The Mascot

by Mark Kurzem

  Though he could not be certain that Lobe had been at Slonim, or indeed whether the massacre he himself had witnessed was at Slonim, the affidavit raised for him the question of his own complicity. I knew that we must find the truth about Slonim, if only to help my father come to terms with his decision to sign the affidavit. But I feared that my father would not forgive himself easily.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  NO ESCAPE

  I’d reached rock bottom. For the greatest part of my life I had followed every order the Latvians had given me. Now they wanted more. I couldn’t betray them. Perhaps what Uncle had said was true. I owed them my life. I thought that I’d never be free of them. They’d find me wherever I went. The past would draw me down and suffocate me.”

  “Did the affidavit reach Sweden?” I asked.

  “I assume it did. I did hear later that Commander Lobe was cleared.”

  “Did Uncle ever mention this incident to you in later years?” I asked.

  My father shook his head. “Never.” He was quiet.

  “So you think it highly likely that the Eighteenth was involved in Slonim?” I continued.

  “Why would the Soviets pursue this otherwise?” he replied. “And as I said earlier, my instinct tells me that on the night I visited him, Uncle knew more than he let on, that the Eighteenth and Commander Lobe were there…”

  “Lobe could be fairly certain that his own soldiers would not betray him after the war. They were as guilty as he was. But who might, if he remembered enough in the future?” I said.

  We both went quiet since we knew the answer: my father.

  My father mulled this over. “But the question remains,” he said finally, “did the extermination of my family occur before late 1941? And where the soldiers captured me—was it anywhere near Slonim?”

  “There’s an atlas in my room,” I said, rising to fetch it. “Let’s find Slonim.”

  We hunched over the atlas, our heads close together, scanning the maps of eastern Europe. We finally located Slonim in central southwestern Belarus.

  “This would mean the Eighteenth would need to have been somewhere in the vicinity of Slonim at the end of 1941 if it took part in the massacre,” I said. “And if you were taken shortly before that, your village must not have been too far away.”

  “That’s right,” my father said. “I couldn’t have traveled very far in a matter of weeks. I do remember going in circles as well.”

  My father pulled the atlas closer. Suddenly he stopped and pointed his finger at a spot on the map. “Look at this town,” he said excitedly. “Stolbtsi. To the northeast of Slonim.”

  I didn’t understand what had roused his interest so pointedly.

  “Don’t you remember?” he said. “I mentioned that the Eighteenth was positioned at a place known as ‘S’ when they picked me up. That was where I first met the commander. ‘S’ was about a day’s march from the schoolyard where Sergeant Kulis took me out of the firing line.”

  My father continued to hold his finger on the spot but was staring at me intently. Then his finger began to move across the page again, as his eyes scanned the area surrounding Stolbtsi.

  “The commander and the soldiers were careful to only ever refer to ‘S’ and not its proper name. Why on earth did they do this unless they were deliberately obscuring their movements for some reason…

  “What if ‘S’ was Stolbtsi, Marky?” he said, barely able to contain himself. “What if my village was somewhere nearby as well?”

  “We’ve got to find out the significance of Koidanov,” I said. “Give me the atlas. My eyes are better than yours.” I drew the map closer and examined it. There was no Koidanov in the vicinity of Stolbtsi.

  “Perhaps it’s too small a place to be recorded in an atlas, no more than a hamlet or tiny shtetl,” I said, trying to be optimistic. “We need to get hold of a more detailed map,” I added, recalling that I had been about to do so in Oxford when I’d been abruptly summoned back to Australia.

  I leaned back in my chair and noticed my father was doing the same. We laughed. My father raised his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “You’re tired, Dad,” I said.

  “No,” he protested, “not in the slightest.” He returned his glasses to the end of his nose and stared down at his hands.

  “So the affidavit was the end of your association with the Latvians, apart from the Dzenis family,” I said.

  My father screwed up his face as if tasting something sour. “It wasn’t quite as simple as that,” he said. “Of course, I didn’t want anything to do with Mr. Lobe after what had taken place. But word had obviously got around the Latvian community, and there was a sort of pressure put on me.

  “The commander was a national hero to all Latvians. You couldn’t have said a word against the man in the Latvian community in Australia. Most of the threats were low-key: veiled references to my duty to Commander Lobe and how good he and the other soldiers had been to me.

  “That would happen when I came into contact with some of the old soldiers at social functions at the Latvian Community House. They’d reminisce about their time in the army and then they’d turn to me and say, ‘Isn’t that so, Uldis?’”

  “They weren’t just being nostalgic with you?”

  “Don’t be absurd!” my father snapped. “I understood the nuance. They were reminding me that I was one of them and had been there with them, through it all.

  “Some threats were more direct—anonymous letters sent in the mail warning me to remain silent about Commander Lobe and the battalion’s wartime past.”

  I was shocked. This was the stuff of spy novels and films, not my father’s life. “Have you kept any of them?” I asked.

