Poles, Jews, Football--and a Race from the Synagogue to the Stadium
Stories regularly appear
in the newspapers about the “Jewish past” of football clubs like
Ajax or Bayern Munich. In Poland, it wasn’t so much a matter of
individual clubs as of Jewish players, officials, and activists being
woven into the football culture. The scorer of the first Poland
international goal, the manager of the first winning Poland
international team, and on and on. There were purely Jewish clubs,
and there were big clubs with Jewish stars. All of that ended when
the Germans invaded, and the story has largely been forgotten.
The late Henryk Vogler, a
dear man I sorely miss, grew up in Cracow rooting for two teams.
First and foremost, he supported Cracovia in its eternal rivalry with
Wisla.
Among the all-Jewish clubs, at the same time, he preferred Jutrzenka over the Zionist club Makkabi, for complex reasons he explains in his 1994 reminiscence Wyznanie mojzeszowe (a devilishly tricky title to translate without knowing the whole context of Polish-Jewish history; I would call it “Jewish by Denomination” but that doesn’t come close to conveying the subtleties of identity).
Among the all-Jewish clubs, at the same time, he preferred Jutrzenka over the Zionist club Makkabi, for complex reasons he explains in his 1994 reminiscence Wyznanie mojzeszowe (a devilishly tricky title to translate without knowing the whole context of Polish-Jewish history; I would call it “Jewish by Denomination” but that doesn’t come close to conveying the subtleties of identity).
He
starts that book by recalling how, on the day of a Wisla-Cracovia
derby in 1921, he had a brush with one of his heroes and ended up
racing across town to get him to the match on time, from synagogue to
stadium.
His
orthodox, observant uncle took him to services in one of the
countless small prayer houses in the Jewish district. The prayer
house was crowded, stuffy, and fervent, but what made it special was
that “praying along with the others was Sperling. Small,
with black, slightly curly hair, he was the outstanding left winger
in the history of Polish football.” He notes proudly that, at the time, “Cracovia were the
uncontested champions of Poland over a season when the English league
system had not yet been introduced . . . undefeated for more than two
years.”
Seventy-three years after
that particular morning, Vogler was able to reel off and characterize
those Invincibles:
“Keeping goal was Stefan
Popiel, a landowner from an old gentry family who committed suicide
not long after. Playing in defense were Ludwik Gintel, who later
became an architect and today [in 1994], in Israel, is the only
member of that team still alive. Alongside him was Stefan Fryc, who
specialized in setting the offside trap (at the time, a player was
offside if he had only one defender in front of him, rather than none
as at present) and who fell in the Warsaw Uprising [the Polish Home
Army’s 1944 Uprising, not to be confused with the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising of the previous year – trans.]. The midfielders were the
recently deceased Zdzislaw Styczen, a municipal official
distinguished on the pitch by a sharp, ruthless aggressiveness that
might explain his nickname of “Zulu,” partnered by the future
physician Stanisław Cikowski, an elegant player, and the balding
Tadeusz Synowiec, a teacher who gave no quarter in one-on-one
situations and was known as “The Steel Cable.” Then there were
the attackers. On the right wing was Stanislaw Mielech, a captain or
major in the Polish army who turned to the theory of football when he
hung up his boots and wrote several books on the subject. Next to him
was Boleslaw Kotapka, a manual laborer who was murdered that same
year, 1921, or the following year, in a brawl at a bar on the corner
of Zwierzyniecka and Powiśla streets. In the middle was one of the
most legendary Polish footballers, Jozef Kaluza, a teacher and the
captain who led the attack with such precision that they called him
“The Little Craftsman.” Then there was Adam Kogut, another
professional army officer who fell fighting abroad [in World War II –
trans.]. Finally, the office clerk Leon Sperling, affectionately
known by the spectators as “Munio,” who dribbled artfully past
his opponents before getting off a shot on target, or enabling a
teammate to do so. The Germans murdered him in the Lviv ghetto during
the occupation.”
On that memorable morning
of derby day, the prayer services dragged on and on, and Sperling was
still sitting on the bench among the worshippers. “My uncle on my
mother’s side, Romek Berwald, a friend of his, was praying
alongside him,” Vogler recalls. “He slipped out to fetch a
horse-drawn cab.” Vogler’s uncle shepherded Sperling and the
ten-year-old Vogler into what was still the fastest way of getting
around town, and they set off at a gallop for Wisla stadium.
As they clattered over the
cobblestones, Vogler assisted in what he refers to as “a sacred
ceremony of transfiguration. . . . Sperling removed the individual
items of his civilian clothing, his trousers, jacket, and shirt, and
pulled on in nervous haste the elements of his kit as my uncle and I
handed them to him after taking them out of a small bag into which
they had previously been packed: his socks, his football boots with
studs, his white shorts, and finally the holy of holies, his
red-and-white striped jersey. . . . And thus in my eyes an ordinary
little Jew was transformed into a gigantic figure in almost Homeric
armor.”
They didn't make
it on time. The match had already kicked off, but Cracovia had lined up with
only ten men (the offside rule is not the only regulation that has changed
in the meantime). To a roar from the away supporters,
Sperling, kitted up during the cab ride from the synagogue, trotted
onto the field. Vogler recalls with satisfaction that he was
“admitted into the stands with no little respect owing to the
company I had been in,” and watched the match for free.
Cracovia kept their
unbeaten run alive that day, defeating Wisla 3-0 with “The Little
Craftsman” Kaluzny scoring a hat trick.
The referee was Ignacy
Rosenstock, a civil engineer who was one of the founders in 1919 of
the Polish Football Association (PZPN) and first editor-in-chief of
Przeglad Sportowy, still the country’s leading sport daily, which
published its inaugural issue six weeks after the match that Henryk
Vogler rode to in a horse-drawn cab with Munio Sperling. Rosenstock
died of appendicitis in 1935 and is buried in the New Jewish Cemetery
in Cracow.
Cracovia defender Ludwik
Gintel, who later became an architect in Israel, was the first Poland player to score an own goal in an international match, against
Hungary at Cracovia stadium on May 14, 1922.
Two weeks later Jozef
Lustgarten, a Jewish lawyer who played in goal—and sometimes up
front—for Cracovia before World War I, managed Poland to its first
international victory in Stockholm (Lustgarten was arrested by the
Soviets in 1939 and spent 17 years in the Gulag before returning to
Poland).
Jozef Klotz, a defender
who was the son of a Cracow shoemaker, scored Poland’s first
international goal, a penalty, during the victory over Sweden. Klotz
went on to a long career with Makkabi Warsaw, a Jewish club in the
capital. The Germans murdered him and his teammates in the ghetto in
1941, and razed the Makkabi ground, which was located at the present
site of the new Polish National Stadium, where the first match of the
2012 Euros will take place.
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