David Bolchover
The Story of Béla Guttman: “The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide to Football Glory”
David Bolchover | The Story of Béla Guttman “The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide to Football Glory” | 05.12.22
- Today we have the pleasure or I have the pleasure of introducing David Bolchover, who will be relaying the story of Bela Guttmann, “The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide to Football Glory.” David Bolchover is an author and commentator. His latest book, “The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide to Football Glory,” is a biography of the legendary football coach Bela Guttmann. The title was short-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. David has also published three high profile business books, including the bestselling, “The 90-Minute Manager,” and has written opinion columns for a number of leading newspapers, including The Times, the Telegraph, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. He has appeared frequently on the BBC Sky and on other broadcast outlets. So welcome, David. It’s a real privilege and honour to have you with us. I enjoyed our chat, which we had initially. I just want to say don’t forget to share with our audience your next venture. And I’m so looking forward to hearing what you have to say today. So over to you. Thank you.
- Thank you very much indeed, Wendy. And it’s a great privilege to be able to talk to all of you today about Bela Guttmann. A subject that was a passion for me for several years while I was writing this book. So in this talk, I want to give you a flavour of, the bulk of flavour of who Bela Guttmann was, the journey I took to discover the truth about him, and the approach I took. And then maybe one or two other themes which came out of the book. If any of you have a very developed knowledge of football history, then you might have heard of Bela Guttmann then, but otherwise, I should imagine not. The best way to think of Bela Guttmann is he was the first really of the great superstar football coaches. Forgive me for using the term football, I’ll use it interchangeably with soccer. I appreciate there’s quite a lot of people in America listening to this talk. But he was the first of the great superstar football coaches. And now, of course, we have top football coaches such as Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho, Jurgen Klopp, other names that you might have heard on the news even if you don’t really follow football. And these great coaches move from country to country, selling themselves to the highest bidder and working for these great clubs throughout Europe and winning trophy after trophy.
But it might seem difficult to believe before Bela Guttmann came on the scene in the 1950s and 1960s, the coach in football had not been very highly appreciated. It was thought that the players rather than the coach brought success. And it was Bela Guttmann who really forged the path for these other great coaches to follow. His greatest successes, as I say, came in the 1950s and 1960s. The European Cup competition was founded in 1955. It is now known as the UEFA Champions League, but then it was known as the European Cup for the first few decades of its existence. And the competition would include the best team in every country. So the winner of the championship in every country would go through to the European Cup in the following season and they would contest the trophy. And for the first five years of this competition, Real Madrid, the great Real Madrid team, won this tournament. And it seemed like they were going to win this tournament forever and ever. But that was until Bela Guttmann came along. And he, coach of the Benfica team, Benfica of Lisbon in Portugal, he broke this sequence. And Benfica, under Guttmann, won the European Cup in 1961 and 1962, beating Barcelona and Real Madrid respectively.
Guttmann was very aware of his value despite the prevailing orthodoxy that the coach was not very important. And this constant desire to push for the best deal for himself, led to an alleged incident which Guttmann is perhaps most famous for. And if you’d certainly gone on the internet before my book came out, this would be the story that you would be most likely to see. After the second of those European Cup finals in 1962, when Benfica beat Real Madrid five-three, Guttmann approached his board of directors and he said to them, “I’ve won you two European Cups in succession now. I want more money. Give me more money.” But they, being 1962, and not fully appreciating the value of the coach, turned him down. Could you imagine what would happen now if a top coach won the European Cup twice in succession and they asked for more money? The board of directors would say, “Write your own check.” But this was a different era, and they said no. And Bela Guttmann said, “Okay, right, because you’re not giving me any more money, I’m leaving. And not only am I leaving, but you, Benfica, will not win another European trophy for 100 years.”
