Ben Helfgott Obituary

by David Wallechinsky

On 16 June 2023, Ben Helfgott, a two-time Olympic weightlifter. died at the age of 93. Jewish, he was born in Poland 22 November 1929. Between 1942, when Ben was 12 years old, and 1945, Germans and Poles killed 24 of 28 members of his extended family, including both his parents and one of his two sisters. On 20 December, 1942, his mother, Sarah, and his 9-year-old sister, Lusia. were pulled out of a synagogue, marched into a forest and shot to death. In May 1945, his father, Moshe, was shot to death by Germans.

Ben survived the Holocaust, but only barely. He was sent to three concentration camps. He worked in Nazi labor camps. Small but strong, he was working in a glass factory. One day a German soldier came in and told Ben’s Polish overseer that there was room for one more Jew to be squashed into a train that was headed to the gas chambers, and he pointed at Ben. The overseer, who had treated Ben somewhat harshly until then, stepped in and told the German that Ben was not a Jew, and they left him alone.

When World War II ended, Ben Helfgott was 15 years old. He weighed 36 kilograms. On May 9, 1945, he walked out of Theresienstadt concentration camp. He and a younger cousin tried to return to Poland by train. At the border, they were seized by Polish police who took their food and their possessions and told them that the Germans should have killed all the Jews. They wanted to “finish the job.” “When my cousin, who was three years younger, and I, coming from Theresienstadt, had to change trains in Częstochowa, two policemen asked us who we were and what we were doing here. After we answered, they shouted at us: ‘Shut your f—— mouth you f—— Jew!’ I thought I wasn’t hearing right. The Nazi cancer had been removed, but its tentacles were still widespread and deeply rooted. We were suddenly terrified again.

“The policemen drove us to an area with dilapidated buildings. They pointed their guns at us and ordered us to go to the nearest wall.” Ben, who spoke perfect Polish, talked them out of it. “Desperately I talked to them, begging them not to kill us. Finally, one of them took pity and said, ‘Get lost and consider yourselves lucky. You are the first ones we let live.’”

Leonard Montefiore, a British Jewish philanthropist, persuaded the British government to allow 1,000 Jewish orphans to be transported from liberated concentration camps to group homes in England once the war ended. Surviving children were so few that only 732 could be found. Ben arrived in England in August 1945. He flourished on every level—intellectual, spiritual and physical—and he became a champion weightlifter. “I resolved to be British champion,” he said. He became the British national champion in the lightweight division in 1954.

Helfgott represented Great Britain at two Olympics, the 1956 Melbourne Games and in Rome in 1960. “Whenever I pulled on that GB vest I wanted to do well,” he recalled. “I so wanted to win a medal to say thank you to the country that saved me.” He earned the bronze medal at the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff in 1958.

The Opening Ceremony of the 1956 Olympics took place on his 27th birthday. “While one hundred thousand people cheered,” he recounted, “I marched into the stadium with tears in my eyes. I thought of my parents, how proud they would have been if they could have seen that.”

Helfgott was a strong supporter of the Olympic Movement. He explained, “When athletes come together, they don’t think like their leaders.”

Ten years after World War II, Ben was invited to compete in Poland. He accepted, and did so again in 1959. Later he took part in reconciliation events in Poland. Some Jews criticized him for going back to the country where his family had been murdered. But Ben reminded them that, although some Poles had committed evil acts, other Poles had helped the Jews, and one had even saved his life.

The last question I asked Ben Helfgott when I interviewed him for the International Olympic Committee in 2019 was, “Setting aside sport, are there any lessons in life you would like to pass on to younger generations?” His answer was, “Never judge a person by his religion. Never judge a person by his nationality. Never judge a person by his race. Never judge a person by his ethnicity. Judge each person as an individual.”