Did a Jewish orphan really become Hitler’s youngest recruit?

This story is part of the February 3 edition of Good WeekendSee all 14 stories.

My phone buzzes. It’s a weekday night in 2021 during the blur of the COVID-19 pandemic. I glance at the screen. The name stares back at me.

I rattle through the memory bank in my brain. Who?

Bingo. It’s “The Mascot”, a Melbourne man by the name of Alex Kurzem, who has a staggering claim to fame: he says he survived the Holocaust by becoming Adolf Hitler’s youngest soldier.

Sounds like a tall tale, right? A young Jewish boy from Byelorussia (present-day Belarus) who was captured by a police battalion in 1942 and managed to cheat death, hide his Jewish identity and dupe them into believing he was a Russian orphan.

Aged between five and nine – he was too young to recall, and there was no birth certificate – he claims he witnessed the massacre of his family months earlier in the town of Koidanov. Then he escaped to the frozen badlands of the Byelorussian forest, where he survived one of the coldest winters on record, foraging for strawberries that sprouted around rotting corpses, begging for food and sleeping tied in trees to avoid being eaten by wolves.

Eventually, he was captured by the Latvian 18th Kurzeme Police Battalion, which was engaged in anti-partisan and anti-Jewish operations in Byelorussia and later absorbed into the Waffen-SS. Facing the firing squad for being Jewish, he had the chutzpah to beg – but not for mercy.

“I asked the soldier, ‘Can you give me a piece of bread before you kill me because I’m hungry?’ ” he said in recorded testimony given at the Jewish Holocaust Centre (now called the Melbourne Holocaust Museum) in the 1990s.

Kurzem worked as a TV repairman in suburban Melbourne.Credit: Courtesy of SBS

Miraculously, the soldier took pity on the young boy, presumably because he had blond hair and blue eyes, and told him to say he was a Russian orphan.

He was made the battalion’s toy soldier, their child mascot – a macabre irony hidden within the monstrosity of Hitler’s Final Solution. They even dressed him in a pint-sized uniform and armed him with a shorn-off rifle. The battalion anointed their mascot with a new name: Uldis Kurzemnieks. Uldis is a typical Latvian name; Kurzemnieks is a nod to the Kurzeme region of Latvia.

He said his SS commanders never discovered his secret: that their little Nazi poster boy was a Jew. “I had to hide all my life. I had to make sure nobody knew I was a Jewish boy among Nazis,” he said. “I knew if they unravelled my secret I would be dead … so I made myself forget my Jewish name.”

When the fighting between Hitler’s forces and the Red Army intensified, the battalion sent him to the safety of the Latvian capital, Riga, to live with the family of Jekabs Dzenis, who ran a chocolate factory and had volunteered to look after the “Russian” orphan. The Mascot says he kept his secret while under their roof and joined the family when they emigrated by boat to Melbourne in 1949.

That’s where he’s calling me from: his home in the city’s western suburbs, where he hid his secret for almost 50 years. He arrived here a teenager with nothing but a battered brown suitcase carrying the shards of his shattered life and the ghosts of his harrowing trauma. Inside were old black-and-white and sepia-toned photographs, articles and documents.

With nothing but street smarts, he jagged a job with Wirth’s Circus as the elephant boy, apparently witnessing the night in 1953 when five lions and one elephant escaped after their trailer was hit by a train near Coffs Harbour on the NSW North Coast.

When he finally settled down, he married a Catholic woman, fathered three sons and worked as a TV repairman in Altona – far from Melbourne’s Jewish suburbs where tattooed Holocaust survivors began to rebuild their lives out of the ashes of Auschwitz.

Then, in the 1990s, he finally allowed his kids – metaphorically – to peek inside his battered suitcase, revealing fragments of his miraculous story. It triggered a cascading chain of events that, if true, would make Hollywood screenwriters salivate (more on that later).

I answer the phone. The Mascot is speaking feverishly. “Dan, I proved them wrong,” he says. “I told you I would. I proved them all wrong.”

Alex Kurzem in 2007 with his decades-old suitcase in which he stored photos and documents from his past.Credit: AP

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Back in 2012, I was moonlighting for newspapers across the Jewish world, in Israel, the US and Britain. I’d been an editor at Lonely Planet, national editor of The Australian Jewish News, and sub-editor at The Bulletin and at The Sydney Morning Herald before newspaper classified advertising’s “rivers of gold” dried up in the mid-2000s.

So I had to re-invent myself. Documentary filmmaking was the closest thing to the long-form journalism I loved. Luckily, I got a foot in the door, but kept my other foot in print journalism.

