Pod Insights Personally Toy Soldier, Episode 4: A Complicated Miracle About this episode Alex finally takes a DNA test, hoping to prove his identity – once and for all. What will it find? Who will it find? The results surprise everyone, even Alex.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hi, I just had to tell you that I think your podcast has changed my life.
0:06 Speaker 01 Season one of Sold a Story hit a nerve. It was about teaching kids to read.
0:11 Speaker 02 We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation.
0:15 Speaker 01 Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading.
0:19 Speaker 00 I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.
0:26 Speaker 01 I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.
0:31 Speaker 03 This is a CBC Podcast.
0:36 Speaker 04 We're rolling. Okay, Martin, interview.
0:41 Speaker 05 Why don't you grab the briefcase and sit on your hunches and bring it out?
0:51 Speaker 05 This is the famous briefcase that you grew up with.
0:54 Speaker 06 What I grew up with, that we never looked at. He never really let us see inside it.
1:04 Speaker 05 This is Martin Kurzum, Alex's middle son. We're sitting in his home in Melbourne's western suburbs with his father's prized possession in between us.
1:15 Speaker 05 The suitcase. Tell me about the suitcase and tell me at what point in growing up did it become...
1:23 Speaker 06 That would come out on a Saturday or a Sunday, whenever Dad used to tell his stories. He used to tell a few stories.
1:30 Speaker 05 Alex would pull items from the case one by one, telling his kids about them, then quickly shut the lid again.
1:37 Speaker 06 Dad was very protective. It never left his side. But he always said, oh, his life story's in it.
1:45 Speaker 05 It had travelled with Alex since he escaped the war as a child, slowly filling to its brim over decades.
1:54 Speaker 05 Until recently, Martin had never seen inside it.
1:59 Speaker 06 We never, even up until three days ago, I didn't want to open the suitcase.
2:05 Speaker 06 I felt like, I don't know, I felt like I was invading his privacy.
2:11 Speaker 05 Just describe what you... Found in it.
2:16 Speaker 06 Photos, newspaper clips, letters from people all over the world. Just a myfield of things that I didn't know existed, yeah.
2:27 Speaker 05 But it gives you not a reminder, a confirmation of how massive and global this story became.
2:37 Speaker 06 Yeah, considering, you know, they went to tell his story, I think it was about ninety six or ninety seven. There was more doubters than believers. And I could imagine how he felt. People doubting it would have made it pretty, pretty tough.
2:58 Speaker 05 But it became a blockbuster story.
3:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, it didn't in good and bad ways, you know.
3:09 Speaker 05 And then the final twist.
3:14 Speaker 06 In two thousand nineteen, for my sixtieth, I got a, um, an ancestry DNA kit. It said I was forty nine percent Irish.
3:24 Speaker 06 Fifty percent Jewish.
3:33 Speaker 06 So come around to dad and I say, well, here it is. If I'm fifty percent Jewish, you must be a hundred percent.
3:40 Speaker 06 It's a no brainer. So I said, what do you want to do?
3:47 Speaker 06 He said, send Colleen Fitzpatrick an email.
3:51 Speaker 05 Colleen's the forensic scientist who uses genealogy to solve cold cases. She'd been investigating Alex's identity for a decade when Martin sent her that email. She had long pleaded with Alex to take his own DNA test, but he'd refused again and again.
4:11 Speaker 05 Until now.
4:18 Speaker 02 And the results were that, in fact, as he claimed, he was 100% Ashkenazi Jewish.
4:27 Speaker 05 There was finally proof of what Alex had always said, what many had refused to believe. He was Jewish.
4:37 Speaker 05 But he wasn't who he thought he was.
4:46 Speaker 05 I'm Dan Gobert. I'm from CBC's Personally. This is Toy Soldier.
5:04 Speaker 05 There are a million Holocaust survival stories, but this one somehow sits in a different kind of plane in terms of pinning the truth. And what we'd love you to do this morning is to help us pinpoint some of the historical facts around Alex Kirshen.
5:23 Speaker 02 Right. I will do my best to answer your question.
5:30 Speaker 05 Alex's DNA test had now confirmed the most crucial part of his story. And what's more, it determined where he was from. DNA tied him to the Belarusian village of Kordynov, the place he'd always remembered as his home. So what about the rest of his story? The massacre he witnessed, the warning he got that allowed him to escape, the battalion that took him in, the new identity he was given? What else can we find proof of? I've come to Conrad Quape for some answers. He's a historian and leading Holocaust scholar in Australia.
