Pod Insights Personally Toy Soldier, Episode 3: The Money Angle About this episode Alex’s story goes viral (as viral as it can in the early 2000s), but doubts and accusations swirl around him – dividing his family and community. Alex is called a liar and a conman trying to profit from the Holocaust, yet he refuses to do the one thing that would prove he’s telling the truth.
Transcript 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 organisation with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
0:31 Speaker 01 This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neil Conan in Washington. When Mark Kurzum was a child, his father Alex told him stories of his childhood. But there was one story he didn't tell.
0:48 Speaker 02 It's late 2007, and Mark Kurzum is on a press tour with his father. His current stop? NPR, America's Public Radio Network.
0:58 Speaker 01 Blog of the Nation. Mark Kurzum is the author of The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood, and he joins us from BBC Studios in Oxford, England. Welcome to Talk of the Nation.
1:09 Speaker 03 Thank you.
1:12 Speaker 02 It's now been about a decade since Alex Kurzum first testified at the Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, and about five years since Alex met his long-lost family in Belarus with a son, Mark, and a camera crew.
1:25 Speaker 03 Yes, yes, wrote and produced, co-produced documentary film also entitled The Mascot. But for various reasons, I was dissatisfied with the outcome. And I felt that writing, written language, would provide a much more textured and richer portrayal of what had affected my father during his childhood.
1:53 Speaker 02 So Mark writes a book, telling his father's story again. But this time, it's told like a thriller that carins us back and forth in time through Alex's life.
2:07 Speaker 02 And it works. The book is a hit. Described by The New York Times as spellbinding. It's translated into around a dozen languages on four continents.
2:19 Speaker 01 And Alex Kirsham, let me ask you. The documentary film and the book have not been universally well received. What do you think of the response?
2:29 Speaker 04 So far, it's been great. I've been to a few countries now and followed the results. And they've been very, very well received.
2:37 Speaker 01 Yet some people are upset with this information.
2:45 Speaker 04 Well, you can't please everybody. The truth came out.
2:51 Speaker 02 The truth, as is often the case, was contested. As more and more people learned of Alex's story through the book and the worldwide media attention that followed, there were more and more questions, criticisms, and skepticism.
3:10 Speaker 02 Doubt had enveloped Alex's story and wouldn't let go. Could a little boy really have survived the massacre of his village? Was Alex really Elia Galperin? Was he even really Jewish? Was any of it true?
3:27 Speaker 02 It was a debate that raged loudly at first, then simmered, but remained unresolved for nearly 20 more years.
3:38 Speaker 02 Until one side was finally proven right.
3:56 Speaker 02 I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's Personally. This is Toy Soldier.
4:10 Speaker 05 Is it emotional for you as a survivor to hear somebody else who you think is a hoax?
4:19 Speaker 06 Yes, very much so. Very, very much so. I believe in some justice. It doesn't always happen.
4:35 Speaker 02 Doubts about Alex's story and his motives began long before the book's release.
4:41 Speaker 05 At what point in the interview, if you can recall, at what point did you start disbelieving him?
4:48 Speaker 06 Straight away from the beginning.
4:53 Speaker 02 This is Philip Mizou again. Philip was one of the first to hear Alex's story. He's the Holocaust survivor who recorded the testimonies of more than a thousand others like him. He spent hours interviewing Alex in the late 90s. You heard part of Philip's interviews earlier. His suspicions began even before the interview, when Alex first arrived at the Holocaust Center.
5:20 Speaker 06 He simply said, "Look, I am a Jew, but I pretended that I'm Latvian. If you want me to return back to the Jewish nation, you have to lend me $17,000 so I can repay mortgage on my house. Could you please give me $17,000 so I will again become a Jew?"
5:48 Speaker 05 He asked for money to become a Jew?
5:50 Speaker 06 Yeah.
5:55 Speaker 02 Alex had long struggled with money. He made his living as a TV repairman, but after business deals gone wrong, he'd fallen into debt. The request for money raised concerns at the Holocaust Center, but Alex was invited to give his testimony anyway.
6:14 Speaker 02 The staff believed he could have valuable information about Latvia's involvement in the Holocaust. But when asked to recall specific details...
6:24 Speaker 06 He mentions only the name of the people who were already dead.
6:30 Speaker 05 You think he was protecting them?
6:32 Speaker 06 Selective memory, trying to protect people. He found himself in a very awkward position that he has to give a testimony to which he wasn't prepared. And he has to produce the story at the moment of the interview.
