The World Cup and the Holocaust

Who is the greatest Jewish footballer of all time?

This is the question posed by David Bolchover in his gripping new book, Digging Deep: Unearthing the Stories of Eleven Murdered Jewish Footballing Greats, and in the week of the largest-ever World Cup, it’s not as foolish a question as modern football fans might think. Jewish footballers, managers and clubs were everywhere in interwar Europe, competing and winning against the best, and the fact that they are all but forgotten now tells us much about the devastating impact the Holocaust had on Jewish life, and on Europe as a whole.

Bolchover tells the story of eleven murdered Jewish professional footballers, all of whom represented their countries in international matches. He was spoilt for choice: reading Digging Deep, you get the impression that Jewish footballers were as prevalent in the football leagues of central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s as black players are in the Premier League today. Some of the stories are, for football fans, fascinating, and for the countries involved, historic. Poland’s first-ever international game of football, a 1-0 defeat to Hungary in 1921, featured two Jews in the Polish team and five playing for Hungary. The first ever hat-trick for Poland was scored by a Jewish player, Zygmunt Steuermann, in a 6-1 defeat of Turkey in 1926. When Austria played Hungary in 1923, both teams were captained by Jews. Italy’s heaviest-ever defeat is a 7-1 loss to Hungary in 1924, in which six of the seven goals for Hungary were scored by Jews; even the referee was Jewish that day.

Back then, being a Jewish club didn’t mean, like Spurs or Ajax today, having a few Jewish fans and a mythical historical connection: it meant real Jewish players and managers wowing huge crowds, winning trophies, beating the best teams in the country, and going on overseas tours. The first time an English team lost at home to a foreign side? That would be when Hakoah Vienna, the pride of Jewish football with a Zionist ethos and a Star of David on their kit, trounced West Ham United 5-0 in 1923.

Bolchover ended up choosing five Hungarians, three Poles, two Austrians and a German for his virtual team. Running onto the football field, all were considered Hungarian, Polish, Austrian or German enough to represent their countries. Few imagined that, within a few short years, they would simply be Jews, isolated from wider society, stripped of their rights, and murdered, often by their former compatriots. Julius Hirsh, a dashing left winger who scored four times for Germany against Holland in a 5-5 draw when he was just 19 years old (the other German goal that day was also scored by a Jewish player, Gottfried Fuchs), even earned the Iron Cross fighting as a German in World War One, before being gassed as a Jew at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Digging Deep is a book about football history, but really, at its core, is about the Holocaust and the lost civilisation of Jewish Europe. The Nazis and their accomplices did not just kill six million Jewish individuals; they destroyed an entire culture. The legacy of this erasure still distorts Jewish identity, and perceptions of Jewish life, up to the present. For example, the contribution to European intellectual and literary culture of Jewish writers and thinkers who escaped Nazi persecution, like Freud and Einstein, Arendt and Zweig, is widely known and celebrated. In some circles, it shapes what people like to think of as the most admirable aspect of Jewish culture and sensibilities today. But this Jewish role in European intellectual life during the interwar years was matched by the Jewish contribution to its sporting life, and especially to football, at a time when Austria and Hungary in particular were the strongest footballing nations in Europe. Except, while many leading Jewish intellectuals escaped, most Jewish footballers didn’t, and almost all their fans were slaughtered along with them.

It leaves us with an absence of absence: not only is the Jewish football world gone, but we don’t even notice that it is missing. The writers of the joke in Airplane! about Jewish sports legends being all but non-existent didn’t know it, but their quip was an unintended tribute to the efficiency of the Holocaust in wiping out not just Jewish life, but any future knowledge of that life. Joni Mitchell famously sang “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”: the obliteration of Jewish life was so complete that we don’t even remember what we had.

This makes the failure of UEFA and FIFA to mark Holocaust Memorial Day each year even more indefensible and disgraceful. The one place in the world where a Jewish football culture survives is in Israel, and their teams are, as Bolchover points out, the inheritors of the traditions of Hakoah Vienna and the other lost European clubs. At a time when there are political campaigns to boycott Israeli football teams, and even to ostracise any non-Jews who have played or managed in Israel, the lack of recognition by these two bodies of the central role that Jews played in building the world’s favourite sport is an act of complicity in antisemitism.

The other aspect of the Holocaust that Digging Deep exposes in raw, painful detail, is the fragility of Jewish life in the diaspora. These Jewish footballers came from families that were rich and poor, assimilated and isolated, religious and secular. It made no difference in the end. They achieved their sporting success despite the growing antisemitism of their own societies, and that antisemitism eventually ended their lives. The idea that the Holocaust was a Nazi aberration, rather than a reflection of widespread, normative Jew-hate, is a comforting myth. It was Hungarians, Italians, Dutch, Latvians, Ukrainians and French people who arrested, deported and murdered the football stars at the centre of this story, despite those footballers having proudly worn the shirts of those same nations on the football pitch not long beforehand. Their fame and celebrity could not protect them from suffering the same fate as millions of other Jewish victims. It may even have been some of their former fans who killed them.

