Customer Reviews

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

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Many times I'm asked why I study history, specifically that of the Second World War. This book is what they should read if they want to understand my answer. Even today, over half a century later, the Second World War affects lives and more so helps make up national character for a multitude of countries throughout the world. This story first attracted me when I read an article about it online, a Jewish child used as a Mascot by those fighting on the side of Nazi Germany? Was I surprised? No, reading "Europa Europa" was more than enough to convince me that history is more powerful than any human imagination. Thus, while I wasn't surprised I was intrigued, how did the child survive?

This book, while starting out slowly (I kept yelling at it to pick up the pace and get to the point within the first hundred or so pages) picks up pretty quickly after that, 2-3 days reading is more than enough to tackle all of its 400 pages. The beginning of the book is mainly a rendition of memories, by bits and pieces, of a man who is trying to recall who he was in an almost past life. By the time one gets to the end, much of what seemed like it couldn't possibly mean anything takes on a whole new meaning. I would hate to ruin any of it for future readers so I'll only say a few words.

A boy escapes into the forest and witnesses the death of his mother, brother, and sister. He survives to be found by Latvian soldiers in the service of the Germans and is raised partly by them and partly by a rich Latvian and his family who owns a chocolate factory. It took him over half a century to finally tell his story to his family and with the help of a few people the mysteries that he could never understand, words he could never put into context, were all solved for him. Easily one of the better books I've read in a long time about the Holocaust, even though the concentration is less the Holocaust as a whole and more a struggle of one 6 year old boy to survive and over 60 years later to find out his true past and identity. Highly recommended.

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.

There are many stories to come out of World War II, both told and untold, this is surely one of the most remarkable. It is a tale of survival but not without cost.

As a five-year-old boy Alex Kurzem saw his mother and father as well as neighbors shot by the Nazis. For some inexplicable reason his life was spared and he ran to hide in a dense Russian forest. Amazingly he did not freeze to death during the unrelenting cold but existed by searching for food and taking the clothes of dead soldiers.

When he is found by a group of Latvian SS soldiers they never imagine he is Jewish but believe he is Russian and more or less adopt him, making him a little corporal in the SS with his own uniform. Young Alex fears for his life, of course, and does as he is told, even to repeatedly watching repetitions of the same fate that befell his parents and starring in a Nazi propaganda film.

What price survival? What he has done will haunt Alex for the rest of his days. He is so troubled by his past that he does not even tell his wife and only later reveals his entire story to his son, the author of this memoir, Mark Kurzem.

The Mascot is not only a reminder of one of history's darkest times but testimony to the dramatic effects it may have on those who are not killed but sorely injured in their hearts and souls.

- Gail Cooke

"The Mascot"makes for rivetting reading. It really tells three stories which are inticately intertwined:The story of a child survivor under horrendous circumstances, the story of the survivor's struggle as an ageing father of adult children to come to terms with his past and how that impacts on his family relations and the story of retracing the past and finding remenants of that troubled childhood.
What makes this book such fascinating reading is it's style. The author is the son of that child survivor who had never told his story, but for some reason now feels compelled to tell one of his sons, Mark.
Mark writes this story almost without analysis or comment. He simply lets us readers sit at the kitchen table late at night and listen to the intimate and difficult conversations with his father. He let's us be there when his father struggles with himself to tell his story and he takes us with them on a journey to the locations of the child's survival.
As a child survior of the Holocaust myself (although my storyis comletely different) I can so well identify with the internal struggles, the nightmares,the emotional turbulence...
This book makes such an important contribution to the need for survivors to know that they are neither alone nor unique. Most importantly, it provides an insight to others, especially those born after WW II into the horrors of that period and how ordinary people were forced to find extraordinary strength and means to survive.

I read this book in one day. Truly. I just couldn't put it down. The story of a 5-year old child in Eastern Europe (to give away details of exactly where the story begins is to give away a big revelation in the story itself) who survives a mass killing by Nazis and is then "rescued" by an SS brigade and adopted as its mascot, this book is a provocative look at memory and identity.


What really distinguishes this book is that it is two parallel stories: the story of the boy and the story of the writer uncovering the truth about his subject, who also happens to be his father.

