In shadows deep, where memory weeps, A solemn vow, our conscience keeps. For in the annals of history’s scroll, A harrowing tale, the heart’s deep toll.
In silence, hear the echoes of despair, As anguish fills the somber air. In chambers choked with darkness dread, Lies the testament of the countless dead.
Whispers linger of horrors untold, Of innocence robbed, of stories cold. Yet amidst the ashes, a flicker of light, Resilience shines, a beacon bright.
From the depths of despair, hope arose, As heroes emerged, defiance chose. Their courage, a testament to human grace, In the darkest hour, they held their place.
Let us remember, with hearts sincere, The lives lost, the ones held dear. May their legacy forever endure, A solemn vow, we shall ensure.
For in the echoes of history’s cry, We pledge to never let them die. Holocaust Remembrance, a sacred vow, Lest we forget, we remember now.
One name to represent the millions.
Curt Simon Wolff was born in Bad Neuenahr, Germany on 18 September 1928. Murdered in Tröbitz on 6 May 1945. He reached the age of 16 years.
For Curt, it was a double tragedy. In early April 1945, prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. One of the three trains used for this was liberated by the Russian army near the village of Tröbitz. Many passengers did not survive this train journey. Of those who survived the train journey, a large number died as a result of the outbreak of the typhus epidemic. Curt was one of them, liberation had come too late. His family lived in the Netherlands when the war broke out. His mother was Dutch and died a few days later on May 11, 1945. Curt died one day after the Netherlands was liberated. Both liberations did not save his life.
Although the Red Cross does important work, it often got it wrong in the past, and arguably in the present, when it’s about political positions. They appear to take one side—usually the side that controls the data.
One infamous example is the visit by the International Red Cross to Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in 1944. The Nazis orchestrated a deceptive façade, presenting the camp as a model settlement to the Red Cross inspectors, who were not allowed to speak with the inmates freely. This visit resulted in a misleading report that downplayed the true nature of the camp and the Holocaust.
An inspection was demanded by the King of Denmark, following the deportation of 466 Danish Jews to Terezin in 1943.
In February 1944, the SS embarked on a “beautification” (German: Verschönerung) campaign to prepare the ghetto for the Red Cross visit. Many “prominent” prisoners and Danish Jews were re-housed in private, superior quarters. The streets were renamed and cleaned; sham shops and a school were set up; the SS encouraged the prisoners to perform an increasing number of cultural activities, which exceeded that of an ordinary town in peacetime. As part of the preparations, 7,503 people were sent to the family camp at Auschwitz in May; the transports targeted sick, elderly, and disabled people who had no place in the ideal Jewish settlement.
Maurice Rossel was a Swiss delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) who visited Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in June 1944. His report on Theresienstadt has been a subject of controversy and criticism. Rossel’s report portrayed Theresienstadt as a “model ghetto” where Jews were supposedly well-treated, with adequate housing, food, and cultural activities. However, this depiction was highly misleading and failed to capture the true horrors of the Holocaust. Rossel admitted that he gave Theresienstadt a clean bill of health and would probably have done so again and that he was also given a tour of Auschwitz, which he did not realize was a death camp despite the sullen, haunted looks he received from the inmates.
Two delegates—from the International Red Cross and one from the Danish Red Cross—visited the ghetto, accompanied by Theresienstadt commandant SS First Lieutenant Karl Rahm and one of his deputies. The facility had been “cleaned up” and rearranged as a model village. Hints that all was not well included a bruise under the eye of the “mayor” of the “town,” a part played by Paul Eppstein, the Elders’ Council member representing German Jews. Despite these hints, the International Red Cross inspectors were taken in. This was in part because they expected to see ghetto conditions like those in occupied Poland with people starving in the streets and armed policemen on the perimeter.
For the Red Cross visit, even the SS Scharfuhrer [squad leader] Rudolph Haindl was nice to the children for the benefit of the camera…he posed for the camera, smiling, and not insisting that he be greeted by Jews from a distance of three steps, as he had demanded just the day before.
