Nov. 14



BELARUS:

Jewish boy became Nazi mascot to survive


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 Jewish 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 immigrates 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 this month
in the United States. But still the search is incomplete.

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

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 also serves as a reminder of the toll it took
on children. Only 6 percent to 11 percent 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.

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 the age of 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 awoken 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 from 1,000 to 1,920 Jews
in Dzerzhinsk on Oct. 21. 1941.

In the diary of Sarah Fishkin, a Jewish girl from the Dzerzhinsk area who
was later shot by the Germans, she describes what she heard from survivors
five days after the massacre.

"They gathered them and brought them to completed deep graves. The
children looked at it with big eyes and didn't understand. People said
goodbye to one another. Parents with small children pushed themselves
forward to the grave so that they would fall first and not have to look
upon the death of their dearest ...," she wrote in the diary, a copy of
which is at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial.

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 a 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 Jewishness. 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 his Jewishness, and he was
then made the battalion's mascot. Latvian military records provided to the
AP by the Hoover Institution Archives confirm the country's 18th Kurzeme
Battalion "adopted" a young boy whose parents were unknown on July 12,
1942, 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 1st 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.

Another time, Kurzem says in the book, he was made to hand out chocolate
bars to Jews being loaded into trucks. He said he was told they were being
resettled, but they probably were bound for concentration camps or to
forests to be massacred.

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 the 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 acknowledges that 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 even 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 so-called "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.

He also remembers being used as bait to lure young women into the clutches
of men in the battalion who would rape them. In his book he says that
although he was an innocent pawn, "I feel responsible for what had
happened to them, even now."

Experts also question how a circumcised boy managed to conceal his
Jewishness from some 400 men of his battalion for several years. But they
acknowledge there were other, similar cases during the war.

Kurzem says it was a matter of survival. When the battalion would go for a
wash, "I made sure that I was not visible to anybody."

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

Kurzem worked with a traveling circus before starting his 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, which
is 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., told the AP 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
they are related.

Kurzem's latest trip to Dzerzhinsk appeared to further persuade 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 laid 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."

(source: Associated Press)