The Youngest Corporal In The Nazi Army

(CBS)  This is a story of survival - the incredible story of how a six-year-old Jewish boy survived the Nazis' final solution and kept how he survived a secret for more than 50 years.

It's the story of Alex Kurzem, who at the age of six watched his family being shot by the Nazis. He escaped and wandered alone for months until he was captured by Nazi soldiers. But instead of killing him, they made him their mascot.

Alex was so young, he quickly forgot his family name, his age, and the name of his village. But he did remember that the Nazis had fenced the Jews into a ghetto, and on his last night there Nazi soldiers burst into his house and began beating his mother.

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"I remember, when she shielded me that her blood [was] dripping. I felt my face and [there] was blood on my head. But it was my mother's blood," Kurzem told 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon.

Kurzem told Simon he and his siblings were hiding under skirts. "My little brother and sister and we were, she was shielding us sort of."

She could shield them from the soldiers' blows, but not their bullets. And she told Alex that the next day they would all be shot. "That night my mother took me in her arms. And she said, 'Tomorrow we all have to die.' And I thought, 'I don't want to die. I'll have to try to escape.'"

So that night, crawling through the grass, he snuck past Nazi soldiers and up to the top of a hill, and hid in a forest overlooking the village. "And when the daylight broke I heard a lot of commotion and noise below. When I looked down, I saw soldiers lining up people and shooting them in a big, big pit," Kurzem recalled. "And then I saw my mother with my brother and sister also there."

Kurzem told Simon he saw how his mother and siblings were lined up and shot. "That's very visible in my head all the time."

Village records say the Nazis massacred more than 1,600 people there on October 21, 1941; and Nazi records show that a Nazi battalion took Alex in on July 12, 1942.

The months in between are a mystery. Alex says all he remembers is wandering alone, cold and hungry in the forest. He took a winter coat off a dead soldier to keep from freezing to death. And he slept in empty sheds and in trees by tying himself to branches.

Asked why he decided to sleep in trees, Kurzem told Simon, "I heard wolves in the distance. And I knew that if the wolves find me asleep on the ground they would eat me most likely. So I got scared of that. So the only way to survive, climb a tree."

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[proudmilvet]

Rush Limbaugh(Der Fuhrer)Dick Cheney(DR.Mengele)Ann Coulter(Eva Braun)Sean Hannity(Josef Goebbles,Minister of propaganda)Bill O'Reilly(Baron Von Stupid)GW Bush(Sgt.Shultz)Glenn Beck(One of the Katzenjammer kids)Newt Gingrich(Herr Goring)Karl Rove(Himmler)

[Im_N0t_0v3r]

This sounds strikingly similar to what happened to Solmon Perel and what was made into the move "Europa Europa" .

[courlander]

I saw the interview and it exaggerated some of the claims in the book for I have read it. There was nothing "NAZI" about the soldiers who captured him. They were the 18th Kurzemes police Battalion drafted by the Germans to hunt partisans in that area and Alex did not live alone but with the partisans who also happened to be Jewish. Under Geneva rules armed partisans do not have the rights that soldiers have. The Russians in a 1960's show trial convicted several of the 18th Kurzemes soldier for the Solin massacre even though the unit was 130km away from that town that day.The only partisan chasing unit near the town was a Lithuanian one.
If anyone wants to get deeper there was a thread at
http://latviansonline.com/forum/viewthread/32934/ about the book

[sean1z]

Alex survived Nazi attack on his village. Israel should a lesson. The murder of innocent Children are war crimes.

[neznative]

anti-zion You obviously didn't read the article! Or waht part of being passed off as a Russian orphan did you not catch? Many people don't circumsize their kids esspecially in pour nations. And if you were any kind of student of history you'd know that Eastern Europe at the times we're discussing here were extremly pour. Here's an idea foryou take a nice long trip through the Appalatian communities in the US and the destitution you see there is not even close to some of Eastern Europe even today.
As to claiming that the story is a fake is like that Bishop that just got kicked out of South America for denigning the Holocast's gas chambers. He should be put in chains and let around to see all the documentation films the Army made us watch about finding the death camps, the crematoriums and emaciated human beings. We were even given guided tours of the camps, As he should be still wearing the chains. Unfortunately the stentch of burned flesh is long since disappeared.
The only hope for you though is a rigorous education the maybe you'll learn some humillity

[barbaram99]

The nazis got their ideas from America. ,

[gaby888]

I can?t figure out who wrote this
?Story? Jack London or Edgar Rice Burroughs,
A 6 year old boy Tarzan with a selective memory (I am 78 and can remember my kindergarten teacher and every one in my class) running around in the dead of winter dragging a coat to heavy to carry and sleeping in trees?
No wonder holocaust deniers are growing by the 10?s of thousands!
Gaby888

[gaby888]

I can?t figure out who wrote this
?Story? Jack London or Edgar Rice Burroughs,
A 6 year old boy Tarzan with a selective memory (I am 78 and can remember my kindergarten teacher and every one in my class) running around in the dead of winter dragging a coat to heavy to carry and sleeping in trees?
No wonder holocaust deniers are growing by the 10?s of thousands!
Gaby888

[hinda39]

Apparently it is open season on Jews when even 60 Minutes that was started by Jews have turned into an open forum against common sense. If anyone has ever spoke with Holocaust Survivors or worked on the Shoah Project they would understand the plight of would do anything just to survive. The many tales told by Issac B. Singer as well as Elie Wiesel do not mean anything? They speak of survival. Yes there were people who would sacrifice others just to survive another day. Does that make all Jews wrong?

Look at the many deniers today. The facts of the Holocaust are being distorted by those very educators who have listened to the Alex Jones or read the Turner Diaries. Yet even the staff at CBS have failed to become like the late Edward R. Murrow who was not afraid of facing the deniers. There were many true books of facts that had come out in the thirty years since Hitler's demise -- one of the first one is called "The Black Book." This was given to all Jewish military personnel after WWII to prove the facts of Hitler's final solution. This book also documented how Jews, Handicapped, Gypsies, Political Prisoners, etc. were treated and segregated. Another was called "Der Faderland, Rest Well" which was printed in 1949 by a German who returned to the country of her birth -- with photographs of the Nazis and the German villages that were also under Nazi control and would ignore the stench of the crematoriums. Another book, "I Never Saw A Butterfly" - talks about coming of age in Auschwitz -- and how she marvelled at the freedom insects had but not knowing when they would go to the showers or be transported elsewhere.

To those who think Zionism is another form of Nazism, it is not- Moses was a zionist as he wanted to go to the Land of Milk and Honey. But I have this to ask you who hate Jews and Israel. Why would you want to destroy a people who have given so much to humanity yet appease those who murder their own children in the name of Honor and of their own beliefs? This is coming from a third generation American who's father was in Normandy and in WWII under Eisenhower, mother worked for the Army Signal Corps, brother in Vietnam (UN caused conflict), Uncle in both WWII and Korea (UN caused conflict), and who is an employee of the VA where I listen to veterans returning after witnessing a genocide made by people who hate life.

[Mr_Sundayschool]

No one would ever make up a story like this at a time when that whole "Angel at the Fence" thing has recently caused such a stir. Why would someone even think to make up such a story just to acheive nothing more than fame and fortune? What do they take us for - a bunch of naive, gullible idiots? It is very obvious that people who deny all these highly documented holocaust stories are anti-semites and Nazis and not just in the German army.