The Mascot

by Mark Kurzem

  Though I had my own intuitions, there was so much I wanted to ask Jekabs Dzenis and the other men who’d come into contact with my father. How had they felt about the boy-soldier and mascot in their midst? Why had they kept him? Were they trying to convince themselves that they hadn’t corrupted their own humanity?

  But Uncle and Auntie had died, as had Commander Lobe, many years before. And recently, just as a reconciliation between my father and his “stepsister” Mirdza seemed possible, she, too, passed away.

  Trying to learn more about Jekabs Kulis, the soldier who had taken my father out of the firing line, I traced a family to New York, from where Kulis had written to my father in the 1950s. I tried to make contact by telephone. An elderly woman with a thick European accent picked up the receiver. When I mentioned who I was and what I was seeking, I heard her gasp before hastily denying any knowledge of my father.

  “We are Czech Jews! Leave us alone!” she cried, before slamming down the telephone.

  When I reported this to my father, he appeared resigned and advised me to leave them in peace. “What point would it serve?” he said. “Even if it is them, they are probably too old and sick to want to remember me now.”

  “The Kulises have probably never been able to forget you,” I protested.

  But my father was adamant. The trail went cold after that.

  Although nobody has come forward with information, I suspect that there are individuals—descendants of soldiers and perhaps old soldiers themselves—in Europe and elsewhere who know something about the little mascot. For whatever reason they remain tight-lipped.

  And what of the enigma of Slonim? In the end I learned from the work of the historian Andrew Ezergailis that the Eighteenth Battalion was in fact stationed in the town of Stolbtsi in Belarus, as we had suspected. Given its proximity—a day’s journey—to Slonim, it was feasible that the Eighteenth had been there. But I was confronted with a greater problem: I learned that the presence of the Eighteenth in Belarus at the time of the Slonim massacre is mired in yet a wider controversy. Some historians have claimed that the battalion was there but suggest variable dates for the massacre itself. And while some suggest that it was an isolated incident, others have argued that the massacre persisted as a series of incidents for which the Eighteenth was responsible from the end of 1941 through most of 1942. According to some, even if the battalion was present, extermination duty was not necessarily one of their official duties. Whatever the truth behind these controversies, we will never know whether my father actually witnessed what happened at Slonim or whether it was one of the many unnamed massacres he saw the soldiers commit. What remains indisputable is that my father cannot lay to rest his sense of accountability both for what he remembers of that day and for what he does not.

  And then there are our discoveries from our journey to Belarus.

  The mystery of the dusty bag of photographs from my father’s original home in Koidanov persists. Who are these people whose framed sepia faces stare out at us? Cousins, uncles, nieces, grandparents? It is as if they are pleading to be recognized and remembered. But we can only identify one half-torn image of a young woman, smiling shyly, who just might be Hana Gildenberg, my father’s mother.

  We had learned later from Erick that his father, Solomon Galperin, had returned to the family home, hoping to find his wife and children, including his son Ilya Galperin, my father. Solomon had stayed in Koidanov until the last years of his life, when he moved to Minsk, where he died in 1975. If my father had spoken sooner of his past, then father and son may have been reunited.

  There were other painful memories and realities to be confronted. Alongside the potential rediscovery of a family home was the mass grave where my father had witnessed his family’s extermination.

  Still, I had learned something of my father’s resilience in the past months. While what was happening to him was extracting a heavy emotional toll, he maintained that this would provide him with ballast for what lay ahead.

  Sadly, too, the relationship between my father and Erick, his half brother, has waned. The exact reasons for this estrangement remain obscure. It may be the language barrier: my father’s Russian is that of a child.

  But it has also proved difficult for the two men, one in his seventies and one in his fifties, to overcome the tyranny of distance—physical and historical—that separates them, in order to forge an easy bond.

  The situation is not made any easier by the fact that my father often returns to the question of “Panok,” and again raises the possibility that he might have been born a Panok and not a Galperin. He does so despite the correlation of his recollections with Volodya’s during our day in Koidanov.

  Who was Elli, the woman who befriended me in Oxford? She suddenly disappeared without explanation from the city and without forwarding details. Her father was an Israeli intelligence agent: was he behind the break-in at my parents’ home? No valuables were stolen, but my father’s papers had been ransacked as if the intruder searched for something specific. The photograph of my father posing with the members of the Eighteenth Battalion, perhaps?

  Was either Elli or her father connected to two men who later appeared on my parents’ doorstep one morning, claiming to be war crimes investigators? They, too, had come seeking the photograph of my father with the soldiers. How had they known about it? And why had they refused to give my father their names?

  Every effort I made to find answers to these mysteries left me stranded with only my intuitions and suspicions. However, the evidence that I did have was sufficient to support my father’s version of his childhood, and I wanted public vindication for him.

  Somewhat naively I encouraged my father to return to the Holocaust center in Melbourne armed with the new details garnered from our visit to Belarus and Latvia. I believed that the experience would be a positive one for him. He might now be able to present himself to his interviewers as legitimately Jewish, whatever that meant in this context, and be embraced by them.

