To keep from screaming, he bit his hand
November 30, 2007 6:42 am Christianity, Antisemitism, and the HolocaustThe Mascot - Mark Kurzem - Book Review - New York Times, November 30, 2007
To begin with, Alex now tells Mark, he is Jewish, something he has never revealed, even to his wife, a Roman Catholic. He remembers — he was probably 5, but doesn’t know his birth date — witnessing Nazi troops shooting his mother and bayoneting his baby brother and sister near their village in Belarus. To keep from screaming, he bit his hand. Believing his father dead, he fled into the forest but was caught — probably by the very soldiers who had murdered his family. They were about to shoot him, he said, when he begged for a piece of bread. One of them pitied him, and he was saved.
It is an anguished tale set in the morally gray zone between culpability and survival. The soldier discovered that the boy was Jewish — he was circumcised — and warned him to hide it. The others thought he was Russian and named him Uldis Kurzemnieks. They made him their mascot, a miniature soldier with a uniform decorated with Nazi insignia. As he traveled with them, he said, he witnessed atrocities, including hundreds of Jews being herded into a synagogue and burned alive. He became a propaganda tool, the Reich’s youngest Nazi, the subject of newspaper articles and a documentary.