6:08 Speaker 05 Let's just take a step back and just in a brief way, I know for historians that's difficult, but just give us a sense of 1941, what was happening in the war?
6:22 Speaker 02 The Germans launched their war of destruction against the Soviet Union in June 1941, and within days, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarusia and Estonia were taken. And then the military took over. And at the same time, mobile killing units came and started to liquidate Jews, communists and others.
6:46 Speaker 05 The boy was from Koidanov, which was in Belarusia. So that switched the focus to the Jews of Belarusia.
6:54 Speaker 02 The destruction of the Jewish community in Belarusia was much higher because there were more Jews living there and there was a higher degree of partisan warfare. So Belarusia is one of the key centres of the killing field of the Holocaust.
7:12 Speaker 05 Let's get into a bit of detail then. Koidanov, just give us a sense of what this shtero was like and what happened on October 21, 1941.
7:22 Speaker 02 Koidanov is a city of some 4,000, 3,000 people. At the beginning, more or less, one-third were Jews. In 1941, there were still some 1,000 Jews living in Koidanov. It's a very old stetl, so it has had a reputation as a famous vibrant Jewish community. South of Minsk. And then, in autumn of 1941, there was a very famous killing operation. The Jews were arrested, men, women and children. They were driven to the outskirts of the village
8:04 Speaker 02 and there was a huge pit prepared for them. Then, the victims were undressed. They had to line up at the edge of the pit and they were shot by marksmen. And the Germans and the Lithuanians learnt what was then become known in the language of the perpetrators, the Sardine Method. The victims were driven, group by group, into the pit. They fell once they were targeted and then normally six layers. And once the killing was over, then sand was levelled the ground and they disappeared.
8:48 Speaker 05 The details of this massacre line up with Alex's memory of what happened to his family.
8:55 Speaker 02 On the 20th of October, these killing units arrived in Koidanov. They wanted to shoot the Jews, but they couldn't do that because there was a storm and the climatic condition didn't... They didn't allow that. And they returned on the 21st of October. That is the official report of the German reserve battalion.
9:25 Speaker 05 This is a little bit of a revelation for me, and I'll tell you why. Because the mascot, in his testimonies and in his media appearances, told the same story again and again and again. My mom told me we're going to be shot tomorrow. And some critics and some skeptics said the Nazis never operated like that. They came, they killed. They didn't come and say, "G'day, we're going to kill you tomorrow." They came and they killed. Now, what you're saying is, they did come, but the weather was too bad, so they had to come the next day. Well, that fits.
10:01 Speaker 02 That's correct.
10:01 Speaker 05 That fits entirely with the mascot's central narrative that people have questioned.
10:09 Speaker 05 How do you know that they...
10:10 Speaker 02 Because that was in the trial against the commander of the German reserve battalion. And they went through the whole killing operation.
10:21 Speaker 02 They said that we arrived on the 20th, couldn't do it. And then next day, the weather was better, and we did it. So that is archivally or historically recorded.
10:39 Speaker 05 What Konrad's telling me, it's astonishing. This is the first I'm learning of a piece of history that corroborates one of the most contested details of Alex's story. Many doubted that the Nazis would allow anyone to escape in the way that Alex did, that our community would have received any warning of what was to come. But Konrad says, in some cases, that's exactly what happened.
11:09 Speaker 05 Ultimately, you're saying it's entirely feasible that they knew they were going to be killed the next day?
11:15 Speaker 02 Everybody knew, once the pit was prepared, that Jews would be killed. Yeah, the Germans couldn't come simply and then shoot them. There had to be a logistic preparation.
11:31 Speaker 05 It's important to note that not every historical record detailing this massacre mentions what Conrad found: the delay caused by bad weather. But Conrad also says a Jewish person in Koidinoff at that time would have known what awaited them soon enough.
11:52 Speaker 02 At that stage, in October 41, all Jewish community in that era knew that Jews were killed. Because we're talking about October 41, that is already three months after the first wave of these open-air shootings, of the Holocaust by bullets.
12:14 Speaker 05 Okay, so the boy says his mom told him they were going to die. He escapes, and he says he witnesses his family being massacred. He says from a hill.
