Alfred Nakache

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The grave of Alfred Nakache and his second wife Marie on the Cimetière Le Py in Sète (Hérault). The tombstone also commemorates his first wife Paule and their daughter Annie Laurence, who were both murdered in Auschwitz

Alfred "Artem" Nakache (born November 18, 1915 in Constantine , † August 4, 1983 in Cerbère ) was a French swimmer and water polo player . He is the only athlete who took part in the Olympic Games before and after being imprisoned in Auschwitz . In France he was nicknamed "nageur d'Auschwitz" ("Swimmer of Auschwitz").

biography

Childhood and youth in Algeria

Alfred Nakache's grandfather, a Sephardic Jew, came to Algeria from Morocco in the 19th century , then part of French North Africa . There Nakache was born in Constantine as one of ten children of a traditional Jewish family. At that time, the city was nicknamed petit Jerusalem because of its 20 percent Jewish population with a total of around 100,000 inhabitants .

The father David Nakache taught his son, who was initially terrified of water, to swim in the Piscine Sidi M'Cid near the bridge of the same name . Soon, however, it was swimming so well that it was nicknamed “Artem”, Hebrew for “fish”. He also played water polo with his father and brothers. At the age of 17 he started for his club for the first time in a championship and shortly afterwards won the Coupe de Noël de Constantine , a swimming competition in the open sea near Philippeville (now Skikda).

Success as a swimmer until 1942

In 1933 Nakache took part in the French championships in the Piscine des Tourelles in Paris , where he met his idol Jean Taris , with whom he then became a lifelong friend. He stayed in Paris, became a member of the Racing Club de France and began training as a sports teacher at the Institut national du sport et de l'éducation physique (INSEP), which he completed in 1939.

In 1935 Nakache won the silver medal in freestyle at the Maccabiade in Tel Aviv . In the following year he started at the Olympic Games in Berlin in the 4 × 200 meter relay in freestyle. The team made up of Nakache, Jean Taris, Christian Talli and René Cavalero finished fourth. Because of his athletic achievements, he was supposed to take part in a comparison between a European and a US team in 1937 , but had to give his place to a swimmer from Germany, probably because he was Jewish. In 1938 he was runner- up in the 4 × 200 m crawl relay with Talli, Cavalero and Roland Pallard , and in 1939 he won four gold medals at the French student championships.

After the occupation of France by the German Wehrmacht and the associated restrictions for Jews from 1940, Nakache and his family fled to Toulouse in Vichy-France and joined the Toulouse Olympique Etudiants Club (TOEC), whose swimming department was called Dauphins du TOEC . There he opened a sports studio with his wife Paule and also trained members of the Jewish resistance. On July 6, 1941, in Marseille , he improved the 200 m world record of the American Jack Kasley in the breaststroke to 2: 36.8 minutes. At the following French championships in Villeurbanne , he won eight of a total of twelve titles. In 1943 the authorities put pressure on the organizers of the French championships in Toulouse that Nakache would not be allowed to start. As a result, all swimmers from his TOEC club and several swimmers from other clubs did not compete in solidarity with him.

A former athletic rival, however, Jacques Cartonnet (also called Ulysse Cartonnet ), was a staunch fascist and militiaman who incited against the Jews and especially Nakache in the newspaper Le Grand Écho du Midi . Other newspapers wrote that this Jewish swimmer "pollutes the water in French swimming pools".

Cartonnet is also said to have been the one who later denounced the Nakache family to the Gestapo . In November 1947 Der Spiegel wrote : “Jacques Cartonnet, the former French champion swimmer, condemned to death as a collaborator after the war and escaped, until now stayed under a false name in the Italian Capuchin monastery in Foligno . The Italian police arrested him. "

In Auschwitz

Extinguishing water basin in Auschwitz

In December 1943, Nakache was imprisoned with his wife Paule and his two-year-old daughter Annie and deported to Auschwitz via the Drancy and Buna-Monowitz camps. There were 1,368 people in the convoy, 47 of whom ultimately saw the end of the war. Also in this convoy were the Tunisian boxer Victor Perez and the French sports journalist Noah Klieger , with whom he befriended, as well as other inmates, including the American film set designer Willy Holt and the Italian writer Primo Levi . Nakache's wife and daughter were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival, something Nakache had no knowledge of until the end of the war. Perez was shot on a death march in January 1945 , Levi, Klieger and Holt survived the Shoah . Holt recalled Nakache in his memoirs as someone who "gave hope to many of us."

