Introducing: Toy Soldier

As a child, Alex Kurzem faced a choice: be killed or join the killers. After escaping the massacre that killed his family during the Holocaust, he’s found by the enemy and taken in as one of their own – becoming a Jewish boy masquerading as a Nazi soldier. He’d live with this false identity for so long, he no longer remembered who he was before. This is the story Alex would tell the world decades later, but could a story so unbelievable be true? Host Dan Goldberg finds out.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  What is your full name?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Aldous Kuzynik.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  And you were like a man who carried within yourself a secret which he didn't want to disclose.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Nobody now.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  The man you're listening to, he believed for most of his life that he'd die before anyone knew who he really was, before he himself really knew.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  As a child, he was found wandering the woods by a group of soldiers during the Second World War.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  And the soldiers, they all loved me, like mother and father. They gave me a uniform, they gave me a birthday, they gave me a name.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  They made him one of their own. They made him a member of Hitler's army.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  But what the soldiers didn't know, what his family and friends wouldn't know for decades, he was Jewish, a Jewish boy masquerading as a Nazi soldier.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  For much of his life, he'd lived with this false identity, forgetting his parents' faces and his real name.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  I'm two persons in one body. One has been living a normal life, and now the other person's waking up in me.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  A strange thing happens as we age. The past can pull you back and unravel the present.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  The story just kept getting crazier and crazier.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  A lot of roadkill on the way through this epic story. A lot of people have been hurt. He was just my dear uncle. Eighty years on, is it possible to uncover who he really is?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I made myself forget my Jewish name. I made myself.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  His argument to me was, I know how I am, I know the story, I'm convinced that it's correct. Why would I do a DNA test? And I kept saying, why wouldn't you? He is the closest family that I have.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  And after living a life of lies, will anyone believe what he calls the truth?

• 2:25Speaker 00

  At what point did you start disbelieving him?

• 2:28Speaker 04

  Straight away from the beginning.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  You were pursuing whether this was another Holocaust hoax?

• 2:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's put it this way. I just wanted to find the truth.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  That's why people didn't believe him.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Because it's an unbelievable story.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  My name is Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's Personally. This is Toy Soldier. Coming soon, wherever you get your podcasts.