Margit Koretzova painted this while imprisoned at the Theresienstadt, and was murdered at the age of ten
The visitors were suitably impressed, and the reports after the visit were positive. Pleased with their success, the Nazis decided to create a “documentary-style” film about Terezín in the summer of 1944. Kurt Gerron, an inmate who had been a well-known actor and director, was put in charge of the filming of The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, but he was not allowed to edit the film or even view the developed footage.
This PAINTING by Bedrich Fritta, a prisoner at Terezín, depicts the “beautification” of the ghetto camp undertaken by the SS before the Red Cross visit in 1944
Two weeks after the movie was completed, he and other participants were sent to Auschwitz. Gerron was gassed soon after his arrival.
On December 19, 1996, the International Committee of the Red Cross today released copies of its World War II files, some of which provided verification that it knew of the persecution of Jews in Nazi concentration camps but felt powerless to speak out.
The files, 25,000 microfilmed pages, were donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Red Cross said its knowledge about the treatment of Jews during World War II had been written about by Jean-Claude Favez in his book ”Une Mission Impossible.” The book was published in France in 1988 and later translated into German but never appeared in English. Some American scholars and Holocaust survivors in the United States were also aware of the Red Cross’s knowledge, but generally, it was not known more widely.
The Red Cross has long acknowledged its awareness of the treatment of Jews during World War II, maintaining that if it had disclosed what it knew, it would have lost its ability to inspect prisoner-of-war camps on both sides of the front.
No one at the museum has had the opportunity to study the material, said Radu Ioanid, the museum’s specialist on Holocaust survivors. But Mr. Ioanid said documents that he had briefly seen disclosed that the Red Cross, which is supposed to maintain neutrality, had rescued thousands of Jews in Hungary and Romania and had assisted Jews at a concentration camp in Ravensbruck, Germany.
For the most part, however, the Red Cross’s assistance came late in the war and beneficiaries were relatively few compared with the millions of people who died in the camps.
”The International Committee of the Red Cross has shared responsibility for the silence of the world community,” Georges Willemin, the organization’s archivist, said today. ”Could we have gone further? Could we have done more? I don’t know.”
The documents are in two groups, one dealing with Jewish prisoners and the other with hostages and political detainees. Mr. Willemin said both groups of files contained many first-hand accounts and reports on the persecution of Jews and political prisoners from 1939 to 1945.
Asked why it had taken more than 50 years for the organization’s information to be released, Mr. Willemin replied, ”Because it takes time to face your own history.”
Miles Lerman, chairman of the Holocaust Museum, said lives could have been saved if the Red Cross had spoken out during the war, but Mr. Lerman also cautioned against condemning the organization.
”There is no question about it,” he said. ”People, good people, decided to look the other way, including people in the Red Cross in Britain and the United States.
”Always when people speak out, lives are saved. ”I wouldn’t describe them as villains but as part of the world that found it more convenient to remain silent.”
Another scholar at the museum, Randolph L. Braham, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Political Science at the City University of New York, wrote in his book, ”The Politics of Genocide” (Columbia University Press, 1994): ”The International Red Cross feared that intervention in support of the Jews might jeopardize its traditional activities on behalf of prisoners of war.”
Mr. Ioanid said, ”There is no doubt that the Red Cross let itself be used by the Nazis.”
He gave as an example the ”positive reports” that Red Cross inspectors wrote about the concentration camp at Terezin, Czechoslovakia, and said the organization had been ”clearly manipulated.”
To all outward appearances, Terezin, also known as Theresienstadt, was an unthreatening, model camp that even had its own symphony orchestra. In reality, it was a way station for Jews and other prisoners headed to the death camp at Auschwitz.
To its credit, Mr. Ioanid said, the Red Cross took 3,000 to 3,500 Jewish orphans from Romania to Palestine on ships in 1944 when the Romanians realized their German allies were going to lose the war and relaxed their anti-Jewish campaign. By then, however, half of Romania’s 760,000 Jews had already been killed.
