Alex Kurzem (born Ilya Galperin, in Belarus, 1936), son of Jewish parents, was orphaned at age 5 during the Second World War. The German armies entered the country on October 20, 1941, when their invaded people fled to the forests, where they were wandering lost a season, during this time the data are uncertain. It is known that he was saved from a certain death by the Latvian sergeant Jekabs Kulis belonging to the SS, while prisoners were lined up for an execution he became interested in Kurzem, whom he provided a false identity to conceal his Jewish ancestry and his provenance, facilitated by the resemblance of his features to the Aryans. Thus Latvian and German soldiers knew him as a Russian orphan.
During his childhood he soon became a pet boy, Kurzem appeared in Nazi propaganda films and also acted as a dealer for chocolate bars for the Jews, as they boarded trains that would take them to concentration camps. In 1944, when the Nazis began to glimpse their imminent defeat, the SS commander sent him to live with a Lithuanian family.
After the IIGM, in 1949 he arrived in Australia, with only a small brown suitcase. He kept secret his past, which did not even tell his wife, until finally, in 1997 revealed it to his relatives. He and his son began to investigate about his past, the result of these investigations is a book published by Mark Kurzem, his son, entitled "The mascot", published in 2007, and published in Spain in 2008. He resides in Australia where he became repairman of televisions, married and had three children, his wife, Patricia, died in 2003.
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