And this is known as, throughout football, as the Bela Guttmann curse. And since that time in 1962, Benfica have appeared in eight European finals, and they have lost every single one. It’s a source of great psychological trauma to the players and the fans of that club. In 1990, Bela Guttmann actually died in 1981, and he’s buried in the Jewish cemetery in Vienna. And nine years after his death in 1990, Benfica qualified for one of those finals. And on the afternoon of the game, a few hours before the game, their greatest ever former player Eusebio, who himself had retired by that time, but had been discovered by Bela Guttmann 30 years previously in Mozambique, plucked from obscurity and thrown into international stardom by Bela Guttmann. Eusebio visited the grave on that day. He knelt down before the grave of Bela Guttmann, and he begged his former and now dead mentor to lift the curse on Benfica and allow them to win that night. But Benfica still lost. Milan won one-nil, and the curse went on. Who was Bela Guttmann? Well, he was born in Budapest, the capital of Hungary in 1899. He was the son of a Abraham and Eszter Guttmann who were part of a huge influx of Hungarian Jews from the provinces to the capital of Budapest in the last three decades of the 19th century. And this was a community, the Hungarian Jewish community, that was extremely keen to be accepted as Hungarian. And they were very successful in integrating within the society.
And some of the statistics from around the First World War are quite astonishing. 60% of the lawyers and doctors in Budapest were Jews. 50% of the journalists in Budapest were Jews, and more at the top newspapers. Two thirds of the tradesmen in Budapest were Jews as Jewish entrepreneurs powered the local economy. Many people would say that Budapest had a strong Jewish influence before the Holocaust. I would say this underplays the reality. Budapest was, to a large extent, a Jewish city. So much so that anti-Semites throughout Europe, unsurprisingly would refer to the city as Jewdapest. And these Hungarian Jews consider themselves Hungarian in a way that perhaps modern American Jews think of themselves as American, and modern British Jews think of themselves as British. And what was to happen to them in the quarter of a century after the First World War would’ve seemed absolutely unthinkable to them at that time. And the bad news started long before the , long before the Holocaust.
From 1919 to 1921, there was The White Terror in Hungary where up to 3,000 Jews were butchered and slaughtered throughout the country in supposed revenge for the communist government led by the half-Jew Bela Kun for half a year in 1919. Guttmann himself a young player at that time, aged about 20. He himself fled Budapest with his brother to Yugoslavia. Anti-Jewish laws started in 1938 in Hungary, although Hungary was not invaded, was not a part of the Nazi empire until 1944. March the 19th, 1944, Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany, and they started to pass anti-Jewish laws starting in 1938. And Bela Guttmann lost his job as a young coach in Ujpest, on the outskirts of Budapest. Despite having won the Hungarian league that season in 1939, he was sacked because he was a Jew, and then joined the Holocaust. 600,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered, including after the Nazi invasion of March, 1944, 437,402, 437,402, a number etched in my mind, Jews, men, women, and children were deported from Hungary. Almost all of them went to Auschwitz, and almost all of them were murdered. And that is a rate of 8,000 Jews a day. A rate of one Jew murdered every 11 seconds.
I don’t think we need to be professional psychologists to believe that these terrible events emerging from what had been a very secure environment for Bela Guttmann shaped his character. And part of what made the Guttmann story so captivating to me was his clearly defined personality. He was outspoken, he was distrustful, he was iconoclastic, he was innovative, he was always, always arguing with authority. So the exciting football story and Bela Guttmann’s contribution to the development of football as the first superstar coach, and the great anecdotes with his distinctive character to the fore were fascinating enough, and that’s what got me initially interested. But it’s what I found out soon after I started the research, which got me absolutely hooked. There’s been, before my book came out, there was quite a bit written about Bela Guttmann, not in any great depth, but there was obviously a Wikipedia page and several articles and several references to him in football histories. But there was very little, if not almost nothing, about what happened to Bela Guttmann during the Holocaust years. In fact, if you looked up the internet before my book came out, you would’ve discovered the following about what happened to Bela Guttmann during the war.
