Alex Kurzem

Alex Kurzem (believed to have been born Ilya Galperin in Belarus, either in 1935 or 1936) is a retired Australian television repairman, whose experiences in World War II have been the subject of a book and film.

History

He had three children with wife Patricia (died 2003), and immigrated to the country from a Displaced Person's camp in Hamburg, Germany, in 1949.

Kurzem's parents (Believed to be Solomon Galperin and Chana Gildenberg) were Jewish and on October 21, 1941, his mother and younger brother and sister were exterminated along with approximately 1,600 other Russian Jews in Koidanov (now Dzyarzhynsk, Belarus). After weeks or months of living in the forests and begging for food (the precise date of his rescue is unknown), he was saved from certain death by Latvian Sergeant Jekabs Kulis. While being lined up for execution, Kulis took an interest in him and adopted him as the battalion's mascot, having secretly warned him never to reveal his Jewish identity. Latvian and German soldiers knew him as a Russian orphan who had lost his parents in the forest, and even when he grew up, Kurzem never told his wife or sons that he was Jewish.

Throughout his childhood, Kurzem appeared in Nazi propaganda media as an Aryan mascot, including at least one newsreel. On one occasion Kurzem claims to have been ordered by his commanding officer, Karlis Lobe, to hand out chocolates to other Jews to calm them as they boarded trucks that took them to be exterminated. Unbeknown to Kurzem, his probable father, Solomon Galperin, had joined a group of Russian partisans; he was later caught and sent to Auschwitz. Galperin returned to Dzyarzhynsk after the war, remarried, and died in 1975 without ever knowing, according to Kurzem, that his eldest son had survived.

In 2002, Kurzem's son Mark (died November 2009) wrote and produced a documentary (with Lina Caneva) entitled The Mascot, which detailed his father's childhood among the Latvian Nazi SS. Mark later wrote a book, also called The Mascot (2007), which tells the same story, although it conflicts in many details with the earlier documentary.

Alex Kurzem's application for Article 2 reparations was approved by the Jewish Claims Conference in the late 1990s. Typical applications contain a detailed narrative of the applicant's life during the Holocaust. Kurzem has refused requests for copies of his application materials. Kurzem also recorded video testimonies of his Holocaust experiences in 1996 and 1998 at the Melbourne Holocaust Center, but has placed an embargo on them, preventing them from being released to the public during his lifetime. He also refuses to release other materials he has in his possession that would support his claims that he is Ilya Galperin. In December 2010, Alex Kurzem was approached by Lina Cavena, the co-producer of The Mascot to take a Y-DNA test to confirm his was the half-brother of Erik Galperin in Minsk. He refused.

See also

Solomon Perel

References

• Mark Kurzem & Lina Caneva, The Mascot (Australian documentary for ABC television, 2002)
• Mark Kurzem, The Mascot (2007)

External links

• The Mascot, TheAge.com
• The secret history of the Nazi mascot, BBC
• The Nazis' Little Mascot
• 'Nazi mascot' ends almost 60 years of silence
• 'The Youngest Corporal In The Nazi Army, 60 Minutes