Gabrielle
Registered
"One gap that puzzles historians is the nine months between the massacre and Kurzem's "adoption" by the Latvians. Alexey Litvin, a scholar at the Belarusian National Academy of Sciences' History Institute, said "it is beyond belief" that the boy could have survived the unusually harsh winter of 1941-42 alone and unsheltered.
Kurzem acknowledges that the gap "has been bothering me a lot," and he can't explain it. "All I know is, I was begging for food, I was cold, I was hungry. But to survive that winter ... I just can't imagine it."
But the record shows how confusing the search has become.
In 1996 he filled out a form for the Jewish Holocaust Center in Melbourne in which he gave his name as Uldis (Alex) Kurzem, birthplace Riga, which is some 250 miles from the Belarus village. He wrote that he was born Nov. 18, 1933. The book says the date Nov. 18, which was given to him by the Latvian battalion, is Latvian independence day, but nowhere is his real birth date on record. It is also the birth date he used when registering as a displaced person after the war, according to records at the International Tracing Service for war victims in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
In the form he filled out he gave his original surname as Panok. How he arrived at that name is not known -- Kurzem says it was the only word, besides Koidanovo, that he remembered.
He also remembers being used as bait to lure young women into the clutches of men in the battalion who would rape them. In his book he says that although he was an innocent pawn, "I feel responsible for what had happened to them, even now."
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-the-mascot,0,6465547.story?page=1
Kurzem acknowledges that the gap "has been bothering me a lot," and he can't explain it. "All I know is, I was begging for food, I was cold, I was hungry. But to survive that winter ... I just can't imagine it."
But the record shows how confusing the search has become.
In 1996 he filled out a form for the Jewish Holocaust Center in Melbourne in which he gave his name as Uldis (Alex) Kurzem, birthplace Riga, which is some 250 miles from the Belarus village. He wrote that he was born Nov. 18, 1933. The book says the date Nov. 18, which was given to him by the Latvian battalion, is Latvian independence day, but nowhere is his real birth date on record. It is also the birth date he used when registering as a displaced person after the war, according to records at the International Tracing Service for war victims in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
In the form he filled out he gave his original surname as Panok. How he arrived at that name is not known -- Kurzem says it was the only word, besides Koidanovo, that he remembered.
He also remembers being used as bait to lure young women into the clutches of men in the battalion who would rape them. In his book he says that although he was an innocent pawn, "I feel responsible for what had happened to them, even now."
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-the-mascot,0,6465547.story?page=1