You would’ve found out that he escaped to Switzerland. Switzerland was, of course, a neutral country during the war. And several thousand Jews did actually manage to escape death by managing to get to Switzerland. You would’ve been told that he met his wife Mariann, and that he married her in Switzerland in 1942. You’ll have learned that his brother Armin, who played with Bela in the early stages of his football career, died in a concentration camp in Germany in 1945. That’s what you would’ve learned. And every single last bit of what you would’ve learned is completely and utterly false. Soon after I started my research, I wrote to the Swiss authorities. There’s a department in the Swiss government that looks after the names, all the details of the Jewish interns who went there during the war. And I asked them, “Do you know anyone by Bela Guttmann’s name?” I gave them his date of birth, et cetera. And they didn’t know anyone by that name. They didn’t have anyone in their archives by that name. He hadn’t been in Switzerland. And then I came across, in the course of my research, an interview published in a book in Hungarian after Bela Guttmann had died in 1981. It was interview published posthumously.
The interview was conducted a couple of years before he died, in which Bela Guttmann talked at length about his life and career. And in this interview, he very briefly mentions his time in a slave labour camp, in a brutal slave labour camp in the environs of Budapest, and his escape from that camp. And then I had a stroke of luck. I came across an interview with the son of Bela Guttmann’s brother-in-law who describes what happened to Bela in 1944. Apart from his escape from the labour camp, he was also, Bela was also hidden by his brother-in-law. Bela’s wife Mariann was a non-Jew, a Catholic. And her brother, Bela’s brother-in-law, Pal Moldovan hid Bela above his hairdressing salon in Ujpest near Budapest at the same time as Jews across the street and around the corner were being herded to their deaths. I also wanted to find out what had happened to Bela Guttmann’s family. He had a sister and two brothers, and a father that was still alive. His mother died before the war. I’d seen on the Yad Vashem website that several Guttmann’s, including Abraham Guttmann, his father, with the same birthdate of 1866, had been deported from Miskolc. But I hadn’t paid much attention to that because the Guttmanns were a Budapest family. But I hired a Hungarian researcher, and what they found out led me to believe that, in fact, it was the Guttmann family that had been deported from Miskolc, and included his 78, Bela’s 78-year-old father, Abraham, Bela’s sister Sharon, age 50, and his nephew Irvin.
But Armin, the brother that was supposed to have been killed according to the internet, survived. I managed to contact another nephew of Bela Guttmann now living in Sao Paolo in Brazil, and he filled in the missing pieces of the jigsaw and told me that Armin had survived. So getting to the bottom of what happened to Guttmann and to the Guttmann family during the Holocaust, when so many glossed over that story or got it wrong, which is interesting in itself that so many people had got it wrong, felt like a major triumph for me. It will be clear to any readers of my book that the title of the book, “The Greatest Comeback,” has more than one meaning. “The Greatest Comeback” primarily refers to Bela Guttmann. In 1944, much of Europe wanted Bela Guttmann dead, and much of Europe succeeded in murdering his, in murdering his people, his extended family, et cetera. But 16 years later, Guttmann won the most prestigious sporting competition in that very same continent. So, but it struck me that Guttmann’s life really largely traced his life story, largely traced the story of the Jewish nation as a whole, during the 20th century. And the broader story, the broader Jewish story features throughout the book, if Bela Guttmann accomplished the greatest individual comeback in football history, then surely the Jews of the 20th century performed the greatest national comeback in human history.
To give you one example of that parallel, when Bela Guttmann led his team to victory in his first European Cup in 1961 against Barcelona in Bern, at that very same time, at that very same time, Adolf Eichmann, who was possibly the greatest architect of the Hungarian Holocaust, and the man who meticulously planned the murder of Bela Guttmann’s family, was being tried in a Jewish court, with Jewish judges, in the ancient Jewish capital of Jerusalem. Some other themes thrown up by my book is the way, one example is the way Europe played down or even ignored the Holocaust in the postwar years, surely contributing to the ignorance about what happened to Bela Guttmann. One classic, absurd example I discovered was in World Soccer magazine, which is like a upmarket magazine for more educated football fans, and it was an interview with Bela Guttmann in 1961 at the height of his success. And the very well-respected football journalist Eric Batty wrote about Bela Guttmann as he introduced the interview, and he quote and he says, and I quote, “Bela Guttmann lived in Hungary between 1938 and 1949.” And he left it at that, omitting the rather pertinent fact that Bela Guttmann was a Hungarian Jew, and that 600,000 Hungarian Jews, including Bela Guttmann’s family had been murdered during that time.
