Forget Poseurs Trump, Musk, Et Al And Meet Some Real Heroes
I am disgusted, sick and tired of these spoiled, entitled, childish, jackanape, fascist-loving billionaires living in their protected, gilded mansions with their prostrating minions while they play with the lives of millions of people like they are enjoying a game of Mr. Potato Head in their own personal sandbox.
It is time for a story about men who literally had to fight for their lives.
They were skilled boxers who were prisoners in Nazi death camps. Each was forced to entertain their Nazi guards by bare-knuckled fighting with other concentration camp prisoners in a smoke-filled warehouse with the guards drinking and placing bets. It was like human cockfights.
The stakes were high; the winners lived to fight again, the losers were either shot to death in the ring or sent to the gas chamber. Boxers faced an unfathomable choice of defeating other Jewish concentration camp captives and knowing they had sealed their fates or of losing and saving a prisoner challenger.
Three of these men who would be racked with guilt for the rest of their lives, were Harry Haft, Jacques “Jacko” Razon, Salamo Arouch and Young Perez.
Harry Haft
Haft, who died in 2007, won enough boxing matches to survive the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the war, he briefly fought professionally in post-war Germany, and later boxed as a light heavyweight in the United States from 1948–1949.
Haft, who was Jewish, was born in Bełchatów, Poland on July 28,1925. He had five brothers and three sisters and was just 3 when his father died of typhoid. By the late 1930s, storm clouds were gathering over Poland and Haft’s older brothers were conscripted in the Polish army. Haft was left alone with his mother, without enough money for bread, surviving off of potatoes and corn.
In 1936, the 14-year-old Haft was an eyewitness to the invasion and German occupation of Poland. Early in the Polish occupation, the Germans began registering the Jews, including Haft’s brothers and ordered the Jews to gather at a local hall. Haft learned of the Nazi plan and helped his brothers escape but he was captured. Haft was tortured but refused to give up their location to the Germans.
Haft was transported to the Posen labor camp. There was no food or water for days and many of the imprisoned Jews died. Haft survived and arrived at a labor camp along with 600 other Jews from his hometown.
Haft was soon transferred with other prisoners to a coal mine that was used as a labor camp. Haft made use of his smuggling skills. And in exchange for better treatment, Haft would sneak out of the camp and steal munitions from nearby trains and cars.
One morning he returned to the camp to find that his cousin had been hanged. He also learned that one of his sisters had a baby in the camp but a German officer ripped the two-hour-old from her mother’s arms and threw infant and mother onto a truck to be killed.
Eventually, Haft ended up the Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camp. He was placed in the Sonderkommando unit, where Jews were forced to dispose of the lifeless bodies of gas chamber victims. At one point, Haft befriended an unnamed Nazi and worked out a deal with him. If Haft was allowed to live he would turn over to the Nazi the possessions of the murdered Jews.
Haft was sent to another nearby labor camp to work in the coal mines. It was there that Haft began to box for his life for the entertainment of the Germans. Haft’s captors began calling him the “Jew Animal.”
Haft was a powerful man who stood at five-feet-nine and between 168 and 180 pounds. Because of his physical stature, by 1943 an SS overseer trained him to be a boxer, and had him compete at fights to the death in front of the military personnel.
He fought 76 bouts at the Jaworzno camp, a coal mine north of Auschwitz. Historians believe that as many as 70 men ended up in the gas chamber after losing matches to Haft.
When the camp in Jaworzno was dissolved because of the advancing Soviet Red Army, Haft was one of thousands of surviving inmates who the Nazis sent West on death marches to Germany.
Haft managed to escape in April 1945. Haft took refuge in an abandoned farmhouse, outside of Regensburg. He saw he a group of men approaching and was prepared for another gunfight when he saw one of the men carrying an American flag. The war was over and Haft was free.
Haft lived in a camp for displaced victims from 1945 to 1947. Still just 23 years old, Haft boarded a US Army troopship, SS Marine Marlin, to the U.S. and the start of a new life.
Haft was just 22 when he emigrated to the U.S. in 1948, with the help of an uncle in New Jersey. Once in the U.S., he made his living as a prizefighter, competing as a light heavyweight in 1948 to 1949.
Haft’s final fight was against Marciano on July 18, 1949 in Rhode Island Auditorium. Haft wore purple Everlast trunks with a Star of David stitched on. He made a good showing but was knocked out by Marciano in the third round. In his biography, Haft claimed that he was threatened by the Mafia and forced to throw the fight against Marciano but there is no evidence and his son later doubted his father’s claims.
After his loss to Marciano, Haft retired and married Miriam Wofsoniker in November 1949.They opened a fruit and vegetable store in Brooklyn. His eldest son, Alan Scott, was born in 1950, followed by a daughter and another son.
In April 2007, Haft was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. He died of cancer, in November of the same year, in Pembroke Pines, Fla., at the age of 82.
A film about Haft, “The Survivor,” was directed by Academy Award-winner Barry Levinson and starred Ben Foster as Haft. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021 and was released on HBO on April 27, 2022, Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day.
Salamo Arouch
Salamo Arouch was a Greek-Israeli boxer and Holocaust survivor. Arouch was the Middleweight Champion of Greece in 1938 and the All-Balkans Middleweight Champion in 1939, when his career was cut short with the outbreak of World War II.
During the Axis occupation of Greece, Arouch and his family were deported to German-occupied Poland, where he was interned at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Known as “the Ballet Dancer” because of his fancy footwork, the 5-foot-6, 135-pound boxer survived more than 200 boxing matches to entertain his Nazi captors. His story was the subject of the 1989 film “Triumph of the Spirit,” in which he was portrayed by the actor, Willem Dafoe.
