SURVIVOR’S TALE INSPIRES BLUES

vWomen’s Champions League Second leg (Lyon lead 2-1) Tomorrow, KO 2pm CHELSEA will go into tomorrow’s big Champions League showdown with Lyon inspired by a Holocaust survivor.

Blues boss Emma Hayes (top left) invited Susan Pollack MBE (top right), a Hungarian Jew whose mother and father were murdered by the Nazis, to teach her players a thing or two about resilience.

Pollack, an avid goalkeeper as a child, and her brother Laci, were both sent to Auschwitz, where they were separated but survived to be reunited years later.

After marrying a fellow survivor in Canada, she now has three children and six grandchildren, and her visit to Chelsea’s Cobham training HQ formed part of the club’s ‘Say No To Antisemitism’ campaign.

Chelsea lost the first leg 2-1 against the holders (Erin Cuthbert scoring, inset) and Hayes said: “We had a 45-minute talk from a beautiful woman, called Susan Pollack. She

came to discuss her experiences of being taken to a concentration camp, watching her mother taken away to be murdered in a gas chamber, her father taken away to be beaten to a pulp, while her brother disappeared.

“Listening to her experience of being dehumanised and persecuted as six million people lost their lives, not only was it incredibly traumatic to listen to, and emotional, but I asked her one question, ‘How did you keep going, what got you through that?’. “She said, ‘I was young and wanted to give something back to life, I felt hopeful enough to do that and I’m grateful that life is worth living’.

“It was a reminder that your resilience is important, you are going to need it in really, really, really difficult times and she had it in abundance.”

Chelsea will be roared on by a sell-out 4,000 crowd. Hayes added: “Our crowd will inspire the players. I’ll have a drum attached to my chest, so I’ll be joining in!”