Israel Matzav

Hitler's Jewish soccer league

Here's the amazing story of the Jewish soccer league that existed from 1942-44 in the Terezin ghetto, the Nazis' attempt to fool the world about what they were really doing to the Jews.

In 1939 there were hundreds of professional soccer clubs playing in every country in Europe. But as Hitler’s war swept the continent, clubs shuttered as players everywhere were called up to combat. Amazingly, one of the only places that maintained a soccer league during World War II was the Terezin ghetto—arguably the strangest of the Nazi transit camps and ghettos—where, under German imprisonment, professional and amateur Jewish players were allowed to organize and self-administer a vibrant soccer league: Liga Terezin (Terezin League). There, in the fortress and garrison town of Terezin, 40 miles northwest of Prague, hundreds of games with dozens of players were played between 1942 and 1944. For the Jews, it was a matter of survival; for the Nazis, it was part of an overall strategy designed to fool the world.

But many have never heard of the league, perhaps due to the musical, literary, and artistic legacy that Terezin’s prisoners left behind. A new documentary film is setting out to change that. Liga Terezin which was aired for the first time on Israeli television on this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, tells the story of the league through the perspective of its survivors and their relatives. The backbone of the film is extensive coverage of a game that took place on Sept. 1, 1944—just weeks before most of the players were sent to extermination camps.

(Approximately 160,000 Jews passed through Terezin, of whom 35,409 died while in the ghetto; 88,129 were deported to extermination camps, and of these, just 4,136 survived.)
Take the story of Paul Mahrer, who was imprisoned by the Nazis in Terezin after the German occupation of the Sudetenland. He had played soccer for the Czechoslovakian national team, including two games in the 1924 Olympics, and then played on several teams in the United States before returning to Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Though already over 40 when he was brought to the ghetto, he was still a well-known sports figure and ended up playing in Liga Terezin with the other Jewish workers. His “salary” as a player was the ability to obtain better food portions. He survived the war and ended up in the United States, where he died in 1985.
“Soccer saved my family’s life,” his 25 year-old great-granddaughter, Dani Mahrer, told me last week in Jerusalem.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Holocaust, soccer

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:46 PM