6:53 Speaker 02 Philip does believe Alex was adopted by the Latvian battalion, that he became a mascot for the Nazis.
7:00 Speaker 06 Oh, this is true. He has the photos to prove it. He was carrying in his suitcase always with him. And there is no doubt that he was a mascot. He was very proud of it, that he was wearing a uniform of the German army.
7:20 Speaker 02 But what Philip didn't believe was that Alex was Jewish, that he was a true survivor of the Holocaust. Philip thought his story was too implausible to be true. In particular, the warning Alex says he got from his mother that allowed him to escape.
7:37 Speaker 06 For instance, he said to me that the Germans told the Jews that they are going to execute them next day and says they will come back tomorrow. This is not typical for Germans. His description of his past didn't correspond with historical facts they knew.
7:57 Speaker 05 Okay, but is it not possible to allow him some forgetfulness, given that he was a young boy?
8:06 Speaker 06 I could feel that it is intentional forgetfulness. It's like somebody telling a story which he hoped that I will accept.
8:18 Speaker 05 You think that he was basically a con man? Was he doing it for money, for fame?
8:27 Speaker 06 For fame, for fame. He wanted to be famous.
8:33 Speaker 06 And this is actually main characteristic of his personality, to be famous.
8:47 Speaker 06 In four and a half months, I'll be 100, which is quite a ripe age.
8:54 Speaker 06 Alex was one of the most unpleasant incidents in my life.
9:07 Speaker 02 For Jews like me, the history of Hitler's mass murder of 6 million European Jews is sacred text.
9:16 Speaker 02 But it spawned those who denied it, those who lied about it, and those who profited from it. So if Alex was lying, he wouldn't be the only one.
9:28 Speaker 06 I'm grateful to you that you try to record what happened and tell the truth about Alex. It is important, important to tell the truth.
9:53 Speaker 02 Philip wasn't alone in his disbelief of Alex's story, and it seemed Mark may have seen this coming, because he began his book with these words, quote, "The story of my father, the mascot, is a true one."
10:09 Speaker 02 But what if his father's story and the one told in the book weren't entirely the same?
10:19 Speaker 02 Alex is pretty matter-of-fact about what he saw and what he didn't, what he remembers and what he doesn't.
10:28 Speaker 02 But where Alex tells his own story with blurred edges, Mark carves it out in Sharp Relief. More drama, more villains, and more Mark.
10:44 Speaker 02 The book tends to be very much Mark's version and Mark's story, while he appropriated my initial research and some of the stories that all...
10:58 Speaker 05 shared with me. Much of the book is really about Mark.
11:06 Speaker 02 This is Beba again, Mark's cousin. She started recording her uncle's story about a decade earlier. Beba and Alex had agreed she would write a book about him and share the proceeds. And how much did you write?
11:20 Speaker 05 Well, I wrote about three chapters or something. But, you know, then it all went to shit in a handbasket. And then I couldn't work on it anymore. It was just too painful. I was scared by Mark's threats and I didn't know how real any of them were. And just how, how much power he might have.
11:45 Speaker 02 According to Beba, Mark had demanded she pay a large sum of money for the copyright to his father's story. When she didn't agree, he began to write the book himself and ordered she no longer have any contact with Alex.
12:00 Speaker 02 What do you think Mark's motivations were?
12:04 Speaker 05 I think in the beginning, at least, Mark's motivations were about saving his father from debt. I do believe that that was perhaps his strongest motivation. But overlying that, I think that once Mark saw the dollar signs on the story, I think that he, he saw an opportunity to make his name as well known as his father's name.
12:38 Speaker 02 In Mark's telling of the story, he's the first to learn about Alex's secret. And he alone is on a quest to solve the mystery of his father's past. Beba has been erased from the story.
13:02 Speaker 02 I found this in Aldi's suitcase. Do you recognise it?
13:07 Speaker 05 I haven't seen this letter in a long time.
13:12 Speaker 02 In the process of investigating this story, I was given access to Alex's tattered brown suitcase, the one he opened up for Beba all those years ago, telling her.
13:23 Speaker 05 I've kept this suitcase all my years. I've kept it hidden at the back of my wardrobe. But in here, he says, is my life.
13:37 Speaker 02 The suitcase he'd carried with him from Europe to Australia, containing fragments from his shattered past. Inside, I found his old photos, documents in several languages, newspaper cuttings, and this letter from Beba.