The mystery of The Mascot landed on my desk in 2012, thanks to the Melbourne Herald Sun’s investigations editor, Keith Moor. In his article, critics of The Mascot alleged his story – revealed a few years earlier – was a hoax, and it was later alleged to be a fraud concocted in an apparent bid to gain fame and fortune. The Mascot stridently denied the claims.

‘I’m a million per cent sure I am Jewish. I wish I wasn’t when I was a little boy. It was a curse.’

Alex Kurzem

Holocaust hoaxes aren’t new, but they are news, especially for Jews. I alerted my editors overseas and, unsurprisingly, they commissioned stories.

The sceptic in me smelled bullshit and I set out with an instinct that it was probably a hoax. I called Alex Kurzem and put the allegations to him. The Mascot was trenchant in his defence that his critics were wrong, and he’d prove it.

HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR IN AUSTRALIA FACES QUESTIONS OF AUTHENTICITY, blared the headline on Israel’s leading broadsheet, Haaretz. AUSTRALIAN MAN’S HOLOCAUST STORY LABELLED A ‘LIE’ , screamed The Jewish Chronicle in London.

As the story snowballed, pressure mounted on The Mascot to prove his identity by taking a DNA test. Some survivors at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne didn’t believe him; others shunned him as a traitor. Dr Efraim Zuroff, the executive director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, was far from convinced, adding that “everything in this case appears to point to a scam”.

I felt compelled to eyeball The Mascot, so I flew to Melbourne and knocked on the door of his dishevelled bungalow. I was greeted by a humble pensioner living in borderline poverty. “They’re accusing me and sentencing me,” he told me. “I’m a million per cent sure I am Jewish. I wish I wasn’t when I was a little boy. It was a curse.”

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Alex Kurzem (left) with Erik Galperin in front of the Galperin family’s pre-war house in Belarus in 2007. Kurzem, holding a photo of Erik’s father Solomon, believed he and Erik were half-brothers.Credit: AP

Some stories die a quick death. Others get a life, even an after-life, as the story unravels. This story also had a pre-life. It had been told in several forms by the time I started filing reports in 2012. There was a documentary, titled The Mascot and broadcast by the ABC in 2003, which won a prize at the Sydney Film Festival. It followed The Mascot and his eldest son, Mark Kurzem, a scholar at the University of Oxford, as they travelled back to Belarus looking for pieces of Alex’s past.

They managed to track down The Mascot’s apparent half-brother, Erik Galperin, and filmed a long-lost family reunion. “Have you found your name?” Mark Kurzem asks his father in the ABC documentary. “Well, now I have, now I have,” he replied. “Ilya Solomonovich Galperin.”

There was a bestselling book published by Penguin in 2007, also called The Mascot. Written by Mark Kurzem, it was translated into more than a dozen languages. Like the documentary, it traced his father’s story from Byelorussia to Melbourne and back to Belarus, culminating in the reunion with the Galperin family. The New York Times hailed it “a spellbinding thriller” and the BBC described it as “one of the most remarkable stories to have emerged from the war”.

But not everyone was so smitten. Baiba Mangalis-Ford, whose Latvian grandfather had brought The Mascot to Melbourne after the war, says The Mascot had first agreed to share his story with her, not Mark Kurzem. She had started recording his testimony on cassettes in 1996, a decade before Mark Kurzem’s book was published. “I’m left out of the picture entirely, so that incensed me from the very beginning,” she says.

And she claims Mark, whom she had adored like a brother, demanded a six-figure sum of money for the copyright of his father’s story in an apparent bid to improve The Mascot’s financial woes. The fallout took an emotional toll as The Mascot’s family – real and adopted – began to implode.

Baiba Mangalis-Ford’s grandfather brought Alex to Melbourne after the war. She claimed Kurzem had shared his story with her first.Credit: Jessica Hromas

Baiba’s first cousin, Maris Lakis, was also outraged by the book. He grew up in Melbourne with fond memories of The Mascot, his adopted “uncle” who would visit in the 1960s with a much-prized television for the kids to watch. He claimed the book was “wildly embellished and mostly fiction” and compiled a 69-page dossier of its “baseless defamatory allegations” which he sent to Penguin in 2008, demanding the book be pulped.

Penguin referred him to the author, Mark Kurzem, who died the following year from diabetes complications.

The book triggered a global tour. And that’s when CBS’s 60 Minutes decided to run a feature interview with The Mascot. One of its 100-million-plus American viewers that night in 2009 was Barry Resnick, a college professor who’d lost family in the Holocaust. He instinctively didn’t believe the story.

He tracked down a leading forensic genealogist, Dr Colleen Fitzpatrick. She had uncovered two other Holocaust hoaxes: Misha Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves memoir and Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence.

