Sir Ben Helfgott, one of two Holocaust survivors who competed in the Olympics, died at the age of 93 on Friday.
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Sir Helfgott served as the captain of the British weightlifting team at the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956 and Rome in 1960, competing in the lightweight category and finishing in 13th and 18th place, respectively.
During the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff (1958), the survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp won a bronze medal, as well as three gold medals in the Maccabiah Games in Israel.
Ben Helfgott was born on November 22, 1929, in the Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski where his father, Moshe, ran the local flour mill. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Helfgott and his family were deported to the city’s newly established ghetto.
The struggle to survive was nearly impossible. At the age of 12, he managed to find work with his father and sister outside the ghetto, which allowed him to move relatively freely, while almost 24,000 Jews in the ghetto were sent to their extermination in Treblinka.
A few years ago, he revealed that he still hadn't overcome his fear of dogs, as a high-ranking Nazi officer in the ghetto would train his giant dog to viciously attack the genitals of men and boys.
From the concentration camp to Lake Windermere
Helfgott, his father, and his sister managed to survive almost the entire war in the ghetto until August 1944, when the men were transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp and the sister to Ravensbrück. They were the last remaining members of the family that had been brutally torn apart.
Their mother Sarah and another sister, Lucja, had hidden in the ghetto to avoid deportation but were eventually forced out after the Germans promised that anyone leaving their hiding place would be spared. They were among the 520 Jews who responded to the call. Once exposed, they were immediately taken to the nearby forest and shot to death.
Helfgott was a healthy young boy with a penchant for sports, which helped him survive the dire conditions, but he couldn't save his father. The son was transferred between various camps until he was liberated by Russian soldiers, three weeks after arriving at Theresienstadt. However, Moshe was captured and killed while attempting to escape a death march from Buchenwald.
The decision of the British government to grant entry permits to hundreds of surviving boys and girls from the concentration camps became a turning point in their lives and in Helfgott’s life in particular. Their incredible story recently resurfaced in the film The Windermere Children, released in 2020, which depicts their reception in the summer of 1945 in a village near Lake Windermere in northwest England.
The young survivor quickly became a star in British sports. He became addicted to weightlifting, and from the slender body of the boy who emerged from Buchenwald, a muscular athlete was formed, crowned as a British champion.
Helfgott was one of two Jewish athletes who participated in the Olympics after surviving the Holocaust, along with Alfred Nakache, the French swimming champion and water polo player. Nakache, who passed away in 1983, competed in swimming at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the 1948 London Olympics.
Outside the world of sports, Sir Helfgott married Arza, with whom he had three sons and nine grandchildren. The legendary athlete was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in a ceremony honoring her birthday in 2018.
He dedicated a significant part of his life to promoting Holocaust education and involvement, serving as the president of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and as a member of the Holocaust Commission established by former Prime Minister David Cameron.