  It was not to be. Inexplicably, the male interviewer had become determinedly set against my father. In a public interview he stated that my father was not Jewish, that he did not have a Jewish heart, and that he had never lost his sense of loyalty to the Latvians above all else. Most disturbing of all, he cast doubt on the veracity of my father’s story, despite the plethora of evidence we now had. We decided to leave him to his insinuations.

  The official rejection of my father’s application for assistance from the Claims Conference in New York, 1999, later rescinded after much struggle.

  In one final push for recognition, I turned to the Claims Conference in New York, the organization primarily responsible for evaluating claims of Holocaust suffering and awarding appropriate “compensation.”

  It, too, declined to recognize my father’s experiences in the Holocaust. “How has your father suffered?” one of its representatives demanded of me. “Your father was not even in a concentration camp,” she argued indignantly.

  Then came its final, embittering decision that my father had volunteered for the SS.

  Official verification from the Gilf Society.

  After many months of argument and verification of my father’s story by the Gilf Society in Minsk, the conference was eventually forced to overturn its verdict.

  In the midst of this struggle my father remained stoic. But as the months passed, I learned from my mother that his insomnia had returned, fueled by nightmares from which he awoke disoriented and in a cold sweat. He had none of his usual appetite for food and had lost weight. It seemed that the past as well as his more recent experiences had worn him down; he could no longer be placated by the space and the sunshine, the bright optimism of the “lucky country.”

  My mother’s health also continued to worry us. Finally, a diagnosis was reached: she was suffering from a rare form of cancer that doctors deemed unresponsive to the usual forms of treatment. Her condition fluctuated; for days and weeks on end she would be fine, and a stranger would
never guess how unwell she actually was.

  Then one day in September 2003 I received a call from my father. My mother’s health had suddenly deteriorated and she had been admitted to the hospital. He couldn’t bring himself to tell me that the prognosis was extremely poor. My mother’s sister called me the following morning to tell me to come home as soon as I could.

  That evening I caught a plane to Melbourne.

  A month later my mother died.

  A darkness, not threatening, but sad and bewildering, settled over our home. My father had lost his dearest friend and partner.

  One evening, sitting in the blanketing gloom of the unlit kitchen, my father and I both succumbed to a lingering sense of guilt that had until then been too painful to broach: we wondered whether in some way his story had contributed to her death.

  “Your mother was a practical woman,” my father said, “and people mistook this for toughness. She wasn’t. Your mother was too soft, too kind. She was exhausted by my story. It was too much for her.”

  During the weeks that followed, he gradually lost interest in the unanswered questions about his past, telling me that the search didn’t seem worth it anymore.

  “The pieces we have,” he said, “we’ll make do with them.”

  Two months later I decided to return to Oxford: we’d rattled around under the same roof for long enough, usually avoiding each other’s company. I had an inexpressible anger and grief toward the world that had taken my mother and sensed I was not a person my father wanted to, or should, be around.

  The morning of my departure arrived. I didn’t know how long it would be until I saw my father again, and I wanted to make a gesture of conciliation. I found him seated at the kitchen table, browsing the morning paper, as was his habit.

  “Dad,” I said.

  He looked up.

  “Fancy a visit to Williamstown?”

  “For what?”

  I shrugged awkwardly, shifting from foot to foot as if I were an ungainly teenager. “Coffee, perhaps,” I said. “Or lunch, or an ice cream. A strawberry one, even.”

  For the first time in a long while he smiled. It was at my mention of strawberry ice cream. He was silent for several moments, thinking over my offer.

  “Okay, son,” he said finally.

  Later that morning we found ourselves sitting on the same bench I’d sat on with my mother six years earlier. It had been the morning after she’d seen the videotape of my father’s interview and finally knew what had been bothering her husband so much.

  Once again, the dinghies moored just offshore bobbed in the light breeze, the occasional ring of one of their bells punctuating the silence between me and my father.

  For some time I’d wondered whether the search we had undertaken had brought us enough proof that the past had actually unfolded as my father had claimed—and the doubters be damned. Still, many questions remained unanswered, and I wondered if a resolution would ever be found. I worried that I’d misjudged the heavy toll memory would take on my father.

  “Has this been worth it?” I asked.

  “What would make it worth it? Who knows? I have a name.” My father shrugged. “And the film clip as well. Now that your mother’s gone,” he added gloomily, “I ask myself that question every day.”

  He began to shake his head. “But the truth is, my story is all that I have now…”

  My father paused before he continued.

  “From that single moment when I opened my eyes and chose to live—without knowing clearly what that even meant—and stepped outside into the darkness, my life took an unimaginable turn. And look where I’ve ended up sixty years on. The other side of the world!”

  My father rose and headed for the shore; for several minutes he watched a black swan walking on the beach. Then he returned to where I’d remained seated and stood in front of me, obscuring the sunlight and my view of the bay.

