soviet Union.

The battalion was busy killing Jews.

Kurzem recalls being hungry and running to a soldier to ask for a bit of bread before his turn came to die.

Then, he says, a miracle happened that still baffles him. The soldier, a sergeant named Jekabs Kulis, took pity on him.

He says Kulis looked him over and saw that he was circumcised -- at that time and place a certain marker of a Jew. But the boy was also blond and blue-eyed, which enabled Kulis to present him to his comrades as a gentile, and they came to believe he was an orphaned Russian swineherd.

Kurzem says Kulis warned him never to reveal that he was Jewish, and he was made the battalion’s mascot. Latvian military records provided to the AP by the Hoover Institution Archives confirm that on July 12, 1942, the country’s 18th Kurzeme Battalion “adopted” a young boy whose parents were unknown and gave him the name Uldis Kurzemnieks, roughly meaning “from Kurzeme,” a region in western Latvia. (The name was shortened when Kurzem moved to Australia.)

Six months later, the soldiers gave their ward the honorary rank of private first class “for his diligent learning and good behavior,” the documents say. Wartime photos show the boy wearing a Nazi uniform and carrying a gun while posing with Kulis and other Nazi soldiers. According to records seen by the AP, he would have been 9, though Kurzem believes he is two years younger than the records say.

Over the next two years, the battalion took Kurzem to hospitals to visit wounded Nazi soldiers and celebrated their young recruit in propaganda films. The footage shows a uniformed, solemn-looking child with neatly parted hair.

As Kurzem tells it, inhumanity and kindness went hand in hand. His Nazi elders were kind to him, he says, yet he also remembers how the battalion rounded up dozens of women and children, barricaded them in a synagogue and set it ablaze. Those who escaped were shot by three soldiers, one of whom was Kulis, his protector.

In all, some 250,000 were murdered in western Belarus -- virtually the entire Jewish population of the region, according to Martin Dean at the Washington Holocaust museum, an expert on the Holocaust in Belarus and Ukraine. More than 10,000 Jews from the area survived the war.

“I didn’t understand about the war and what they did; I couldn’t help it. But at least they looked after me,” Kurzem said. “I was all alone. . . . If the devil had come along, I would have gone with him.”

One gap that puzzles historians is the nine months between the massacre and Kurzem’s “adoption” by the Latvians. Alexey Litvin, a scholar at the Belarusian National Academy of Sciences’ History Institute, said “it is beyond belief” that the boy could have survived the unusually harsh winter of 1941-42 alone and unsheltered.

Kurzem says the gap “has been bothering me a lot,” and he can’t explain it. “All I know is, I was begging for food, I was cold, I was hungry. But to survive that winter . . . I just can’t imagine it.”

Kurzem spent many hours with Kulis, his Latvian protector, who at least once took the boy with him on home leave. But he has no clear answer why he saved him. Kulis immigrated to the United States in 1951 and died in 1978. Attempts by the AP to contact Kulis’ son in New York were unsuccessful.

Litvin said there were military units during World War II that adopted orphaned children as “sons of the regiment.” He suggested the battalion, which was charged with wiping out anti-Nazi partisans in the region, could have used the Russian-speaking boy to gather intelligence. Kurzem says he was never made to spy and was only asked to perform basic tasks such as boiling water and gathering firewood.

In 1944, with the Nazis nearing defeat, the commander of Kurzem’s unit sent him to live with a Latvian chocolate maker in the capital, Riga. Five years later, the family moved to Australia and took him with them.

Kurzem worked with a traveling circus before starting a TV repair business. He married and had three sons, but told no one of his past.

“I managed all the years to switch myself off,” he said. “But it was always in the back of my head. I always wanted to go back to the village and put a flower on my mother’s grave.”

The experience of battling cancer spurred Kurzem in 1997 to finally reveal his past to his eldest son, Mark. The pair began piecing things together.

But he could remember only that his father may have been a tanner, and only knew a few words from his childhood. One of them was “Koidanovo,” which was Dzerzhinsk’s name before World War II.

But the record shows how confusing the search has become.

In 1996 he filled out a form for the Jewish Holocaust Center in Melbourne in which he gave his name as Uldis (Alex) Kurzem, birthplace Riga, some 250 miles from the Belarus village. He wrote that he was born Nov. 18, 1933. The book says the date Nov. 18, which was given to him by the Latvian battalion, is Latvian independence day, but nowhere is his real birth date on record. It is also the birth date he used when registering as a displaced person after the war, according to records at the International Tracing Service for war victims in Bad Arolsen, Germany.

In the form he filled out, he gave his original surname as Panok. How he arrived at that name is not known. Kurzem says it was the only word, besides Koidanovo, that he remembered.

Several Holocaust survivors from Dzerzhinsk now living in the United States, and other elderly Dzerzhinsk residents reached by the AP, confirm that a Panok family lived in Koidanovo before the war and had children. That could mean that Kurzem could have been a Panok himself or was friends with the Panok children.

But there’s another possibility. With the help of a Belarusian Jewish organization, Kurzem learned of Erik Galperin, a publisher from Dzerzhinsk now living in Minsk whose Jewish father, Solomon, was a tanner.

Solomon Galperin survived the massacre in Dzerzhinsk, but was later sent to Auschwitz and Dachau and returned home to discover that his wife and three children were gone. He remarried, started a new family and died in 1975.

After striking up a correspondence, Erik Galperin sent Kurzem a photograph of his father. Both were struck by a resemblance between Solomon and the elderly Kurzem.

Solomon Galperin’s nephew, Emmanuel Krupitsky, who had known Galperin after the war and who met with Kurzem, confirmed the two men look very much alike.

“Alex is the spitting image of Solomon,” Krupitsky, 86, who now lives in Little Rock, Ark., said in a telephone interview.

In the late 1990s, Kurzem traveled to Dzerzhinsk, outside Minsk, the Belarus capital, to meet Erik Galperin and see if he remembered anything about the village. “I had this feeling of the impossible,” Galperin said, recalling his first encounter with Kurzem. “I felt like something -- like I saw my father alive.”

The Galperins and others in the village, as well as Kurzem himself, are convinced he is really Ilya Galperin, Solomon Galperin’s eldest son from his first marriage. However, no DNA tests have been carried out to show whether they are related.

Kurzem’s latest trip to Dzerzhinsk appeared to further convince him that he is Ilya, son of Galperin and half-brother of Erik. But many questions went unanswered.

He searched for the apple tree, but it had been chopped down. He visited a dilapidated wooden house on October Street, which might have been where he grew up, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Why did you chop down the apple tree?” he asked Sergei Kalechin, a 57-year-old electrician who bought the house on October Street some years back. Then he cried out “Yabloko,” the Russian word for apple. As he talked to Erik Galperin, more Russian words tumbled out: “it is cold,” “work,” a popular Russian wartime song.

He visited the knoll where he hid from the massacre and remembered sledding there in winter. As he placed two pink roses on the mass grave, Kurzem let out a deep sigh and struggled to hold back tears.

What does he think possessed a Latvian who was killing Jews to save his life? He says he remains baffled.

“I often ask myself, ‘Why me, why me?’ ” Kurzem said. “I never, never, never had the answer for it.”

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Foley reported from Sydney, Australia; Danilova from Dzerzhinsk; and Herschaft from New York. Also contributing were AP writers Yuras Karmanau in Minsk, Belarus; Tim Jacobs in New York; and Gary Peach in Riga.