FIBA - FIBA legend delivers UN keynote address on Auschwitz liberation anniversary (part1)

SWITZERLAND (FIBA) – Veteran Israeli journalist and one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors Noah Klieger was the keynote speaker in Geneva on Wednesday as the United Nations celebrated the 65th anniversary of the liberation of World War II concentration camp Auschwitz.

Mr Klieger, 83, has been associated with FIBA for the better part of the last six decades. In that time, he has reported on 27 of the 29 European Championships played since attending his first one in 1951 and provided coverage of countless Summer Olympic Games and World Championships. He has worked primarily for leading Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot as well as French sports daily L’Equipe, publications he has been tied with for more than 50 years.

The current Chairman for the Basketball Commission of AIPS (International Sportswriters Association) and former President of the now-defunct FIBA Media Council, he has assisted FIBA in making huge strides to set the regulations for coverage of all international competitions.

Before beginning his career in journalism and basketball, Mr Klieger survived a two-year spell at Auschwitz. Ahead of his speech at the UN, he took time to talk to FIBA.

In the first part of an extensive interview, he tells of his World War II ordeal.

FIBA: Can you think back to January 27th 1945?

Noah Klieger: Officially January 27th 1945 was the day that the Soviet army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp but that in fact is not quite true.

Auschwitz was not liberated for the simple reason that in the night of January 17th-18th 1945, the Germans evacuated the complex. They decided to retreat because they knew they couldn’t fight the Soviets who had hundreds of positions around the area. So the Germans decided to retreat from Auschwitz and Poland, to go back into Germany, in the Ruhr.

But the Germans still needed workers because at that time they didn’t believe the war was lost yet. They were convinced they could still win because of the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs which they sent over London from January to March 1945. These bombs were made in factories inside the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. I worked there after being deported from Auschwitz on January 18th 1945.

More than 57,000 people were taken from Auschwitz on a march to Dora-Mittelbau in order to make us work in those factories. The Germans were travelling there in their army vehicles with us, the prisoners, walking behind them. We walked January, February and March to get there.

They were in a hurry to get there because they didn’t want the Soviets to catch up with them. Less than 20,000 of us made it to Dora-Mittelbau. Some 37,000 were shot because they couldn’t match the pace the Germans had set for us.

So when the Soviets entered Auschwitz, all they found was about 4,000 bodies because the prisoners had been moved.

Actually General Vasily Petrenko, the Soviet general who was made Hero of the Soviet Union as the liberator of Auschwitz, wasn’t the first person to get to the camp. Another Soviet general arrived before him – Petrenko got there a day later, on January 28th 1945 – but the Soviet army preferred to give the honour to Petrenko who had more friends in higher positions. The other general did not get anything.

FIBA: So is January 27th 1945 an irrelevant date for you?

Noah Klieger: For me January 27th 1945 is another thing. It was the beginning of the last phase of my time in the German camp.

I was born in Strasbourg, France and lived there until 1938. As far back as 1934, my father who was a writer, journalist and socialist had anticipated there would be a war so he moved our family to Belgium, which was neutral, in 1938. Unfortunately, the country wasn’t spared when war broke out.

My life in concentration camps began in October 1942 when I was grabbed by the Gestapo in a small place called Moukron on the Belgian-French border. I was imprisoned in Melechen and deported to Auschwitz where I arrived on January 18th 1943.

I survived two years which in itself is quite an accomplishment because the average prisoner’s life expectancy in there was only two months.

A majority of prisoners who were sent to Auschwitz went to the gas chamber right away because the Germans had no use for them. The others were sent to work in the various camps where for example we would make the synthetic rubber Buna.

The survival of a person in a camp like Auschwitz was a miracle. You needed several miracles a day to survive there. People were brought there to die, either immediately or after being worked to death. It was a camp with a strong record: 1.4 million people died and less than 50,000 survived.

FIBA: What would you do to survive and cope?

Noah Klieger: One thing I did was become a member of Auschwitz’s boxing club. I am actually its last survivor. Heinrich Schwarz, the commander of Auschwitz camp III, was a boxing fanatic so he put together a boxing club.

Why would anyone join this club you ask? Life was hard enough in Auschwitz when you worked all day and got little to no food. But you would join the club because Schwarz made sure that the boxers got an extra litre of soup and that extra litre of soup kept me going for a few months.

I wasn’t a boxer. I didn’t know how to box. Growing up, I was a street fighter because at school the other Jewish kids and I were teased and picked on and we would defend ourselves. I was probably one of the most vicious of them all. I was very lucky to get into the Auschwitz boxing club.

FIBA: How did the last phase of your time in a prison camp come to an end?

Noah Klieger: I was at Dora-Mittelbau, working in the factories that built V-1 and V-2 flying bombs in March-April 1945.

On April 4th, a month before the Germans surrendered, they still did not release the prisoners. They took us and other prisoners on another death march to Ravensbrück without any food or water. It wasn’t just Jewish people this time. There were all sorts of prisoners from the camp in Dora: Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, French, political prisoners…We were 3,000 when we left and roughly 600 when we arrived.

Then when we got there, we were put to work, to do fortifications. In mid-April, we were doing fortification work. How was that possible? On April 26th, the Germans evacuated the camp of Ravensbrück.

They dragged 600 prisoners with them and I refused to go. I said if I’ve got to die and I know I will die, I’ll do so here. The Germans didn’t do anything. They were in too much of a hurry to leave because they knew the Soviet army was closing in on them.

So they dragged the prisoners with them and closed the gate. Then on April 28th they massacred the 600. It was the last massacre in World War II. The 70-80 of us that had stayed in the Ravensbrück camp were saved the next day.

For Part II of this interview in which Mr Klieger recalls the first time he saw a basketball game, his long-standing collaboration with FIBA and reveals his favourite players and teams, please click here.

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