Pod Insights Personally Toy Soldier, Episode 2: Born a Second Time About this episode Uldis is now Alex – living an ordinary, happy life in Australia, but the horrors of his past have resurfaced. Fifty years after his name was stolen from him, can he find it again? A letter from Minsk might hold the answers.
Transcript 4,073 words · 13 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals. No kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
0:31 Speaker 01 This is a CBC Podcast.
0:36 Speaker 02 So Philip, it's been a long time. We've been talking for months and months and months about this strange story.
0:44 Speaker 03 Yes, but eventually we're finding out the truth about it.
0:52 Speaker 02 I'm sitting down with Philip Mizel, a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor.
0:57 Speaker 03 It's an important story.
0:59 Speaker 02 Why is it important?
1:01 Speaker 03 We have to find out the truth. Who was Alex Kurzum?
1:10 Speaker 02 Alex Kurzum. That's the man I've been calling Aldi Kurzum the X. Aldi was the name given to him by the Latvian soldiers who found him during the war and made him their mascot. But Alex is the name he took on in Australia.
1:29 Speaker 02 Philip and Alex first met at the Melbourne Holocaust Centre in 1996. Philip's job there was to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors like himself.
1:41 Speaker 03 It was a main task to collect as many testimonies as possible.
1:45 Speaker 02 And these are all Holocaust survivors?
1:47 Speaker 03 All Holocaust survivors.
1:51 Speaker 02 Philip would spend almost 30 years collecting these stories.
1:56 Speaker 03 I participated in interviewing of 1,000 people. Alex was one of them.
2:06 Speaker 02 This was just a few months after Alex first shared the secrets of his past with his niece Beba.
2:14 Speaker 04 His main concern was to find his identity.
2:20 Speaker 04 Because he didn't know his name, he didn't know his parents' name, he wasn't aware of exactly when he was born. And I sensed a deep longing for him, to find his identity, to find his place in the world.
2:42 Speaker 02 But Alex only had a few clues to go on.
2:46 Speaker 04 He said that all his life he'd kept three words locked inside. There was the word Pannock, there was the word Koidnov, and there was the word Tanner. So, Pannock, he thought, might be his name. Koidnov was the name of the village he thought he was from. And Tanner was the profession of his father. So these three things he had kept tightly within himself, protected.
3:26 Speaker 04 He was desperate to see if Pannock was his name and if he could find family. I suggested to him that really the best way was for him to go to the Holocaust Centre in Melbourne and to start that search. And speaking to Philip Meisel would be the second thing.
3:53 Speaker 05 Philip Meisel is interviewing at the Jewish Holocaust Centre Oral History Project, Mr Alex Kuzim on the 12th of September 96. Mr Kuzim's story is rather unusual.
4:17 Speaker 02 Alex's story makes him a different kind of Holocaust survivor, but a survivor nonetheless. And now he's here to start the search for who he was before the Holocaust. So, who really was Alex Krusen?
4:45 Speaker 02 I'm Dan Goberg. I'm from CBC's Personally. This is Toy Soldier.
5:04 Speaker 05 Please, Mr. Krusen, fill me in on the details.
5:09 Speaker 06 Well, my first recollection of the war was in...
5:14 Speaker 02 Alex tells Philip the same remarkable story he told Beba, surviving the massacre that killed his family and Jewish community, scavenging in the snow-covered woods, annoying his life to the Latvian battalion that took him in as one of their own.
5:30 Speaker 05 You were present during the atrocities where they were killing and torturing people.
5:36 Speaker 06 Hmm.
5:37 Speaker 05 What do you think about it?
5:39 Speaker 06 Always thought it was wrong, but what can you do?
5:44 Speaker 05 How did you know that this is wrong?
5:47 Speaker 06 Well, for killing people like they killed my mother and all this, I knew it was wrong from the beginning.
5:52 Speaker 05 Oh, that you felt it, this resembles...
5:55 Speaker 06 Oh, killing of my family, except it was happening to someone else, not to me.
6:02 Speaker 02 At times, Alex was not only a witness, but forced to be an accomplice.
6:08 Speaker 06 One day, we got back to the barracks. They had a Jewish boy with a rope around his neck, and they told me to make him dance around me. And I had to do it, and they were standing around clapping, so encouraging me to make him dance. But I had a rope around his neck, and I had to hold the rope, and he was going around me in circles. Oh, my heart was hurting me. I said, "I couldn't do this," but... I had to do it. I had to pretend I'm a hero and go along with. To preserve your life? Preserve my life, to show them how loyal to them I am.