In the camp where he worked in the hospital, Nakache maintained his morale by secretly swimming with other prisoners in the extinguishing water basins. The claim by a Nakache biographer that the guards made "fun" of humiliating Nakache by making him dive for objects like a "trained animal" was dismissed as an "invention" by Klieger. Ultimately, Nakache survived the tortures in the concentration camp thanks to his strong physical and mental constitution, and he also survived the death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald in January 1945. After the liberation of the camp by the 3rd US Army on April 11, 1945, he stayed there for the time being to look after fellow inmates in the hospital. When he returned to Toulouse, the former 85 kilogram man still weighed 42 kilograms. The municipal swimming pool there was named after him on October 9, 1944, because he was believed to be dead.

After the war

Alfred Nakache was initially accepted by the family of one of his swimming friends, Jean Taris or Alex Jany. For months he went to the train station in the hope of finding the names of his wife and daughter on lists of survivors; he learned of her death later. With an iron will to live, he immediately started training again, so that eight months later he won three French championship titles in swimming and was in the national final with the water polo team. In 1946 he won his last championship title over 200 meters chest, in 1947 and 1948 he was runner-up. In 1948 he was for the Olympic Games in London nominated, where he of the 200-meter competition reached the semifinals in the breaststroke. He swam in the butterfly style, which he had already practiced as one of the first and which was considered a type of breaststroke until it was recognized as a separate discipline in 1953. According to various sources, he is also said to have been a member of the French water polo team, which took sixth place.

Then Nakache ended his athletic career, but continued to work as a sports teacher and swimming coach. He was one of the coaches of the future Olympic champion Jean Boiteux . In 1946 he hid weapons in his gym for the former resistance and Zionist activist Abraham Polonski , who later became a commander in the Hagana and co-founder of the Israeli army. In 1950 he married for the second time.

In 1961 the last members of his family, including his parents, left Algeria and came to Nakache in Toulouse after the Jewish musician Cheikh Raymond was assassinated by Algerian nationalists in Constantine. As early as 1934, 27 people, 25 of them Jews, were killed by Muslims in a pogrom in Constantine.

From 1972 to 1976 Nakache lived with his wife on Réunion , where he founded a swimming club and gave physical education at the newly founded university . Its declared aim was to promote swimmers from the French overseas territories .

As a retiree, Alfred Nakache settled near the Mediterranean coast between Sète and Cerbère, as his wife Marie came from there and the climate and landscape reminded him of Algeria. He died of a heart attack in 1983 while doing his daily swimming training in the port of Cerbère. At his request, the names of his first wife Paule and his daughter Annie, who are remembered as “victims of German barbarism”, can be found on his tombstone in the Le Py cemetery in Sète.

reception

In France, other swimming pools are named after Alfred Nakache, including in Paris, Montpellier and Nancy . In 2014 an exhibition on Nakache was shown in the town hall of Sète.

In 1993, Nakache was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame .

In 2001 a documentary about Nakache was produced (Christian Meunier: Alfred Nakache, le nageur d'Auschwitz); In 2009 Denis Baud published the book Alfred Nakache. Le nageur d'Auschwitz (Nouvelles Editions Loubatières. ISBN 978-2-86266-591-7 ). In the same year it became known that a feature film about Nakache's life with the two swimmers Laure Manaudou and Frédérick Bousquet was planned, which had not yet been made because the von Nakache family rejected this project.

