Front Burner - Weekend Listen: He owes his life to a lie, now will anyone believe what he calls the truth?

Episode Date: March 1, 2025

As a child, Alex Kurzem faced a choice: be killed or join the killers.In the midst of the Second World War, he was separated from his family and taken in by a group of soldiers as one of their own. He was made a member of Hitler’s army – a toy soldier with his own rifle and miniature SS uniform.But what the soldiers didn’t know and what no one would know for decades: he was a Jewish boy masquerading as a Nazi to save his life.Alex lives with this false identity for so long, he no longer remembers who he was before – forgetting his parents’ faces, his birthday, his own name. But before he dies, Alex is determined to find the identity and family stolen from him during the Holocaust. This is the story Alex would tell the world decades later, but doubts quickly took hold and wouldn’t let go. Could a story so unbelievable be true? Or is this a con to profit from the Holocaust? Eighty years on, is it possible to uncover who Alex really is? Host Dan Goldberg unravels the true story.Get lost in someone else’s life. From a mysterious childhood spent on the run, to a courageous escape from domestic violence, each season of Personally invites you to explore the human experience in all its complexity, one story — or season — at a time.More episodes of Personally: Toy Soldier are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/PVBRcQ

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All investing involves risk. Learn more at Wealthsimple.com slash margin. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi there, Jamie here. So we have a special bonus episode for you today from a brand new podcast. It's called Toy Soldier from CBC's Personally. As a child, Alex Kurzem faced a choice, be killed or join the killers.

His decision saved his life, but erased his identity. It's 1942 and the slaughter of the Holocaust is underway. Alex escapes the massacre of his family and survives in the woods until the enemy finds him. But instead of killing him, he's made their mascot, and at times their accomplice, a Jewish boy masquerading as a Nazi toy soldier. He'd lived with his false identity for much of his life,

forgetting his parents' faces and his own name. This is how Alex would tell his story when he finally shared it with the world decades later. But doubts enveloped his story and he finally shared it with the world decades later. But doubts enveloped his story and wouldn't let go. Could a story so fantastical be true? Or is it another in a long line of Holocaust hoaxes? And are there any answers to be found 80 years later? Now here's the first episode of Toy Soldier. Have a listen. to your family? Did you want to take revenge? No, never revenge. Just wanted the world to know what can happen. Because not only did they take away your father and mother, the rest of the family,

they forced you to take on a different identity. Yeah, it was brainwashed into you in a way. And you had to Yeah, it was brainwashed into you in a way. And you had to continue with it? Yeah. Until you became sick and you were in the hospital. Yeah. What thoughts did you have then?

I thought, oh, I wish I knew my real name. I knew I didn't have family, but I said, I wish I knew my name. MUSIC The man you're listening to, he believed for most of his life that he'd die before anyone knew who he really was, before he himself really knew. But a strange thing happens as we age. The past can pull you back and unravel the present.

The story just kept getting crazier and crazier. He was so desperate to find a name, to find who he was. At what point did you start disbelieving him? Straight away from the beginning. It is a miracle and it is our family. The more he kept refusing, the more it was pushing me to the fact that it wasn't true.

If the devil had come along and taken me by the hand, I would have gone with him. along and take me by the hand I would have gone with him. My name is Dan Goldberg and this is the story of a lie. One that fractured the family, erased an identity and saved a life. From CBC's personally, this is Toy Soldier. Let's just chat about Uncle Aldi. He was your uncle, but in a different sense than most people understand the word uncle. I mean, for me, Uncle Aldi was always family. I loved him dearly. This is Baby Mangaless Ford. Baby always knew her uncle wasn't related to her by blood, but it didn't matter.

