Noah Klieger, a Shoah survivor, died on Thursday at the age of 92

© Boxer for Survival.

Originally from Strasbourg, Noah Klieger was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 16 from Mechelen, Belgium. The day after his arrival at Auschwitz, the SS are looking for boxers because the camp commander, Heinrich Schwartz, is passionate about boxing and organizes fights between detainees.   SS officers then arrive in his barracks and ask if there are boxers among the detainees. Four prisoners raise their hand: two Dutch, Sally Weinschenk, who had been European champion, and Sam Potts, a very good tall boxer, Jean Korn, goalkeeper of a football team in Belgium and finally Noah Klieger, who does not actually know grand-thing about practicing boxing. Noah will manage to fool the SS by learning some techniques from a real boxer from the camp. Better treated than the other deportees, the boxers are also better fed. Boxing will save the life of the young man, who will survive even the death marches, which will however get the better of his comrade Victor "Young" Perez, world champion in boxing in 1931, shot dead after the evacuation of the Auschwitz camp while he was distributing bread to his comrades. Noah Klieger will be released at the Ravensbrück concentration camp by the Red Army.

Having survived the deportation, Noah Klieger joins the crew of the Exodus. Illegally immigrated to Israel, passionate about sports, he became a correspondent for the newspaper L'Equipe in 1953. In 1957, he joined the editorial staff of the largest Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot, where he spent his entire career. His passion for sport will never leave him. He declared in an interview with L'Equipe in 2014: "I have always thought that sport was a way to get closer to each other, to eliminate differences, hatred.  It was a huge hope... At the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, when 11 athletes and members of the Israeli delegation were assassinated by a Palestinian commando, Noah Klieger was present.

Noah Klieger is an example of courage, optimism and resilience. He testified many times about his experience at Auschwitz, especially in front of the young people. He had also testified on the occasion of the exhibition 'European sport put to the test by Nazism' in 2011 at the Shoah Memorial and had returned in 2017 to present the film 'Boxer pour survivre' by Uri Borreda, a documentary illustrated with archive footage in which he returns for the first time to the places that marked his life as a French Jewish teenager from 1940 to 1947.

All our thoughts today go to his loved ones.

We invite you to (re)discover this video of a lecture given on 13 May 2008 in the E. J. Safra Auditorium of the Memorial, in the presence of Noah Klieger.
Exceptional meeting with passengers and witnesses from the stopover of the ship l'Exodus in France, on the occasion of the release of the film by Jean-Michel Vecchiet "Nous étions l'Exodus", edited by France 2, 7 witnesses tell.