In 2019, Alfred Nakache was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale , Florida .

family

The well-known French filmmakers Olivier Nakache and his sister Géraldine Nakache and the former French MP Yvette Benayoun-Nakache from Toulouse are descendants of siblings of Alfred Nakache.

literature

  • Lutz Krusche: Boxer shorts with a Jewish star . In: Der Spiegel . No. 50 , 1999 ( online ).
  • Christian Eichler, Der Freischwimmer, in: FAZ No. 265, November 14, 2015, p. 44 ( online ).
  • Denis Baud: Alfred Nakache: Le nageur d'Auschwitz. Nouvelles Éditions Loubatières, Toulouse 2009, ISBN 978-2-8626-6591-7

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ There is no further precise information about him. See also: Cartonnet (Ulysse dit Jacque). Galaxie Natation, September 9, 2013, accessed April 30, 2014 (French).
  1. ↑ a b c d e f Alfred Nakache, le nageur d'Auschwitz. Véronique Chemla, accessed April 29, 2014 .
  2. ↑ A l'est ... Eden: Bains de Sidi M'cid à ​​Constantine. vitaminedz.com, accessed April 30, 2014 (French).
  3. ↑ a b c d e Alfred Nakache: le triomphe de la vie. natationpourtous.com, accessed April 29, 2014 (French).
  4. ↑ a b c d e Alfred Nakache. Memoire Afrique du Nord, accessed April 29, 2014 (French).
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Bernard Gensane: Daniel Baud: Alfred Nakache, le nageur d'Auschwitz. Le Grand Soir, February 28, 2010, accessed April 29, 2014 (French).
  6. ↑ Ulysse Cartonnet in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original ), accessed on April 30, 2014.
  7. ↑ Jacques Cartonnet . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 1947 ( online - Nov. 15, 1947 ).
  8. ↑ Paule Nakache. Yad Vashem, accessed April 29, 2014 .
  9. ↑ Annie Nakache. Yad Vashem, accessed April 29, 2014 .
  10. ^ Alain Buisson: Willy Holt: comment j'ai survécu à la Shoah. La Depeche, October 8, 2000, accessed April 30, 2014 (French).
  11. ↑ Christian Eichler: Der Freischwimmer , p. 3 at faz.net, November 17, 2015 (accessed November 17, 2015).
  12. ↑ Denis Baud : Alfred Nakache le nageur d'Auschwitz, éd. Loubatières . Francis Pornon , 2010, archived from the original on May 27, 2014 ; accessed on September 16, 2019 (French, original website no longer available).
  13. ↑ The bath was not renamed afterwards and still bears his name today.
  14. ↑ Swimming at the 1948 London Summer Games: Men's 200 meters Breaststroke. Sports-Reference.com, accessed April 30, 2014 .
  15. ↑ (example natationpourtous.com )
  16. ↑ This information cannot be verified. In the Official Report of the 1948 Olympic Games, Nakache is not listed as a member of the water polo team.
  17. ↑ See: Pogrom de Constantine. latorturenalgerie.free.fr, accessed on May 14, 2014 (French).
  18. ^ Piscine Olympique Alfred Nakache Nancy-Gentilly. Retrieved April 29, 2014 (French).
  19. ↑ Alfred Nakache. jewishsports.net, accessed April 29, 2014 .
  20. ↑ Laure Manaudou: La Famille Nakache n'en veut pas. Voici, September 28, 2009, accessed April 29, 2014 (French).
  21. ^ Alfred Nakache au Hall of Fame Fort-Lauderdale: en souvenir du nageur d'Auschwitz. In: lequipe.fr. May 19, 2019, accessed May 22, 2019 .
  22. ^ Yvette Benayoun-Nakache arrêté la politique. (No longer available online.) Voix du Midi, January 12, 2014, archived from the original on May 2, 2014 ; Retrieved April 30, 2014 (French). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.voixdumidi.fr
personal data
SURNAME Nakache, Alfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nakache, Artem (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French swimmer
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Constantine
DATE OF DEATH 4th August 1983
Place of death Cerbère