12:24 Speaker 02 From a hill, yeah. Okay, that is the location within which the killing took place.
12:32 Speaker 05 You said it did take place up a hill?
12:34 Speaker 02 At a hillside.
12:37 Speaker 05 After the massacre, Alex escapes into the nearby forest. He couldn't be sure exactly how long he hid in the woods, how long it was before the Latvian battalion picked him up. Do we have any documentary evidence of this boy being picked up by the battalion?
12:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, there is one distinct document, which is kept at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in the United States. And I'm going to read in order from the Schumer Battalion dated of the 10th of January 1943.
13:16 Speaker 02 "Today, the Latvian Defence Unit 18, Kosmene Battalion, looks back on the year's progress from the 11th of January 1942. Counted in the battalion from the 12th of July 42, as Kosmene Battalion's foster son, is the 10-years-old boy, found during last summer's July mission, whose parents are unknown. The boy has been named Uldes Kurzemieniks."
13:55 Speaker 05 Wow.
13:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's definitely not a forgery. Yeah, these are, well, have been original documents which have been brought by the Latvian soldiers in Germany.
14:09 Speaker 05 That confirms that they picked up a boy, so it fits. That's the historical record.
14:18 Speaker 05 July 1942. That's when Alex was taken in by the battalion. So that means if Alex escaped Koidanov in October 41, he survived months and months in the forest, including a brutal winter. While the soldiers guessed his age to be 10, we can't be sure just how young he was.
14:40 Speaker 02 I have problems with six months living on his own. I know from adult partisan fighters who went into the forest, they've encountered an anarchy of forest and they hardly couldn't survive it. And some went even back into the ghettos because they had a much more safer environment there. He was a young boy, how he did that. There is one tiny element which might explain the survival. If you grow up in Koidanov, surrounding with forest, knowing how you can eat certain things, how you can live in forest, he might have survived it, but I found it
15:24 Speaker 02 still difficult to understand how he was able to survive that long in the forest.
15:35 Speaker 05 Alex has always maintained he was sometimes given food and shelter from locals during this time.
15:42 Speaker 05 It's one of those people who eventually turns him in to be killed by the battalion. But Konrad offers another possibility.
15:51 Speaker 02 It could have been that months later, because there were some Jews surviving in Koidanov. There was a second massacre in early March 1942 in Koidanov. And there were 3,000 Jews massacred. These were refugees deported from the SS from Minsk to Koidanov to be shot there, 3,000. He might have witnessed here the massacre and then he would have escaped and only survived three months in the nearby under totally different and much more safe conditions. I don't know that and no one knows that.
16:32 Speaker 05 Alex does remember he and his family trying to flee towards Minsk and then being brought back to his village of Koidanov before the killings began. So maybe the massacre he survived was the one in March. We'll likely never know for sure.
16:49 Speaker 05 What we do know is that after being picked up by the battalion, Alex spent several months with them, witnessing what they carried out.
16:59 Speaker 02 The clear mission, the task of these auxiliaries was to assist the Germans in liquidating ghettos, in fighting and killing partisans and in following what you could call the order given to them from the Germans.
17:19 Speaker 02 At the beginning, I had some doubts on the story of this legendary mascot.
17:27 Speaker 05 And now?
17:29 Speaker 02 I am convinced that he is an authentic figure.
17:52 Speaker 04 It sort of verifies what I've always been telling people. I'm still feel that...
17:59 Speaker 05 This is Alex in 1998, when he believed he'd found his own proof in the form of the Galperin family.
18:08 Speaker 04 And it verifies my story that I come from Koidenov and a story that I couldn't invent, you know?
18:18 Speaker 05 The Galperins, a Jewish family from Koidenov, had heard Alex's story and recognised it. They believed he was a relative of theirs, who'd been presumed killed in the Holocaust. When they claimed Alex as one of their own, it corroborated his story. And Alex believed he'd finally found what he'd been looking for: his identity and his family.
18:46 Speaker 07 When Aldi told me, I think it was along the lines of: "Baba, Baba, they've found my family!"
18:55 Speaker 05 Alex's niece Baba recalls the moment when he told her the news.
19:00 Speaker 07 He was so excited at the thought that he did have a family, that he did have a name.
19:12 Speaker 07 And now, all of a sudden, his name was Ilya. Baba, I have a name. My name is Ilya.