Time after time, the stories of deportations are accompanied by scenes of locals cheering and laughing as they were taken to their deaths. There were “crowds of people”, the daughter of the Rabbi in the Hungarian town of Putnok later recalled about the deportation of the town’s Jews in 1944. “Hundreds of gentiles were lined up at the station, applauding and cheering, jubilant at the event: the last able-bodied Jewish man was leaving their town… Parents, children, young and old - celebrating our departure as if it was a soccer championship.” The comparison is aptly jarring.

This aspect of Digging Deep sits in contrast to another new book about the Jewish experience in interwar Europe, and a brief comparison of the difference in their reception reveals something important about how Jewish identity and Holocaust memory are treated today. The other book is Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, which tells the story of the Jewish socialist organisation The Bund that thrived for four decades in pre-revolutionary Russia and pre-war Poland. The Bund combined Jewish cultural identity with socialism and a doctrine of do’ikayt, or “Hereness.” Crabapple explains this as the idea that, whereas Zionism argued that Jews ought to leave antisemitic Europe for their own separate homeland, “Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood. They would fight for a better and more beautiful world, even alongside people they had been raised to see as enemies.” The Bund was very popular for a while, until those same enemies annihilated the Bund along with the rest of Polish Jewry, destroying not only their cadres but also the credibility of their message.

Whereas Digging Deep has had barely a review - Ha’aretz is the only one I can find - Here Where We Live is a New York Times bestseller and has received gushing coverage elsewhere. This seems odd: it’s not as if pre-war Polish Jewish socialism is of more mass market interest than football. But the Bund were sworn enemies of Zionism, and activists from both movements even came to blows (they each had their own football clubs too, with matches between them becoming fierce local derbies). Right now, an idealised story of Jewish identity that rejects Zionism has a certain appeal in parts of the left. “What Does Judaism Look Like Without Zionism?” is the headline of the New York Times review of Crabapple’s book, and there are a growing number of people who like to imagine just such a world.

Crabapple doesn’t whitewash the horror of the Shoah, and she is open about the abandonment of the Bund, and of the Jews, by their putative allies on both right and left of wider, non-Jewish society. But she rejects the obvious conclusion that it would be best not to place Jewish safety in the hands of similarly unreliable allies in future. She writes:

the Bund fought for the very multiracial, democratic socialism that a new generation now champions at the ballot box… The Bund was a Jewish group, but its history is not for Jews alone. It belongs to all of us who believe in the necessity of human solidarity. In the story of the Bund—across decades and geographies, ages and faiths—I found the story of our own time, a blueprint for survival, a cautionary tale of death, and a philosophy that might yet save us.

Calling the Bund “a blueprint for survival” is almost Orwellian, but this universalist call carries an implied forgiveness for Europe’s mass betrayal of its Jews during the Shoah; a promise to let bygones be bygones and try again. It provides a much more palatable version of the Holocaust for non-Jewish ears than the one Bolchover tells, in which Judaism without Zionism involves famous Jewish ex-footballers being shot into pits and having their gold teeth ripped out by people who just a few years earlier were cheering them on from the terraces. But then, as Bolchover writes, while Holocaust memorialisation is everywhere today, it is carefully curated in a way that “camouflages multiple layers of denial”. Not denial of the basic facts of the Shoah, but a narrowing of who we see as perpetrators, and a universalising of the Holocaust as if it could have happened to anyone - whereas in reality, Europe’s long history of antisemitism, and the deep cultural roots of its anti-Jewish traditions, were central to why and how so many people from different nations joined in.

At a time when antisemitism has returned to the European mainstream, it all brings to mind the famous George Santayana quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Whether it is our limiting of Holocaust memory to the crimes of German Nazis, our collective forgetting of the history of Jewish footballers, or the foolish nostalgia for the Bund amongst some Jewish socialists today, remembering the past isn’t enough: what you choose to remember and what you draw from that memory matters just as much.

As for my original question about the greatest ever Jewish footballer? Bolchover gives us an answer: József Braun, the “Hebrew Ronaldo”, a dazzling winger who played for the Hungarian national team at a time when Hungary was a European footballing power. Braun scored on his international debut in 1918 at the age of just 17, won numerous league titles and international caps, then worked in several countries as a coach, before, some years later, being worked and starved to death in a Hungarian forced labour battalion in the snow of the Eastern Front in 1943, just another dead Jew among millions.