The Mascot (43 page)

A still from the propaganda film.

Miss Slavits rewound the film, and then suddenly we found ourselves back in Carnikava, my father springing down the stairs with his Aryan playmates. When the footage came to an end again, we remained seated in the darkness. Nobody said a word. Miss Slavits spoke first. “What do you think?” she asked gently.

My father was overcome with emotion and unable to utter a word. I heard him blow his nose. Then he said, “Who would have believed it?”

After that he lapsed into silence again.

We took leave of Miss Slavits outside the archive. Once our taxi was on the main road heading toward the center of Riga, my father leaned back in his seat. He was exhausted, but his body seemed electrified by what he'd just seen.

“It was as I told you, wasn't it?” he said. “Only a shame that more footage did not survive. Still, there was enough to prove I wasn't lying.” My father closed his eyes. I wondered whether he was sleeping or replaying the footage in his mind's eye.

I let him be and gazed out the window as the taxi made its way past the Freedom Monument on Brivibas iela. What a mockery the film made of Latvia's flirtation with Nazism. They'd made a Jewish boy into a symbol of racial purity.

I was roused from my thoughts by the sound of my father shouting frantically to the driver to stop. His eyes were bulbous and panicked, as if he were suffocating. The car screeched to a halt, and my father sprang out and onto the sidewalk. Shocked, I followed him, tossing money for the fare to the driver.

On the sidewalk I gripped my father by the arm and shook him until he gasped as if breath had been knocked violently into him. He jerked away from me. Passersby stared at us.

“Dad! Are you all right?” I cried out. “Speak to me.”

My father gave a weak nod. He looked around but seemed unable to take in his surroundings.

“Let's find somewhere to sit down,” I suggested.

On the opposite corner of an intersection I spied a brightly painted café. We crossed over to it. Neither of us could have been more surprised at what we found—it was a Jewish café with a large blue Star of David painted on its window. An eager waiter greeted us and guided us to a table by the window.

The café was empty and had a forlorn atmosphere that was somehow accentuated rather than diminished by its bright blue and yellow interior and the artificial grapevine suspended from its ceiling.

The menu listed my father's favorite foods—blinis, latkes, and, most loved of all, cabbage rolls. “Have something to eat,” I suggested. “It'll give you some strength.”

My father shook his head. “A cup of tea will be fine.”

The waiter had been hovering expectantly.

“Two teas, please,” my father said.

“Nothing to eat?”

“No.”

The waiter's face dropped. As he went to fetch our tea, he snapped his fingers grandly in the air, and from out of nowhere there appeared a violinist who wouldn't have been out of place in a production of
Fiddler on the Roof
. The man looked embarrassed as he burst into a lively tune.

“That music is giving me a headache,” my father said tetchily.

The waiter returned with our tea and my father greedily snatched at his cup. He quickly stirred in three teaspoons of sugar and then took a sip. “Not enough sugar!” he exclaimed, making a sour face. My father had always had an exceptional sweet tooth. I watched him add yet more sugar. He took another sip.

“Better?” I asked.

“So-so,” he replied.

My father now seemed less restless, almost contemplative, with his hands loosely clasped in front of him. He looked around him. “It's harder than I thought,” he said, avoiding eye contact. “I didn't do anything wrong,” he said, looking at me for reassurance. “But I feel guilty that I ended up on the wrong side with the people who were doing evil to others.”

“You're not guilty of anything,” I insisted, but my words fell on deaf ears.

“Why did they keep me alive?” he said to himself.

“They used you, Dad,” I said, my anger toward these men growing. “They exploited you for their own purposes. You were a good-luck charm”—I searched for other words—“a prisoner of war.”

A knot of confused feelings had began to unravel, and he spoke: “I
was
a prisoner…a frightened child…but nobody could see the bars around me, except perhaps Commander Lobe. He must've known what he was putting me through.

“I was a pet that was being trained. There was nothing I could do to change my situation. All the time everybody reminded me of how lucky I was to be alive, and how grateful I should be to Latvia. I always had to show my gratitude to them. I had to do the right thing for them. I always made sure that everybody was happy and pleased with me. What would have happened if I'd disobeyed them? But inside I didn't accept it. I knew that I was not one of them, and I never would be.” Exhausted, my father fell silent.

The Latvian soldiers had “rescued” him from the forest, but they'd stolen him from himself. I thought back to the film and its background of happy children's music suggesting the life of a mascot was nothing but an innocent game, while offscreen he was constantly terrorized by the threat of death.

My father rose suddenly, telling me to take care of the bill. It seemed that he'd had enough.