19:25 Speaker 07 It was massive. It was life-affirming for Aldi. He really felt that finally, he had a name. Finally, he had an identity. Finally, he'd found a family.
19:43 Speaker 07 You know, for him, this was huge, as big as it gets, you know?
19:54 Speaker 07 While I was very excited at the thought that this could be, part of me felt that seemed too easy and I wasn't quite sure.
20:07 Speaker 07 It just seemed, yeah, too easy.
20:14 Speaker 07 But as far as I was concerned, I didn't care. If he was happy at having found some family, even if they weren't real family, even if they weren't genetic family, and if they were happy because they'd found a long-lost member, then it didn't matter to me whether that was real or true, if he felt it was. But yeah, I didn't know. And unless they had a DNA test, how would we know?
20:51 Speaker 05 For reasons I still don't really understand, Alex would wait years to take a DNA test. But when he finally did, his DNA showed that he was Jewish, that he was from the village he'd always believed he was from.
21:08 Speaker 05 But it also showed he was not Ilya Galperin.
21:14 Speaker 05 So if he wasn't Ilya, who the hell was he?
21:27 Speaker 07 Hi, I just had to tell you that I think your podcast has changed my life.
21:33 Speaker 01 Season one of Sold a Story hit a nerve. It was about teaching kids to read. We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation. Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading.
21:46 Speaker 00 I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.
21:53 Speaker 01 I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.
22:07 Speaker 07 I think Aldi must have felt like he'd been kicked in the guts back to the beginning where he has no name and to have that hope and expectation of finding your identity, finding out who you are, finally being able to put on a cloak that says, "This is my name, this is who I am." Now that seemed to have evaporated.
22:37 Speaker 05 What had evaporated was all the evidence that pointed to Alex being Ilya Galperin, the lining up of places and dates, Alex's resemblance to his apparent father, the apple tree in the backyard. It all turned out to be nothing more than coincidence, a story that both sides believed to be true because they really wanted it to be.
23:05 Speaker 06 He's not Ilya Galperin.
23:09 Speaker 06 So his dad wasn't Solomon Galperin and his half-brother wasn't Eric Galperin,
23:18 Speaker 06 according to DNA results.
23:21 Speaker 05 Alex's son Martin again.
23:24 Speaker 06 He just got knocked from side to side, you know, he must have just been beaten his head just and to be honest, like he was getting on frail and he was just confused with the whole thing, but you know.
23:37 Speaker 05 But the DNA test didn't more than determine who he wasn't, it also brought him much closer to who he was. And this time Alex could be sure in his joy and relief.
23:51 Speaker 06 This was the final, this was it. You couldn't deny what we've come to now.
23:59 Speaker 05 What they'd come to now is Alex's real family.
24:14 Speaker 05 So just for ordinary folks who aren't forensic investigators like yourself, you're 100% sure he's a member of the Edelman-Solsky family? Yes, 100% sure.
24:29 Speaker 05 Colleen Fitzpatrick again.
24:32 Speaker 05 Once Alex's DNA was entered into the ancestry database, close relatives began to appear. He came up with some cousins in Canada that were like first cousins once removed. These are very, in our book, these are close relatives. So we were unbelievably ecstatic. You know, there are people like the Holocaust survivors that would do anything to know who their parents were, to be connected with, you know, relatives. They've grown up in a vacuum. Granted that Alex was with the Dennis family in Australia, but there's nothing like knowing your own mother and father.
25:11 Speaker 05 You know, I've done so many adoption searches. And it's really funny, I'll come to the answer late at night. And I always say, should I call him right now and wake him up and tell him I found his birth parents? Or should I wait in the morning?
25:27 Speaker 05 And I always wait till the morning because I say, let the guy sleep one more night in his old identity because tomorrow he's going to be a brand-new person.
25:50 Speaker 05 Alex was now in his 80s, but finally, he could be certain he had found a part of his family. And he'd found them while they were still alive, although living on the other side of the world.
26:07 Speaker 03 In 2020, around March, I get an email from someone by the name of Martin Kurtson.
26:15 Speaker 03 And it didn't sound very Jewish, but he says, "We are related, so can you send me some pictures?"
26:22 Speaker 05 This is Leon Edelman, Alex's closest genetic match.
26:27 Speaker 03 And he sends me a note saying, "By the way, do you have a picture of your dad or..."