13:53 Speaker 05 Dear, dear Aldi, Mark has written me some very surprising and upsetting letters suggesting that in order to write a book about your story, I will have to pay you or him large sums of money. I think this is all because he sees your story as the only way out for you in terms of your financial difficulties, and he thinks that perhaps I will not honour my commitment to you.
14:18 Speaker 05 I remember you and I talked about what you wanted out of it all, and you replied, money, and to tell my story, of course.
14:28 Speaker 05 Telling your story in the best way I can in order for it to be a financial success is the only way I
14:40 Speaker 05 is the only way I know of helping you and honouring my complete trust in you.
14:49 Speaker 05 It is also my own way of trying to atone in some small way
14:57 Speaker 05 for the things that were done to you, for the things you experienced. Do I have to read the whole thing?
15:03 Speaker 02 No, I just found it and wanted to give it back to you.
15:13 Speaker 02 You invited them to Sydney.
15:15 Speaker 05 How would you feel about coming up to Sydney for a weekend if I organised the ticket? You can leave all your cares behind and come and enjoy Sydney's great weather for two days. I promise I can organise it so it won't rain. I have good contacts, you know. What do you say? Arbača, Baba.
15:39 Speaker 05 I'm sorry.
15:42 Speaker 05 Now that really has...
15:48 Speaker 05 Oh, I can't cope.
15:52 Speaker 05 Well, that never came to pass. He never did come.
16:00 Speaker 02 So it was dear to him because the only things in there were dear to him?
16:06 Speaker 05 I know I was dear to him. I know.
16:20 Speaker 02 Baba had lost her relationship with her beloved uncle and she was left with a deep sense of betrayal. But Baba wasn't the only one.
16:33 Speaker 02 Mark's book had laid bare the complicity and collaboration of many Latvians in the Holocaust. Though Alex always knew he wasn't really Latvian, in practical terms, they were his community. And some of them believed they'd been misrepresented by someone they considered one of their own.
16:53 Speaker 05 I'm very clear that I believe the stories that Aldi recounted to me as being his experiences. So if that can be taken to defame all Latvians, that's a question of nationalism taken to an extreme degree.
17:13 Speaker 02 Saying that stuff like that didn't happen just because they were Latvians. Latvians didn't do that sort of thing. Palpably, that's not true. People in war do all sorts of bad things.
17:36 Speaker 02 The book had also divided Alex's family. In Mark's telling of the story, he draws a straight line between Jacob Zennis, the man who took Alex in, and the Nazis. And that connection simply wasn't true, according to members of the Zennis family. They believed that he was maligned, to sensationalise the book further, that the story was better if Alex was not only adopted by a Nazi battalion, but by a Nazi family as well.
18:06 Speaker 02 While we have no evidence that Jacob Zennis was a member of the Nazi party, we know he was close with the high-ranking Nazi who brought Alex to him, the same Colonel who Zennis would later ask Alex to testify for during his war crimes trial. What Alex has always maintained is that Zennis was a good man and not involved in the war. That even though he may have suspected Alex was Jewish, he always treated him as a beloved son.
18:35 Speaker 02 I can't find any specific circumstances in which there is something that I would call libel. But Mark certainly hated the Latvians for what he thought they had done to his father.
18:55 Speaker 02 Mark died prematurely a couple of years after his book was published, so he's no longer here to tell his side of the story.
19:14 Speaker 02 In the end, some Latvians called Alex a traitor and some Jews called him a liar. Each side was pulling at different edges of the same story, trying to tear at its seams. But both needed real, concrete proof that Alex was not who he said he was.
19:47 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 build 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. 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.
20:28 Speaker 02 We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation.
20:32 Speaker 00 Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading.
20:36 Speaker 02 I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.
20:43 Speaker 00 I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.
20:51 Speaker 05 So, yeah, Keith. Yep. You're going to be one of the few people, I suspect, who don't hate me at the end. I may be wrong about that.
21:00 Speaker 02 I'm talking to Keith Moore, a veteran Australian investigative journalist.
21:06 Speaker 05 Not because I have no intent to burn anyone, but there's just a lot of fucking roadkill on the way to the story. Yeah. It's full of trauma and he said, she said, and, you know, in the end, you've got to put it out there for the audience to make up their mind.