The truth was out there if any journalist wanted to de display a modicum of journalistic know-how to discover it. For example, in a book published in 1963 by Arthur Goldman, future president of South African, McCarthy, it was a book about Jewish sport, he devoted a chapter to Bela Guttmann. And in this chapter, he talks about Bela Guttmann’s time in a slave labour camp in Budapest. The truth was known in Jewish circles, but non-Jewish Europe seemingly did not want to know. Bela Guttmann himself, perhaps along with many survivors, instinctively understood Europe’s reluctance to confront the uniqueness and enormity of the Holocaust. And he published an 80,000 word biography in German, in 1964, at the height of his fame. And in this book, in this long book, he has one paragraph about the war years. And this is what he says. “In the last 15 years, countless books have been written about the destructive years of struggle for life and death. It would thus be superfluous to trouble my readers with such details I suffered and endured no more or less the many millions of my European contemporaries.”
The word Jew did not appear in the entire book, nor any mention of the Jewish teams that he played for. Bela Guttmann was an ambitious person seeking to make his way in postwar Europe. And who would’ve been his readers in the German language in 1964? Germans, Austrians, shall we put it, of a certain generation, mostly men. Men at that time being mostly the football fans, men who had perpetrated atrocities against Jews, who had supported atrocities against Jews or had condoned them. Bela Guttmann knew all too well the subject he should not breach. Europe does now acknowledge the Holocaust more openly, but I still think it’s presented in a rather disingenuous way in order to preserve Europe’s self-image and reputation. A form of what Deborah Lipstadt, the Jewish historian, calls soft-core Holocaust denial. When Deborah Lipstadt talks about soft-core Holocaust denial, normally she’s referring to the de-Judaization of the Holocaust, the constant lumping together of other victims with the Jewish victims in the Holocaust. But I think there are other, two other methods of this soft-core denial. One is telling us without any further elaboration that it was the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust, neglecting to mention the very eager or compliant participants supporting the Nazis throughout Europe.
In fact, interestingly, there was a survey done of British teenagers aged about 14, year nine, by University College London, and they asked these teenagers who perpetrated the Holocaust? 56% said one word, “Hitler.” Hitler did the Holocaust, but he’s dead so we can move on. The second way the soft-core holocaust denial I think is conveyed, is portraying the Holocaust as a terrible blip, a period of temporary insanity in German and European history, downplaying the fact that Jews have been murdered, expelled, tortured, on an extremely consistent basis over many centuries. I sought in the book to counter this soft-core denial, but I didn’t really need much help because the Guttmann story really did that for me. Guttmann lived in 14 countries, and several of whose governments and populations enthusiastically participated in the murder of the Jews or were glad to see the back of the Jews. One example being in Miskolc where his family was deported from in northern Hungary, where 10,000 Jews in scenes reminiscent of other scenes throughout Europe at that time were led through the streets, spat at and jeered according to Jewish survivors by their former Hungarian neighbours as they were led to the trains to be deported to their deaths.
The whole operation was led by the town prefect Emil Borbely-Maczky. The Nazis were nowhere to be seen. As for the argument that the Holocaust was a temporary aberration. Bela Guttmann’s life also gives a lie to this soft-core denial. Anti-Semitism obviously accounted for his suffering during the Holocaust and the murder of his family and community, but there was a lot more to it than that. I’ve already mentioned The White Terror of 1920, the anti-Jewish laws, as I will go into, the team that he played for, Hakoah Vienna, suffered the most terrible anti-Semitic abuse. After surviving the Holocaust, Bela Guttmann returned to Hungary. He returned to a Central and Eastern Europe where up to 2,000 Jews, surviving Jews from the Holocaust were then murdered by their former neighbours, having returned to their former villages, up to 2,000 Jews throughout the region. In 1949, Bela Guttmann emigrated from Hungary, from a communist, a nascent communist system in which Jews were being routinely tried and even executed for the alleged crime of Zionism.