Mr. Willemin said the Red Cross’s decision to release its wartime records ”was an important change for an organization that through its history has been inclined to protect the privacy of its records so as not to run any risk of impairing its humanitarian work and its reputation for impartiality and neutrality.”
The camp became a model city for six hours while International Red Cross delegates visited on June 23, 1944. Unfortunately, the International Red Cross seems not to have learned from the past.
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The story of Emanuel Arnold Maurice Speijer reminds me a lot of that of Nikolai Vavilov, a scientist who sacrificed his life to save the seeds in the Leningrad seed bank. Emmanuel Speijer was more fortunate though.
Speijer was an entomologist. Entomology is the study of insects and their relationship to humans, the environment, and other organisms. Entomologists make great contributions to such diverse fields as agriculture, chemistry, biology, human/animal health, molecular science, criminology, and forensics.
For most people, a concentration camp would not be the obvious place to collect insects. However, for the Dutch Jewish scientist Emmanuel Speijer, establishing an entomological collection was a way to survive. While he was a prisoner in De Schaffelaar internment camp, in Barneveld, Westerbork, and Theresienstadt concentration camps, He did research on the insects that lived there and the diseases they spread. After the liberation, he published an article on his experiences, ‘Entomological work in the Nazi camps’
Speijer managed to use his passion for entomology to make life a bit more bearable in the camps. Insect plagues were resolved in an animal-friendly manner and he tried to prevent infections such as typhus by drawing up rules. The extensive Westerbork collection was collected in just one year.
This drawer contains all kinds of bees, bumblebees, wasps and ants collected in concentration camps during the Second World War by Emanuel Speijer.
On 19 December 1942, Speijer and his family were deported to De Schaffelaar internment camp near Barneveld in the Netherlands. More than 600 ‘socially prominent’ Dutch Jews were interned in the camp, which was housed in a castle, between 1942 and 1943. Due to their positions or connections, they were initially exempt from deportation to the East, but they too, faced increasingly strict rules.
Speijer’s stay in De Schaffelaar did not last long. After nine months, he was deported to Westerbork in the Northeastern Netherlands. He felt that it was important to preserve his collection, even if this meant giving it to the Germans, and he therefore asked them to keep it safe. It is partly thanks to these efforts that some of his collections can still be admired in Naturalis today.
‘In the beginning, it didn’t seem that my stay in this camp would be interesting from an entomological perspective,’ wrote Speijer of his first days in Westerbork. It wasn’t long before the camp’s Medical Service made him the ‘entomologist in the quarantine department.’ Instead of the caterpillars he’d studied in De Schaffelaar, he had to examine new camp prisoners for lice and mites. These bugs need to be removed with the utmost care, to prevent disease from spreading in the camp.
Despite the careful checks in the quarantine department, there were various disease outbreaks in Westerbork. Speijer wrote in length about one of them—the mysterious disease 7. Could this disease have been caused by lice? Or was the culprit a mite that was brought from Greece on rags distributed by the Germans? Speijer began a study to find an answer to this question. He sent specimens of infected skin to Leiden, to no avail.
Speijer spent the final, and perhaps the most turbulent, year of his imprisonment in the Czech concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Nowadays, the typhus outbreak there in the first half of 1945 is one of the most discussed outbreaks of the Second World War. Fearing the Allied advance, the Germans took large groups of prisoners to Theresienstadt in the last months of the war. It soon became impossible to check all new prisoners for lice and ‘disinfect’ them. As a result, the body louse—the main spreader of typhus—rapidly moves through the camp.
Because of his close contact with patients, he also became infected with typhus. After two days, he had such a high fever that he was unable to keep working.
As the Allied forces closed in, the Nazis began to empty ghettos and camps in Eastern Europe and send prisoners on death marches to camps and ghettos closer to Germany. Approximately 15,000 such prisoners arrived in Theresienstadt in the last weeks of April 1945. This increase almost doubled the camp‘s population to approximately 30,000 people.