We always understood that he'd been adopted into the family and that that had happened during World War II. Baber knew that the war had separated her uncle from his family as a child and that he'd later been placed with her grandparents in nearby Latvia. By 1949 they fled Europe for Australia with their three daughters and Aldi. He arrived as Aldis Kuzemnayeks, but soon he became known as Alex Kourzum. So they probably said to Aldi, Aldis? Nah, too hard, we'll call you Alex. I'm sitting with Beba in our home in the Blue Mountains,

about an hour west of Sydney. Australia's where our uncle would grow up and grow old. I remember this, sometimes he looked like a koala because he had these tufts of silver hair just over his ears here and he had this round face and the tufty hair and this benign smile. Very koala. What's your first memory?

My first memory is that he was always involved with radios and televisions and he knew a lot about them. And back in those days we didn't have a television. So the idea that I had an uncle who had access to televisions was just like, wow. And he was super cool because he was different. He was younger than my mother and father and he was kind of edgy.

He was very funny. He was a raconteur. He could tell a story like no one else and he used to have us in stitches. Whenever we got together there was always the opportunity for him to tell us about how when he first started working in Australia he worked different kinds of jobs. He worked in the railways. But the most interesting to us as children was the fact that one day he woke up in Hyde Park and discovered that Wirth Circus had set up next to where he was sleeping. And he enters and he says basically to them, can I join the circus?

And of course he did join the circus. They gave him a job as elephant boy, which meant, of course, looking after the elephant, cleaning him. The stories were always told in such a way that there was always like a punchline. He loved telling stories about when he met Frank Sinatra in Sydney when he was working in the nightclub area and he had to be Frank Sinatra's minder. Before the show Aldi had said, Frankie at some point just tap me on the shoulder as if you want to speak to me. And when Frankie did tap Uldi on the shoulder, Uldi turned and said,

not now, Frankie, I'm busy. I can't be sure that all the stories Uldi told Babe were true. I've seen a photo of him as the elephant boy at the circus, so that one seems like it happened. But the punchline about Frank Sinatra? That sounds a lot like a story Sinatra once told on late night TV, about something comedian Don Rickles did to him. I walked by the table and I said,

How are you, Don? Nice to see you. He said, Can't you see I'm eating, Frank? What are you doing? Although he was a very, very happy raconteur and loved to tell stories, there was also a sense that he was a very private person and that he kept to himself in a deep way. And he kept the stories of his time before joining Beba's family especially close to him. The general story was that he'd been found wandering in the woods or somewhere in some village looking after goat sheep or pigs or whatever. And that he'd been found by a group of Latvian

soldiers during World War II and that he had been rescued by them and because apparently he couldn't remember who his parents were, he couldn't remember anything at all. He said he couldn't remember his name even, or when he was born. There seemed to be no chance of reuniting him with the family, so he was asked to join the group. He obviously jumped at the chance, so the story goes. And it wasn't until the war deepened and the battalion was sent to the Eastern Front and it was Jakobs Dennis, managed a chocolate factory.

My grandfather, who had three daughters, I think he jumped at the opportunity to have a boy in the family. And so grandpa welcomed him with open arms as did my mother and her two sisters. So that was the story about how he came to be in our family. And so fast forward a little bit to where you sensed that there was more of a story and you started to. I think throughout my life I always thought there was more to the story

and it was hard to know what that story might be and it was also hard to know how one could ever find out. It wasn't until I was an adult that I started thinking about, well, I wonder what the real story is. And then his eldest son, Mark, with whom I was very close, was visiting one time and we were talking about his father having nightmares and that he had certain memories that were coming back to him and I kept thinking that if there were nightmares then possibly there was trauma associated with his early past and that this is what he was revisiting in his dreams. And

and that this is what he was revisiting in his dreams. And so I wrote Aldi a letter, and I said that he had a lot of stories that would be worth telling. Would he be willing to do so on tape? You left Latvia on the 4th of November? That's right, yeah. It's the mid-1990s. Aldi's in his 60s and Beba begins flying to Melbourne to visit him. What I was trying to do was to peel an onion layer by layer because I knew the core of the story

was going to take time to uncover and that if there was trauma at the centre of the story, it wasn't something that one could dive into immediately. It was something that I would have to work at gaining Aldi's trust because he was vulnerable. Sometimes he was happy to talk, and sometimes he just didn't want to go there. I had to accept that. I thought it was much longer than three weeks. I thought it was at least a month.

