The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood

One of the very few books I have read that held my attention. In fact, it was difficult to put down once started. I usually only read at night just prior to bed time. This book, on more than one occasion, caused me to dream about the terrible things that happened to the Jews. I am 71 and remember those years.

Yes, this is a well written story that reads like a novel. It is a story that tens of millions of people should read. There is so much in this story to think about. I know I will carry this story in my mind for the rest of my life. To some who heard his story, there was the question, "Is he a Jew?" To me Alex is the ultimate Jew. He was robbed of a life with his family, his mother and father, sister and brother, his childhood and finally his identity. The only thing they did not take from him was his life. And for over 50 years he lived his life not really knowing who he was. What a price to pay for surviving. A son helping his father to find his lost past is a beautiful story. Read this book and think about it.

A mesmerizing read, thorougly engaging, painfully revealing of the dark that lurks inside each and every one of us, and right beside that shadow, the light. I first heard about "The Mascot" on an NPR station, with both son and father being interviewed--and I knew this was a story I needed to read and ponder. After all, it touched upon some part of my own heritage as a Latvian born of immigrant parents, come to the United States during WWII as refugees fleeing the Soviet occupation in Latvia.

This is the story of Uldis Kurzemnieks, by birth Ilya Galperin, a Jewish boy caught in the turning wheels of the Nazi onslaught and Holocaust. To the best of his memory, Uldis/Ilya tells his story to his son, the book's author, Mark Kurzem, and his memory seems remarkable indeed for one so very young. In bits and puzzle pieces, the now elderly man recalls his childhood of close escape from Nazis executing Jews in Belarus, his mother and siblings of those who did not survive. After six months wandering in the woods, eating berries, wrapping himself in the coat of a dead soldier, the boy is rescued by a group of Latvian SS soldiers who subsequently transform him into something of a miniature soldier-mascot. They treat him well. But here is the flux of the circumstance: the very ones who save his life are also the same who execute more Jews, and not all of them realize that the boy is Jewish, too. This is the story of extreme paradox, in which we see that one man, one group of soldiers, can exhibit mercy just as they exhibit unspeakable cruelty. Perhaps all soldiers can say the same.

The horror of the Holocaust is incomprehensible and unforgivable. Many are accountable, by commission just as by ommission of deed. No doubt, young Uldis witnessed in very close encounter the worst of humanity and suffered lifelong for it. What makes my Latvian heart ache, aside from this, however, is that the author of this book sweeps with just as broad a brush across another nation--the Latvians--as was swept across his--the Jews--as if an entire nation of peoples can be called wholly good or evil. Indeed, very few individuals can be called one or the other, but contain a blend of both, let alone an entire country be crossed off as such.

The irony of this is that the Latvian nation has suffered a very similar fate and at almost the same moment in time. This is a tiny Baltic country that has been occupied by one great power or another through almost its entire history. We, too, have been herded onto cattle cars in the dark of the night at gunpoint, our children and elderly executed, deported to concentration camps in Siberia, our property, our homes and land and businesses annihilated or stolen from us, our families dispersed, our freedom denied us, and lived through many years of strategic genocide. Kurzem accuses us of whitewashing our history to hide our sins against the Jews. I would argue that ALL histories are a mix of truth and propaganda; look to its source to find its slant. We, too, carry a mark of guilt on our foreheads, and I will not deny it. We owe apologies, even as apologies are owed us. Caught between two superpowers, two great evils, we made hard choices that I am not equipped to defend or accuse in that I myself have never stood in such a position, nor my own child, my own home so threatened. Only those who have stood in such a place, their own families under threat, can truly say what they would do to save their own. Consider, too, the source of at least some of Kurzem's most damning evidence against this battalion of Latvian soldiers: the Soviets. I will not make excuses or rationalizations, only urge the author, and this book's readers, to consider that no one entire nation should be so marked as wrong or right, but each individual called to judgment for his or her actions. Just as Americans would hope not to be judged by Abu Ghraib in Iraq or My Lai in Vietnam or the Trail of Tears in the South U.S., so let us practice tolerance and understanding for all until proven otherwise, and not curse an entire nation for the actions of a few.

That aside, I plan to give this book to read to my friends and family. It is a remarkable story. While not all details can be verified, memory being what it is, enough is evidence-based that we can, and should, learn from this story and engrain it in ourselves: this must never happen again.

