Football’s greatest comeback

IN THE 54 days between May 15 and July 8 1944, approximately 430,000 Jews were deported from Hungary, almost all of them to Auschwitz. A rate of 8000 Jews a day — on average one Jew sent to their death every 11 seconds. The conventional wisdom has been that the great football coach Bela Guttmann missed this imagination-defying slaughter and lived out the war years sitting peacefully in neutral Switzerland. But the reality was quite different.

Guttmann actually spent much of 1944 hiding in a dingy attic on the outskirts of the Jewish ghetto of Újpest near his native Budapest.

Later in 1944, he found himself in a slave labour camp, primarily reserved for Jewish men. In the last days of the war, he got wind that his battalion was about to be deported to Nazi Austria. Facing almost inevitable death, he and four others escaped by jumping from a first floor window.

Guttmann’s father and sister were murdered, so too his wider family, his friends, his former teammates. His natural habitat, the Jewish world of central and eastern Europe was obliterated.

But by 1961, Béla Guttmann had completed the most remarkable turnaround. As coach of Benfica of Lisbon, he lifted the most prestigious sporting prize in this continent, the European Cup. He did it again the following year. From the death pits of Europe to champion of Europe, and all in little more than sixteen years.

It may seem difficult to believe now but before Guttmann the role of the football coach had been considered relatively unimportant. He was the first of a breed of superstar coaches, moving from country to country selling his talent, a pioneer who changed the most popular sport on the planet. His fearless and pulsating brand of attacking football lit up packed stadiums throughout Europe and South America. His tactical acumen, his ideas on diet, fitness and conditioning, his approach to man management, the way he handled the media to gain advantage for his team — all these would be considered standard among top coaches now. Sixty years ago, many of them were groundbreaking.

The trajectory of Guttmann’s life largely traces that of the Jewish nation as a whole, and this broader story features throughout my book about him. The book’s title — The Greatest Comeback — has another connotation. If Guttmann achieved the greatest personal comeback in football history, then the Jews of the twentieth century performed the greatest national comeback in human history. As Guttmann’s Benfica took to the pitch for their first European Cup final against Barcelona in 1961, the reborn Jewish state of Israel, almost unbelievably, was prosecuting Adolf Eichmann, the principal Nazi architect of the Hungarian Holocaust, in a Jewish court with Jewish judges in its ancient capital of Jerusalem. He was ]QN »[\] of the super star football coaches

Also in the background throughout the book is the whiff of Holocaust denial, in its various forms still more common in Europe today than generally acknowledged.

Deborah Lipstadt, the Jewish historian, divides Holocaust denial into two — hardcore and softcore. Hardcore denial involves the outright refusal to acknowledge that the Holocaust happened, or the claim that the numbers of fatalities have been deliberately exaggerated; the received wisdom in certain parts of the world. It exists at the extremes in Europe too, but here more refined forms of denial are usually at play.

It is principally the dejudaisation of the Holocaust that Lipstadt refers to as softcore denial, the constant false comparisons with the fate of European Jewry. Guttmann himself instinctively understood Europe’s reluctance to acknowledge the uniqueness and enormity of the Holocaust.

In his autobiography published in German in 1964, he wrote simply: “In the last fifteen years, countless books have been written about the destructive years of struggle for life and death. It would thus be superfluous to trouble my readers with such details. I suffered and endured no more or less than many millions of my European contemporaries.” The word “Jew” did not appear in the entire book. An ambitious person seeking to make his way in