F
ollowing my parents' return to Australia I spoke to them regularly by telephone. As far as I could gather, they had slipped back into their normal routine.

On one occasion when I spoke with my father, he told me how pleased he was to be home.

“You don't think of Belarus as home?” I asked.

“Of course not!” he replied somewhat indignantly. “I'm an Aussie.”

With surprising candor he expressed gratitude for his life in Australia, telling me that his early vagabond days there—as an elephant boy and a roustabout in a traveling circus, as well as his itinerant existence in the remote outback—had helped him to bury and forget his past. And in spite of his own intensity, or perhaps because of it, my father enjoyed the laid-back ethos of “she'll be right, mate” prized by so many Australians.

Back in Oxford, as I absorbed the experiences of the past months, I found I had further questions about my father's story as well as recent events. But while I spent hours in pursuit of answers I became increasingly frustrated by dead ends.

Not long after his return to Melbourne, my father received a letter from Erick Galperin informing him that Anya Katz had died after a short illness and that Volodya, blind and not able to fully care for himself, had been admitted to a state-care facility, where he died some months later.

As far as I knew, there were no other witnesses who could cast more light on my father's story, and without the elderly couple's reminiscences my desire to learn more about my father's early life and that of his parents was thwarted. Erick continued to claim he knew little of his family's history.

My research into my father's life in Riga and on patrol with the soldiers proved equally frustrating.

Though I had my own intuitions, there was so much I wanted to ask Jekabs Dzenis and the other men who'd come into contact with my father. How had they felt about the boy-soldier and mascot in their midst? Why had they kept him? Were they trying to convince themselves that they hadn't corrupted their own humanity?

But Uncle and Auntie had died, as had Commander Lobe, many years before. And recently, just as a reconciliation between my father and his “stepsister” Mirdza seemed possible, she, too, passed away.

Trying to learn more about Jekabs Kulis, the soldier who had taken my father out of the firing line, I traced a family to New York, from where Kulis had written to my father in the 1950s. I tried to make contact by telephone. An elderly woman with a thick European accent picked up the receiver. When I mentioned who I was and what I was seeking, I heard her gasp before hastily denying any knowledge of my father.

“We are Czech Jews! Leave us alone!” she cried, before slamming down the telephone.

When I reported this to my father, he appeared resigned and advised me to leave them in peace. “What point would it serve?” he said. “Even if it is them, they are probably too old and sick to want to remember me now.”

“The Kulises have probably never been able to forget you,” I protested.

But my father was adamant. The trail went cold after that.

Although nobody has come forward with information, I suspect that there are individuals—descendants of soldiers and perhaps old soldiers themselves—in Europe and elsewhere who know something about the little mascot. For whatever reason they remain tight-lipped.

And what of the enigma of Slonim? In the end I learned from the work of the historian Andrew Ezergailis that the Eighteenth Battalion was in fact stationed in the town of Stolbtsi in Belarus, as we had suspected. Given its proximity—a day's journey—to Slonim, it was feasible that the Eighteenth had been there. But I was confronted with a greater problem: I learned that the presence of the Eighteenth in Belarus at the time of the Slonim massacre is mired in yet a wider controversy. Some historians have claimed that the battalion was there but suggest variable dates for the massacre itself. And while some suggest that it was an isolated incident, others have argued that the massacre persisted as a series of incidents for which the Eighteenth was responsible from the end of 1941 through most of 1942. According to some, even if the battalion was present, extermination duty was not necessarily one of their official duties. Whatever the truth behind these controversies, we will never know whether my father actually witnessed what happened at Slonim or whether it was one of the many unnamed massacres he saw the soldiers commit. What remains indisputable is that my father cannot lay to rest his sense of accountability both for what he remembers of that day and for what he does not.

And then there are our discoveries from our journey to Belarus.

The mystery of the dusty bag of photographs from my father's original home in Koidanov persists. Who are these people whose framed sepia faces stare out at us? Cousins, uncles, nieces, grandparents? It is as if they are pleading to be recognized and remembered. But we can only identify one half-torn image of a young woman, smiling shyly, who just might be Hana Gildenberg, my father's mother.

We had learned later from Erick that his father, Solomon Galperin, had returned to the family home, hoping to find his wife and children, including his son Ilya Galperin, my father. Solomon had stayed in Koidanov until the last years of his life, when he moved to Minsk, where he died in 1975. If my father had spoken sooner of his past, then father and son may have been reunited.

There were other painful memories and realities to be confronted. Alongside the potential rediscovery of a family home was the mass grave where my father had witnessed his family's extermination.