6:49 Speaker 06 Did you have to block it out from your mind? That I was Jewish? No, never. This was always in my mind. Inside your sin, "Oh, you're a Jewish boy. Don't forget to protect yourself. Not to reveal to anyone that you're Jewish. Doesn't matter where you are, just keep your secret to yourself."
7:10 Speaker 06 Every moment of your day, you had to think of the consequences?
7:18 Speaker 06 Did you ever suspect that somebody might know something?
7:23 Speaker 06 Well, no one really said anything to me, so I suspected I didn't know. And while I didn't know, I was happy. Sometimes we used to pass on a train Minsk. And the soldiers said to me, "You better look, you might find your mother or your father in Minsk."
7:43 Speaker 02 The soldiers believed Alex was the lost child of a Russian shepherd.
7:47 Speaker 06 And I knew it was wrong, because I knew they were shot and killed. But I had to look around and say, "Oh, yes, I can't see them."
7:58 Speaker 02 Soon, the battalion became his family.
8:03 Speaker 06 They all loved me. Like mother and father, they were always thinking about me, taking care of me. They taught me how to shoot, and they taught me everything. How to trojanize, and, you know, how to read and write and count and, you know. It made me into a real patriot.
8:29 Speaker 06 What were your duties? I had to sometimes bring water for the cook to cook the big boiler for the soups. And sometimes polish shoes or something. They used to send me to the villages to get a few girls. They said, "Look, there's a party tonight. There'll be chocolates and drinks. Come to the party." You were some kind of a mascot? Yeah, so mascot. They adopted me as a mascot. As a good luck mascot? Well, no, just as a mascot. They sometimes they had a goat for a mascot. Now they had me as a mascot, so.
9:05 Speaker 02 After Alex was adopted, his battalion joined the ranks of the SS.
9:15 Speaker 06 Latin soldiers wearing Latin uniforms? German uniforms, SS uniforms at the time. Yeah, it was changed into SS uniforms. And you yourself, what kind of uniform? Yeah, I had SS uniforms too made for me specially. Were you conscious of the iron? Very conscious, but I was very proud at the time that I was a soldier. Soldiers in people's eyes and they all took notice of me.
9:44 Speaker 06 Took me with them everywhere they went, around places, shooting partisans.
9:52 Speaker 02 Partisans, they were the guerrilla fighters who resisted the Nazi occupation across Europe. Many were communists and anti-fascists from Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland and elsewhere. Some of the partisans were Jews, those who'd managed to escape the ghettos or labor camps and fled to the forests. They managed to derail countless trains and kill thousands of soldiers.
10:19 Speaker 06 I remember going in trains, protecting the trains. You used to sit on top of the trains and you had guns, you used to fire them in the night so to scare the partisans. They think that the train is protected, not to attack the train. What else did you do? They were going on different missions, but I sometimes didn't go with the missions. To find partisans? Probably partisans, yeah, because I think that main job was partisans.
10:45 Speaker 02 From Alex's memory, one of the main missions of his battalion was to kill partisans.
10:55 Speaker 02 By 1943, the tide was beginning to turn against the Nazis. Alex recalls Allied bombs exploding.
11:05 Speaker 06 But I remember when they bombed, I said, "Good, the revenge has come."
11:15 Speaker 02 And Alex's time as a Nazi mascot had come to an end. The front became too dangerous and he was sent away to live with Beba's grandfather, Jakob Zennas, in Latvia.
11:29 Speaker 05 Was he some kind of a Latin patriot or just...?
11:33 Speaker 06 He was a good man. He wasn't a patriot, but he was a good man. I never seen harm to anybody. He was a very fair man. And he had his daughters and he took me and his family. They probably were suspicious of my being a Jew, but they never mentioned to me, never, ever mentioned to me that. I can truly say that all my life I've been with him, you couldn't meet any better people.
12:06 Speaker 02 Alex was given to Beba's grandfather Jakob Zennas by a high-ranking Latvian member of the SS.
12:13 Speaker 06 He was my commanding officer, Loeb.
12:17 Speaker 02 Colonel Carlos Loeb.
12:19 Speaker 06 He was like a stepfather to me too, because he was friends with Mr. Dennis.
12:25 Speaker 02 Decades after the war, Loeb would be tried for war crimes and Alex would be asked to sign an affidavit on his behalf.
12:35 Speaker 06 Mr. Dennis asked me to sign a paper that Mr. Loeb was a fair man, to send it to the court.