26:35 Speaker 03 Have your picture just to see if there is any similarities between my dad. He actually writes.
26:44 Speaker 05 Leon knew nothing of Martin or his father. What he did know was that only a few members of his family had survived the Holocaust. Roughly how many of your family perished in the Holocaust?
26:58 Speaker 03 I have my mother's sisters, two sisters, survived in the Soviet Union. The two sisters of my father who immigrated to the United States. His brother, Monia, we don't know what happened to him. We don't know. So in a sense, all of the family disappeared.
27:29 Speaker 05 Leon's parents survived the Holocaust and he was born shortly after the war's end. Later in life, he moved to Canada, to Montreal. And that's where Martin's email would find him.
27:42 Speaker 03 And I think within a week or even less than that, I get an email from another person.
27:50 Speaker 03 Colleen Fitzpatrick, who introduces herself and she says she's helping someone by the name of Arden Kurtzam find the origins of his father. And that's Alex.
28:06 Speaker 03 But she didn't tell me the whole story.
28:11 Speaker 05 What the DNA found was that Leon's father and Alex's father were most likely half-brothers.
28:19 Speaker 03 Based on the DNA modeling, Alex and I are first half cousins.
28:27 Speaker 05 The two share a paternal grandmother, but because they don't share a paternal grandfather, they don't share a last name.
28:36 Speaker 05 Leon had never been told of his half cousin, never been told his name.
28:42 Speaker 05 Leon searched through what remains of his family's archives, looking for some sign of Alex, but there is no record of him.
28:56 Speaker 05 From the rubble of the Holocaust, there's not many
29:02 Speaker 05 pieces of data or information or photographs left. But this is one of them, which I think
29:11 Speaker 05 is the only photograph that brings you and Alex almost together. Yeah, and I think that, you know... Leon shows me a black and white photo from 1930. A sharply dressed family stares back at us. So, of course, the lady in the middle, this is Fruma, which is my grandmother.
29:37 Speaker 05 My grandmother. And Alex's grandmother are the same.
29:43 Speaker 05 On the far left is my father. And on the extreme right of the photograph is Monia, my father's brother. Monia is believed to be Alex's father. And what I assume again is Monia's wife and probably Alex's mother. With the child, that most probably is Alex's sibling.
30:19 Speaker 05 The child in the photograph does bear a striking resemblance to Alex, but it's likely not him. Alex would have been born after this photo was taken.
30:30 Speaker 05 With Leon not having any photos of Alex, it's possible that the only ones that still exist of him as a young child are those of him in a soldier's uniform.
30:47 Speaker 05 As Colleen begins her work with Leon, she also reaches out to Alex's other genetic matches.
30:55 Speaker 07 And then I started getting phone calls from California, which I ignored because I thought it was just a spam phone call.
31:06 Speaker 05 Lindy Meshwork in Toronto had recently uploaded her DNA to the ancestry registry. That's when the calls from California began.
31:16 Speaker 07 And then finally, something said to me, "Just answer the phone."
31:21 Speaker 07 And I did, and it was Colleen Fitzpatrick.
31:26 Speaker 07 And she said, "I've been trying to reach you." I said, "Yes, I know." And she explains why she was trying to call me. And I was just blown away. And she told me that on ancestry, I was a match to Alex Curzum, and pretty close match, and that he was a Holocaust survivor.
31:55 Speaker 05 Lindy's also related to Alex on his father's side, according to the DNA. They're second cousins, meaning they share great-grandparents.
32:04 Speaker 07 I was totally overwhelmed.
32:06 Speaker 05 And emotional?
32:08 Speaker 07 Very, very. I mean, it was miraculous.
32:14 Speaker 07 As far as we knew, everyone was gone. We didn't know that there was anybody left.
32:22 Speaker 07 Yeah, so I think the first thing I did, I think I called my father. I said, "You're not going to believe this. We found a relative that survived the war."
32:37 Speaker 05 In his 90s, Lindy's father is Alex's oldest surviving relative. But he doesn't know Alex's real name either.
32:46 Speaker 05 At this point, it's possible there's no one left alive who can tell us Alex's first or last name.
33:08 Speaker 05 Talk me through the revelation that it's actually a miracle, but a complicated miracle.
33:16 Speaker 07 Very complicated.
33:19 Speaker 05 Colleen, does she tell you the whole story?