  My father shook his head. “I burned them as soon as I received them. I didn’t want your mother to come across them. Even my case didn’t seem secure enough. They must have come from old soldiers who’d emigrated to Australia. Or other Latvians who knew of my exploits with the army. It didn’t end there, either. It got worse after I married your mother and we settled together in Melbourne.

  “There was one man in particular who was more blatant than the rest—Arnold Smits. I’d first encountered Smits in Riga during the war. Even though I was only a child, I could tell that he was a deeply nasty person. He was a sports journalist on a newspaper in Riga, but he collaborated with Commander Lobe on some special projects as well. He was heavily involved in Nazi propaganda to incite hatred against Jews, demanding that Jewish vermin—that’s the term he used—be barred from Latvian sports and other rubbish like that.

  “Smits emigrated to Melbourne after the war and wrote for a Latvian newspaper. One day—it must have been around 1958 or 1959, when Mum and I were living in Pascoe Vale on the other side of the city—Smits appeared on our doorstep. I was immediately suspicious. I didn’t want him in my home—I didn’t want your mother to be exposed to this man—so I stood out front with him, out of Mum’s earshot.

  “He told me that he wanted to write a series of articles about my life in Latvia for the Latvian newspapers in Australia. I made it clear to him from the outset that I wouldn’t cooperate. At first he tried to cajole me into it, telling me what an honor it would be. ‘Don’t you want your story to be read by everybody who doesn’t yet know it?’ he said. Of course, it was the official version he wanted to write about and not the truth.

  “I didn’t want anything to do with his plan, but he was like a dog with a bone. In the end I was frank with him. I told him that the story was a pack of lies, and Lobe was not the hero Latvians believed him to be. He laughed directly in my face, telling me that he was going to write the articles no matter what my objections.

  “He did exactly as he said he would. The articles were published in 1959. I have a copy here if you want to see it.”

  Once again he dug deeply into his case. The articles were written in Latvian. He offered to translate them for me there and then, but at that moment, in the middle of the night, I felt too weary
to listen to more of these men’s lies.

  “Later, after I’ve gotten some sleep,” I replied. I could see that my response had disappointed him, but he didn’t push me. Instead, as he returned the article to his case, he removed another tatty and yellowed newspaper cutting. “See,” he said. “Smits and I.”

  He passed the scrap of paper across to me. It was a grainy photograph with a caption, printed decades ago. In it, my father, barely distinguishable, and another man were hunched over a chessboard, absorbed in a game and surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. As I examined it more closely to see if I recognized any of the faces in the crowd, he told me that he and Smits had belonged to the same chess club in Melbourne.

  “I don’t know whether or not Smits joined just to keep an eye on me,” he said, “but whenever I ran into him there, he would insist on challenging me. I beat him every time, just as I’d beaten every soldier in the Eighteenth once they’d taught me to play.

  “He always demanded that we sit in the far corner of the clubrooms, as far as possible from the other players, saying that he needed silence in order to concentrate on his strategy.

  “As we entered into the depth of our game, he would make it very clear to me, smiling his death’s-head smile, that nobody would believe my word against that of real Latvians, and that I would make certain people very unhappy and risk dire consequences if I tried to discredit Latvia or any of its people in any way. I would sit there with my head down and try to focus on the game in front of me, though more than once I came very close to sweeping the pieces off the board and denouncing him. But I never did. Who’d have listened? Nobody would have been interested. In those days Australia was a sleepy backwater, full of immigrants who’d come to forget the past, not dig it up.

  “After the war, Australia welcomed thousands of people from the Baltic States. ‘Balts,’ we were called. We were seen as refugees from Stalinism and thus on the Aussies’ side. The authorities weren’t suddenly going to have a change of heart and stir up a hornet’s nest by hunting for war criminals.”

  It wasn’t until the 1990s that the Australian government examined with any vigor how many Baltic war criminals had come to its shores.

  “Once Smits’s articles were published,” I heard my father say, “I felt more locked into the official version of my story than ever. Having made it all the way to the freedom of Australia, I felt that the right to be left in peace had been taken from me. As I’d feared, these men kept in touch with each other, and each in his own way was set against me.”

  “The last threat I received was almost two decades ago. I guess they thought that if I hadn’t said anything by then, I wasn’t going to talk at all. And many of the old soldiers were starting to die off.

  “God knows what will happen if my story gets out,” he mused, trying to make light of the situation. “They’ll all turn over in their graves and come back to haunt me.”

  For a moment I felt a surge of anger not only toward the Latvians but toward my father as well. I felt that his choice to remain silent about these threats had somehow added to his betrayal. He appeared to sense this, and he opened his case and began to fumble absently with its contents, obviously keen to avoid my ire. It was a cunning, theatrical move, but it also struck me as rather desperate, and my anger turned to pity. I imagined myself subtly tormented as he had been for most of his adult life. During those early years in Australia he had looked to the future and resolved to make a new life for himself. But the tentacles of this Latvian nationalist network, unable either to leave its past behind or to face it honestly, had stretched out and ensnared him.