21:30 Speaker 02 After around 40 years in journalism, Keith recently retired from The Herald Sun, one of Australia's largest newspapers. Because I was head of the Herald Sun's investigative unit. I've done other things, but I specialize in writing. Crime matters, unsolved cold cases in particular.
21:48 Speaker 02 While reporting on cold cases, Keith had worked with a forensic investigator. And one day in 2011, she came to him with a request.
22:00 Speaker 02 Can I get you interested in another story that I've been working on about Alex Kurzum? She tried to convince me from the start that she was certainly, in my view, suggesting that the story wasn't true.
22:15 Speaker 02 Her name was Colleen Fitzpatrick.
22:19 Speaker 05 My name is Colleen Fitzpatrick and I work mainly forensic cases, cold case homicides and sexual assaults, kidnappings, those kind of things for law enforcement agencies, mainly in the US, but a few in other countries as well.
22:36 Speaker 02 You crack cold cases using DNA?
22:39 Speaker 05 Yes, I'm one of the pioneers in using genealogy to crack the cold cases.
22:46 Speaker 02 So this isn't a cold case, Alex Kurzum isn't technically a cold case?
22:52 Speaker 05 It depends on how you define cold case. Classically, no, but it is a person, say, whose identity is unknown.
23:02 Speaker 02 And you were pursuing, I guess, whether this was another Holocaust hoax?
23:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, I, let's put it this way, I just wanted to find the truth.
23:16 Speaker 02 By the time Colleen contacted Keith, she'd already been looking into Alex for a couple of years.
23:23 Speaker 05 I had worked on two previous Holocaust frauds, Herman Rosenblatt's apple story and Misha's Surviving with Wolves story.
23:33 Speaker 02 These two stories were part of a burgeoning literary genre. Holocaust memoirs eventually exposed as hoaxes. In Herman Rosenblatt's case, he invented a girl who threw him apples over the fence at Buchenwald concentration camp.
23:50 Speaker 02 The Hollywood ending had him finding the same girl on a blind date years later and marrying her. Mischa Defonseca, or to use her real name, Monique De Waal, claims she was a Jewish child protected by a pack of wolves. Both books were being debunked around the same time as Alex's story was being released. It isn't hard to see why many saw similarities between them.
24:17 Speaker 02 So you came at it through the prism of Mischa Defonseca's wolf story and Herman Rosenblatt's fence story? Yes, I did. Said, oh, OK, you know, same thing. I know what to do. I know the drill, and I know the drill, and the drill didn't work, and here we are 14 years later.
24:43 Speaker 02 Colleen trolled through a sea of documents and interviewed those who knew Alex, but for her to crack the case, she needed his DNA. So she asked Keith Moore to help her. So I basically had to say to Colleen, look, Australia's biggest selling newspaper, we're not just going to write another story regurgitating the same stuff. I need a peg to hang it on, then we'll go big with it. And what I need is his DNA. So then what happened?
25:12 Speaker 02 So I then contacted Alex and go off to see him, and we sat down, and, look, he was very likeable. He made me a nice cup of tea, and he said, you know, what's going on? I said, I explained that, you know, I'd been contacted by this organisation that was sort of casting doubt on his story, and that I, like them, thought, look, there's an easy way to settle this, Alex. All fingers point to him being Ilya Galperin, right? Yes. Ilya Galperin was the name Alex had discovered after tracing his family history back to Belarus. And obviously, there are other members of that family whose DNA he can get to do the comparison. So all he has to do is a little swab in the mouth and a cotton bud,
25:55 Speaker 02 do the same in Belarus, and then he would know for certain. And I kept arguing, Alex, surely you want to know. You might not be, and there might be a chance to try and find out whether you have other brothers or sisters. Don't you just want to know?
26:09 Speaker 03 And he was very reluctant. Um, he, he, he, his argument to me was, I know how I am. I know the story. I'm convinced that it's correct. But, you know, why would I, why, why would I do a DNA test? And I kept saying, why wouldn't you?
26:27 Speaker 02 Then Keith brought up Colleen and her wanting to conduct the DNA test.
26:33 Speaker 03 He then started saying, well, if she wants me to take it, then she should have to pay for it. And I then said, well, how much do you, how much do you think? And look, it was like a two or three minute conversation before he said, if she offered me a hundred thousand, then I would do it. Hundred thousand bucks to do it.
26:53 Speaker 02 Alex would later claim that this was a joke, just as Australian sense of humour.
