Books |
The Mascot
Mark Kurzem
By
Published: Jan 01, 2007
Category:
Biography
“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. 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 soldiers with rifles, 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.