Following two further visits in April 1945, the International Red Cross took over the running of Theresienstadt on 2 May 1945. One week later, on 9 May 1945, Soviet forces liberated the ghetto. Speijer left Theresienstadt on a stretcher, with the Red Cross.
When he returned to the Netherlands after the war, his ‘first task was to inquire about the collection.’ Unfortunately, little remains of his collections from Westerbork and Theresienstadt. According to him, though, entomology had shown that ‘it can help to give meaning to our lives, even in the most difficult circumstances.’ Doing research had given him a goal and had prevented the occupying forces from breaking his spirit. The tiny creatures had thus been of the utmost importance.
He died on October 30, 1999, at 95, in the Hague, South Holland, Netherlands.
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I was reluctant to use the title, From Zero to 102 as the title, I didn’t want it to look like a review for a car. However, I couldn’t think of a more suitable title either. The 0 and the 102 are the ages of two victims of the Holocaust.
This is how evil the Nazi regime really was. It is also why their industrialized way of murder was so effective. It is in human nature to always find the good in our fellow human beings, even animals. No one could really fathom the level of cruelty by the Nazis. It was unprecedented.
Suzanne Kaminski was born on 11 March 1943, in Brussels, Belgium. On 19 April 1943, she was deported from Mechelen to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival on 22 April, she was murdered by the Nazis that same day. She was only 45 days old and considered the youngest Jewish child to be deported from Belgium.
Klara Engelsman was born on 30 April 1842 in Amsterdam as the daughter of Salomon “Samuel” Abraham Engelsman and Saartje Hartog Cosman. Klara Engelsman married Daniel Brush on 24 May 1865. As far as we know, the couple had no children. Daniel Brush died at 76 years old on 9 July 1918 in Amsterdam.
At the time of her 100th birthday, Mrs. Klara Brush-Engelsman lived at the home of the Morpurgo family. Later she stayed in the Jewish care home. In March 1944 she arrived in Camp Westerbork, where she was nursed in the camp hospital. There she still experienced her 102th birthday. She was taken on a stretcher to the train on 4 September 1944, which went to Theresienstadt, where she was murdered on 12 October 1944.
The murder of a 45 days old baby and a 102-year-old lady, is the clearest indication that the Nazis’ ideology was based on hate and hate only. Anyone who condoned this or still condones it, subscribes to that same ideology.
My interview with Jackie Young, a Holocaust survivor:
Jackie Young (born Jona Spiegel) was born in December 1941 in Vienna, Austria, but raised by adoptive parents in England. He talks about slowly learning about his own past, which his adoptive parents had kept from him despite his own faint memories and hints mentioned by relatives.
Young, adopted by a Jewish couple from North London, never spoke about his past. But, when he was nine, he discovered he was adopted. It did not matter until, when he was a teenager, his grandmother told him he was born in Austria.
Young miraculously survived as an orphaned infant for two years and eight months at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) camp ghetto in Czechoslovakia. The Nazis deported him when he was an infant to Maly Trostinec, near Minsk, where his mother, Elsa Spiegel, was deported and murdered.
Elsa Spiegel handed her baby, named Yona Jakob Spiegel, born at the Rothschild-Spital (Jewish hospital) on December 18, 1941, to an orphanage before her deportation. Young found two accounts of this, one saying he was three and a half months old and another saying he was five and a half months old.
Young was deported to Terezin in September 1942 and was interned there between the ages of nine months and three and a half years. He has been able to establish that he was the sole survivor among the 15 children without parents who were together with him on the same transport to the camp. He survived the camp. After the war, and sent to the UK as part of the Windermere children.
After a while, he was in the care of a young family who adopted him when he was nine years old.
Taken from his memoirs, Lost and Waiting to be Found:
“I gradually began to understand what being adopted meant, and it now became clear to me why I had always had a feeling of being different from other children. I could remember back to when I was five years old, playing with lots of boys and girls, and one day some of us were ushered forward to meet two people—a young man and a woman. They wanted to take us out for a ride in the country. One day I was to go alone with these people to stay with them for a few days, and obviously, that visit was to lead to my being adopted.