26:59 Speaker 03 I said, I would put that to Colleen. I said, look, I don't think that you're likely to get that. But then I kept saying, look, I can understand why you want some money, Alex. But that's a lot of money just to do a DNA test. And 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. Not eighty percent or eighty-five percent, but a hundred percent. And he never agreed. And he kept bringing up the money angle.
27:28 Speaker 03 He was really worried that the claims compensation body was going to stop his pension.
27:33 Speaker 02 This is, just to be clear, this is the Claims Conference, which gives Jewish survivors of the Holocaust compensation.
27:40 Speaker 03 Yes, and Alex had been getting that for a very long time. And he said they were convinced he was Jewish. And he was really concerned that what Colleen was doing and what I was possibly going to do by writing a story, might stop that. He was concerned that it also might affect the movie that was going to be made. And he told me that it was like this close to being done. And, you know, he's, he's naming people that are like, like Anthony Hopkins and various other people that are going to be in it.
28:11 Speaker 02 Soon after the release of the book, film producers came calling and a movie was in the works. And they wanted to be sure it was a true story before they called it one.
28:23 Speaker 03 We're not going to do this. There's now some doubt about it because obviously they wanted to be the true story. So again, I said, just do the DNA test and then the film people, everybody will know that it is genuine. It's like all your fear, your fear about losing the pension, your fear about the movie not happening will just disappear.
28:40 Speaker 05 I have never really made up my mind whether the story is true or not. I just kept thinking, why not do the DNA test so you know one way or the other? And the more he kept refusing, the more it was pushing me, and it would push anybody, I would imagine, to the fact that it wasn't true.
29:03 Speaker 02 So Keith begins his years-long investigation of the curious case of Alex Kurzum.
29:10 Speaker 02 Well, you've got it right there in that first story that you wrote. The headline read, "I've Got Nothing To Hide."
29:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, "I've Got Nothing To Hide." I interviewed as many people as I could that were on Alex's side, and there weren't many of them, a lot of detractors.
29:31 Speaker 02 I'm just realising that you're to blame for everything. Because, this is now making sense to me, I don't know why I didn't work it out before. Your story, that story, "I Have Nothing To Hide," was the story that came across my desk. When was that? 2011?
29:55 Speaker 05 Yes, May the 20th, 2011.
29:59 Speaker 02 At the time, I was the Australian correspondent for newspapers and wire agencies in Israel, North America, and the UK. I'd covered Alex's story before, lots of news agencies had. It wasn't new. But Keith's reporting was the first I'd seen questioning the veracity of Alex's story.
30:19 Speaker 02 And then I just thought, something more there. You know, Holocaust hoax is a big deal in the Jewish community, for obvious reasons.
30:32 Speaker 05 Do you think being Jewish played any part in why you wanted to follow it up?
30:37 Speaker 02 So the short answer is yes, the long answer is...
30:42 Speaker 02 And this keeps me awake at night because I will be skewered by members of the Jewish community for making a song and dance out of a story that Holocaust deniers will point to potentially to say, "See, here's another hoax." Any seed of doubt will be they'll have a party, and that's a problem for me. Yeah, of course. Because for two reasons: one, they're members of my community, but that's not the issue so much as Holocaust deniers, a horrific idea.
31:32 Speaker 02 I interviewed Alex several times after doubts were raised about his story, trying to get to the truth myself, but it didn't seem like Alex would ever take a DNA test, and without it, we'd never know for sure.
31:50 Speaker 02 I continued to follow Alex's case, but there wasn't much more to write about, and so Keith and I, we eventually moved on.
32:03 Speaker 02 Have you sat down with Alex since then? In 2021, September 2021, this is eight, nine years after I walked away from the story, I got a phone call.
32:21 Speaker 02 And it said Alex Skurzen. And, you know, I had to wrack my brains, it was 10 years on. Yeah. He said, "It's me, it's Alex. I proved them all wrong. I am Jewish. I am from Codinoff. I am the mascot.
32:39 Speaker 02 And I want you to tell everyone."
32:52 Speaker 02 Coming up.
32:54 Speaker 05 While I was very excited, part of me felt that seemed too easy.
32:59 Speaker 02 In 2020, around March, I get an email from someone, but he says, we are related. It's not a far stretch to imagine that your dad's battalion was killing. Family, yeah.
33:29 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 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 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. Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.
34:15 Speaker 02 Archival material for this episode comes from NPR.
34:29 Speaker 02 For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.
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