Alex Kurzem near his Melbourne home.
THE world-famous Nazi hunters at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre are trying to prove the wartime memoirs of Victorian Alex Kurzem are false.
Mr Kurzem claims he watched the Nazi-driven execution of his Jewish mother and siblings before becoming a child mascot for a murderous SS unit in war-torn Europe.
His son, Mark, wrote an international best-selling book that portrays Mr Kurzem as a five-year-old Russian Jew who survived the Holocaust by working closely with an SS extermination squad during World War II.
Mr Kurzem recently told the Herald Sun he stood by the accuracy of everything in the book.
He has been receiving payments since 1999 from the US-based Jewish Claims Conference -- which compensates Jewish Holocaust survivors from funds provided by the German government.
The director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Israel office, Dr Efraim Zuroff, recently wrote to the Claims Conference urging it to hold a new investigation into Mr Kurzem's claim to be a Holocaust survivor.
"Everything in this case appears to point to a scam," he wrote.
"Only a comprehensive investigation can finally determine whether Kurzem is indeed a Holocaust survivor, which I very much doubt, or an imposter whose main motivation was to gain fortune and fame by distorting his unusual wartime experiences."
The Claims Conference has handed over a dossier of evidence disputing Mr Kurzem's claims to its Israel-based ombudsman, Shmuel Hollander, to investigate.
Much of that dossier was prepared by Mr Kurzem's main doubters, forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, senior staff at the Melbourne Holocaust Centre and US-based psychologist Dr Barry Resnick, who lost relatives in the Holocaust.
Mr Kurzem has refused an offer by the Herald Sun to organise and pay for medical and DNA tests to help prove his identity and whether or not he is Jewish.
He did recently get a certificate from a doctor in France that says he is circumcised, and he had sent that to the Claims Conference.
But he is continuing to refuse to take a DNA test, which would either prove or disprove claims made in the book about his life that he is a member of the Galperin family.
Mr Kurzem said he had recently taken the circumcision test at the behest of a European film company, which is making a movie about his life, and that he would consider taking a DNA test if the movie makers asked him to.
He said he had been told by others that he was a member of the Galperin family. "I might be. I might be anybody, but I have got no proof who I am," Mr Kurzem said.
keith.moor@news.com.au
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