Ben Helfgott, Holocaust survivor turned weightlifter, dies at 93

Ben Helfgott, a Polish Jew who, after being freed from Nazi captivity in 1945 and weighing an 80-pound skeleton, became an Olympic weightlifter for Britain, his adopted country, and who later devoted himself to a public life of Holocaust education and memorial, died June 16 at his home in London. He turned 93.

His son Maurice confirmed the death.

Mr. Helfgott had been orphaned by the war. His mother and one of his sisters were shot dead in a forest in 1942. His father was killed trying to escape a death march shortly before he was supposed to be freed.

At the age of 15, having survived three Nazi camps, Mr. Helfgott was one of 301 surviving children, most of them boys, who had been liberated from concentration camps and given a new life. They were flown by the Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Aid) in August 1945 to the mountainous Lake District in the North West of England. (About 400 additional children were brought to Britain until 1948.)

The children went to school. They swam and walked. They watched movies. The members of the group, known simply as “the boys,” formed a bond formed through the mutual experiences of lives punctuated by ghettos, lice-infested barracks, cattle truck rides to concentration camps, starvation, and forced labor.

They stayed close and helped each other for decades. Some are still alive.

“Anyone who observed us during the day would never have believed what we went through,” said Mr. Helfgott when interviewed in 2007 for “Desert Island Disks,” a BBC radio program asking guests what recordings they would like to have with them if they were shipwrecked. “But there was another story when we went to sleep. Then something happened, because most of us were still living with the trauma. And I lived with a terrible trauma because I kept thinking about my father.”

In 1948, after moving to London, the 5-foot-5 Mr. Helfgott weightlifters training in a park. He was intrigued — and, demonstrating an obvious aptitude for the sport, stunned one of them by lifting a 140-pound barbell overhead. He soon began training three nights a week after school.

It was the start of a great amateur career. He won four British weightlifting titles and three lightweight gold medals at the Maccabiah Games in Israel. He competed in the Olympic Games twice.

At the 1956 Summer Games in Melbourne, Australia, where the opening ceremony fell on his 27th birthday, he finished 13th in his weight class. Four years later, in Rome, he finished 18th. He was the captain of the British weightlifting team at both Olympics.

“I felt like I was representing all the talent that couldn’t reach their potential because of the Nazi horror,” he told The Times of London in 2021.

Mr. Helfgott was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1995.

Ber Helfgott, known as Ben, was born on November 22, 1929 in Pabianice, in central Poland, near Lodz, and grew up in Piotrkow. He was one of three children born to Moshe Helfgott, who owned a grist mill, and Sara (Klein) Helfgott, a housewife.

When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, bombers bombed Piotrkow, causing the Helfgotts to flee to Sulejow, nine miles away. There, a deluge of German incendiary bombs fell on the village. Houses – and people – burned down.

“They ran blindly, as did cats, dogs, horses and cows, many on fire,” Mr. Helfgott in 2012 to The Times of London. “They ran, mad, senseless, tormenting.”

Shortly after the Helfgotts returned to Piotrkow, they were forced into a Jewish ghetto. Ben worked in glass and woodworking factories. His father smuggled flour into the ghetto and sometimes disappeared for a day or two. Ben and his mother urged him to stop the risky activity, which could have killed him.

But, as Mr. Helfgott said on “Desert Island Discs,” his father told them, “I’d like to see how long you keep talking like that when all you have to do is live on potatoes and salt.”

At the end of 1944, with his mother and sister Luisa dead, Mr. Helfgott and his father were deported to Buchenwald. His sister Mala was sent to the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp in Germany and later to Bergen-Belsen, also in Germany; she survived. Mr. Helfgott was sent to Schlieben, a subcamp of Buchenwald, where he left his father before spending his last weeks in captivity in the Theresienstadt labor camp and ghetto in Czechoslovakia.

Three months after his liberation, Mr. Helfgott to his new life in Britain.

During his time as a weightlifter, he worked for bag and paper companies and as a manager for Great Universal Stores, a retail and mail-order catalog company. After his competitive career ended in the early 1960s, he was a partner in a women’s sportswear company.

He retired in 1980 to concentrate on his Holocaust-related work.

He was long-time president of the ’45 Relief Organization, a charitable organization founded by the Boys in 1963 to support themselves and their families. He was honorary president of the Holocaust Memorial Day Foundationwho leads Britain’s Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January each year. He was also part of the group that a permanent Holocaust exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2021, as well as an active member of the Claims Conference, which secures compensation for Holocaust survivors.

“His wise advice was always based on his deep belief in human dignity and human rights.” the Claims Conference said in a statement.

Mr. Helfgott urged many of the Boys to tell their story to British historian Martin Gilbert, whom he persuaded to publish the book “The Boys: The Untold Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors”, published in 1997. to write.

“There’s something different about them than older survivors,” said Mr. Gilbert that year to The New York Times. “The older survivors came out of the camps as individuals. This group stayed together for three, four, five years. It seemed to have given them some sort of collective strength. They were never without someone who understood.”

Mr Helfgott, who was also interviewed for that article, said: “We came here naked. We tried to build a family and bring a zest for life to it.”

In addition to his son Maurice and his sister Mala Tribich, Mr. Helfgott is survived by his wife, Arza (Gordon) Helfgott; two other sons, Michael and Nathan; and nine grandchildren.

Mr Helfgott was knighted by the Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) in 2018. The King paid tribute to him in a letter read aloud at Mr. Helfgott’s shiva.

The letter said in part that Mr Helfgott “treasured the welcome this country gave him – and I know he called himself a great Anglophile. In return he has made a truly remarkable contribution to British life.”