(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-13 12:04

"I didn't understand about the war and what they did; I couldn't help it. But at least they looked after me," Kurzem said. "I was all alone ... If the devil had come along, I would have gone with him."

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."

Kurzem spent many hours with Kulis, his Latvian protector, who at least once even took the boy with him on home leave. But he has no clear answer why he saved him. Kulis immigrated to the United States in 1951 and died in 1978. Attempts by the AP to contact Kulis' son in New York were unsuccessful.

Litvin said there were military units during World War II that adopted orphaned children as so-called "sons of the regiment."

He suggested the battalion, which was charged with wiping out anti-Nazi partisans in the region, could have used the Russian-speaking boy to gather intelligence. Kurzem says he was never made to spy and was only asked to perform basic tasks such as boiling water and gathering firewood.

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."

Experts also question how a circumcised boy managed to conceal his Jewishness from some 400 men of his battalion for several years. But they acknowledge there were other, similar cases during the war.

Kurzem says it was a matter of survival. When the battalion would go for a wash, "I made sure that I was not visible to anybody."

In 1944, with the Nazis nearing defeat, the commander of Kurzem's unit sent him to live with Jekabs Dzenis, a Latvian chocolate maker in the capital, Riga. Five years later, the Denis family moved to Australia and took him with them.

Kurzem worked with a traveling circus before starting his TV repair business. He married and had three sons, but told no one of his past.

"I managed all the years to switch myself off," he said. "But it was always in the back of my head. I always wanted to go back to the village and put a flower on my mother's grave."

The experience of battling cancer spurred Kurzem in 1997 to finally reveal his past to his eldest son, Mark. The pair began piecing things together.

But he could remember only that his father may have been a tanner, and only knew a few words from his childhood. One of them was "Koidanovo," which was Dzerzhinsk's name before World War II.

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.

Several Holocaust survivors from Dzerzhinsk now living in the United States, and other elderly Dzerzhinsk residents reached by the AP, confirm that a Panok family lived in Koidanovo before the war and had children. That could mean that Kurzem could have been a Panok himself or was friends with the Panok children.

But there's another possibility. With the help of a Belarusian Jewish organization, Kurzem learned of Erik Galperin, a publisher from Dzerzhinsk now living in Minsk whose Jewish father, Solomon, was a tanner.

Solomon Galperin survived the massacre in Dzerzhinsk, but was later sent to Auschwitz and Dachau and returned home to discover that his wife and three children were gone. He remarried, started a new family and died in 1975.

After striking up a correspondence, Erik Galperin sent Kurzem a photograph of his father. Both were struck by a resemblance between Solomon and the elderly Kurzem.

Solomon Galperin's nephew, Emmanuel Krupitsky, who had known Galperin after the war and who met with Kurzem, confirmed the two men look very much alike.

"Alex is the spitting image of Solomon," Krupitsky, 86, who now lives in Little Rock, Ark., told the AP in a telephone interview.

In the late 1990s, Kurzem traveled to Dzerzhinsk, outside Minsk, the Belarus capital, to meet Erik Galperin and see if he remembered anything about the village. "I had this feeling of the impossible," Galperin said, recalling his first encounter with Kurzem. "I felt like something -- like I saw my father alive."

The Galperins and others in the village, as well as Kurzem himself, are convinced he is really Ilya Galperin, Solomon Galperin's eldest son from his first marriage. However, no DNA tests have been carried out to show they are related.

Kurzem's latest trip to Dzerzhinsk appeared to further persuade him that he is Ilya, son of Galperin and half brother of Erik. But many questions went unanswered.

He searched for the apple tree, but it had been chopped down. He visited a dilapidated wooden house on October Street, which might have been where he grew up, but he couldn't be sure.

"Why did you chop down the apple tree?" he asked Sergei Kalechin, a 57-year-old electrician who bought the house on October Street some years back. Then he cried out "Yabloko," the Russian word for apple. As he talked to Erik Galperin, more Russian words tumbled out: "it is cold," "work," a popular Russian wartime song.

He visited the knoll where he hid from the massacre and remembered sledding there in winter.

As he laid two pink roses on the mass grave, Kurzem let out a deep sigh and struggled to hold back tears.

What does he think possessed a Latvian who was killing Jews to save his life? He says he remains baffled.

"I often ask myself, 'Why me, why me?'" Kurzem said. "I never, never, never had the answer for it."

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