Pod Insights Personally Toy Soldier, Episode 1: The Hidden Suitcase About this episode Uldis Kurzemnieks believed he would take his lie to the grave – his life had depended on it. For decades, he told the same story of how he survived the Second World War as a boy, but his niece always believed there was more to the story. Now, she’s learning the whole truth – piece by shocking piece.
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.
0:38 Speaker 04 What is your full name?
0:41 Speaker 04 Aldous Cousing, yes. And you were like a man who carried within yourself a secret. Did you ever think that you have to tell the world what happened to your family? Did you want to take revenge? No, never, never revenge. Just wanted the world to know what can happen. Because not only that they took away your father and mother, the rest of the family, they forced you to take on a different identity. Yeah, it was brainwashed into you in a way. And you had to continue with it? Yeah. Until you became sick and you were in a hospital? Yeah. What thoughts did you have then?
1:27 Speaker 04 I thought, oh, I wish I knew my real name. I knew I didn't have family, but I thought, I wish I knew my name.
1:45 Speaker 05 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.
1:57 Speaker 05 But a strange thing happens as we age. The past can pull you back and unravel the present.
2:09 Speaker 05 The story just kept getting crazier and crazier. He was so desperate to find a name, to find who he was. At what point did you start disbelieving him? Straight away from the beginning. It's a miracle and it is our family. The more he kept refusing, the more it was pushing me to the fact that it wasn't true. If the devil had come along and taken me by the hand, I would have gone with him.
2:40 Speaker 05 My name is Dan Goldberg and this is the story of a lie. One that fractured the family, erased an identity and saved a life.
2:53 Speaker 05 From CBC's Personally, this is Toy Soldier.
3:09 Speaker 05 Let's just chat about Uncle Aldi. He was your uncle, but in a different sense than most people understand the word uncle.
3:19 Speaker 06 I mean, for me, Uncle Aldi was always family. I loved him dearly.
3:25 Speaker 05 This is Beba Mangalas Ford. Beba always knew her uncle wasn't related to her by blood, but it didn't matter.
3:33 Speaker 06 We always understood that he'd been adopted into the family and that that had happened during World War II.
3:43 Speaker 05 Beba knew that the war had separated her uncle from his family as a child and that he'd later been placed with her grandparents in nearby Latvia.
3:53 Speaker 05 By 1949, they fled Europe for Australia with their three daughters and Aldi.
4:00 Speaker 05 He arrived as Aldis Kuzemniaks, but soon he became known as Alex Kuzem.
4:08 Speaker 06 So they probably said to Aldi, Aldis, nah, too hard. We'll call you Alex.
4:15 Speaker 05 I'm sitting with Beba in our home in the Blue Mountains, about an hour west of Sydney. Australia's where her uncle would grow up and grow old.
4:25 Speaker 06 I remember this, sometimes he looked like a koala. Because he had these tufts of silver hair just over his ears here. And he had this round face and the tufty hair and this benign smile.
4:40 Speaker 06 Very koala. What's your first memory? My first memory is that he was always involved with radios and televisions. And he knew a lot about them. And back in those days, we didn't have a television. So the idea that I had an uncle who had access to televisions was just like, wow. And he was super cool because he was different. He was younger than my mother and father. And he was kind of edgy. He was very funny. He was a raconteur. He could tell a story like no one else. And he used to have us in stitches.
5:26 Speaker 06 Whenever we got together, there was always the opportunity for him to tell us about how, when he first started working in Australia, he worked different kinds of jobs. He worked in the railways. But the most interesting to us as children was the fact that one day he woke up in Hyde Park and discovered that Worth Circus had set up next to where he was sleeping.
5:51 Speaker 06 And he enters and he says basically to them, can I join the circus? And of course, he did join the circus. They gave him a job as Elephant Boy, which meant, of course, looking after the elephant, cleaning him. The stories were always told in such a way that there was always like a punchline. He loved telling stories about when he met Frank Sinatra in Sydney, when he was working in the nightclub area. And he had to be Frank Sinatra's minder.
6:27 Speaker 06 Before the show, Aldi had said, Frankie, at some point, just tap me on the shoulder as if you want to speak to me. And when Frankie did tap Aldi on the shoulder, Aldi turned and said, not now Frankie, I'm busy.