Well, but this is the interesting thing about memory. Number one, you were a little boy. Yeah, that's why I made it dumb. And a little boy's memory is very different from an adult. I know it was a long time, I was so, you know... The moment when things moved forward was when he came out to the kitchen table with a little brown suitcase and he opened it up and he said, I've kept this suitcase all my years.

I've kept it hidden at the back of my wardrobe. But in here, he says, is my life. Baber tells me that's when Aldi pulled out a trove of items from his suitcase. There were documents, there were photographs. And of course I was absolutely entranced because now the story was about my family as well because there was stuff there with my grandfather's signature with photographs of my mother, photographs of my grandfather, you know,

photographs obviously of Aldi as this little boy because we all knew the story that he was with the Latvian army. Well, that's what it was called, the Latvian army. In the photos, Aldi looks about seven or eight, maybe even nine years old. His hair is neatly slicked, his small frame in a miniature uniform. On his shoulder hangs a gun in its holster, his hands perched on its barrel, other soldiers tower above him, smiling. They all loved me, like mother and father.

They gave me the best they could give for me. They gave me a uniform, they gave me a birthday, they gave me a name, all the screws and nicks. In these conversations, Babe aligns for the first time what really happened after the soldiers found Uldi in the woods. So they trained you how to use the gun, they trained you how to kill? Did you kill anyone? I don't remember shooting anybody at all, except birds and things like that. They gave you the rank of private in the beginning? When did you become a corporal?

I don't know, it must have been in Poland, become a corporal in Poland. Uldi tells Beba part of the battalion's job was to protect the army's trains. He remembers riding on top of them with the other soldiers, machine guns in hand. So you sat up on the top with them? Yeah, on top with them, yeah. With a machine gun? Machine gun, big machine gun, big machine gun. I couldn't even lift them.

Just pull the trigger and make a noise. Make a noise. I have such a vivid imagination of you on the trains, sitting on top, riding through the Polish countryside. Yeah, in the dark, and getting shot at too. We were getting shot and bombed, and we had to sort of fire back, but you didn't know where you were firing in the dark and getting shot at. We were getting shot and bombed. And we had to sort of fire back, but you didn't know where you were in the dark. But to make, to let them know that you're protecting the train,

you have to make a big noise to scare them off. Yes. Were you ever frightened? Oh, yeah, one day I was frightened in the truck. We were in a big truck and I was in the back of it. And the truck front was blown up and they attacked the truck and the bullets were coming. Everywhere I was and I was hiding amongst all the goods. Odi says because of the constant attacks, he and the rest of his battalion lived in

an underground bunker. So the only way to live was underground. But in the water from the swamp, you see, see, see, if you ever pop out of bed, you need deep modern water. And that's they couldn't get out. They swim in the water. The night shining eyes. You see the night shining eyes and all this. It's amazing. So many little boys in Australia play at being in war.

You were a little boy and you were living war with the soldiers, side by side. As Oldie recounted more and more details, it became clear who had rescued him from the woods and what side of the war they were fighting for. They were a Latvian police battalion that would go on to serve the SS, the elite arm of the Nazi regime, responsible for the final solution. Uldi would become part of Hitler's army. Upside. You just found a hot stock and grabbed some shares. Downside. You wanted to buy more. Upside. Wealthsimple now offers margin trading. Borrow against your existing assets and seize market moments as they happen, with interest rates lower than any Canadian bank and no hidden fees. More upside? Get a 1% match on eligible amounts when you register to transfer your existing margin

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Desjardins business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardins today. We'd love to talk business. News of Uldi, a blonde blue-eyed toy soldier, began to spread through the army's ranks. And soon he was a sensation. And I became a mascot for the Nazi army. A mascot for the Nazi army.

