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).

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.