12:47 Speaker 06 Without thinking anything, I sort of went along and I signed it, because I was obliged to do it.
12:54 Speaker 07 He was in charge of the killing of 30,000 Jews in Rika.
12:59 Speaker 06 Truly.
13:01 Speaker 02 A member of the Holocaust Center staff, who'd been observing the interview quietly, now pipes up. She tells Alex that his commanding officer was in charge of the killing of 30,000 Jews.
13:15 Speaker 07 You were adopted by the very, very important Nazi, Latvian Nazi group.
13:25 Speaker 06 I'm believing that.
13:37 Speaker 06 So in 1949, the Australian government wanted all the Baltic people to come to Australia.
13:47 Speaker 06 So Mr. Jennings and family decided to come here. So I came with them to Melbourne. And they sent me to Sydney to work on a railway. And Mr. Jennings came to Melbourne. And then I come to see him now and then. And they often said to me, "We're surprised that you still stick to our family." But that's the only family I knew. Whether I liked it or not, and they were good to me. So even Mr. Jennings, when he died here, he left my three sons in his will. That's why it's so absurd.
14:24 Speaker 06 They kill me in one way and give me things in other ways.
14:31 Speaker 02 Despite it all, Alex says he's remained close to his adoptive family.
14:38 Speaker 05 There was a special relationship between you and your niece.
14:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:43 Speaker 02 Philip is talking about Beba.
14:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah. She's a very, very persistent, clever girl. She wants to be a writer. And she's interested in my story more than I've told. And she's always asking for different parts of my life. So slowly, I tell her more and more.
15:13 Speaker 06 She's writing a book about me.
15:16 Speaker 05 Her experience.
15:17 Speaker 06 Yeah, experience in the book. And she's doing more researching than I ever could do because she's got the connections and the know-how.
15:27 Speaker 06 She is digging more in it than I ever knew how the Latvians mistreated the Jews. She tells me more than I know.
15:45 Speaker 05 Previously you considered yourself a Latvian.
15:49 Speaker 06 Yes.
15:49 Speaker 05 Who don't like Jews. And suddenly you had to make obvious to everybody that you are Jewish. How did you feel about it?
15:58 Speaker 06 I'm still feel that like I'm two persons in one body.
16:04 Speaker 05 Yes.
16:06 Speaker 06 One has been lying there living a normal life and now the other person is waking up in me.
16:11 Speaker 05 Uh huh.
16:12 Speaker 06 And they're not getting along very well.
16:18 Speaker 05 And how do you feel today?
16:20 Speaker 06 I feel more relieved now that I'm talking to people and telling them.
16:25 Speaker 05 And how did your own wife and children react when you told them that?
16:31 Speaker 06 Oh, they were happy, happy for me. They are with me and they don't mind what I was as long as I was a good person. They all admire me, how I survived all this life without talking to anybody about it.
16:50 Speaker 06 I just went to live my life and looking for the future, so I kept quiet.
16:58 Speaker 02 Philip asks when he started looking to the past.
17:02 Speaker 06 I got very sick with cancer, 1980. And while I was in hospital, I was sort of thinking about maybe my days are gone, you know?
17:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
17:14 Speaker 06 As you get older, you get more time and more thinking. As you're young, you rush around, you work. I worked seven days a week for the support of family and all that. You sort of pushed your past in the back of your head, you know? And that's what happened. That I maybe if I get better, maybe I should look a bit into the past.
17:45 Speaker 05 What do you remember of your childhood? Do you remember mother taking you in her arms, kissing you, telling stories? Maybe lighting candles?
17:56 Speaker 06 Don't remember that.
17:57 Speaker 05 What do you remember? Feeding you?
18:01 Speaker 05 You remember your house?
18:03 Speaker 06 Remember the house, yeah.
18:05 Speaker 05 What did it look like?
18:06 Speaker 06 No, just a little house next to a tannery. Where my father had a little hide, you know, skin treating place. There was an apple tree in the back.
18:17 Speaker 05 Yes.
18:18 Speaker 06 Which I used to climb and get an apple now and then. Used to play with some children there. Used to skate on the slopes, on the little slates, in the town.
18:30 Speaker 06 But I didn't have much of a childhood.
18:34 Speaker 05 But possibly you remember your father, yes?
18:37 Speaker 06 I remember my father, yeah. I don't remember any names. After all the years, it was completely away.
