When Jewish players dominated European football

The first ever hat-trick from a Polish footballer in an international game was scored by Zygmunt Steuermann. Newspapers rhapsodised about the skills of József Braun, who played as a forward for Hungary, then a footballing powerhouse. Max Scheuer shone in Vienna’s HaKoah team, a defender referred to as “an insurmountable wall”. After a successful professional career, Arpad Weisz’s skill as a manager was such that he would become known as Il Mago – The magician – in Italy, the youngest coach to ever win Serie A.

These Jewish men, alongside seven others brimming with footballing talent, who made their mark on pitches and in newspaper reports across the continent, were all murdered in the Holocaust. Some were killed by Nazis in the death camps; others by many willing local accomplices across Europe. Most are barely remembered.
Now, however, the author David Bolchover has written a book which chronicles the stories of eleven – a football team’s worth – of these remarkably talented men.

Many of us, at one point or another, have laughed self-deprecatingly at the supposed lack of Jewish sporting talent. I have done it, Bolchover has done it, and I suspect that many people reading this article will have done as well.

“Hopefully, my book will play a role in stopping people laughing about it, because when people laugh about it, they’re laughing about the destruction of European Jews”, Bolchover says, frankly.

“Effectively, they don’t know what they’re laughing at. They should be crying.
“This is something that isn’t maybe understood enough, the Holocaust didn’t just account for 6 million Jews, it also shattered Jewish collective memory. There’s so much we don’t know about the Holocaust, but there’s also so much we don’t know about the world before that, and it’s up to us to restore that memory.”

Digging Deep, as the book is called, is Bolchover’s impressive contribution towards that restoration. But despite the fact that the book is very much about the past – 11 men, and the tidal wave of horror surging in their direction, ultimately sweeping them and millions of others away – it is also about the present.

József Braun in particular was a generational talent, a supernova in a nation filled with footballing stars, described by Bolchover, without a trace of hyperbole, as “the greatest Jewish footballer of all time.” And as he tells me, “the last image we have of Braun, this unbelievable footballer, is of the Hungarian guards crouching over his lifeless body in the snow, wrenching out his gold teeth.

“Those guards, only a few years previously, were probably spending their evenings in the pub talking about how great Braun was; they changed their tune. These stories about how quick we can sink make you question the community around us, how when they come up with these words of support, really, do we trust them, after what has happened to us throughout history?”

Bolchover’s previous work, The Greatest Comeback, was on one particular footballing icon, Béla Guttmann, who survived Nazi torture in a slave labour camp during the Holocaust and went on to achieve glory with Benfica, winning back-to-back European cups with the Portuguese club. But Digging Deep covers eleven footballers, from a number of different nations, with a wide variety of different languages and archival evidence to navigate. The book took him six years to complete, and it’s clear just how deeply writing it has affected him – at a number of points during our talk, he describes the subjects of his book not simply as “the players”, but as “my players”.

The research, he says, “was a long effort, and there were various strands to it.”

There was the career research, which involved significant archival work – “match reports, interviews with the players, descriptions of their profiles”. And then there was the research into how exactly they died, which he describes as “divided basically into two. You’ve got Western Europe, where things were very documented, ‘they were on transport number 36 and it left at 8:50am and it went from Paris, and it went, it stopped at these stops, and it went to Auschwitz’, and then you can work out whether they gassed on arrival or whether they went to a labour camp.

“But in Eastern Europe, the Holocaust by Bullets, when the Einsatzgruppen just went in and shot people, it’s impossible. And finding out what happened to them prior was also very difficult. Were they in a labour camp? How did they cope? I just tried to find any information I could.”

Another key element of the book is the idea the Europe has barely scratched the surface in terms of understanding what it did to the Jews. Even before the War, as the book details, the Football Associations of various Mitteleuropa countries were discriminating in a significant way against Jews – something that few, if any, FAs have ever apologised for.

“Somebody told me the other night that FIFA have never had anything on their website about the Holocaust or have marked Holocaust Memorial Day in any way”, Bolchover says.

“Europe’s in denial; they cover up their denial with a very superficial form of memorialisation. The denial takes many forms – one of the main ones is to give the impression that the Holocaust was perpetrated by this cadre of Nazis who were, who took over by force Europe, and neglecting to mention the complicity of many Europeans.

“And I think we can see the denial now, and their lack of understanding of what they did to us, in the [European] onslaught against Israel, which is the country where the vast majority of survivors went to. The Holocaust accelerated the creation of the State of Israel, and yet they’re so obsessed with hating Israel. In a football sense, obviously we see this growing campaign to ban the natural successors of these Zionist football teams such as Hakoah and Hasmonea that they closed down 80 years ago,  – the clubs and national team of the State of Israel. As many people have said, the State of Israel is now the world’s Jew.”

Given the work and the passion which has gone into creating the book, I wonder exactly what he is hoping readers will get from it.

“First and foremost, I want to elevate the names of these 11 players who have been largely forgotten by history”, he says.

“And I want a non-Jewish audience, people who don’t know much about Jewish history or the Holocaust, I want them to be drawn into the stories about these players, but also to understand more about the history and the parallels with today.
But in a broader sense, it’s to restore the memory of what Jews contributed to football. How pivotal we are. My book is a mainstream book. The subject should be a mainstream subject.”

Bolchover says that apart from being interested in people’s reaction to the book, he also wants to know who their favourite player was.

“I loved all my players, really”, he tells me.

“As I said at the end of the book, I miss them all. I felt so attached to them; finding out what happened to them in the end devastated me, but I had a couple of real favourite players in there. I’ll be interested to find out from readers who they love the most.”

Digging Deep (Biteback Publishing) is available for purchase online and in all good bookshops.