I highly recommend this book.

This is an exceptionally well-written book that tells an amazing story. Since other reviewers have given the details of the story, I will not rehash them. Suffice to say that Alex Kurzem's story is a good example of the terrible suffering innocent individuals have had to endure (a suffering that may even be worse than death itself) as a result of Nazi cruelty.

Some reviewers have said this book is unfair to the Latvian people and tarnishes the entire nation with the same brush. I beg to differ. I believe the author went out of his way to distinguish between those Latvians (police and troops) who committed war crimes and those Latvians who did not (such as the family that took in his father). Even with regard to Commander Lobe, whose soldiers did commit atrocities, the author is careful to indicate he can not say for certain that the commander participated in those war crimes although he may have.

It would have helped to set the stage for his story if the author had included a brief introductory chapter on the history of Latvia during World War II. Nazi Germany and the USSR divided Poland between themselves in 1939. Then, in the spring of 1940, with no pretext or justification, Stalin swallowed up the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Naturally, the Latvians were outraged at this groundless conquest of their country and communization of their economy. Most Latvian Jews, however, were more willing to accommodate themselves to life under Soviet rule, even if it meant giving up personal property, because they felt they were now safe from the Nazis. In June 1941, however, Hitler broke his alliance with Stalin and turned on Russia. When the Nazis conquered Latvia, most Latvians saw them as liberators from the hated Russians, especially since they restored the Latvians' private property (that is, other than the Latvian Jews' property). One thing the Nazis did not restore, however, was Latvia's independence. The more thoughtful Latvians realized this. To them the Nazis may have been the lesser of the two evils, but they were still evil. Other Latvians, however, saw the Nazis as their friends, protectors and allies. This was unfortunate, and both the Latvians and the Latvian Jews ended up paying a terrible price. Close to 90 percent of all Latvian Jews were killed by the Nazis and those Latvians who made common cause with them. In addition, some Latvians even went into other countries (including Alex Kurzen's village in what is now Belarus) to help the Nazis commit their evil atrocities. Toward the end of the war, the USSR took over Latvia and annexed it. For the next 45 years the Latvians knew no freedom and the Soviets settled many Russians in their country, who live there to this day.

The Latvians should have at least tried to follow the example of the nearby Finns. The Russians also wanted to conquer Finland and as a result Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany. But the Finns fought only to regain the land Russia had taken from them and refused to participate in the Nazi invasion of Russia itself nor did they send troops to help the Nazis anywhere else. The Finns refused to harm their country's Jewish citizens nor would they turn them over to the Nazis, though Germany requested they do so many times.

As a result, the Russians grudgingly respected the Finns and did not see them as Nazi puppets or stooges. Finland therefore managed to maintain its freedom and democracy in the aftermath of World War II, though they had to remain neutral in the Cold War, so as not to offend their Russian neighbor.

The moral of the story: If a nation puts its trust in another nation to the extent that it willingly relinquishes its independence and willingly ceases to take responsibility for its actions, there will be a price to pay.

During World War Two, Sergeant Jekabs Kulis, a Latvian SS soldier had taken five-year old Alex Kurzem out of a firing line. Later on, Kulis received permission from his commander Karl Lobe to adopt Alex as the troop's mascot. Kulis new that Alex was Jewish, but Lobe did not. Alex wondered why Kulis risked his freedom to save him. "Perhaps I reminded him of another boy he knew. Perhaps he pitted me. After all, what decent person would let harm come to a child? He saw that I was a human being...This episode and Alex's other experiences during the War are being relayed to his oldest son Mark in the book THE MASCOT. I have not found an explanation why Kulis had decided to save Alex's life" It is very perplexing reading that the same Kulis, later on, took part in burning a synagogue with hundreds of innocent men women and children in it. "He'd done what other soldiers had done to my family. He was no different from them (p79)."