In 1964, in the same year as his conciliatory autobiography was published, Bela Guttmann resigned from his then role as coach of the Austrian national team in his first ever, and only ever, discussion on record of anti-Semitism, Bela Guttmann said to an interviewer that he was resigning because he could not bear the constant anti-Semitism from the press, the Austrian press, from the Austrian players, and from the Austrian fans. And this extensive list excludes the constant carping, the innuendo about Bela Guttmann’s alleged money grabbing. And he faced such accusations, not least in Portugal, seen of his greatest glory, where in other respects anti-Jewish activity was not so prominent, possibly because Jews had been murdered, expelled, forcibly converted in Portugal almost 500 years before that. Another substory in my book is the huge role of Jews, particularly Central European Jews before the Holocaust. I knew something about this history, but the extent was a revelation to me, I have to admit. When Guttmann made his debut for an excellent Hungary team in 1921, beating Germany three-nil, there were six Jews in the Hungarian starting 11. And don’t forget this was in the midst of The White Terror. Despite the prevailing anti-Semitism, Hungarian football needed its Jews.
Almost all of the clubs Bela Guttmann played for throughout his career in Austria, in Hungary, in the United States were effectively Jewish clubs. It was quite possible during that era for Jewish footballers to play for only Jewish clubs and reach the top level of football. His first major club, Bela Guttmann’s first major club was MTK in Budapest, which was founded in 1888 by a Jewish businessmen. More than 50% of MTK’s players in the first three decades of the 20th century were Jews. And there were many, the Jewish supporters, the Jews were the majority of their supporters. And this team was hugely successful during Bela Guttmann’s era. And they won the league, the Hungarian league, nine times the succession after the First World War. The non-Jewish population regarded them as Jews. But MTK were very keen to play down their Jewish roots, reflecting the aspirations of Hungarian Jewry at that time. They were known, the MTK stands for the Circle of Hungarian Fitness Activists, nothing about being Jews. They even temporarily changed their name to Hungaria in an attempt to portray themselves as Hungarian. But obviously that was an unsuccessful attempt. They were always known as a Jewish club.
Other clubs that Bela Guttmann played for had a much more forceful Jewish identity. The most obvious example would be Hakoah Vienna. And this, I believe, is the most captivating and heroic and tragic story of any football club in history. And I think it’s doubly tragic because so few people, even Jews know about this incredible story. Hakoah Vienna was not just a Jewish football team in the sense that it was founded by Jewish supporters. It was also a proudly Zionist team. It wore blue and white, it, where they wore blue and white kit. They had a big Star of David on their shirts. They used to line up before most games and sing the Hatikvah. By the way, Austria and Hungary were not backwaters in European football at that time, which they actually are now. In the interwar era, they were right at the forefront, largely because of their Jewish populations, right at the forefront of European football. And in the ‘20s and '30s, the Hungarian and Austrian national teams were possibly, along with Italy, the strongest in Europe. And Hakoah Vienna, in 1925, in the first fully professional league in mainland Europe, Hakoah Vienna won the Austrian league.
Hakoah were heroes throughout the Jewish world. And as a result of their popularity and to raise funds, they travelled throughout, throughout the world. They were so popular that at one point they arrived in Warsaw in 1924, and 10,000 people actually met them at the train station. On that tour, they provoked civil disturbances because they beat Poland’s finest team Polonia, one-nil. The fans couldn’t bear the fact that their heroes had lost to these Jewish upstarts. They came to America in 1926 on a tour, and they broke a record, a record for a soccer attendance at the Polo Grounds in New York, which stood for another 50 years. They came to London in 1923 and they beat West Ham United, one of the top teams in England, five-nil. But just as they were worshipped by their fans, they were also despised by the opposing fans. And most of the Hakoah’s fans were obviously either emigrated in fear, in the 1930s, or themselves murdered. And many of the perpetrators were standing on the opposing terraces.