33:24 Speaker 07 She said that he had been found. Somehow, he had survived and taken in by these soldiers, who eventually made him a mascot. And I said, like, how could that be? First of all, he was Jewish, right? And why would they let him live? It was just, it was crazy, absolutely crazy. So she told me that he had been interviewed on 60 Minutes. And so I looked it up. And it just, the story just kept getting crazier and crazier.
34:10 Speaker 03 Lyndy, she says, have you seen the movie? I said, what movie? And said, there's a movie about Alex, and this is, it's a crazy story.
34:20 Speaker 05 Once Lyndy tells her cousin Leon there's more to Alex's story, he starts digging. Leon finds everything there is online: articles, documentaries, interviews. That's when he learns the whole truth: that Alex survived the Holocaust on the side of the Nazis.
34:42 Speaker 05 So I just want to try and understand your state of mind. If you can take me back there. On the one hand, my God, it's a miracle. We've found a Holocaust survivor. Nobody survived. They found him, and you're related. That's a miracle. On the other hand, you're looking up the internet at this guy, and it's not...
35:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, and that's exactly the difficult time that I had. He is a family, the closest family that I think I have on my father's side. There's nobody else that I have. But I now have also to resolve in my own mind The other side, which is he ends up with a brigade whose goal was to chase the partisans. These are the partisans that my father was in.
35:49 Speaker 05 Leon's father, Alex's uncle, was a partisan, one of the guerrilla fighters resisting the Nazis. Possibly the same partisans that Alex's battalion was ordered to kill. Meinjow was partisan. I remember protecting the trains. You used to sit on top of the trains and you had guns. I used to fire them in the night.
36:23 Speaker 03 How did my father end up in the partisans is he was in a labor camp near Minsk. I think, I suspect that later on he ended up in the Minsk ghetto. When the Minsk ghetto was liquidated, there were a number of people who escaped from the ghetto and joined the partisans. And I have gotten the information from Colleen. The information about the battalion where Alex, who Alex was with, they have very accurate records. And if you try and put two and two together,
37:05 Speaker 03 July 1942, when the ghetto, Minsk ghetto, is being liquidated and when the people are running to the partisans is exactly when the battalion finds Alex.
37:17 Speaker 05 That's correct.
37:25 Speaker 05 I share this revelation with Alex's son, Martin.
37:30 Speaker 05 It's not a far stretch to imagine that your dad's battalion Mm-hmm. was killing. Family, eh?
37:42 Speaker 05 That's mind blowing.
37:45 Speaker 05 Hmm. Yeah, it is. It is mind blowing.
37:58 Speaker 05 From his archives, Leon pulls out a letter his father wrote to relatives during the war.
38:06 Speaker 03 And he writes, "This is I, Hillel Edelman, the hero who stood against the..."
38:17 Speaker 03 I knew I'm not going to be able to read this.
38:26 Speaker 03 "The hero who stood against the murderer's hand." I am...
38:32 Speaker 03 A partisan.
38:36 Speaker 03 I was with the partisans for two years.
38:42 Speaker 03 I can't...
38:46 Speaker 03 Sorry.
38:51 Speaker 03 I have to get up. Inexcessively.
38:56 Speaker 05 You OK?
38:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
39:06 Speaker 03 It is an assumption at this point, but it may very well be that Alex, on the train, shooting in the air, he may have been on the other side of the partisans that my father was with. And how do you reconcile this?
39:44 Speaker 05 Coming up, on the final episode of Toy Soldier.
39:48 Speaker 03 I know that the next question will be, "What do you think about Alex and what he did?"
39:55 Speaker 01 I don't know still who I am. I don't know my real name still. Soon you will know. Soon you will know. Today, we come together to remember a survivor in every sense of the word.
40:18 Speaker 05 You've been listening to Toy Soldier from CBC's Personally. The series is reported and produced by me, Dan Goldberg. It's written by Alina Gosch and myself. Mixing and sound design by Julia Whitman. Studio recording and direction by Greg Crittenden. Research by Colin Fitzpatrick, Beba Manglasford, Emeritus Professor Conrad Quaid, Barry Resnick, Maris Lakkas and Keith Moore. Anna Ashite is our coordinating producer. Our senior producers are Ashley Mack, Jeff Turner and Andrew Friesen. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tonya Springer is the senior manager. Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.
41:04 Speaker 05 Archival material for this episode comes from the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.
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