18:50 Speaker 02 After his first visit to the Holocaust Center in 1996, Alex was approached by one of its volunteers. She offered to help him uncover his past. Alex tells her he thinks he's from Kordanov, the pre-war name of a small village in what's now Belarus. And so she reaches out to a colleague at the Jewish center there.
19:14 Speaker 06 Alyshia, from the Holocaust Center, sent off some documents to Minsk with my story. We left it like that, and we hoped we'd get a reply.
19:31 Speaker 02 Months later, Alex gets a call.
19:34 Speaker 06 Some very important things have developed. So I jumped in the car and come to Alstomik, the center here. And Alyshia showed me a telegram from Rashia.
19:47 Speaker 06 I nearly fell over when she told me the story.
19:52 Speaker 06 It says that: "Mrs. Alyshia, on receiving your letter, we inform the father of the man with the unusual fate remained alive after the war."
20:06 Speaker 02 According to The Telegram, they'd found the identity of Alex's father.
20:12 Speaker 02 And he'd survived the war.
20:23 Speaker 00 Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
20:53 Speaker 08 Hi, I just had to tell you that I think your podcast has changed my life. 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.
21:12 Speaker 00 I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.
21:19 Speaker 08 I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.
21:28 Speaker 02 Here's what appears to have happened behind the scenes in Belarus. A letter from Melbourne reaches the head of the Jewish center in Minsk. She happens to mention Alex's story to a printer who did some work for her. He responds that he too came from Khodanov, and he too had a father who was a Tanner.
21:50 Speaker 02 Alex had always believed his father was killed, but he hadn't actually seen it happen, like he had with the other members of his family.
22:00 Speaker 06 Apparently, my father
22:05 Speaker 06 wasn't shot by the Germans.
22:08 Speaker 06 He was caught by the Germans and was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. He survived there because he was a shoemaker and the Germans needed tradesmen. After the war, the Americans liberated him and said he could go to America or back to Russia. He chose to go back to Russia to look for his family.
22:35 Speaker 06 When he got back to Kuidno, all the family had been murdered by the Germans. And me included, of course.
22:47 Speaker 06 So my father didn't look for me anymore. And I didn't know he was alive to look for him.
22:54 Speaker 06 He married again in 1947. He married a lady, another Jewish lady, whose family had perished in the war also.
23:09 Speaker 06 It says that the name of the father is Gaoperin Solomon Iljevich. His first wife's name was Hannah. That is my mother's name, Hannah.
23:26 Speaker 06 And your name is Ilya.
23:39 Speaker 06 That's the first time I knew my father was alive and my mother's name and my name.
23:51 Speaker 06 It was like I was born a second time.
24:13 Speaker 02 It was about 20 years too late for Alex to meet the man he now believed was his father. Solomon Gaoperin died in the 1970s. But his son, Eric Gaoperin, was waiting for Alex's call.
24:28 Speaker 06 The Holocaust Center made a phone call to Russia the same day and put me to talk to my brother, which they can't believe, that anybody escaped the killings in Germany and turning up in Australia 60 years after. I couldn't believe that anything like that could happen. So finally, I got a name and a family, which I never knew, and somebody called me brother.
24:59 Speaker 02 In the video testimony, you can see Alex beaming a near disbelief as he says these words.
25:07 Speaker 06 So, we've been corresponding, sending photos to each other. He sent me my father's photo, his family photo. I sent him my family photo. And we're in constant touch now. And he tells me more about things about my father, that my father took him often to the grave where my family are buried.
25:35 Speaker 05 What kind of additional proof can you bring, certifying that you are to the brother of Alex now?
25:46 Speaker 06 Well, first of all, the things that I told you that my father had something to do with leather, with tannery.
25:54 Speaker 05 That's right.
25:56 Speaker 06 Is a proof that my father was a shoemaker for the German army in the concentration camp, in Booth. He sent me a photo of my father and everybody that I showed to.
26:09 Speaker 05 Could you show the photo?
26:10 Speaker 06 Yes.
26:18 Speaker 06 People say that it's a bit image of me.
26:21 Speaker 05 Actually, you look very, very similar.
26:25 Speaker 02 They really do look similar.
26:28 Speaker 06 Yes, so those all things that I've told him about my past and plus these photos, it verifies my story that I come from Kuytov and a story that I couldn't invent if I, you know.
26:45 Speaker 05 Did anybody else express any interest in your life story? Like, were there newspaper writers or television companies who'd ask you about your life story and would like to do something about it?
26:59 Speaker 06 Well, I kept the publicity very low because I'm not in a position to talk officially. I didn't want publicity yet. But I talked amongst friends and your Holocaust center and all this, but I'd never gone public yet.