In March, 1938, after the Anschluss, when the Nazis moved into Austria, the club was shut down. Their ground was taken over, and the results were annulled from history, from the history books. Great innovators of strategy and tactics, Jewish coaches, Jewish coaches were absolutely everywhere throughout Europe. The first time Real Madrid won the Spanish league, their coach was a Jew. The first time by Munich won the German league, their coach was a Jew. The first time Benfica won the Portuguese league, their coach was a Jew. And no, it wasn’t Bela Guttmann. Another Jew, Lippo Hertzka, had got there before him. The most successful coach of the great Italian league of the 1930s was a Jew. Arpad Weisz won the league three times at Inter Milan and Bologna before being murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. And that with the knowledge that his wife and two young children had been murdered there 15 months before. These Jewish figures, and many, many more, feature throughout my book. And as Wendy pointed out, I’m now researching another book about 11 Jewish footballers who played for their country, and were then murdered during the Holocaust.
The history of these Jewish footballers and Jewish coaches was fascinating but also extremely sad for me. Here I am a Jew with a passion for football since my very earliest years, with a passion for Jewish history since my teenage years, certainly, who knew virtually nothing about this history. And it became clear to me that while I was researching this book, that the Holocaust did not just account for the murder of six million Jews, but also destroyed our collective memory to the extent that we don’t even really know who we were. The devastation of Jewish memory, I think is one reason. The devastation of Jewish memory caused by the Holocaust is one reason why we were so ignorant about this illustrious history. But there are other reasons too, other subsidiary reasons. 90% of the world’s Jews now live in the United States and Israel. Soccer is a foreign sport in the United States, despite reasonable popularity in certain periods when it has become more popular. But it is not the most popular sport in the United States. It’s a long time since Hakoah Vienna came to New York to be met by so many thousands of Jewish supporters. And US Jews are more interested in the exploits of other US Jews in sports such as Sandy Kofax, Mark Spitz, Hank Greenberg.
The newly established State of Israel was perhaps too busy developing their own narrative identity and folklore to spend too much time focusing on the exploits of diaspora Jews. Here in the UK, very limited exploits of Jewish footballers in Britain, certainly in comparison to what went on before the Holocaust in Europe, has been used, I think, in a bid to prove how British we supposedly all are. Look at us, we play and watch football. We are just like you. In 2014, the Jewish Museum hosted an exhibition called Four Four Jew. And it promised to tell the untold story in quotes “about Jews in football.” And I went along to that exhibition with great enthusiasm, having just started my research on my book. And this exhibition made a big play of journeyman average. Well, certainly in comparison to the great European Jewish footballers, journeyman footballers of British Jewish descent. But there was no mention of Bela Guttmann. There was no mention of Hakoah Vienna and the other great Jewish clubs of Central and Eastern Europe. There was no mention of Arpad Weisz, of Lippo Hertzka, of Hugo Meisel, the pre-war Austrian coach who revolutionised world tactics and played a big role in founding the FIFA World Cup competition.
There was no mention of Imre Hirschl, the championship winning manager from Hungary, the championship winning manager in Argentina of River Plate and in Uruguay, Peñarol. There was no mention of Jozef Klotz, the man who scored the first ever goal for Poland in international football in 1922, who was murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. There was no mention of Julius Hirsch, the German international, who scored four goals on his second appearance for the German national team, and won the Iron Cross in the First World War fighting for Germany, and was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. The lack of interest among Jewish historians, and perhaps even snobbishness, is one other reason why these great Jews are so unknown, when they should all trip off the tongue of any Jewish football fan, or for that matter, any Jew with any good general knowledge of Jewish history. “Encyclopaedia Judaica,” which is a extremely comprehensive resource, was written in the early 1970s. And it includes 25,000 articles on a wide range of subjects and personalities. Bela Guttmann and Hakoah Vienna were given passing mentions in articles on sport.