In the memoir "A Lucky Child" a Holocaust survivor describes his unbelievable tribulations and his survival tactics in concentration camps, as a pre-teen age boy. His survival was due to his own cunning and help from others. Courage and kindness exist in the most fearful and abominable surroundings. In the autobiography "From A name to a Number", a Holocaust survivor describes how a German woman brought sandwiches for him every day, for thirty days. The survivor has been wondering, till this very day, what motivated the German woman to risk her life thirty times. He writes "I was only a young Jewish boy, an untermentch (a subhuman) by Nazi criterion. She ignored the daily propagandized odium, quivering inside, while helping me. Why? Did she have a son at my age and felt sorry for me? Was she a religious person who tried to abide by the tenets of her faith, succoring the helpless? Did she wish to assert that under the most ruthless dictatorship, a single human conscience can fight back? Did she want to patch up a punctured veneer of civilization, telling me and to herself that we both were cut from the same human cloth?"

Most Holocaust survivors' stories are shocking and hard to believe. Hitler had told his lieutenants: The atrocities the Jews would be subjected to will be so horrific that if any Jews do survive the Holocaust nobody would find their stories credible. THE MASCOT narrative is very strange, unique, stunning. It is, for example, unimaginable that Alex a five-year old boy could have survived hiding for an entire winter in a Russian forest? Some reviewers of the book took a skeptical stance regarding the story. To my understanding, only few relayed events that took place sixty-three years ago might be inaccurate. Memories are not infallible and children's memories are unreliable. This book might be embellished but not a complete hoax, a malicious deception, as some critiques deem it to be. Several photos in the book, pertinent to the story are not disputable. There is a plethora of evidence to substantiate the essence of Alex's story.

Simon Dubnow, the renowned Jewish historian from Latvia was killed by the Nazis in December 1941. His last words, in Yiddish" were: "shreibt unt farshreibt" (Write and record!) He felt that those who witnessed the horrific events of the Holocaust have a sacred duty to tell what they had experienced. Alex told his son:"To be truthful, I don't want to remember anything of what happened to me...I am just focused on Mum and you, my children... I wanted to protect you from my past...But the bigger truth is that I am more terrified to forget. I am trapped." This is a very poignant statement indeed. Holocaust survivors do not have to live with the past; the past lives within them for as long as they live. Mark writes (page 120)"My father did not wake up from his nightmares into the love if his own family." There had not been a soul who could reassure him that the world was as it should be, because he knew instinctively and through experience that it was not."

It would be unconscionable to put those experiences in the attic and let the contents atrophy. Ergo, Mark Kurzem's recording of his father's afflictions during WWII deserves recognition. He arranged and joined his parents in arduous journeys, in 1998, to Belarus and Latvia. Mark's pursuit to unravel the mystery of his Jewish father's past is highly recommendable. Many Holocaust survivors' descendents, including my own, show no interest in their father's Holocaust experience or heritage. They would rather take an entertaining cruise than visit villages in Europe where their relatives grew up and later perished in the Holocaust.The book is very well written. The unfolding drama is flabbergasting and riveting. THE MASCOT does enhance the literary scope of the Holocaust legacy

Just finished The Mascot and am suprised by some of the reviews which doubt its authenticity. I found it extremely honestly written, but there are holes- as to be expected by anyone recalling trauma from childhood. I saw all the characteristics of someone with post-traumatic stress in Alex which would be expected of a child witnessing his family's murder and the other holocaust events. His survivor guilt is so palpable and real. I was suprised by the response that the author recieved also from historical scholars-outright calling him a liar- as if written text and primary source material is always the ultimate truth. An excellent illustration that history is always in some form SUBJECTIVE- depending on who is doing the reporting. Would you not agree that a small child may ultimately have the most real and honest view of history?

For those of us who know alot about the halocaust this is an interesting perspective on one man's life during those years. For those in our society that still don't know much about these times it may not explain things well enough, for example it just implies some of the horrific experiences this boy sees and is forced to participate in. But it is an excellent example of what people in those times did to survive, just to live through it.

The book is very well written and I could not lay it down until I have finished reading the entire book. Maybe the Hollywood famous movie director Steven Spielberg will decide some day to make a film from this unbelievable true story. After reading the entire book, I did not find any answer for why his half brother Erick has deliberately taken him to a wrong house instead of the right one. The book does not give us a specific answer. I will be glad to receive an answer.