By 1943 he's featured in a Nazi propaganda film, an Aryan poster boy. The boy in uniform is the finnish child of the Latvian SS-Frivolous Legion, who she brought from her front-line job and who is brought up here. In the film, Uldi's in full uniform, running around a yard with other Aryan children. He marches upstairs, arms swinging as a line of children follow. Stitched on his sleeve, the Nazi eagle. The journalists that come down to the capital pick me up and take me to hospitals, visit wounded soldiers, all German and whatever nationalities they were.

They took me with them and, you know, shake the hand. And then sometimes there used to be a theatre or somewhere. They put me on the stage to show me that this Aryan boy and all this. But inside, I knew it was wrong. Every day, every minute, actually, I had to say to myself, never let them know who you are, because you're dead if you find out. Because there was one crucial piece of information that Uldi hid from the soldiers who rescued him, a detail he kept from everyone, even his family and friends, all these decades later.

Uldi was Jewish. It was a moment when he demonstrated to me that he trusted me with that knowledge. It had taken a year or more, I think, to get to that point where he was able to say to me, you know, I'm not Russian at all. I'm Jewish. For him, it was a moment of, I guess, release. And he said, I've never told anyone this before. I felt extremely honoured that he trusted me enough.

And I felt relieved that he could actually say those words. Once he'd said those, then we could set about looking at what had really happened to him in the past. My first recollection of the war was that we were packed in wagons and we were trying to run away from the Germans. I don't know what town it was, but we were, for a few days we were in the wagons, the whole Jewish community was running away, but we got caught. The Germans had paratroops coming down in motorbikes,

and at night they all surrounded us. But I don't know what town it was. Somewhere in Russia near Minsk must have been. They made us go back, they told us to go back where we came from. So my recollection is we went back to the place I lived. Then they took my father and all the rest of the men away. And my father never came back, but he told us he was killed. Then one day my mother said,

we're going to be shot tomorrow. She said to me, we're going to be shot. She knew. And I said, well, I don't want to die. And she said, well, we have to die all together. I said, well, we have to die all together. I said, no. It's in the middle of the night. I escaped.

I ran through the back fence and I ran my family, they laid down near the forest and shot all of them. Enough to watch it. I was hiding on the hill, and I saw the little valley where they took them all down and shot him. He said that he bit his hand so that he wouldn't cry out as he was watching this terrible scene. At that moment I was extremely shocked and moved because I couldn't imagine how a child, how he could process this terrible, terrible sin and the loss of his family. And I still don't know. I think he carried that with him his entire life. He knew from that moment on that in order to survive he had to hide the fact that he was Jewish. And he went to great lengths to do that.

Ody says after the massacre of his family, he wandered the area knocking on doors in search of food and shelter. Well, then I wandered around the area, knocking on people's doors and getting some food. It was very cold and some people let me sleep in there on the ovens where they bake the bread. He told me that he found a dead soldier. He took the great coat off the soldier.

He put that on to keep himself warm. He took the dead soldier. He took the great coat off the soldier. He put that on to keep himself warm. He took the dead soldier's boots. He stuffed the boots with newspaper in order to keep himself warm. He told me that he tied himself into trees at night with the belt of the uniform so that the wolves couldn't get him, so that he wasn't on the ground. He said he begged for food. He ate whatever he found, whatever it was

he ate, everything raw. One day I went to a place and the man in the house, he must have recognized me. And he caught me. Udi says this man recognized he was Jewish. He said, he's a Jewish boy. And he dragged me to some kind of a school where soldiers were shooting people. And he dragged me there to be shot. I remember that and I said, oh well, this is the end of me

because the people get lined up and shot. My turn will come. And I said to myself, maybe I'll ask for a bit of bread before I'm hungry. So I asked the soldier, can you give me a bit of bread before you kill me? I'm hungry. And he took pity on me. He took me on the back.