Every so often, I tried to question my parents where was I born, and where were my real parents. But they usually fobbed me off with the statement that they loved me very much, and that was all that mattered. In retrospect, my adopted parents were behaving protectively, they did not want me to be hurt, but I started to become increasingly frustrated. I noticed that at school—if I were naughty, the teachers would tell me off in the nicest possible way and even apologise for hitting me. This seemed very strange, and I quickly began to realize that I possessed a lever which enabled me to get my own way with my parents, providing I didn’t ask questions. Looking back I can see that I was thoroughly spoilt.”
I believe that the most effective way to keep the Holocaust in our memory is by remembering individuals—rather than talking about numbers, which are just so hard to comprehend.
Ralph Blankenstein was born in Hamburg on September 29, 1922. His father, Isidor, lived in Hamburg, where he met his future wife Helene Blankenstein née Bluman, born on November 17, 1892, in Hamburg. The couple married on October 22, 1921, and on September 29, 1922, their only child, Ralph Blankenstein, was born. Since 1932, Isidor worked as a general representative in tobacco products for the companies Kuhlenkampf & Co. and Altmann and Budde. His wife, Helene, worked as a secretary for the French Consulate General in Hamburg from 1932 to 1935. Ralph attended the Talmud Torah School from 1932 to 1937.
In April 1937, Isidor Blankenstein lost his job because of his “non-Aryan” origins. He then left Hamburg with his wife Helene and his son Ralph and traveled with them to the Netherlands. Due to discrepancies about the 6,000 Reichsmarks owed to the companies Kuhlenkampf & Co. and Altmann and Budde, an arrest warrant was issued against Isidor for the alleged attempt to illegally obtain assets from strangers. When he wanted to visit his mother in Germany, he was arrested in Kleve (Düsseldorf) and transferred to the prison in Hamburg on June 3, 1937. Isidor denied having committed a criminal offense and was successful in having the arrest warrant revoked. He was released from prison on July 7, 1937, and returned to his family in the Netherlands. However, in doing so, he evaded the requirement to report to the police—and an arrest warrant was once again issued. Isidor had German citizenship until September 1938, but he lost it when he left the country and became stateless.
His last stay in the Netherlands was at the internment Camp in Hoorn (North Holland). He was arrested again in 1940 and first taken to Amsterdam before being transferred again to the prison in Hamburg. In the criminal case against Isidor Blankenstein, he was represented by his “consultant” M. Israel Samson. (Jewish lawyers were referred to as consultants when their general license to practice law was revoked—but had permission to legally represent or advise other Jews.) On July 21, 1941, Isidor was released from the prison in Hamburg. On October 1, 1941, the Hamburg District Court, Department 135, pronounced the verdict according to which the defendant Isidor Blankenstein had been acquitted of the charge of fraud to the detriment of the Altmann Company, but at the same time was sentenced to nine months in prison for breach of trust to the detriment of the Kuhlenkampf & Co. Company. The sentence was deemed served through pre-trial detention.
Isidor Blankenstein was not able to enjoy his freedom regained for long. About three weeks later, he received the deportation order at his last home address in Hamburg, Heinrich-Barth-Straße 10 (near Seligmann). Isidor Blankenstein was deported to Łódź on October 25, 1941. He died in the ghetto on April 5, 1942.
Helene Blankenstein was arrested and sent to the Westerbork Transit Camp in the Netherlands on July 16, 1940. She stayed there until September 4, 1944, and then deported to Theresienstadt. She was liberated on May 8, 1945, and survived World War II.
Their son, Ralph, was deported to Westerbork on June 6, 1942. He was then moved to Theresienstadt, and then on September 29, 1944, to the Auschwitz Extermination Camp. Ralph Blankenstein was declared dead after the war on February 2, 1945. However, most likely, he was murdered in September 1944 in Auschwitz.
A mistake many people would make is that a charity as large as the Red Cross would not fall victim to manipulation. Although they have the best intentions, any charity can only go by the information given to them. They may believe they are eyewitnesses to something, but to suit “certain” narratives—façades can cover the truth.
