"NAZI MASCOT" ENDS 60 YEARS OF SILENCE

'Nazi mascot' ends almost 60 years of silence
MELBOURNE (AFP) — As a five-year-old, Alex Kurzem watched Nazi soldiers slaughter members of his Jewish family in 1941, little realising that he would spend the rest of World War II acting as a child mascot for the Latvian SS.

Forced to hide his Jewish background from the terrifying stormtroopers who became his protectors, Kurzem told no one of his wartime experiences for more than 50 years before finally unburdening himself to his son.

After revealing the secrets he said were eating away at him "like vipers in my bones," Kurzem's tale has been published in Australia, the country where he sought refuge from the turmoil of post-war Europe.

His book "The Mascot" details a story so remarkable that Holocaust authorities initially dismissed it as nonsense, until research by Kurzem's son Mark unearthed documents, photographs and film footage to back its accuracy.

Part of the evidence is a confronting image from a newsreel that shows Kurzem as an impish six-year-old in a miniature SS uniform, complete with jackboots and tiny toy machine gun, posing with grinning Nazi soldiers.

It contrasts with a photograph showing Kurzem in late 1944, at a party for what he calls the "pretend birthday" given to him by the Nazis, where he appears blank and exhausted by the horrors witnessed in the intervening years.

"I just switched off the whole time I was with them, I couldn't think about what I saw because I would have gone mad," Kurzem told AFP in his adopted hometown of Melbourne.

"Every moment I was terrified they would find out I was a Jew and that would have been the end of me. I was totally alone and I could never relax."

Kurzem, who believes he is 72 but is unsure because precise records of his birth have never been found, was born in the village of Koidanov in Belarus, where he lived until the Nazis came on October 20, 1941.

He fled to a nearby forest, watching from a treetop as the soldiers shot his mother then bayoneted his sister and brother.

The boy lived wild in the forest for months, clothing himself in oversized garments taken from dead bodies and climbing trees to avoid packs of wolves on the hunt.

Eventually, a woodsman caught him and turned him over to a Latvian police patrol in a bid to curry favour with the Nazis who were eliminating Jews in the area as part of Hitler's Final Solution.

But a sergeant with the patrol, Jekabs Kulis, separated Kurzem from a group of Jews bound for the extermination camps and told him never to reveal his background.

The reason for Kulis' action still mystifies Kurzem....

It turned out his birth name was Ilya Galperin and his father, who was not in the family village when the massacre occurred, survived the Nazi death camps and remarried, leaving a son named Erich. Kurzem has since met his half-brother.

"In some ways that was the strangest thing of all for me," said Kurzem, who remains spritely and alert despite his age.

"I'd spent so much time thinking I had no family except for the one I raised in Australia, I thought they'd all been killed by the Nazis but I'd had a half-brother all this time in Europe."

Kurzem said telling his story laid the ghosts of his past to rest, allowing him to finally place a rose on the grave of his mother, who urged him to flee when the Nazis approached their village more than half a century earlier.