Erziehung und Unterricht 2018/3+4

200 Propp, The Danube Maidens – Hakoah Vienna Girls’ Swim Team in the 1920s and 1930s Erziehung und Unterricht • März/April 3-4|2018 The Maccabi World Congress was one of many Jewish organizations calling for Jewish athletes to boycott the games. Even so, Jewish athletes such as fencer Helene Mayer and swimmer Kurt Epstein, who played on the Czechoslovakian water polo team, decided to compete in Berlin. 7 Theodor Deutsch told his seventeen-year-old daughter Judith that the decision was hers. On the boat trip to Palestine the previous year, Judith had become friendly with Jewish swimmers from Germany who gave her an idea about Jews’ mistreatment under the Nuremberg laws. She heard that signs in the parks read DOGS AND JEWS FORBIDDEN and that Jewish athletes, prohibited from using most pools, fields, and equipment, trained in sub-standard conditions. And so, Judith, a consummate competitor at the pinnacle of her career, declined the opportunity of a lifetime. The letter she wrote on June 26 th said, in part: ‘As a Jew I am unable to participate in the Olympic Games in Berlin since my conscience prohibits this. How serious I am with this decision, you can appreciate by the fact that I am very well aware that I thus forgo the highest athletic distinction, that is, to be allowed to start at the Olympic Games in the Austrian team. I ask you to meet my point of view with understanding and not to subject me to any moral constraints.’ 8 Lucie and Ruth followed Judith’s example. ‘We do not boycott Olympia but Berlin’, they wrote to the newspapers. The Austrian sports authorities did not understand the refuseniks’ point of view. Retaliation was swift; they erased the swimmers’ records and issued a lifetime disqualification from swim competitions in Austria. 9 After outrage in the European sports press, the ban was shortened to two years. For Hakoah’s rivals, the Nazi-sympathizing EWASK, the boycott was a gift. As Ruth Langer said when interviewed near the end of her life: ‘They were jolly well pleased that I wasn’t swimming anymore.’ 10 Lucie Goldner wrote: ‘Our rejection provided the Austrian swim federation with a welcome opportunity.’ 11 Essentially, the disqualification made Austrian swim records ‘judenrein’. Without the Hakoah records, once again the anti-Se- mites could claim that Jews were inferior in sports. Some people even believed that the Olympic invitation had been a trap; the Austrian swim Federation bet on the Jews’ refusal, which would conveniently justify swift retaliation and better opportunities for non-Hakoah swimmers. My Conscience Prohibits This Seventy years later, we can ask: what did their boycott do ? It can be difficult to see hero- ism in what was essentially an act of passive resistance. No one thanked the girls for a personal sacrifice that essentially cut short their swim careers in 1936. Certainly, the boy- cott did not stop or even slow the Nazis’ carnage. Every four years for rest of her long life Ruth Langer felt sad when she watched the Olympic Games. Lucie Goldner, who after the war settled in Australia, contracted a deathbed promise from her daughter and four grandchildren that after her funeral they would attend the 2000 games in Sydney. 12 Austria did not bring home any medals from Berlin. The boycott deprived the other con- testants an opportunity to compete against the stellar Viennese swimmers. My conscience prohibits it. Mostly, what these three brave teenagers did is remind us that we have a choice beyond self-interest. Fifty years later, Lucie Goldner wrote: ‘It was a bit too much to ask three Jewish girls to march into the stadium, salute Hitler, and pass by the man who had by then taken up the annihilation of the Jews.’ 13 These three girls remind us that a moral compass can determine decisions. They demonstrate the heroics of being true to one’s conscience in the face of personal gain. This is a legacy that cannot be quantified.