On June 23, 1944, the Nazis invited the International Red Cross to inspect Theresienstadt Concentration Camp. The camp was described as a Utopian experiment by the Germans to produce a self-sustaining community of like-minded citizens who would live and work together for the common good. Craftsmen of all types exercised their talents in specially constructed workshops; fruit and vegetables were grown in abundance in large garden areas close to the moat; there was a post office, bank, library, hospital, and countless opportunities for the residents of the camp to participate in sporting and cultural activities. In short, the Nazis portrayed Theresienstadt as being a veritable paradise camp.
To ensure the Red Cross reported positively on Theresienstadt, the Nazis attempted to mask the true conditions, thereby presenting it as a model ghetto. The Nazis removed 7,503 Jews from Theresienstadt between 16 and 18 May 1944 to reduce the overcrowding of the ghetto, holding them in a special camp at Auschwitz in case the Red Cross requested to visit them there. Buildings along the inspection route were spruced up, a football match was staged, and cultural activities were promoted to add to the deception.
As the Red Cross arrived and toured the ghetto, they followed a specific route, which had been pre-planned to portray the camp in the best light possible. They met the prisoners who had been warned about how to act and what to say. The Red Cross was duped, and their report did not reveal the ghetto’s true purpose or conditions.
The commission that visited on June 23, 1944, included Maurice Rossel, a representative of the ICRC; E. Juel-Henningsen, the head physician at the Danish Ministry of Health; and Franz Hvass, the top civil servant at the Danish Foreign Ministry. Swiss historians Sébastien Farré and Yan Schubert view the choice of the young and inexperienced Rossel as indicative of the ICRC’s indifference to Jewish suffering.
The Nazis intensified deportations from the ghetto shortly before the visit, and the ghetto itself was beautified—by adding a garden, painting houses and renovating barracks. The Nazis had staged social and cultural events for the visiting dignitaries. Once the visit was over, the Germans resumed deportations from Theresienstadt, which ended in October 1944.
Rossel was completely duped. A sad fact is the subsequent report he produced was so favourable that the local SS decided to make a film about the camp. The intention was a resultant propaganda film that would be distributed worldwide, particularly to international humanitarian institutions and neutral countries. This was to assure them that the negative reports from the Western powers about their camps—were all exaggerated and untrue.
Jewish spectators watching a football match at Theresienstadt
Not only was it enough to have a false depiction of Theresienstadt, but the Nazis also coerced German-Jewish Actor/Director Kurt Gerron into directing. Gerron escaped Germany after the Nazis took power and ended up in the Netherlands. When the filming finished, Gerron and members of the jazz pianist Martin Roman Ghetto Swingers—were deported on the final train transport to Auschwitz. Gerron and his wife were gassed immediately upon arrival, as well as the film’s performing entourage, with the exception of Martin Roman and guitarist Coco Schumann.
As a result of preparations for the Red Cross visit, the summer of 1944 was, as one survivor later wrote, “The best time we had in Terezín. Nobody thought of new transports.”
The gimmick was so successful that SS commander Hans Günther tried and decided to expand on it by having Kurt Gerron make a short documentary about the camp to assure audiences that the inmates kept there were not abused. In return, the Nazis promised that he would live. Shooting the film started on September 1, 1944, and took 11 days. Kurt Gerron was murdered upon arrival at Auschwitz on October 28, 1944.
This should be a lesson for today and the future that seeing should not always be believing.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
I am actually happy that I could not find any images of Anton de Rosa because I don’t think I could take that. When I say 10 months of life, that is literally what it was. He only lived for 10 months. The picture above is of his birthplace, Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp. Where was born 80 years ago today?
From Bergen Belsen he was deported to Theresienstadt. The date when this happened is not known. On October 6, 1944, he was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. There were approximately 107 others on that transport, including Rolf Dirk Ullmann, another baby I wrote about before. Rolf Dirk Ullmann had also been born in captivity in Westerbork.
