Ben Helfgott, Holocaust survivor and Olympic weightlifter
Ben Helfgott, an Olympic weightlifter whose entire life was a show of strength, from his endurance as a teenager in Nazi concentration camps, to his exploits on the world’s athletic stage, to his later unflagging efforts on behalf of fellow Holocaust survivors, died June 16 at his home in London. He was 93.
His son Maurice Helfgott confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.
Helfgott first pressed a barbell over his head in 1948, the year he turned 19, when he chanced upon some weightlifters pumping iron in a London park and asked to join them in their exercises.
According to an account published years later in Sports Illustrated, he picked up a 140-pounder and hoisted it into the air. “You’ve never lifted weights?” the coach asked incredulously.
He was a natural athlete. But only three years earlier, Helfgott, a Polish-born Jew, had been liberated from a Nazi camp, starving and weighing only 80 pounds. Both his parents, one of his two sisters, and 21 of his 24 cousins were murdered in the Holocaust.
He came to Britain in 1945 with a group of child survivors that became known as “The Boys,” although there were many girls among the hundreds of refugees in their cohort. Together, and with the aid of relief workers, they set about rebuilding their lives.
Their story was documented in books including “The Boys: The Untold Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors” (1996) by historian Martin Gilbert, and in the 2020 BBC film “The Windermere Children.”
After encountering the weightlifters in the park, Helfgott started training after school and soon entered international competitions. He won three gold medals at the Maccabiah Games in Israel — in 1950, 1953 and 1957 — as well as four British weightlifting championships.
In 1956, Helfgott captained the British weightlifting team at the Melbourne Olympics. At the Opening Ceremonies, which coincided with his 27th birthday, he could scarcely maintain his composure.
“I thought of my parents and of how proud they would have been of me,” the Times of London quoted him as saying. At the end of the World War II, “I was at the point of death, but here I was alive and kicking, representing my adopted country. There was sadness but also exhilaration.”
Helfgott finished 13th in the lightweight category in Melbourne and 18th in the same category at the 1960 Games in Rome, where he again was captain of the British team.
“Whenever I pulled on that [British] vest I wanted to do well,” Helfgott said, according to the London Daily Telegraph. “I so wanted to win a medal to say thank you to the country that saved me.”
In subsequent years, as he pursued a career as a clothing manufacturer, Helfgott also became a spokesman and champion of Holocaust survivors, in particular those who had arrived with him in Britain.
He helped found and promote the ’45 Aid Society, a British charitable organization established in 1963 to support survivors who needed assistance and, in the description of its mission, to “give back to the society that had welcomed them.”
Helfgott was for years chairman of the group, one of many organizations and commissions he served in his effort to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.
He was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 2018. “His legacy,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wrote on Twitter after Helfgott’s death, “is the ultimate triumph over [the] darkness” of the Holocaust.
Helfgott — British newspapers listed his name at birth as Beniek — was born in Pabianice, a Polish city near Lodz, on Nov. 22, 1929, and grew up in Piotrkow.
He was 9, soon to be 10, when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, marking the start of World War II.
For his athletic achievements, he was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
Survivors include his wife of 57 years, the former Arza Gordon, and their three sons, Maurice Helfgott, Michael Helfgott and Nathan Helfgott, all of London; his sister; and nine grandchildren.