This is a very readable book. The author has an ability to provide facts and feelings elloquently. The story itself is incredible, here we have a family mystery intercepted with World history, a courageous man, and a strained father son relationship. The only identity Alex has known is that of a Latvian Nazi soldier boy, from the age of five. Yet somehow in the back of his mind, although that is the life he has lead, he knows that it isn't who he really is. For nearly fifty years he keeps the secret locked inside him,both the secret of his suspected Jewishness and the secret of his Nazi soldier days- too terrified of revealing it to anyone - terrified of the Latvians abandoning him, and also terrified of finding out who he really was, and the real family he missed out on. The nightmares and the memories of what he has seen start to flood his mind, and there is the sense that all these memories are too much for one person to remember, yet alone live through as a child. As the jigsaw puzzle starts to fit together, you realise how torturous it is for a young person to be denied their identity and how that affects their entire life. It is like reading a mystery novel, only this story is sadly true. This is a human story and should be read as such - it is less about Jews and Nazis and the war and more about People and the human races ability for hate, strength, rage, compassion, forgiveness and acceptance - one mans amazing story and his courage to survive it.

"We are all going to die tomorrow," his mother said.

Her eldest child, just five years old, believed her --- that night, soldiers had burst through their door, smashed up their house and beaten his mother. Through it all, she'd sat quietly, hiding his younger brother and baby sister under her long skirt. So she knew what was coming. And, with a resignation that is heartbreaking to imagine, she told her son not to be afraid.

But the boy didn't want to die. And when it was still dark, he slipped out of the house, stumbled across a muddy field and fell asleep, only to wake to the sounds of screaming, shouting and crying. He peered down --- and saw naked people lined in front of a pit and more waiting their turn.

Sixteen hundred people died in that two-day massacre near Belarus in 1941 or 1942.

Three of them were the boy's mother, brother and sister.

He knew because he watched Nazi troops shoot his mother and bayonet his baby brother and sister.

He bit his hand to keep from crying out.

And then he ran.

We are now on page 47 of "The Mascot."

There are 350 pages to go.

The form of the book is mostly talk, and the voice we mostly hear is that of Alex Kurzem, a retired television repairman living in Australia. He remembers just enough of his childhood to have bad nights. And more memories are coming back.

After decades of keeping a secret so large he can hardly believe it himself, he needs to tell his story, to know who he really is.

His designated listener and researcher: his son Mark, a scholar at Oxford.

Kurzem's survival is not his secret. What happened next is. For this tiny boy lived off berries and roots in the woods until soldiers --- possibly including the men who had killed his family --- found him. Once again, he narrowly avoided being killed. But this time, one soldier pretended the boy wasn't Jewish. He appointed the kid the troop's mascot. It seemed like an even trade. The soldiers took care of him, and the boy took care of them --- from his foraging in the woods, he knew that the most delicious strawberries were to be found under the bodies of the unburied dead.

The soldiers created a new identity for their mascot --- now he was Uldis Kurzemnieks, lost son of a Russian pigherder, ripe for adoption by Nazi sympathizers. But the boy was adorable, his invented history irresistible; he was a propagandist's dream. So his life became more and more like a scene from a movie about the upper echelons of the Latvian Third Reich: women in expensive dresses and men in pristine uniforms cooing over a boy in a miniature Nazi uniform. He played his part; he knew what would happen if he said anything that wasn't consistent with the official narrative.

There is some discussion in these pages --- spurred largely by Holocaust groups that once considered this story a fiction --- whether Kurzem was a victim or a collaborator. What rot! He was 6, 7, 8. A mere boy; really, a puppet. How much of a conscience was he supposed to have developed at that age? More than the moral awareness of the millions of well-educated adults who did nothing, said nothing, while the Nazis rolled over their country?

Yes, Kurzem has trouble believing he's a Jew --- it's shocking to him that, once upon a time, he was a boy named Ilya Galperin, that he had a mother and father who loved him, that he had friends to play with. And, even as an adult, he finds excuses for the monsters that befriended him. It's entirely understandable to me.

Is "The Mascot" brilliantly written? No. It doesn't matter. The story suffices. And as it sweeps you forward and the revelations cascade, I dare you to think anything but the almost superhuman power of people --- some people, anyway --- to survive their lives.