After a two-year investigation, the pair exposed multiple inconsistencies in the story and revealed how The Mascot had asked for $100,000 to take a DNA test to prove his relationship with Erik Galperin. “If Holocaust denial is evil,” wrote Fitzpatrick, “isn’t distortion of Holocaust history for financial gain just as bad?”

A media pile-on ensued. The Herald Sun’s headline ran The Mascot’s defence: “I HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE”.

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When The Mascot rang me late that night in 2021, I had no idea that it would set off a chain of events that would consume me for more than two years. I sat down to research and write the sequel to the stories I had filed almost a decade earlier, in which I had led with those who accused him of being a liar.

And now I was writing the opposite: that he appeared to have been vindicated, and that it was all thanks to a random act of kindness. In 2019, The Mascot’s middle son, Martin, received an AncestryDNA kit as a gift for his 60th birthday. “It said I was 50 per cent Jewish,” says Martin. “So I came around to Dad and said, ‘If I’m 50 per cent Jewish, you must be 100 per cent.’ He said [to] send Colleen Fitzpatrick an email.”

She sent him a DNA kit. This time, The Mascot took the test. “The results were, in fact, as he claimed: he was 100 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish,” Fitzpatrick says. Mining the data, she proved that he was from the village in Byelorussia he claimed he was from. Further research revealed he was not Ilya Galperin, the name his son Mark had uncovered in Belarus. Rather, she tracked down his real long-lost relatives who matched his DNA.

I knew I had to interview The Mascot. But we were still in the grip of the pandemic. His health was ailing.

This was the beginning of the end of an 80-year roller-coaster story of a man who’d had multiple false identities, a family reunion that wasn’t and a DNA revelation with a blistering sting in the tail. As I sifted through the rubble of The Mascot’s past, I discovered more twists, revelations and bombshells. I embarked on a globetrotting trail from Europe to Australia, the US and Canada. Along the way, I hit a roadblock in Paris, where a French film company had optioned The Mascot in 2008 to make a blockbuster movie. Robin Williams and Anthony Hopkins had apparently been touted to play Alex Kurzem on the big screen.

Except none of the French producers or their associates would talk. And the more they hid behind their silence, the more suspicious I grew. Several drafts of the script were written, but the film was never made. Why?

It was now that the proverbial penny dropped: this was neither a news story nor a longer-form article, it was a gripping, true crime-esque investigation laden with enough claim, counter-claim and controversy for a feature documentary.

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When I hung up after The Mascot’s call, I knew that I had to race from Sydney to Melbourne to interview him. But we were still in the grip of the pandemic. Melbourne was in lockdown. His health was ailing. He hadn’t been jabbed yet.

And he was old, in his 80s, and still answering to Alex Kurzem, the anglicised version of the fake name given to him by the Latvian battalion. Finally, lockdown lifted. I booked my flight. Then I got a phone call from his middle son. “Dad’s in hospital.”

Instead of the final interview with The Mascot, we filmed the final farewell at Altona Memorial Park cemetery. He had survived the Holocaust but succumbed to COVID-19, among other complications. Atop his casket sat his battered brown suitcase, watched by his two surviving sons.

The truth about The Mascot has been elusive for more than 75 years. For almost 50 of those years, he kept his secret locked in that suitcase.

For the past 25 years his story has been told and re-told in myriad media: hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, from Time magazine to the Los Angeles Times and even Playboy magazine. The documentary, the book and 60 Minutes each offered different, often-contested versions of events.

Piecing this puzzle together was fraught. With few verifiable facts and most eyewitnesses long gone, how much could I rely on the distant memories of a now dead octogenarian?

Mercifully, there were some pieces of documentary evidence in black and white: a haunting photo of the boy surrounded by the Latvian battalion; a Nazi propaganda reel from 1943, miraculously found during the making of the 2003 documentary, featuring The Mascot surrounded by Aryan children; and the diary of the 18th Kurzeme Police Battalion held at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Within the 300-odd pages of scribbled Latvian, it records that on July 12, 1942, the battalion picked up a “foster son whose parents are unknown”. It says they gave him the name Uldis Kurzemnieks.

The end result is a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction documentary that provokes bigger questions about secrets and lies, fact and fiction, family and identity. Should he be judged as a Nazi collaborator? Or as an innocent kid facing a choiceless choice? And, ultimately, what would you or I have done: be killed or join the killers?

Dan Goldberg is the director of Hitler’s Jewish Soldier? – the first documentary in the new season of Australia Uncovered, premiering on SBS and SBS On Demand on February 8.

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