Lost legends

Digging Deep Unearthing the stories of 11 murdered Jewish footballing greats by David Bolchover

Biteback, £22

It’s not accurate to say that this excellent book by David Bolchover is enjoyable. Pleasure is not a feeling that readily springs to mind as one absorbs the meticulously researched life stories of Bolchover’s “team” of interwar footballing stars who were all murdered during the Holocaust simply because they were Jewish. Digging Deep is far more than a book about football, though at one level it does an outstanding job of reminding us how far the supremacy of the Central European game between the wars – and indeed the infrastructure of European football more generally – was built upon the pre-eminence of Jewish players, coaches and teams.

Bolchover delves into the personal histories of 11 players who represented four national teams (Austria, Germany, Hungary and Poland). The resulting narratives are fascinating accounts of a nascent continental sporting culture where national, regional, city and club-basedidentities mixed and merged with developing transnational networks that spread the game far and wide.

Few of the chosen 11 are well known, even – perhaps especially – in their own countries. Yet Bolchover makes the compelling point that many should be household names to anyone with an interest in football history. This is certainly true of Max Scheuer, who captained the famous Jewish side Hakoah Vienna through the 1920s, as well as Hungary’s Arpad Weisz, who coached Inter and Bologna to three Scudettos in total at a time when the Italians dominated international football. And it most definitely applies to Joszef Braun, in Bolchover’s view, possibly the greatest Jewish footballer of all time. The narratives of those who won less, meanwhile, have just as much to tell us about the complex, unsettling and increasingly dangerous realities of life and death for European Jews in the first half of the 20th century.

Framing each of the lives Bolchover examines was an increasingly open, and state-sanctioned, antisemitism that, within a couple of decades, transformed national heroes into murder victims. Tales such as that of the antisemitic referee Mr Wachsmann, who in 1924 sent off Cracovia’s Jewish winger Leon Sperling (one of the featured 11), loudly proclaimed to the crowd that the visiting team “should not bring their Jews [from Krakow] to Poznan” and threatened another player with a gun, take on a more harrowing complexion when examined in this context.

By dealing with death and murder head on, Bolchover has some important things to say about history and memory as it relates to 20th-century Europe in its broadest sense, as well as its football. In the closing pages, Bolchover muses over the likelihood that the post-war footballing decline of Austria and Hungary (notwithstanding the “Golden Team” of the 1950s) could have been “precisely because of the Holocaust, in which so many Hungarians and Austrians willingly participated” and that the failure to consider this possibility has been because “there are so few Jews to raise the point”.

It is one of a series of pertinent observations that is sure to encourage readers to reconsider what they thought they understood about the nature of the European Holocaust and its impact upon European football. Matthew Taylor