|
Alex (Uldis) Kurzem (born 1935 or 1936) is an Australian pensioner originally from Eastern Europe, living in Melbourne; a centre-point of a long-standing controversy regarding his Holocaust memoir which have led to a financial windfall in the early 21st century.〔 He was the subject of a TV documentary and a best-selling book by his own son,〔 translated into 13 languages; both entitled ''The Mascot''.〔〔 According to the story (described as spellbinding by the New York Times), Alex Kurzem is the former boy mascot (hence the book title) of a Latvian police ''Schutzmannschaft'' Battalion 18,〔 who witnessed the massacre of his Jewish mother as a five-year-old boy and subsequently emigrated to Australia.〔 Kurzem maintained that he is a Holocaust survivor from Belarus. However the authenticity of his account has been challenged in 2009 by Dr Barry Resnick among others. When put under further scrutiny by the Jewish-American scholars, and asked to prove his survivor's tale by taking a DNA test, Kurzem refused. He also dismissed out of hand the archival records of the Hoover Institution at Stanford as allegedly falsified;〔 but eventually admitted: "I might be anybody, but I have got no proof who I am."〔Herald Sun, ( "Holocaust survivor's tale under scrutiny." ) Australia.〕〔 ==Autobiography== Kurzem claimed that his parents were Solomon Galperin and Chana Gildenberg, who were Jewish. On October 21, 1941, Gildenberg and her son and daughter were exterminated along with approximately 1,600 other Russian Jews in Koidanov (now Dzyarzhynsk, Belarus). Solomon Galperin escaped extermination and joined a group of Soviet partisans. He was later caught and sent to Auschwitz, returning to Dzyarzhynsk after the war. He remarried, and died in 1975 without ever knowing that Kurzem had survived. Kurzem says that he escaped, and that after months of living in the forests and begging for food, he was rescued (he does not give a precise date). He was saved from probable death by Jekabs Kulis, a sergeant of a Latvian police battalion,〔Christopher Martin, (Michigan War Studies Review - book reviews, literature surveys, essays, and commentary. )〕 who adopted him as the battalion's mascot, and who secretly warned him never to reveal his Jewish identity. Latvian and German soldiers knew him as a Russian orphan who had lost his parents in the forest. Throughout his childhood, Kurzem appeared in Nazi propaganda media as an Aryan mascot, including at least one newsreel. Kurzem says that on one occasion his commanding officer, Karlis Lobe, ordered him to hand out chocolates to other Jews to calm them as they boarded trucks that took them to be exterminated. In 1944, with the Nazis facing almost certain defeat, the commander of the Latvian SS unit sent Kurzem to live with a Latvian family. Kurzem immigrated to Australia from a displaced persons camp in Hamburg, Germany, in 1949. He worked in a circus and eventually became a television repair man in Melbourne. He had three sons with his wife Patricia (died 2003). All the time, he kept his past life to himself, not even telling his wife or children. It was not until 1997 that he finally told his family, and along with his son, Mark, set about discovering more about his past. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Alex Kurzem」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|