But remarkably, neither was given their own article. An honour, which was nevertheless accorded to Bela’s namesakes Michael Guttmann, a Talmudic scholar from the Hungarian provinces, and Robert Guttmann, an artist from Prague. The Jewish intelligentsia have failed to unearth the story of what happened to these great Jewish players, these Jewish, great Jewish clubs. And it makes me think if so much was uncovered about football, what else remains unearthed? What remains buried along with the ashes and bones of European Jewry? Football may not be top of the list when it comes to remembering the great Jewish communities of Europe. But stories of the great passion, the fervour and the pandemonium sparked by Hakoah Vienna throughout the Jewish world, shows what a big part football played in the lives of many Jews. And if my book achieves anything, I want it to reduce the tragic ignorance about the huge influence of Jews on the world’s most popular sport. I hope that talk has aroused your curiosity. I just want to show you before I take any questions, if I can, a few photos. Okay, this is a picture of, the first picture of Bela Guttmann. He’s on the left there.
You’ll see the people who understand German will say, it says he’s there with his father, as I say, murdered in the Holocaust. And with his brother, it says, “Murdered, who died in a concentration camp in 1945.” This, as I’ve said, is not true. This is one of the many falsehoods about Bela Guttmann. And there’s Bela on the left. Look how proud his father Abraham is of his two sons. This is a picture of the great Hakoah Vienna side in their pomp. Bela Guttmann is second from the left tying his bootlace. Notice the big Star of David on their shirts. This is another picture of Hakoah Vienna. Notice the Jewish flag, the Zionist flag behind them. As I say, they used to line up before every game, sing the Hatikvah. There’s Bela Guttmann in front of the flag. This is a house in Budapest. There’s a story about this house. This was a house which was lived in by a man called Lipot Aschner, who was the chairman of Ujpest Football Club where Bela Guttmann was coached in 1939. Lipot Aschner was a Jew. And in 1939, he was under huge pressure as chairman of Ujpest to sack Bela Guttmann. And he had to, in fact, sack Bela despite the fact that Bela had won the Hungarian league that season. And against his will, he had to sack him.
In 1944, in March, 1944, Adolf Eichmann came into Budapest with the invading Nazi army. He was looking for a big house belonging to a rich, a Jewish businessman. He located this house, he moved in. And Lipot Aschner was taken to Mauthausen concentration camp. And it’s from this balcony, from this house that Adolf Eichmann planned meticulously the murder of Hungarian Jewry. This is the hero in many ways of my book. This is Pal Moldovan, the non-Jewish brother-in-law of Bela Guttmann, who hid Bela Guttmann above his hairdressing salon near Budapest in 1944. This is Bela with his wife Mariann. This is Bela as coach with two great players, particularly the one on the right, Ferenc Puskas, the Hungarian player, one of the greatest footballers in world football history. This is Bela with another great, another probably of the top 10 greatest Jewish footballers of all time.
As I said, Bela actually discovered this man, Eusebio. This is the man that prayed on Bela Guttmann’s grave to ask him to lift the curse. This is Bela after another one of his triumphs, I think in Porto, in Portugal. This is Bela Guttmann giving instruction to his Austrian, the players in the Austrian national team. As I say, he resigned from that role in 1964 because he couldn’t bear the constant anti-Semitism around. And this is Bela in his finest hour, in the dressing room in 1962 with two of his players, Mario Coluna and Eusebio having won the European Cup for the second time in succession. That is the end of my talk. I’d be happy to take any questions anybody in the audience has. Thank you very much for your time.
Q&A and Comments
[Wendy] Thank you so much, David. We do have a couple of questions. I’ll start here. “Jews love to take pride in our successes from the worldwide community. Why do you think so many of these stories were hidden?”
