Erziehung und Unterricht 2018/3+4

198 Propp, The Danube Maidens – Hakoah Vienna Girls’ Swim Team in the 1920s and 1930s Erziehung und Unterricht • März/April 3-4|2018 My maternal grandfather, Berthold Hirsch, boasted about having played soccer for what he called the ‘Austrian football team’. This would have been in the very early days – around 1910 or 1912, not long after Hakoah was founded. The football team had not yet attained the international glory that it would in the mid 1920s, and a scruffy Jewish boy from Mora- via could still join impromptu games on patchy fields. When World War I broke out, he be- came a soldier. The Hakoah annals record this about my grandfather: ‘Hirsch-Jesernofsky was a very good football player of the first team. He was held a Russian prisoner-of-war, until 1921, when he returned. Then he was active in sports for only a short time more.’ 2 Watching Zilberman’s documentary, I heard interviews with a handful of Hakoah swimmers, now elderly women, who spoke in a uniquely accented English, one I had not heard since I was a child in my grandparents’ one-bedroom apartment on Cruger Avenue in the Bronx. The arch enunciations, the undercurrent of outrage fueled by a sense of superiority, and the digressions into nostalgia – was for me like listening to a long-forgot- ten, beloved piece of music. Emotions welled up. Memories were sparked. Warmth and sadness; sweetness and loss – and the long-ago front room where I was adored by my grandparents’ coterie of Viennese friends when they gathered for cake and coffee on Sun- day afternoons. All this was what sent me to dusty archives and transatlantic flights in search of more information about the swimmers. The Maccabiah Games Hedy and Fritzy swam for Austria in the first Maccabiah Games held in the Palestine Mandate in 1932. The first ‘Jewish Olympics’ were a scattered, somewhat make-shift en- deavor. A portion of the ocean near the port in Haifa was cordoned off to make a pool for swimming. There, Hedy won in the first 200-meter breaststroke heat with a time of three minutes and twenty-four seconds. Fritzy came in second. Another Hakoah swimmer, Hansi Bratmann, came in third. Hansi was expected to win the lady’s backstroke; the surprise was that she came in second, ceding first place to Hedy. An American swimmer, referred to only as ‘Bein’ in Valentin Rosenfeld’s report, took third place. For the 300-meter freestyle race Fritzy was nervous going up against Bein. Although Bein fought hard to keep her lead, Fritzy overtook her after 200 meters and then surged ahead for a final time of three minutes and thirty-six seconds. By the end of the Maccabiah Games, the girls were ec- static. They had outdone themselves. In the Mediterranean sea, their prowess was once more confirmed. When the results were tallied Austria – the smallest team – had secured first place in swimming events. 3 By 1935, a second wave of swimmers had come of age. These included Judith Deutsch, Hannie Deutsch, Lucie Goldner, Trude Hirschler, Ruth Langer, Renee Mittler, Annemarie Pick, Elishiva Susz, and many others. Nineteen swimmers, with an average age of 16, sailed from Trieste to Palestine for the second Maccabiah Games in late March, 1935. It’s difficult to underestimate the effect of this trip. As they had three years previous, Hakoah Vienna championed. They won a total of 400 points, nearly half won in swimming; Vienna Hakoah took first place among the 21 clubs. (Germany took second place at 374 points and Palestine third place at 359 points.) Hakoah Vienna swimmers placed in nearly every race; most notably, Fritzy took first place in the 400-meter freestyle (6:17) and Hedy took first place in the 200-meter breaststroke (3:18). Fritzi, Hedy, Judith, and Annemarie won first place for Austria in the 400-meter relay race.