Arouch had two brothers and three sisters. His father was a stevedore who taught the young Arouch how to box. Arouch said he was 14 when he fought and won his first amateur boxing match in 1937 at Maccabi Thessaloniki, a Jewish youth center and gymnasium. After compiling an undefeated record of 24 wins, with all knockouts, Arouch was drafted into the Greek Army. He continued boxing as a member of the Greek Army’s boxing team, winning three fights by knockout.
In May 1943, the Germans marched into Arouch’s hometown, the ancient city of Thessalonica. It was the first major city in Greece to fall to the occupying forces. Before the deportations, the Jewish community in the city had flourished to the point where it had earned the nickname “The Jerusalem of the Balkans.”
Before World War II Thessaloniki had a population of more than 50,000 Jews and was the only city in Europe where the Jews were a majority of the total population. The Jewish community was virtually wiped out when 46,000 were killed at Nazi death camps.
Among those who were captured, on May 15, 1943, after days crammed in a box car, were Arouch, his parents, three younger sisters and his brother. They all arrived at Auschwitz.
The commander at Auschwitz sought boxers among the newly interned and set Arouch to two to three matches a week matches against other prisoners. Arouch lived with other fighters who also were forced to participate in the matches and were paid in extra food or lighter work. Salamo avoided the gas chamber as he was undefeated in 208 matches. Fights lasted until one fighter went down or the Nazis got tired of watching. Arouch fought two or three times a week in three-round bouts for the amusement of the Nazi captors. As a winner, Arouch was spared slave labor and worked as a clerk.
Arouch’s father, a laborer, grew weak and was sent to the gas chamber. His brother refused to pull gold teeth from the dead and was shot to death. In 1945, Arouch was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where he worked performing slave labor until the allies liberated the camp.
Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, and Arouch began searching for relatives in other liberated camps. While searching the Bergen-Belsen camp, he met Marta Yechiel, a 17-year-old from his hometown. They relocated to Palestine, married and eventually had four children and 12 grandchildren.
Arouch fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He later ran a shipping and moving company in Tel Aviv. After the war Arouch kept boxing until 1955 when he suffered his first defeat in a knockout in four rounds by Italy’s Amleto Falcinelli in Tel Aviv.
Arouch died in Israel on April 26, 2009. He was 86.
Young Perez
Among the boxers at Auschwitz was Messaoud Hai Victor Perez, a Jewish boxer from Tunisia who became the World Flyweight Champion in 1931 and 1932, fighting under his ring name Young Perez.
On September 21, 1943, after being denounced by an acquaintance, Perez was arrested in Paris by the Milice Francaise, a French collaborationist paramilitary force of the Vichy Regime. He was detained in the Drancy internment camp before being transported to the German extermination camp of Auschwitz where he was assigned to the Monowitz subcamp to serve as a slave laborer for the I.G. Farben plant.
During his transport to Auschwitz on October 7, 1943, Perez became part of “Transport 60” a group of 1,000 prisoners shipped from Drancy, in France. During his internment, he was forced to participate in boxing matches for the amusement of the German guards and officers. By 1945, Perez was one of just 31 survivors of the original 1,000.
To escape from the Russians rapidly advancing on German held territory, the Nazis abandoned Auschwitz in January 1945. On January 18, 1945, Perez became one of the prisoners on the 37 mile death march from Monowitz in Poland, to the Gleiwitz concentration camp near the Czech border.
Perez was reported to have been murdered three days later on January 21. An eye witness said he was shot to death by a guard while attempting to distribute bread he had found in Gleiwitz’s kitchen to other starving prisoners.
Perez was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1986.
Jacko Razon
Razon was from Thessaloniki, the same hometown as Arouch. Razon had to terminate his studies when the Germans occupied Salonika in 1941. He then learned boxing in Maccabi and in 1939 was the middleweight boxing champion of Greece. He was also goalkeeper for the Salonikan soccer team Olympiakos in the Greek National Football League.
In 1943, he was deported by the Germans to Auschwitz. After two months, he was transferred to the Buna labor camp where he organized the boxing at the camp. He had 12 pairs of boxers, Jews and non-Jews, professionals and amateurs.
During the day Razon worked in the kitchen and after working hours he trained the boxers. He boxed weekly, often against heavyweights, winning most of his matches. Because of his kitchen connections, he was able to help many prisoners and hundreds owed their lives to him.
After a short stay in the Gleiwitz concentration camp, where Jung Perez died, Razon was moved to the Mittelbau-Dora camp in Thuringia, Germany. He also boxed there but received little extra food for his talent and managed to feed only a few individuals at most. Razon made friends with a Jewish physician from Thessaloniki, Dr. Leon Kuenka, who ran a camp clinic. Kuenka had Razon send to the clinic any Jew who could not work. These Jews recovered with help from the doctor, before returning to work.
Razon saved the lives of many inmates by holding staged box fights with him. One inmate was Noah Klieger who was later a noted Israeli journalist, sports administrator and member of the International Basketball Federation FIBA Hall of Fame.
Transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp, Razon was assigned to kitchen duty and helped smuggle food to Greek Jews, when the camp was full of living skeletons and food was scarce. He was liberated by the British in May 1945.
After returning to Greece, Razon was a leader of Holocaust survivors who planned to immigrate to Palestine “illegally.” They sailed on the ship Henrietta Szold, named after one of the founders of Hadassah. It was carrying more than 500 “illegal” Jewish immigrants when it sailed from Greece and arrived in Haifa on August 14, 1946. In Haifa, the Henrietta Szold was met by British warships. Razon led a revolt against the British navy, which was eventually overcome, and he and the other passengers were deported to Cyprus where they were interned for several months.
Eventually Razon arrived in Palestine and participated in Israel’s War of Independence, He was one of the founders of the Organization of Greek Concentration Camp Survivors in Israel.