I think they were hidden, I think because most people, who regarded these great Jewish players as their heroes, were murdered in the Holocaust. That is the main reason. I’m researching at the moment, these 11 Jewish footballers who were murdered in the Holocaust and played for their country and were great heroes. But they were mostly heroes or particularly heroes of the Jews. And those Jews were themselves murdered. But I think there are other reasons too. As I’ve alluded to, 90% of the world’s Jews now live in United States and Israel, have less interest, certainly in United States, in soccer. And I think the Jewish intelligentsia has largely ignored this story.
[Wendy] Thank you. Another question. “Did you speak to the Jewish Museum about the omission of all the outstanding people you mentioned? And if so, what was their response?”
I did not. They approached me. I spoke to them informally, right at the early stages of my research. I did mention about the Central European Jews, which I was beginning to discover, but there was nothing in the talk. There’s nothing in the exhibition about, at all. Only about British Jews.
[Wendy] Thank you. Another comment here, someone says that “It may be useful to mention that over the last four years, the Premier League have been running a programme through the Holocaust Educational Trust to inform the youth teams about the Holocaust. They have participated in amazing research and related learning.”
Fantastic. I’m aware of that. And it that’s good to hear.
[Wendy] Someone’s asking if you’re aware of the movie “Watermarks,” which is a history of Hakoah Vienna’s swimmers and athletes.
I am aware of it, I am aware of it. I’ve seen excerpts, but I haven’t seen the whole film. That’s right. I love a film to be made about the footballers too.
[Wendy] Thanks. Someone is asking, “Your focus is on football. There must be similar stories though regarding other sporting codes, right?”
Oh. There’s enough to fill several shelves in a library. There are some absolutely amazing, amazing story. The story of Salamo Arouch, the Greek Jewish boxer who fought for his life, the boxing fights in Auschwitz, and won lots of fights on pain of death, and ended up in Tel Aviv after the war. The story of, I think his name was Alfred Nakache, who was a French Jewish swimmer, who, his wife and daughter, I think, believe, were killed in the Holocaust. He himself was in Auschwitz. He came out of Auschwitz having obviously lost huge amounts of weight. And he won a gold medal in the Olympics within a year or two, I mean, or broke some world record. I mean, there are some absolutely amazing stories, you know, fencing Jews were particularly good at before the war, and many stories of fencing. So many stories, absolutely.
[Wendy] Incredible. Thank you. And we have one last question. “Will you do a book about the Jews who played rugby for the Springboks?”
You know what? Rugby is not, I’m not an expert in rugby. But yeah, I mean, I know there have been a few. And there’ve been few Jewish cricketers as well, I think. Certainly there was a Jewish, a Jewish captain of South African cricket team, Ali Bacher. And there’ve been other Jews as well. So yeah, Jews are still around in sports. And there are Jews still around in soccer too. There’s Jewish coaches, there’s Jose Pekerman, who was a coach of the Argentinian national team. I think, I believe he’s now coached the Venezuelan national team. And there’s others as well. But nothing compared to the story before the Holocaust, nothing.
So David, I’m going to just jump in and say thank you really very much for that outstanding presentation. So interesting and thought-provoking actually. And I just want to say to all our participants that the book is available on Amazon. So please, please get the book and read it. And I’d also like to add that Ali Bacher actually was the Springbok cricket captain, is my aunt’s brother.
Oh.
Yeah, so I grew up every Sunday with my dad, and Ali, and my uncle, and my cousins. Actually my cousin played cricket for Western Province as well, my first cousin William. So, you know, I grew up with cricket. And Ali is going to give us a presentation. He’s going to talk about his own Latin career. And he’s going to talk also about his life with Nelson Mandela. So, okay, so I always love sports, and I love what sports does to everybody. It unites communities, it bring people together and really promotes a healthy nationalism. So on that note, thank you very, very much, David, for joining us today, and I look forward to hearing about your next book.
Thank you, Wendy.
And thanks to everybody for joining us. And Lauren, a huge thank you. Thanks. Thanks, everyone, Night night.