Ben Helfgott (1929–2023)

Ben (né Ber) Helfgott was born to a Jewish family in Pabianice, Poland. His parents were Sarah (Klein) and Moishe Helfgott, who owned a flour mill, and he had two sisters, Lusia and Mala. When he was a child, the family moved to Piotrków, a town with a large Jewish population. After Nazi Germany invaded in 1939 at the start of World War II, the Helfgotts were forced into a ghetto. In 1942, Sarah and Lusia were among Jews rounded up and shot in nearby woodlands. In 1944, Mala was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and Ben and his father were sent to Buchenwald. Ben was transferred on to Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, before being transferred to Terezín (Theresienstadt). He later learned that Moishe was shot trying to escape a death march. In 1945, at the end of the war, 15-year-old Ben was one of 301 child survivors, mostly boys, re-settled in the Lake District of northern England by the Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Relief). He proved to be a fine athlete and excelled in weightlifting, remarkably for a teenager who had been starved for years. By the early 1950s, Helfgott had become British champion. He competed in the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956 and at the Rome Olympics in 1960. He won gold medals for Britain in the lightweight class at the Maccabiah Games in Israel in 1950, 1953, and 1957. In 1966, he married Arza, with whom he had three sons. He became a partner in a women's sportswear company, and retired in 1980 to focus on his Holocaust education and charitable work. He served as the longtime chairman and eventually president of the '45 Aid Society, founded in 1963 by his group of fellow survivors and boyhood friends, who were known simply as "the Boys." He persuaded British historian Martin Gilbert to write the 1997 book, The Boys: The Untold Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors. Among his many other activities, Helfgott was a member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and served as chairman of its Yad Vashem committee from 1985 to 2005; was a trustee and patron of the Holocaust Educational Trust; and was on the executive of the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. Sir Ben was knighted in 2018 and was the subject of the book Ben Helfgott: The Story of One of the Boys by Michael Freedland (2018).