The story of Alex Kurzem is so remarkable that, when I first heard about it, I was not sure how plausible it was. At that time, however, I also did not know that Mr. Kurzem had died from Covid. Further research gives credence to his story and this story merits mention as a victim of the Holocaust and Covid.
In brief, in Minsk during the Second World War, a mother tells her six-year-old son that soldiers are coming to their home the next morning to kill them and that the family will die together. But the little boy does not wish to die. Under cover of darkness, he runs away from home and hides in the Belarussian forest, where he sees the entire town being slaughtered, including his mother, Chana, along with his brother, Duvid. His father, Solomon Galperin, managed to escape and joined partisans.
Miraculously, Ilya, the name the boy was born with, survived. He was adopted by Latvian soldiers who were acting as National Socialist Germany’s enforcers, and the actions they took indicate they might have known that Ilya was Jewish. Mr. Kurzem later said that one of his early captors told him to keep that aspect of his life secret. He was given a new name – Uldis Kurzemniek – and a new birthday, the 18th of November, in honor of Latvia’s day of independence. He was also given a tiny uniform, sawed-off shotgun, and new identification papers.
The blond, blue-eyed boy did as he was told as he witnessed horror after horror.
“Inside I was crying rivers of tears,” he recalled in an interview, adding that he “would have gone with the devil if he had taken me by the hand.”
As the tide turned against Germany, the young Mr. Kurzem was adopted by a middle-class family in Riga that later moved to Melbourne. All that he took with him were his new identity papers, a tattered leather suitcase that contained several photos of him in uniform during the war, and a deeply scarred psyche.
As with many Holocaust survivors, Mr. Kurzem turned off his memories and feelings, almost in the manner of the song from the musical “Book of Mormon,” to wit:
Turn it off, like a light switch
Just go click. It’s a neat little Mormon trick.
Eventually, Mr. Kurzem began to talk about what had happened, his son Mark (now deceased) wrote about his father’s story, and the Australian Special Broadcasting Service is presenting a documentary, “Hitler’s Little Soldier,” starting on February 8.
Mr. Kurzem, however, didn’t live to see this. He died of complications from SARS-CoV-2 on January 31, 2022 in Melbourne at the age of 88.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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