Memory, Myth, and the Cost of Survival

Read Time:5 Minute, 14 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
The Jewish Nazi? (DVD)
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Genre: Documentary, War, Biography, History
Year Released: 2023, Kino Lorber DVD 2025
Runtime: 1h 30m
Director(s): Dan Goldberg
Where to Watch: available now, order your copy here: www.kinolorber.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: THE JEWISH NAZI? begins with an image so unsettling it almost feels like a deception: a boy in a Nazi uniform, arm raised in salute, eyes wide with confusion. That image—both horrifying and heartbreaking—anchors this powerful documentary from Australian filmmaker Dan Goldberg. The story it tells, of Alex Kurzem, a Jewish child who survived the Holocaust by posing as “Hitler’s youngest soldier,” isn’t just one of history’s strangest footnotes. It’s a meditation on survival, memory, and the blurred boundaries between truth and self-preservation.

Goldberg’s film moves with a deliberate pacing, balancing historical reconstruction with intimate interviews. The subject is extraordinary, not for the spectacle of his experiences, but for the impossible contradictions they embody. In 1941, after escaping a massacre that wiped out his entire Belarusian village, Kurzem—then just a child—wandered alone through the woods before being captured by a Latvian battalion. Instead of killing him, they made him their mascot, dressing him in uniform and parading him through occupied towns. He survived by pretending to be one of them, even as he watched atrocities unfold.

The film confronts this story with an honesty that refuses easy sentimentality. Goldberg, a journalist turned documentarian, doesn’t shy away from the ethical dissonance of its premise. Can survival ever be pure? Is guilt an inescapable inheritance for those who live while others perish? These aren’t rhetorical—they’re the unanswerable questions that haunt Kurzem’s recollections. Through interviews, archival photographs, and visits to the sites of his childhood, the film constructs a mosaic of truth and uncertainty, where memory itself becomes unreliable.

Much of the film’s strength lies in its willingness to challenge its subject without diminishing him. Kurzem’s story, already chronicled in the international bestselling book The Mascot, drew skepticism when historians questioned parts of his recollections. Goldberg doesn’t resolve those doubts; he incorporates them. Instead of undermining the narrative, this skepticism enriches it, transforming the film into something more complex than a simple biographical portrait. It becomes a dialogue about memory’s elasticity—about how trauma distorts even the most sincere attempt to remember.

Kurzem himself is a remarkable presence. Even in old age, his face carries the exhaustion of someone who’s lived several lives. His recounting is calm but never detached; the tremor in his voice betrays the weight of remembering. What emerges isn’t a plea for forgiveness or recognition—it’s an act of reckoning. When he speaks about parading through villages as a child in a Nazi uniform, there’s a sense that he’s narrating not memory but nightmare.

The film’s emotional apex comes when Kurzem finally confronts the people and places tied to his deception. The camera captures his visit to the Holocaust Museum in Melbourne, where his story is both honored and questioned. There’s a tension in his eyes that speaks to decades of internal contradiction. He’s been both hero and fraud, survivor and suspect. Goldberg allows that tension to remain unresolved, reminding viewers that history rarely offers clean endings.

The documentary’s title, THE JEWISH NAZI?, feels provocative by design, but it’s also a direct reflection of its central paradox. It asks the audience to confront the discomfort of coexistence—how innocence can exist alongside complicity, how a victim can wear the uniform of the oppressor and remain human beneath it. It’s an idea that defies binary understanding, and that’s precisely why it resonates.

The result is a documentary that feels less like a definitive account and more like an excavation. Each layer of Kurzem’s story—his survival, his lies, his search for his real family—reveals something about the human instinct to protect ourselves through narrative. Memory becomes a survival tool as essential as food or shelter.

By the end, THE JEWISH NAZI? leaves the audience suspended between admiration and unease. You feel for Kurzem, but you also recognize the limits of empathy. Some wounds aren’t meant to close, and some stories refuse to be resolved. What Goldberg achieves is rare: a Holocaust documentary that doesn’t sanctify or simplify. Instead, it humanizes through contradiction, finding truth not in the accuracy of memory but in the act of remembering itself.

THE JEWISH NAZI? doesn’t offer comfort, redemption, or closure. It provides something more honest: the acknowledgment that living through horror sometimes means becoming part of it. It’s a story that defies comprehension yet demands attention—a story that asks what any of us would have done, and whether we’d have the courage to tell the truth afterward.

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[photo courtesy of KINO LORBER]

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