A new documentary tells the story of the bikers who went out from Mandate Palestine to invite Jews from Europe to take part in the first Maccabiah Games - and the bikers who replicated their journeys in 2015
November 22, 2018 14:12
In the shadow of Auschwitz, Yoram Maron told his son Danny, for the first time, what had happened to him. during the war.
Yoram and his mother were in a cattle car taking them to their deaths, when a fellow prisoner, a Jewish railway worker, managed to open the door from the inside.
“He jumped out, and his coat pulled him under the wheels, cutting him in half; the scream was horrible. At that very moment my mother grabbed me, threw me out and jumped herself. The Gestapo were in the last compartment, and started to shoot, but were surprised and didn’t hit us.”
Yoram and Danny’s conversation took place in 2015, when they were part of a group of bikers travelling from Israel, carrying the Maccabiah torch to the European Maccabi games in Berlin.
Their journey, and the moment when Yoram broke his silence were captured on film for a documentary released this week, Back to Berlin.
The film was made by Catherine Lurie, whose idea it was to replicate journeys first made in the 1930s, when bikers rode out all over Europe and beyond, to find Jewish athletes and encourage them to take part in the first Maccabiah Games in Mandate Palestine.
Lurie, a member of the Board of Trustees for the Maccabi World Union, came up with the idea for the journey when she heard about the original riders from the president of the organisation, whose mother and uncle had taken part in the Games in 1932.
“His quote was ‘Maccabi saved my family from the nails of the Nazis’, because they managed to get out in ‘35 and save all their family.” Lurie convinced the Maccabi World Union to give her the torch, and for Maccabi Deutschland to accept it at the opening ceremony.
There were hundreds of biker applicants for the journey, slowly whittled down to small group, including Danny and Yoram.
“The film triggered his story,” says Lurie. “His bravery, what he went through, the fact that he hid it from his children to save them so that they wouldn’t have these images, so that they grew up normal and strong, and only now telling the story — that’s important.”
Yoram erecounts in the film how he and his mother survived the war. “I think about it all the time. I saw the horrors as a child, aged six to eight. I saw how the Germans killed babies with their boots. With my own eyes I saw these things. I saw how they stepped on old people and shot them in the head,” he says, his voice shaking.
“I didn’t want to tell [my children] so they won’t carry the images all their lives,” Yoram says. “I don’t know. Maybe I made a mistake.”
Lurie describes the journey as “in a way, an act of defiance, to go through Europe, where Jewish populations have been decimated, to take the torch back to the stadium, where Jews weren’t welcome.
“In Greece in particular, when we went to see the community, they said ‘please don’t fly the flag when you get here’. The community had organised police protection at the hotel. ” The bikers had police escorts in Poland and Hungary.
At the start of the process she went to see a top producer in London. “He said ‘for you to touch the subject of Israel is ridiculous. No-one wants to hear about Israel, it’s probably one of the most unpopular subjects in the world’.”
That conversation spurred her to go ahead, especially “in the light of what’s happening in the Labour party now, where the actual legitimacy of Israel is being questioned all the time by the far left; it’s a sad indictment of what’s happening in politics in Britain today.”
For her the most moving thing about the trip was “to take the torch, make a stand and fly the Israeli flag, through all those countries, as new Jews.
“The whole philosophy of the Maccabiah is the strong, proud Jew. That Jews had to change from ghetto-like Jews who only studied in books, to becoming physically strong. For Jews to be perceived in a different way. The Maccabi element is to show how the movement started, what it actually means and that we went back there as different Jews to the Jews that were shunted into railway cars and sent to their deaths.”
Back to Berlin is released this week