6:52 Speaker 05 I can't be sure that all the stories Uldi Tobe were true. I've seen a photo of him as the elephant boy at the circus, so that one seems like it happened. But the punchline about Frank Sinatra? That sounds a lot like a story Sinatra once told on late night TV, about something comedian Don Rickles did to him. I went back and I walked by the table and I said, "How are you, Don? Nice to see you." He said, "Can't you see I'm eating, Frank? What are you doing?"
7:23 Speaker 06 Although he was a very, very happy raconteur and loved to tell stories, there was also a sense that he was a very private person and that he kept to himself in a deep way.
7:38 Speaker 05 And he kept the stories of his time before joining Beba's family, especially close to him.
7:44 Speaker 06 The general story was that he'd been found wandering in the woods or somewhere in some village, looking after goats, sheep, or pigs, or whatever. And that he'd been found by a group of Latvian soldiers during World War II and that he had been rescued by them. And because, apparently, he couldn't remember who his parents were, he couldn't remember anything at all. He said he couldn't remember his name even, or when he was born.
8:23 Speaker 06 There seemed to be no chance of reuniting him with the family, so he was asked to join the group. He obviously jumped at the chance, so the story goes. And it wasn't until the war deepened and the battalion was sent to the eastern front, and it was considered that Uldi, as a young child, was at risk.
8:53 Speaker 06 And so he was brought to Riga, where my grandfather, Jacobs Dennis, managed a chocolate factory. My grandfather, who had three daughters, I think he jumped at the opportunity to have a boy in the family. And so Grandpa welcomed him with open arms, as did my mother and her two sisters. So that was the story about how he came to be in our family.
9:29 Speaker 05 And so fast forward a little bit to where you sensed that there was more of a story and you started to...
9:37 Speaker 06 I think throughout my life, I always thought there was more to the story. And it was hard to know what that story might be. And it was also hard to know how one could ever find out.
9:56 Speaker 06 It wasn't until I was an adult that I started thinking about, well, I wonder what the real story is. And then his eldest son, Mark, with whom I was very close, was visiting one time and we were talking about his father having nightmares and that he had certain memories that were coming back to him. And I kept thinking that if there were nightmares, then possibly there was trauma associated with his early past and that this is what he was revisiting in his dreams. And so I wrote all dear letter
10:41 Speaker 06 and I said that he had a lot of stories that would be worth telling. Would he be willing to do so on tape?
10:56 Speaker 06 You left Latvia on... The 4th of November.
11:02 Speaker 04 That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
11:06 Speaker 05 It's the mid 1990s. Aldi's in his 60s and Beba begins flying to Melbourne to visit him.
11:14 Speaker 06 What I was trying to do was to peel an onion layer by layer because I knew the core of the story was going to take time to uncover and that if there was trauma at the centre of the story, it wasn't something that one could dive into immediately. It was something that I would have to work at gaining Aldi's trust because he was vulnerable.
11:50 Speaker 06 Sometimes he was happy to talk and sometimes he just didn't want to go there.
11:57 Speaker 06 I had to accept that.
12:00 Speaker 04 Ohio said it was much longer than three weeks. I thought it was at least a month.
12:06 Speaker 06 Well, but this is the interesting thing about memory. Number one, you were a little boy.
12:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's why I made a time.
12:11 Speaker 06 And the little boy's memory is very different from an adult.
12:14 Speaker 04 I know, it was a long time, I saw, you know.
12:17 Speaker 06 The moment when things moved forward was when he came out to the kitchen table with a little brown suitcase and he opened it up. And he said, "I've kept this suitcase all my, all my years. I've kept it hidden at the back of my wardrobe.
12:42 Speaker 06 But in here," he says, "is my life."
12:48 Speaker 05 Beba tells me that's when Aldi pulled out a trough of items from his suitcase.
12:54 Speaker 06 There were documents, there were photographs. And of course, I was absolutely entranced because...
13:03 Speaker 06 Now the story was about my family as well, because there was stuff there with my grandfather's signature, with photographs of my mother, photographs of my grandfather, you know, photographs, obviously, of Aldi as this little boy, because we all knew the story that he was with the Lapian Army. Well, that's what it was called, the Lapian Army.
13:32 Speaker 05 In the photos, Aldi looks about seven or eight, maybe even nine years old. His hair is neatly slicked, his small frame in a miniature uniform. On his shoulder hangs a gun in its holster, his hands perched on its barrel. Other soldiers tower above him, smiling.