We are in the middle of a new UEFA Champions League season and only a few months away of UEFA Euro 2024 This inspired me to look at some players who never had a chance to play in football tournaments, either as players or coaches.
Before I go into the stories of some individual footballers, first view the context of the photograph above. Football on a Sunday afternoon in Camp Westerbork. Jewish prisoners during a football match.
The attentive spectator behind the goal is the Austrian Arthur Pisk, leader of the Order Service. A football competition between teams with Jewish prisoners in 1943 at Camp Westerbork was set up. Many of them were murdered in the extermination camps at Sobibor and Auschwitz.
Antal Vágó was a Hungarian-Jewish international footballer who played as a midfielder. Vágó played club football for MTK for twelve seasons, winning the league nine times. Vágó also played for Fővárosi TC and represented the Hungarian national team at international level, earning 17 caps between 1908 and 1917. Vágó was killed during the Holocaust, and some claim that he was shot and his body thrown into the river Danube in late 1944 along with thousands of other Budapest Jews.
A mural at Chelsea’s stadium of Árpád Weisz and Julius Hirsch, Jewish footballers murdered at Auschwitz, and Ron Jones, an English POW and Auschwitz survivor
Árpád Weisz, Julius Hirsch and Ron Jones
Árpád Weisz was a Hungarian Jewish football player and manager who played for Törekvés SE in his native Hungary, in Czechoslovakia for Makabi Brno, and in Italy for Alessandria and Inter Milan. Weisz was a member of the Hungarian squad at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris. After retiring as a player in 1926, Weisz settled in Italy and became an assistant coach for Alessandria before moving to Inter Milan.
Weisz and his family were forced to flee Italy following the enactment of the Italian Racial Laws. They found refuge in the Netherlands, where Weisz got a coaching job with Dordrecht. In 1942, Weisz and his family were deported to Auschwitz. Weisz’s wife, Elena, and his children, Roberto and Clara, were murdered by the Nazis upon arrival. Weisz was kept alive for 18 months and exploited as a worker before his death in January 1944.
Julius Hirsch was a German-Jewish international footballer who played for the clubs SpVgg Greuther Fürth and Karlsruher FV for most of his career. He was the first Jewish player to represent the German national team, who played in seven international matches for Germany between 1911 and 1913.
He retired from football in 1923 and continued working as a youth coach for his club, KFV. Hirsch was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp on 1 March 1943. His exact date of death is unknown.
Ron Jones, known as the Goalkeeper of Auschwitz, was a British prisoner of war (POW) sent to E715 Wehrmacht British POW camp, part of the Auschwitz complex, in 1942. Jones was part of the Auschwitz Football League and was appointed goalkeeper of the Welsh team.
In 1945, Jones was forced to join the ‘death march’ of prisoners across Europe. Together with 230 other Allied prisoners, he marched 900 miles from Poland into Czechoslovakia and finally to Austria, where they were liberated by the Americans. Less than 150 men survived the death march. Jones returned to Newport after the war and was a volunteer for the Poppy Appeal for more than 30 years until his death in 2019 at the age of 102.
Hundreds of matches of soccer were played in Terezin. From 1942-1944, on an impoverished field, Jewish prisoners in Terezin organized and played matches set up in the courtyard of the barracks they lived. In the summer of 1944, the Nazis shot a propaganda film directed by Kurt Gerron. Gerron’s film was shown to the International Red Cross in late 1944, convincing the organization that there was no extermination in the camps.
The 2013 documentary film is setting out to change that. Liga Terezin was aired for the first time on Israeli television at the Holocaust Remembrance Day. It tells the story of the league through the perspective of its survivors and their relatives. The film’s backbone is extensive coverage of a game on 1 September 1944—just weeks before most players were sent to extermination camps.
Zygmunt Steuermann played for Hasmonea Lvov, one of the clubs throughout the area with Zionist foundations. He scored a hat-trick on his debut for the national team against Turkey in Lvov in 1926.
Born in Sambor, then in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, Steuermann was Jewish and a member of a Polonized Jewish family. His older brother was pianist Eduard Steuermann. His older sister was the actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel. As a child, he was nicknamed Dusko.
