Survivors’ Journey to the Olympics: Ágnes Keleti and Ben Helfgott
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With the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris underway, the Claims Conference would like to take a moment to honor two remarkable Holocaust survivors who competed in the Olympic games.
Just shy of her 100 birthday, we met with Ágnes Keleti at her home in Budapest. Her resilience is a central theme in her inspiring life story. Despite the obstacles, she always kept her balance, in and out of the Olympic arena. Now, Ágnes is 103 years old, the world’s oldest Olympic medalist and the most decorated Jewish female Olympian.
Born in Budapest in 1921, Ágnes began gymnastics at four. She was considered a top prospect for the 1940 Olympics, but the games were canceled as World War II raged across Europe. She was 23 when the Nazis invaded Budapest, taking most of her family to concentration camps. Ágnes managed to escape Budapest after buying the identification papers of a Christian girl. She spent the rest of the war hiding in a small village, where she found work as a maid. When the war was over, she returned to find out that her father and uncles had all been murdered in Auschwitz. Only her mother and sister had survived.
In a show of strength and perseverance, Ágnes resumed gymnastics after the war, qualifying for the Hungarian Olympic team in 1948. At 31, she won her first gold medal at the 1952 Helsinki Games. In the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, she won another four. By the end of her career, Ágnes had 10 Olympic medals, including five gold, two silver and one bronze. “It’s not the medals that are significant,” she recalled in an interview, “but the experiences that came with them.”
Because of the unrest in Hungary following the ‘56 Games, Ágnes stayed for a time in Australia before moving to Israel in 1957. She coached the Israeli National Gymnastics team well into the 1990s, and in 2017, she was announced laureate of the Israel Prize in sports.
The Claims Conference also remembers our beloved board member and friend, Sir Ben Helfgott, z”l. A long-time member of the Claims Conference family, Ben was a Holocaust survivor from Poland, an Olympic weightlifter for Britain and life-long advocate for Holocaust remembrance and education.
As a boy, Ben survived the Piotrków Ghetto and the Buchenwald, Schlieben and Theresienstadt concentration camps before being liberated in 1945 at 15 years old. His father, Moshe, mother, Sara and little sister, Lusia, were murdered by the Nazis. His older sister, Mala, was separated from the family and eventually liberated from Bergen-Belsen. With no place to call home following the war, he was one of 732 young people taken in by Great Britain with the help of the Central British Fund for German Jewry.
Despite weighing less than 100 pounds at the time of his liberation, Ben began an extraordinary life-affirming athletic career in Britain, becoming a four-time lightweight weightlifting champion. He was the only known survivor of a Nazi concentration camp to have competed in two Olympic Games, serving as captain of the British weightlifting teams in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and in the 1960 Rome Olympics. He was the bronze medal winner at the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games and winner of the gold medal in the lightweight class at the 1950, 1953 and 1957 Maccabiah Games.
After World War II, his life was about pushing himself and inspiring others to do the same. He was a powerhouse of motivation, staying deeply involved as an advocate for his fellow survivors right up until his death in 2023.
We invite everyone to celebrate and honor these and all survivors who, despite facing horrific atrocities in their formative years, go on to achieve remarkable accomplishments and inspire others to do the same. As Holocaust survivors and Olympians, Ágnes Keleti and Ben Helfgott demonstrate the epitome of strength and resilience.