Still, I had learned something of my father's resilience in the past months. While what was happening to him was extracting a heavy emotional toll, he maintained that this would provide him with ballast for what lay ahead.

Sadly, too, the relationship between my father and Erick, his half brother, has waned. The exact reasons for this estrangement remain obscure. It may be the language barrier: my father's Russian is that of a child.

But it has also proved difficult for the two men, one in his seventies and one in his fifties, to overcome the tyranny of distance—physical and historical—that separates them, in order to forge an easy bond.

The situation is not made any easier by the fact that my father often returns to the question of “Panok,” and again raises the possibility that he might have been born a Panok and not a Galperin. He does so despite the correlation of his recollections with Volodya's during our day in Koidanov.

Who was Elli, the woman who befriended me in Oxford? She suddenly disappeared without explanation from the city and without forwarding details. Her father was an Israeli intelligence agent: was he behind the break-in at my parents' home? No valuables were stolen, but my father's papers had been ransacked as if the intruder searched for something specific. The photograph of my father posing with the members of the Eighteenth Battalion, perhaps?

Was either Elli or her father connected to two men who later appeared on my parents' doorstep one morning, claiming to be war crimes investigators? They, too, had come seeking the photograph of my father with the soldiers. How had they known about it? And why had they refused to give my father their names?

Every effort I made to find answers to these mysteries left me stranded with only my intuitions and suspicions. However, the evidence that I did have was sufficient to support my father's version of his childhood, and I wanted public vindication for him.

Somewhat naively I encouraged my father to return to the Holocaust center in Melbourne armed with the new details garnered from our visit to Belarus and Latvia. I believed that the experience would be a positive one for him. He might now be able to present himself to his interviewers as legitimately Jewish, whatever that meant in this context, and be embraced by them.

It was not to be. Inexplicably, the male interviewer had become determinedly set against my father. In a public interview he stated that my father was not Jewish, that he did not have a Jewish heart, and that he had never lost his sense of loyalty to the Latvians above all else. Most disturbing of all, he cast doubt on the veracity of my father's story, despite the plethora of evidence we now had. We decided to leave him to his insinuations.

The official rejection of my father's application for assistance from the Claims Conference in New York, 1999, later rescinded after much struggle.

In one final push for recognition, I turned to the Claims Conference in New York, the organization primarily responsible for evaluating claims of Holocaust suffering and awarding appropriate “compensation.”

It, too, declined to recognize my father's experiences in the Holocaust. “How has your father suffered?” one of its representatives demanded of me. “Your father was not even in a concentration camp,” she argued indignantly.

Then came its final, embittering decision that my father had volunteered for the SS.

Official verification from the Gilf Society.

After many months of argument and verification of my father's story by the Gilf Society in Minsk, the conference was eventually forced to overturn its verdict.

In the midst of this struggle my father remained stoic. But as the months passed, I learned from my mother that his insomnia had returned, fueled by nightmares from which he awoke disoriented and in a cold sweat. He had none of his usual appetite for food and had lost weight. It seemed that the past as well as his more recent experiences had worn him down; he could no longer be placated by the space and the sunshine, the bright optimism of the “lucky country.”

My mother's health also continued to worry us. Finally, a diagnosis was reached: she was suffering from a rare form of cancer that doctors deemed unresponsive to the usual forms of treatment. Her condition fluctuated; for days and weeks on end she would be fine, and a stranger would never guess how unwell she actually was.

Then one day in September 2003 I received a call from my father. My mother's health had suddenly deteriorated and she had been admitted to the hospital. He couldn't bring himself to tell me that the prognosis was extremely poor. My mother's sister called me the following morning to tell me to come home as soon as I could.

That evening I caught a plane to Melbourne.

A month later my mother died.

A darkness, not threatening, but sad and bewildering, settled over our home. My father had lost his dearest friend and partner.

One evening, sitting in the blanketing gloom of the unlit kitchen, my father and I both succumbed to a lingering sense of guilt that had until then been too painful to broach: we wondered whether in some way his story had contributed to her death.

“Your mother was a practical woman,” my father said, “and people mistook this for toughness. She wasn't. Your mother was too soft, too kind. She was exhausted by my story. It was too much for her.”

During the weeks that followed, he gradually lost interest in the unanswered questions about his past, telling me that the search didn't seem worth it anymore.

“The pieces we have,” he said, “we'll make do with them.”

Two months later I decided to return to Oxford: we'd rattled around under the same roof for long enough, usually avoiding each other's company. I had an inexpressible anger and grief toward the world that had taken my mother and sensed I was not a person my father wanted to, or should, be around.