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Olympics and the Holocaust: Remembering the Sportspeople Lost to the "Final Solution"
(GiveMeSport) Kobe Tong - It had barely been a decade since Judikje "Jud" Simons collected her Olympic gold medal with the Dutch gymnastics team in Amsterdam in 1928, that was now shackled amidst Adolf Hitler's cross-continent destruction. At 38, she was deported to Sobibor extermination camp with her family, where in 1943 she was gassed along with her husband, 5-year old daughter, and 3-year-old son. There were many Olympians among those who perished in the Holocaust, as Agnes Grunwald-Spier's wonderful Who Betrayed the Jews? reveals. Attila Petschauer, of Jewish heritage, was crowned an Olympic fencing champion at Los Angeles in 1932. He was murdered by guards at the Hungarian-controlled Davidovka concentration camp on January 20, 1943. Tennis champion Lenke Ziszovits-Popper won the Romanian National Ladies Championship in 1930 and 1938. She and her daughter were moved into the Oradea ghetto, before being transported to Auschwitz by cattle truck from the very Rhedey Park in which she had played tennis as a youngster.