Hapoel and the enduring memory of a young
LIKE any kid who grew up kicking a ball around the streets, Arthur Vasermil harboured starry-eyed dreams of one day becoming a footballer. Then came the war, the Nazis, the Holocaust and a much bleaker reality. As Jews living in Warsaw, Arthur and his family were rounded up and taken to the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp on the outskirts of the Polish city of Lublin where he would spend the final portion of his short life in misery, hunger and deprivation. He was just seven years old when he died in 1943. “He was thrown into the pit like a toy that nobody wanted,” his mother Lilly later revealed. “At that moment I decided not to bring any more children into this world.”
With no remaining photographs of Arthur or other trinkets from a life curtailed so prematurely, Lilly was determined to keep alive the memory of her son. Freed from Auschwitz in 1945 and with husband Isaac thought to have been another victim of the Holocaust, Lilly chose to start afresh in Israel.
There she met the man who would become her second husband, Solomon Friedman, and also develop a friendship with David Fest, then doctor with the Hapoel Be’er-Sheva football club, Celtic’s opponents in this week’s Champions League play-off tie. Through Fest, Lilly would take a renewed interest in football, something that had not been in her life since Arthur’s untimely passing. She started attending matches, watching training sessions and taking an interest in the club’s youth programmes, growing ever enthused by the sight of thousands of children playing football and fulfilling what was Arthur’s dream.
Be’er-Sheva’s Municipal Ground had been opened in 1960 but come 1988 it was in need of renovation. Lilly, who would be widowed again that year when Solomon suffered a heart attack, decided to bankroll a large part of the cost of the work. In return for her generosity, the ground was renamed after her son – the Vasermil Stadium. Some 45 years after his death, Lilly had kept a promise to herself that her son would never be forgotten.
Within 20 years, however, it became apparent the stadium was no