A young boy witnesses his family being massacred during the Holocaust but cheats death by escaping into the frozen woods in Belorussia. He is eventually captured by a battalion that was absorbed into Hitler’s SS and faces the firing squad and their death pits.
But instead of killing him they make him their child soldier, their ‘Mascot’. They give him a false name, fake birth date, adorn him with a pint-sized uniform and arm him with a shorn-off rifle.
‘Hitler’s Jewish Soldier’ is a gripping true crime-esque investigation into whether his incredible survival story – as well as the discovery of his long-lost Jewish family in the late 1990s – was in fact true or a Holocaust hoax. It follows Jewish journalist and director Dan Goldberg on his quest across the globe in his bid to solve the mystery of The Mascot.
UldisKurzemnieks, the false name given to him by the battalion, was anglicised to Alex Kurzem when he arrived in Australia in 1949. He hid his secret in Melbourne for 50 years until, facing a cancer scare, he told his children his survival story. He then embarked on a mission to find his real name and, hopefully, family members who survived the Holocaust.
What unfolds is the rollercoaster story of The Mascot’s attempt to sift through the rubble of his past, along the way revealing multiple false identities, a family reunion that wasn’t and a DNA revelation with a blistering sting in the tail.
Uldis already told his remarkable survival story in an award-winning documentary called The Mascot (ABC, 2002) and a best-selling book, also titled The Mascot (Penguin, 2007), which was described by the New York Times as “spellbinding” and by the BBC as “one of the most remarkable stories to emerge from the War.”
But some refused to believe it, accusing him of being a hoax, a liar, a fraud…and not even a Jew.
As a journalist, Dan Goldberg reported on the alleged hoax of The Mascot a decade ago, and his stories were syndicated around the Jewish world. Now as a documentary filmmaker, he re-examines the entire saga for the first time. His two-year investigation takes him from Australia to Europe, America and Canada, unearthing key pieces of evidence.
The end result is a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story that provokes bigger questions about secrets and lies, fact and fiction, family and identity.