13:52 Speaker 04 They all loved me, like mother and father. They gave me the best they could give for me. They gave me a uniform, they gave me a birthday, they gave me a name, Aldi Skuzenix.
14:07 Speaker 05 In these conversations, Beba learns for the first time what really happened after the soldiers found Aldi in the woods.
14:18 Speaker 04 So they took you, they gave you an identity, they gave you a birthday. They gave me a uniform. They gave you a rifle. Gave me a rifle. Did they give you any training? We were getting trained before we went to the front in the war. So they trained you how to use the gun, they trained you how to kill. Yeah, I was. Did you kill anyone?
14:41 Speaker 04 Don't remember, I shouldn't anybody at all, except birds and things like that, no. They gave you the rank of private in the beginning? Mm-hmm. When did you become a corporal? I don't know, just, I'm simple. Must have been in Poland to become a corporal, in Poland.
15:00 Speaker 05 Aldi tells Beba part of the battalion's job was to protect the army's trains. He remembers riding on top of them with the other soldiers, machine guns in hand.
15:13 Speaker 04 So you sat up on the top with them? Yeah, on top with them, yeah. With a machine gun? Machine gun, big machine gun, big machine gun.
15:21 Speaker 04 Make a noise.
15:25 Speaker 04 I have such a vivid imagination of you on the train, sitting on top, riding through the Polish countryside. In the dark and getting shot at, too. We were getting shot and bombed. And we had to sort of fire back, but you didn't know where you're running in the dark. But to make, to let them know that you're protecting the train, you had to make a big noise to scare them off.
15:54 Speaker 04 Were you ever frightened? Oh, yeah. One day I was frightened in a truck. We were in a big truck and I was in the back of it. And the truck front was blown up and they attacked the truck and the bullets were coming everywhere where I was and I was hiding amongst them, all the good.
16:09 Speaker 05 Aldi says because of the constant attacks, he and the rest of his battalion lived in an underground bunker.
16:16 Speaker 04 So the only way to live was underground. But in the water from the swamp, you used to seep in. Seep in. If you ever pop out of bed, you need deep mud and water. And the rats, they couldn't get out. And they'd swim in the water and crawl on the beds. You see the night, shining eyes and all this.
16:36 Speaker 04 It's amazing.
16:39 Speaker 04 So many little boys in Australia play at being in war. You were a little boy and you were living war with the soldiers, side by side.
16:54 Speaker 05 As Aldi recounted more and more details, it became clear who had rescued him from the woods and what side of the war they were fighting for.
17:05 Speaker 05 They were a Latvian police battalion that would go on to serve the SS, the elite arm of the Nazi regime, responsible for the final solution.
17:23 Speaker 05 Aldi would become part of Hitler's army.
17:48 Speaker 05 Die Nachricht von Udi, einem blonden, blau geschneideten Kindersoldat, begann zu breitenverbreiten in den Rangungen des Armee, und er wurde sofort ein sensationelles Kind.
17:57 Speaker 04 Und ich wurde ein Maskott für den Nazi-Armee.
18:01 Speaker 05 Ein Maskott für den Nazi-Armee.
18:07 Speaker 05 In 1943 war er in einem Nazi-Propaganda-Film mitgeteilt, "Ein iranischer Kaffeeboy".
18:15 Speaker 04 Der Junge in Uniform ist das Finde Kind der lettischen SS-Freiwilligen Legion, den sie aus ihrem Fronteinsatz mitgebracht hat und der hier erzogen wird.
18:25 Speaker 05 In dem Film ist Udi in voller Uniform, herumzulaufen mit anderen iranischen Kindern. Er geht auf die Höhen, die Arme schwingen, als eine Reihe von Kindern folgt. Auf seinem Schlauch ist der Nazi-Eagle.
18:43 Speaker 04 Die Journalisten kamen zu der Hauptstadt, nahmen mich herum und nahmen mich in die Krankenhäuser, um die verletzte Soldaten zu besuchen, alle Deutschen und whatever nationality sie waren. Sie nahmen mich mit und, Sie wissen, schenkten mir die Hand. Und dann gab es manchmal ein Theater oder irgendwo, sie nahmen mich auf der Bühne, sie zeigten mir diesen iranischen Mann und all das, aber innenwahr wusste ich, es war falsch.