27:14 Speaker 05 Do you intend to?
27:15 Speaker 06 Probably when it's the time.
27:19 Speaker 06 I think it's a very good, good story. It should be known and it should be shown to people and, you know, perhaps films or books or stories. My son is negotiating a deal with a broadcast corporation at the moment.
27:37 Speaker 02 In the early 2000s, a few years after Alex first shared his story, he was ready to take it public in a documentary for the Australian public broadcaster, co-written, co-produced and narrated by his eldest son Mark. While it was Alex's story, the documentary was told from Mark's perspective.
28:02 Speaker 09 I had an ordinary Australian childhood, growing up in the migrant suburbs of Melbourne with my mother Pat and father Alex. There were sunny, happy days with my father telling me and my brothers stories about his days with the travelling circus.
28:16 Speaker 02 This is The Mascot, a documentary produced by Mark and Australian journalist Lena Keneva. The documentary follows Alex as he travels back to his village in Belarus for the first time since he escaped as a child.
28:31 Speaker 02 He's there, of course, to meet his long-lost family, but also to be sure that they are, in fact, his family. The Galprum family takes Alex to the house they believe he grew up in.
28:43 Speaker 10 You grew up here?
28:49 Speaker 06 Apple tree.
28:50 Speaker 10 Apple tree.
28:51 Speaker 06 I always remember apple tree.
28:53 Speaker 10 These apple trees are very old. They are planted before the war.
29:00 Speaker 06 What was next to this?
29:01 Speaker 10 What was next to this house before the war? We shall ask the neighbour maybe.
29:05 Speaker 06 What was next to this house?
29:11 Speaker 11 Ah, tuk tuk, by the war, when we bought, there was a corridor like that. And this corridor is old and old.
29:17 Speaker 06 A shed, a shed in my town. My father, it's skins in it.
29:24 Speaker 10 There are so skins in the shed.
29:26 Speaker 06 That's right, that's right.
29:27 Speaker 10 Everything.
29:30 Speaker 02 The documentary shows Alex's doubts disappearing.
29:36 Speaker 06 Mark, it clicks everything I told him. This clicks now, especially when they tell me that it's a shed. Because when I see the house, I said, "This is not it." But there was a shed with skins, and that must be the house. That's what I remember.
30:04 Speaker 02 When Alex first arrived, he still believed that the name Panok may have been his surname. He asked an older galperum relative about the name, and she said it belonged to another family in the village. They had young sons. Maybe Alex had always remembered the name of a close friend. The documentary appears to show Alex coming to a point of certainty.
30:29 Speaker 06 All I've been looking for is a name.
30:32 Speaker 06 And here I found hundreds of relatives.
30:36 Speaker 09 Have you found your name?
30:40 Speaker 06 Well, now I have.
30:44 Speaker 06 It is Solomonovich Galperin.
30:59 Speaker 02 Before Alex leaves the village, he walks to the edge of a grassy field. Here is where he believes his family was massacred in a mass grave. A small monument now sits on the spot, memorializing the 1,600 Jewish residents of Koidenov, who were killed on 21 October 1941.
31:25 Speaker 02 Here, Alex fulfills a lifelong wish. He places a flower on his mother's grave. He steps back and slowly bows his head in silence. It's hard to convey the heartbreak on his face.
32:06 Speaker 02 At what point in the interview did you start disbelieving him?
32:12 Speaker 03 Straight away from the beginning.
32:22 Speaker 02 Coming up.
32:24 Speaker 03 His description of his past didn't correspond with historical facts, I knew.
32:29 Speaker 06 I kept saying, as a human being, if I was you, Alex, I would want to know. Everybody wants to know where they're from. And he never agreed, and he kept bringing up the money angle.
32:40 Speaker 12 I had worked on two previous Holocaust frauds. I said, oh, OK, you know, same thing. And I know what to do. I know the drill. And the drill didn't work. And here we are 14 years later.
32:59 Speaker 02 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 Golch and myself. Mixing and sound design by Julia Whitman. Studio recording and direction by Greg Crittenden. Research by Colin Fitzpatrick, Beba Manglis-Ford, Emeritus Professor Conrad Quait, Barry Resnick, Maris Lachas and Keith Moore. Anna Ashite 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.
33:41 Speaker 02 Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. Archival material for this episode comes from the Melbourne Holocaust Museum and the documentary film from Coneva Media Productions, The Mascot.
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