He examined me and checked that I was Jewish. Uldi says the soldier asked him to lower his pants to see whether he was circumcised. And he said to me, no good, no good. He said, but I don't want to kill you. to see whether he was circumcised. No idea, I often think why they killed all the other people but left me alive and took me with them. Uli told me several times how much he felt he hated himself. If he hated anybody, it was himself, because he felt he had to turn against his own. He had to learn to pretend to hate all Jews,

to laugh, to jeer, to clap at their demise. And that meant he was destroying part of himself every time he did that. It's a different kind of trauma, it's a trauma of the soul and I think those kind of scars never heal over, they're always there. He witnessed horrific things that a child of his age should never, ever be party to. One of the villages where they stopped, the soldiers wanted to have a bath or a sauna. And there was a little red-haired Jewish girl who was sent to collect towels. Aldi knew that in the next day or so that she would be eliminated, that she would be murdered.

But he couldn't say anything. And he couldn't look her in the eye. He was afraid she might recognise him, but he couldn't warn her. So for the rest of his life he carried that guilt with him. I think one of them that bothered him a great deal was when he came across a couple of very badly wounded soldiers in a ditch. They clearly weren't going to survive. They were in terrible pain and they were begging him to shoot them. He just couldn't do it. But they begged and begged and he looked over his shoulder or somewhere he spotted a grenade. He said he grabbed the grenade, pulled the pin and threw it in the ditch.

and threw it in the ditch. It's unimaginable that a child would have to make that kind of a choice or a decision. And I think this personifies what life was like for Uldi. He was constantly faced with those kind of unimaginable choices. Later on I thought to myself, well you're part of them, but I wasn't. I was forced into it. I didn't volunteer to join him or anything. If the devil had come along and taken me by the hand, I would have gone with him. MUSIC

He was a kind man. He never harboured any hate or desire for revenge at any time. I think this ability to transcend his pain, his suffering, his loss, his loss of identity, his loss of culture, his loss of sense of being, his ability to transcend all of that and not hate is probably the most remarkable thing about him. He was just my dear uncle, and I loved him. And you believed him. The story of what Oldie survived and how he survived it was unbelievable. In the years that followed, his story would be heard around the world as Oldie desperately searched for the name he said was stolen from him.

But 80 years on, is it possible to uncover who he really is? And after living a life of lies, will anyone believe what he calls the truth? Coming up on the series. His argument to me was, I know how I am, I know the story, I'm convinced that it's correct. Why would I do a DNA test? And I kept saying, why wouldn't you? I said, you're not going to believe this. We found a relative that survived the war. You were pursuing whether this was another Holocaust hoax.

Let's put it this way, I just wanted to find the truth. A lot of roadkill on the way through this epic story. A lot of people have been hurt. He is the closest family that I have. While I was very excited, part of me felt that seemed too easy. That's why people didn't believe him, because it's an unbelievable story. You've been listening to Toy Soldier from CBC's Personally. The series is reported and produced by me, Dan Goldberg.

It's written by Alina Gosch and myself. Mixing and sound design by Julia Whitman. Studio recording and direction by Greg Crittenden. Research by Colleen Fitzpatrick, Béba Manglis-Ford, Emeritus Professor Conrad Quait, Barry Resnick, Maris Lacus and Keith Moore. Anna Ashite is our coordinating producer.

Our senior producers are Ashley Mack, Jeff Turner and Andrew Friesen. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandes and Chris Oak. Tonya Springer is the senior manager. Arif Noorani is the director of CBC podcasts. Archival material for this episode comes from the Melbourne Holocaust Museum and the Associated Press.

Alright, that was the first episode of Toy Soldier. If you like what you heard, episode two is waiting for you right now. Find and follow Toy Soldier on CBC's personally feed so you don't miss an episode. Just search for Personally Wherever You Get Your Podcasts. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.