  “I don’t know what I lost,” he said, without prompting. “How can you know the life you didn’t live? I took the chance to survive and I’ve never railed against that. This is just the way that life turned out for me. Any number of times I could’ve been exposed or even let myself be discovered, but I made my survival into a companion, and it has stayed by my side all throughout my life.”

  “Would it have been better if you’d never spoken of the past?” I pressed my father.

  “I honestly don’t know, son,” he said slowly. “Even after sixty years, it unsettled me in a way that I could never have imagined. I thought I was in charge of my life but it wasn’t so. How I survived even now dictates my life, and all I can do is follow at a safe distance, chained to it. It’s as if there are two persons in my body. There is the Alex everybody knows and there’s another Alex who was a secret. They’ll have to learn to accommodate each other again.”

  So I had my answers to questions I had harbored since that day at the Café Daquise in London, when my father had suddenly become a stranger to me.

  There was no resolution, no absolution, no closure, no moving on, no getting over it, no pop-psychology solution. Only an accommodation of the past. My father had somehow known this all along.

  I realized that I, too, had to find a way of living, comfortably or not, with this, my legacy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This journey has been a long and difficult one. Without the support, advice, assistance, and, above all, the friendship of many, my father and I may not have reached this point.

  Sarah Blair has supported me enormously throughout the writing of the book—typing and proofreading—and offering general advice and encouragement. I am deeply grateful to Sarah, and also to Jane Enright, who was similarly unstinting in her help. Thanks also to Luke Mason, who also pitched in with valued work on the manuscript early on in the process.

  Robert Guinsler, my agent, has been very generous with his time. His sound advice and good humor have kept my spirits up during the darker moments of writing this book. The commitment of the editorial team at Penguin, in particular Hilary Redmon, was thorough and solid and always very reassuring. I am also especially grateful to Bernard Nyman for protecting the integrity of my work.

  At the outset, I had little knowledge of the time and space of the world in which my father lived and moved. I listened to the stories and anecdotes of many who did share his world and my gratitude to them is immense—I am humbled by their lives. The research of countless historians also informed my general understanding of Europe at that time. Special note must be made of the scholarship of Professor Andrew Ezergailis in his book The Holocaust in Latvia, which later helped me piece together some of the movements and identities of Latvian troops.

  During the actual journeys to Belarus and Latvia I received invaluable support from many individuals and organizations. In particular I want to acknowledge the support of the Jewish World Congress, London; Frank and Galina Swartz of the East European Jewish Heritage Project in Minsk, who became generous friends and hosts to my mother and father during our time there; Frida Reizman from the Gilf Society in Belarus; the Latvia State Archive for Audiovisual Document in Riga; and Ryuta Akamatsu of Telesis Ltd, Japan.

  In a project such as this, with its inevitably disheartening setbacks and periods of isolation, it was frequently the face of a friend and a kind word now and then or a laugh that made a world of difference. There are many dear people who did so for me: Gro Ween, wonderful Daphne Lennie, kind and generous Audrey and Michael Phillips, Jeffery Lies, Rachel Moseley and John Turner, Uma Bhattacharya, Jane Enright, Alan Russell, Lee Parsons, and Gordon Hickson. Distant friends, too, seemed close at hand and ever present in their support: dear Anne Rahilly, Janet Westwood, Peter Westwood, Lisa Reichenbach, Irene Kuijpers, William J. Holmes, Margaret Chu, Maria Norris, and Mary Ida Bagus and family.

  And then there is Sim Tan, a great friend who lightened my load considerably.

  Special thanks to Eiko and Takaaki (deceased) Hosokawa for their considerable support and friendship during the past years a
nd, similarly, the three branches of my family spread around the globe—the Kurzems in Australia, the Galperin family in Belarus, and the Krupitsky family in the United States.

  Other kinds of help and care bestowed on me must be acknowledged. Thanks to Helen Beer for her information on Yiddish culture and to Heathcote Williams, a man of erudition and immense talent who took a strong interest in my father’s story, and his partner, Diana, who opened her home to me.

  Mention must also be made of every staff member at the Oxford Eye Hospital where I received excellent and compassionate care from all quarters as they struggled to save my eyesight. They did! In particular, I wish to thank Miss Susan Downes, Mr. Paul Rosen, and Mr. John Salmon and their respective teams for holding back that dark prospect.

  There are only two people remaining to thank. First, my very dear friend Alastair Phillips, who has shown faith in my ability to tell this story, even when I faltered. His support, encouragement, compassion, and care have greatly guided me.

  And then last, but of course not least, there is my father, who entrusted me with his voice.

  INDEX

  Acland Street (Melbourne, Australia). See also Café Scheherazade

  affidavit, Alex’s

  Aizum, Captain (German soldier)

  Altona. See Australia

  apple tree

  Alex’s dreams about

  and Alex’s escape from Koidanov

  and Koidanov visit

  Arajs Kommando

  atlas search, Alex’s

  Auschwitz

  Australia

  Alex’s allegiance to

  Alex’s arrival in

  Alex’s early years in

  Alex’s views about

  Dzenis family in

  German influence in

  as Kurzem family home

  as land of refuge