19:11 Speaker 04 Im ganzen Tag, im ganzen Minute, hatte ich mich selbst gesagt, "Nichts zu sagen, dass sie wissen, wer du bist, weil du tot bist, wenn sie es herausfinden."
19:20 Speaker 05 Weil es eine entscheidende Information war, die Udi von den Soldaten versteckte, die ihn retteten, ein Detail, den er von jedem behalten hatte, sogar seiner Familie und Freunde, all diese Jahrzehnte später.
19:34 Speaker 05 Udi war jüdisch.
19:47 Speaker 00 Hi, I just had to tell you that I think your podcast has changed my life.
19:53 Speaker 01 Season one of Sold a Story hit a nerve. It was about teaching kids to read.
19:58 Speaker 02 We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation.
20:02 Speaker 01 Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading.
20:06 Speaker 00 I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.
20:13 Speaker 01 I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.
20:18 Speaker 06 It was a moment when he demonstrated to me that he trusted me with that knowledge. It had taken a year or more, I think, to get to that point where he was able to say to me, "You know, I'm not Russian at all. I'm Jewish."
20:40 Speaker 06 For him, it was a moment of, I guess, release. And he said, "I've never told anyone this before."
20:50 Speaker 06 I felt extremely honored that he trusted me enough. And I felt relieved that he could actually say those words. Once he'd said those, then we could set about looking at what had really happened to him in the past.
21:16 Speaker 04 My first recollection of the war was that we were packed in wagons and we were trying to run away from the Germans. I don't know what town it was, but we were, for a few days, we were in the wagons. The whole Jewish community was running away. But we got caught. The Germans had paratroops coming down and motorbikes. And at night, they all surrounded us. But I don't know what town it was. Somewhere in Russia, near Minsk must have been.
21:48 Speaker 04 They made us go back. They told us to go back where we came from. So my recollection is that we went back to the place I lived. Then they took my father and all the rest of the men away.
22:03 Speaker 04 And my father never came back, but they told us he was killed.
22:11 Speaker 04 Then one day, my mother said, "We're going to be shot tomorrow." She said to me, "We're going to be shot." She knew. And I said, "Well, I don't want to die."
22:24 Speaker 04 And she said, "Well, we have to die all together."
22:28 Speaker 04 I said, "No."
22:31 Speaker 04 So in the middle of the night, I escaped around through the back fence, and I ran away in the hills, near the village.
22:43 Speaker 04 The next morning, I saw my family led down near the forest and shot all of them.
22:55 Speaker 04 Enough to watch it.
23:00 Speaker 04 I was hiding on a hill, and I saw the little valley where they took them all down and shot them.
23:20 Speaker 06 He said that he bit his hand so that he wouldn't cry out as he was watching this terrible scene.
23:31 Speaker 06 At that moment, I was
23:36 Speaker 06 extremely shocked and moved because I couldn't imagine how a child, how he could process this terrible, terrible scene and the loss of his family.
23:53 Speaker 06 And I still don't know. I think he carried that with him his entire life. He knew from that moment on that in order to survive, he had to hide the fact that he was Jewish. And he went to great lengths to do that.
24:15 Speaker 05 Udi says after the massacre of his family, he wandered the area, knocking on doors in search of food and shelter.
24:23 Speaker 04 Well, then I wandered around the area, knocking on people's doors and getting some food. It was very cold. Some people let me sleep in there, on the ovens where they bake the bread.
24:41 Speaker 06 He told me that he found a dead soldier. He took the great coat off the soldier. He put that on to keep himself warm. He took the dead soldier's boots. He stuffed the boots with newspaper in order to keep himself warm. He told me that he tied himself into trees at night with the belt of the uniform so that the wolves couldn't get him, so that he wasn't on the ground. He said he begged for food. He ate whatever he found. Whatever it was, he ate, everything raw.
25:21 Speaker 04 One day I went to a place, and the man in the house, he must have recognized me.
25:28 Speaker 04 And he caught me.
25:30 Speaker 05 Udi says this man recognized he was Jewish.
25:34 Speaker 04 He said, "He's a Jewish boy." And he dragged me to some kind of a school where soldiers were shooting people.
25:47 Speaker 04 And he dragged me there to be shot.