At the age of 12, Steuermann joined the local Korona Sambor. During World War I, he fled to Vienna, where he continued his training in a variety of sports clubs, including Gersthof Wien, Germania Wien, and Amateure Wien. After the war, he returned to Poland. In 1920, he started a semi-professional career in Korona Sambor. The following year, he moved to Lwów (modern Lviv, Ukraine), and joined the ŻKS Lwów Sports Club. In 1923, he was transferred to Hasmonea Lwów, a most important Jewish football club in Poland and one of the four Lwów-based clubs playing in the first league.[6] He remained one of the most notable players of that club until 1932 when he joined Legia Warsaw.
Steuermann also played twice in the Poland national team, scoring four goals: three in a match against Turkey in 1926 and one against the USA in 1928. He was one of only two first-timers in the history of the Poland national team to score a hat-trick in the first match, the other being Józef Korbas (in 1937 against Bulgaria).
During the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, he fled Warsaw settling in his hometown, which was then annexed by the USSR. He returned to Korona Sambor, which was soon afterward closed down and recreated as Dinamo Sambor by the Soviet authorities. Following the Nazi take-over of eastern Poland, he was arrested and sent to the Lemberg Ghetto, where he died in December 1941 at the age of 42.
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In the late 1930s, Anka Bergman was a lively law student living in the Czechoslovakian capital, Prague.
“I wanted company and boyfriends and to enjoy myself. I didn’t know that Hitler was coming, but I filled my time with only cinemas and theatres and concerts and parties,” she says.
At a nightclub, Anka met her husband, Bernd Nathan, an attractive German-Jewish architect who had fled Germany in 1933.
“He thought that it was far enough to be safe,” said Eva. “It wasn’t but, if he hadn’t come to Prague, he wouldn’t have met my mother.”
In March 1939, the Nazis invaded Prague. From that moment on, Anka’s life, and Bernd’s, was changed forever. Anka and her entire family were sent to Theresienstadt.
Although men and women were segregated, the couple met secretly, managed to have sex, and Anka became pregnant. They had a boy that died from pneumonia when he was two months old.
She fell pregnant again in late 1944. Mr Nathan was sent to Auschwitz, and Anka volunteered to follow him.
She was pregnant with Eva on her arrival. However, she was never reunited with Bernd and later discovered that he had been murdered on 18 January 1945. He never knew his wife was even pregnant.
Anka was moved from Auschwitz–Birkenau to a slave labour camp near Dresden, Germany, where she remained for six months. She was later forced to endure a horrific seventeen-day journey to Mauthausen, in open coal wagons, without food, little water and filthy conditions. On arrival at Mauthausen, Anka was so shocked when she saw the name of the notorious concentration camp that she went into labour. Anka weighed just five stone when she gave birth to Eva, who weighed just 3 pounds. It was 29 April 1945, just a few days before Mauthausen was liberated. Her birth certificate was issued on 14 April 1948 by the Standesamt registry office of Mauthausen an der Donau, a small town in Austria where the concentration camp was located.
Previously, when arriving at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Nazi SS doctor Josef Mengele asked Anka if she was pregnant, to which she lied and replied no. The Americans arrived six days later, and an Army Signal Corps cameraman filmed the human wreckage as evidence of Nazi atrocities. He also filmed Anka with her new baby.
Anka was never reunited with her Husband Bernd and later discovered that he had been murdered on 18 January 1945. He never knew his wife was even pregnant.
After returning to Prague, Anka met Karel Bergman, who served as a translator in the RAF during the war but returned to his home country. The birth certificate was needed so Anka and her family could emigrate from Prague to the UK, where they settled in Cardiff.
Anka’s Daughter Eva grew up in the UK. In the 1960s, she met and married Malcolm Clarke, a lawyer from Abergavenny, and they had two sons. Her father-in-law, Kenneth Clarke, was a navigator in RAF Bomber Command who participated in the bombing of Dresden.
History of Sorts 
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