  As if he had followed my train of thought, I heard my father say, “I was to blame, too.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Even though I looked to my new life here, I held back from breaking those bonds completely. These men were the only link to the past, for better or worse. I used to have fantasies that one of them somehow knew my real name—don’t ask me how—and that one day he would take pity on me and tell me.

  “I let them behave as if they owned me because I didn’t want to alienate them. For years that tore me in two inside. That’s the truth of it.”

  “Dad, you’ve never said a single word to any of us,” I said. “Not even Mum.”

  My father ignored my words and instead gave a deep sigh. “Even though the old soldiers are all gone now, the idea that they might have been able to tell me who I was taunts me from their graves.”

  My father looked at me searchingly. “I’ve been naive, haven’t I?” he said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  STOCKHOLM

  My father seemed oblivious to the passing hours. I cast a furtive glance at the clock on the kitchen wall and saw that it was almost four in the morning. I was exhausted but now that my father had finally broken his silence, I was reluctant to stop our conversation.

  “Hearing all of this makes everything fall into place,” I said. “Even though Lobe avoided a trial and extradition, he must have lived in constant fear of retribution. That would explain his behavior when I visited him in Stockholm.”

  My father gave me a questioning look.

  “What did happen?” he asked. “You simply said that the visit was fine.”

  “I decided not to say anything, because you’d seemed so set against me going there at the time.”

  My father simply nodded. I began to tell him about my visit.

  I first described to my father in detail what had gone on in the Lobes’ apartment that day. He listened intently, without interrupting me. “After I left the Lobes,” I told my father, “I hurried along the path that led away from the apartment complex. I was excited and wanted to get back to the city so I could call you in Melbourne. But as I waited for a tram, a number of things began to nag at me, and my euphoria gradually evaporated.

  “Above all, I was alarmed by Lobe’s first reaction to me when I’d knocked on his door the previous day. I realize now that after I’d slipped the note under the door, he must have been fairly sure that I knew nothing of the truth of who he was and who you’d been. No wonder he was so suspicious initially and so exaggerated in his welcome later. Added to that was his semideranged tirade about his association with Nazism. I began to wonder how closely he was personally associated with the Nazis, and, more to the point, how closely you had been.

  “I was unsettled as well by something in Lobe’s and your description of your discovery by the soldiers.”

  My father became alert and sat upright in his chair. “What was that, son?” he asked.

  “It was eerie,” I answered. “The words you used were almost identical. And there was another thing that occurred to me as I stood there in the freezing wind—the perspective of your description. It was as if you had been one of the soldiers who witnessed the boy step from behind the tree. From the outside looking in, rather than from the point of view of the frightened child stepping out to be confronted by a band of soldiers brandishing rifles and bayonets.”

  “As I told you,” my father said, “Commander Lobe had drummed that version into me, and the only way I could believe it was to memorize his every word and repeat it exactly. Still, it’s amazing that you picked up on that.”

  “Yes, but I was mystified at the time and could find no explanation for it. As I journeyed back into the center of Stockholm, I decided to put this unnerving observation to the back of my mind. In fact, I hadn’t thought about that day until you spoke to me in London. I realized then that there might be something complex in your association with Lobe and Uncle.

  “Of course, it’s only now that I’ve got some inkling of why you seemed so apprehensive when I called to tell you that I intended to visit Lobe,” I ventured. “You must have been petrified that I’d learn the truth about your life with the Eighteenth Battalion, and what sort of men they were.”

  My father was silent. My last comment must have seemed accusatory, and I sensed his reluctance to engage with me. I returned to the affidavit.

  “When
Lobe decided to get me to make a statement on his behalf, he must have wondered more and more what I had witnessed all those years ago and how incriminating it might have been. And certainly after my visit to him in Melbourne, Uncle must have conveyed to the commander that I did have recollections that could incriminate him.

  “So even though I signed the statement, that must have played on Commander Lobe’s mind as well for all those years, along with the chance that more of my memory might return. Perhaps in his mind the question of my loyalty was never really settled with the signing of the affidavit.”

  I nodded. “So when I appeared on his doorstep, identifying myself as your son, he must have feared the worst. He must’ve thought that you’d told me, your son, the truth, and that I’d come seeking something. Revenge, perhaps? Why else would Uldis’s son visit him?”

  My father agreed. “It looks that way. How else to explain his response? One thing is clear, even though Commander Lobe had been able to fight off his extradition years earlier, he’d probably spent the remainder of his life in fear that somebody would eventually come after him.”

  “He promised to stay in touch, but I never heard from him,” I said.

  My father looked sheepish. “Shortly after your visit,” he said, “a letter came from out of the blue. I was surprised when I saw the envelope and realized it was from Commander Lobe. He’d never written to me before.”

  He raised the lid of his case slightly and with his usual adroitness produced an envelope. He removed a sheet of paper and smoothed it out on the table. He lowered his eyes and began to read, translating as he did so.

  “‘My dear Uldis Kurzemnieks.

  “‘It is a long time since we last saw each other. I hope that you are in good health. From time to time, I hear news of your life in Australia from Mr. Dzenis. I am happy that you are successful and have your own family.’”