As a child there was nothing Ben Helfgott couldn’t do. He was top of his class — outshining his schoolmates in every subject. He spoke three languages before he was eight.
You never knew when they might be needed. Even then he was politically savvy, reading newspapers and watching films way beyond his years.
Most of all he loved sport. He was blond and small, an agile livewire who won every game. He was also protective and thoughtful.
Ben was born into a comfortable Polish Jewish family, the son of Sarah and Moshe, who owned a flour mill. He had two sisters, Mala and Lusia. They lived in Piotrkow, a small town with a sizeable Jewish population, close to their extended family of 23 cousins.
But in 1939 bad things were beginning to happen in Piotrkow. The intuitive ten-year-old sensed the Nazis, smelled them in the air even before they moved in with their stentorian shouts, their bombs, their guns, their killing machines. The reign of terror had begun. He and his mother and sisters were visiting his grandparents when they heard the bombing.
Returning home via the village of Sulejow, Ben saw wooden houses with thatched roofs set alight. People were running, screaming, some on fire. Low-flying planes starting shooting. The cries for help, the wounded lying on the ground, corpses, body parts everywhere. Things no child should see, let alone live through. And Ben would remember them in every detail for the rest of his 93 years, their terrible screams: “Help us! Help us!”
In March 1942 more than 24,000 Jews from Piotrkow were shunted into a ghetto, forced to surrender their valuables and businesses.
Safety was assured for anyone helping the Germans in the war effort, and the 12-year-old joined his father in a local glass factory. But in October came the deportations; 22,000 people were sent from the ghetto to the gas chambers at Treblinka.
In December Sara and eight-year-old Lusia were shot in a nearby forest, after being rounded up with others in a synagogue.
In November 1944, Moshe and Ben were deported to Buchenwald and Mala to Ravensbrück. Moshe was shot trying to escape a death march to Theresienstadt — where Ben, now completely alone cried for days for his lost family.
Liberated by Czech partisans in May 1945, he became one of the 735 young survivors known as “The Boys” (including 40 girls) who were brought to Windermere by the Central British Fund. Good news came; he was reunited with Mala in 1947.
The pacific lakeside beauty of Windermere, immortalised by Wordsworth and Coleridge, helped him regain something of his shattered childhood. He described the place as being “like heaven”. He could study and engage in his favourite sports.
In years to come Ben returned several times to Piotrkow. It was a place of pilgrimage that he found little had changed, at least physically. It was as though the voices of his murdered family and childhood playmates were erased, leaving a blank screen. But inside him they would continue to hum.
They would forever link him to the fragile fraternity of Holocaust survivors in their fight against race hate. But joy would fill his life too. He became a leading fashion manufacturer and Olympic weightlifter.
He married Arza, a pharmacist from former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in 1966 and they had three sons, Maurice, Michael and Nathan.
Eleven years after being liberated from Nazi concentration camps, Ben captained the British weightlifting team at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and won bronze at the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff in 1958.
He represented Britain in the 1960 Rome Olympics. “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 won gold at the World Maccabiah Games representing Britain in Israel in 1950, 1953 and 1957.
And yet, even in athletic triumph, the past came back to haunt him in a most hideous way. He was officiating at the 1972 Munich Olympics when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches — including the entire weightlifting team — fell victim to Black September terrorists who held them captive, in a failed rescue attempt by German police. Ben was probably the last person to see them alive.
His determination to eradicate antisemitism led to his true crusade, in Holocaust education. It was with “The Boys” that he became founder-chair of the ‘45 Aid Society in 1963 until 2016, when he became president.
The need to stay close to his young fellow victims, some of whom had scattered, was answered in the establishment of the Primrose Club in London’s Belsize Park.
Ben also chaired the Board of Deputies’ Yad Vashem Committee from 1985 to 2005, and was a patron of the Holocaust Education Trust. In 1995 he was elected to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
Appointed MBE in 2000 and knighted in 2018, he alluded to his memories on Desert Island Discs in 2007, when he said: “We can’t bring them back. Their memory has to stay alive, not just for them but for posterity.”
He was on the executive of the Wiener Library, chair of the Polin Institute for Polish Jewish Studies. In his eighties he became vice-chair of the Claims Conference that has recovered billions of dollars for Holocaust victims.
Yet endowed with a rare largesse of spirit, he showed no hatred or desire for vengeance against those he once blamed for having “made animals of us”. He favoured reconciliation with Germany and Poland and received awards from both countries.
He won Poland’s Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit for Holocaust education work and for Polish-Jewish relations. To so many this modest man, small in stature, was “a giant among men” as Karen Pollock of the Holocaust Education Trust, described him.
“Despite all he endured, Ben taught us all about resilience, tolerance and the crucial importance of educating future generations,” she said.
Angela Cohen, chair of the ‘45 Aid Society, said: “My relationship with Ben started when I worked with him on the ‘45 Aid Society Journal around 17 or 18 years ago.
He came from the same town in Poland as my father, Moishe Malenicky and he told me my father’s story, as my father felt unable to talk about his experiences.
Over the years, Ben and I became close and it was because of his encouragement and love that I subsequently took over as chair of the ‘45 Aid Society.
I learned over the years that Ben was incredibly intuitive and instantly connected with all types of people, regardless of whether they were royalty, politicians or just people on the street — he saw everyone as equal. Ben was my mentor and I hope I can live up to his belief in me.”
Ben is survived by his wife Arza, their sons Maurice, Michael and Nathan and his sister Mala.
Sir Ben Helfgott: born November 22, 1929. Died June 16, 2023