25:53 Speaker 04 I remembered it, and I said, "Oh, well, this is the end of me because the people get lined up and shot. My turn will come." And I thought to myself, "Maybe I'll ask him a bit of bread before. I'm hungry." So I asked the soldier, "Can you give me a bit of bread before you kill me? I'm hungry." And he took pity on me. He took me around the back. He examined me and checked that I was Jewish.
26:20 Speaker 05 Aldi says the soldier asked him to Laura's pants to see whether he was circumcised.
26:25 Speaker 04 And he said to me, "No good, no good." He said, "But I don't want to kill you, and I can't leave you here in the village because you'll perish. So what I'll do? I'll take you with me." He said, "I'll tell the other soldiers that you're a Russian orphan."
26:41 Speaker 04 I got no idea why. No idea, often think why they killed all the other people but left me alive and took me with them.
26:56 Speaker 06 Aldi told me several times how much he felt he hated himself. If he hated anybody, it was himself because he felt he had to turn against his own. He had to learn to pretend to hate all Jews, to laugh, to jeer, to clap at their demise. And that meant he was destroying part of himself every time he did that. It's a different kind of trauma. It's a trauma of the soul.
27:35 Speaker 06 And I think those kind of scars never heal over. They're always there.
27:48 Speaker 06 He witnessed horrific things that a child of his age should never, ever be party to.
27:58 Speaker 06 One of the villages where they stopped, the soldiers wanted to have a bath or a sauna. And there was a little red-haired Jewish girl who was sent to collect towels. Aldi knew that in the next day or so that she would be eliminated, that she would be murdered.
28:25 Speaker 06 But he couldn't say anything, and he couldn't look her in the eye. He was afraid she might recognize him, but he couldn't warn her.
28:36 Speaker 06 So for the rest of his life, he carried that guilt with him.
28:44 Speaker 06 I think one of them that bothered him a great deal was when he came across a couple of very badly wounded soldiers in a ditch. They clearly weren't going to survive, they were in terrible pain, and they were begging him to shoot them. He just couldn't do it. But they begged and begged, and he looked over his shoulder or somewhere, he spotted a grenade. He said, he grabbed the grenade, pulled the pin, and threw it in the ditch.
29:32 Speaker 06 It's unimaginable that a child
29:37 Speaker 06 would have to make that kind of a choice or a decision. And I think this personifies what life was like for Aldi. He was constantly faced with those kind of unimaginable choices.
29:57 Speaker 04 Later on, I thought to myself, well, you're part of them, but I wasn't. I was forced into it. I didn't volunteer to join him or anything. If the devil had come along and taken me by the hand, I would have gone with him.
30:21 Speaker 06 He was a kind man. He never harbored any hate or desire for revenge at any time. I think this ability to transcend his pain, his suffering, his loss, his loss of identity, his loss of culture, his loss of sense of being, his ability to transcend all of that and not hate is probably the most remarkable thing about him. He was just my dear uncle Aldi, and I loved him.
31:02 Speaker 05 And you believed him.
31:13 Speaker 05 The story of what Aldi survived and how he survived it was unbelievable. In the years that followed, his story would be heard around the world as Aldi desperately searched for the name he said was stolen from him. But eighty years on, is it possible to uncover who he really is? And after living a life of lies, will anyone believe what he calls the truth?
31:49 Speaker 05 Coming up on the series.
31:52 Speaker 04 His argument to me was, I know who 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?
32:00 Speaker 02 I said, you're not going to believe this. We found a relative that survived the war.
32:07 Speaker 05 You were pursuing whether this was another Holocaust hoax. Let's put it this way, I just wanted to find the truth. A lot of roadkill on the way through this epic story. A lot of people have been hurt.
32:21 Speaker 04 He is the closest family that I have.
32:24 Speaker 06 While I was very excited, part of me felt that seemed too easy.
32:30 Speaker 02 That's why people didn't believe him, because it's an unbelievable story.
32:38 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 Quait, Barry Resnick, Maris Lakkas and Keith Moore. Anna Ashitay is our coordinating producer. Our senior producers are Ashley Mack, Jeff Turner and Andrew Friesen. Executive producers are Ceso Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tonya Springer is the senior manager.
33:20 Speaker 05 Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. Archival material for this episode comes from the Melbourne Holocaust Museum and the Associated Press.
33:37 Speaker 03 For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.
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