Ellen burqa

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Ellen burqa figure skating
Ellen Burka portrait.jpg

Ellen Burka, ca.1990
Full name Ellen Ruth Burqa
nation NetherlandsNetherlands/CanadaCanada
date of birth August 11, 1921
place of birth Amsterdam, Netherlands
date of death September 12, 2016
Place of death Toronto, Ontario
Career
discipline Single run
 

Ellen Ruth Burka CM , née Dambitsch , from 1935 Danby , (born August 11, 1921 in Amsterdam ; died September 12, 2016 in Toronto , Ontario ) was a Canadian - Dutch figure skater and figure skating coach. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, she survived the time of the Shoah , deported as persecuted Jews to the German Theresienstadt camp. As a trainer in Canada, she looked after Olympic champions and world champions in figure skating. She became a member of the Order of Canada in 1978 and inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1996 .

biography

Personal history

Ellen Dambitsch was born in Amsterdam as the daughter of German parents of Jewish origin and had a sister named Margaret ten years older than her. Until she started school, she only spoke German and English . She loved music and took dance lessons. In 1933 she started figure skating with her school friend Elsbeth Meijer. In 1934 the first artificial ice rink opened in the Apollohal in Amsterdam, and Ellen Danby and Elsbeth Meijer spent most of their free time there. Soon they were considered the best figure skaters in the country. Before 1940 they performed together with two young men in small, self-choreographed ice shows. In 1935 the Dambitsch family changed their name to Danby .

During the German occupation and the emerging marginalization and persecution of Jewish people, Ellen Danby, who had not been aware of her Jewish origins until then, was forbidden to continue training with her friends in the Apollohal . In June 1943 she was captured with her family in a major raid and deported to the Westerbork transit camp; her grandmother had been picked up two weeks earlier.

Ellen Danby was registered in Westerbork as a "Dutch figure skating champion", although such a championship had not yet taken place. At first she escaped transport to an extermination camp or other camps in the east; she was postponed because the commandant of Westerbork, Albert Konrad Gemmeker , was an admirer of the figure skaters Maxi Herber and Ernst Baier , and he gave her a privileged position in the camp. Gemmeker arranged for Ellen's skates and sportswear to be brought to the camp by her friend Elsbeth so that she could train there on a frozen pond. It was planned that she would teach German soldiers how to ice skate, but before that came about, the layer of ice on the pond thawed.

In July 1943, Ellen Danby had to watch her parents board the train to the Sobibor extermination camp . There they were murdered, the grandmother had been killed before. She herself initially stayed in Westerbork and worked as the housekeeper for the German architect Arthur Winne, who was in charge of the camp's construction office. According to her later statements, she refused to harass a German soldier at a party in his villa; thereupon she was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto a short time later on instructions from Gemmeker . In a television interview she later reported that Elisabeth Hassel, Gemmeker's secretary and mistress, had persuaded him not to send her to an extermination camp.

In Theresienstadt, Ellen Danby met the Czech artist Jan Burka . After the liberation of the camp by the Red Army in May 1945, the two of them walked and hitchhiked to Amsterdam, 900 kilometers away, within two weeks, where they married. They had two daughters, Petra (* 1946) and Astra (* 1948), with whom they emigrated to Canada in 1951 at the request of Jan Burka, who was afraid of a new war in Europe; Ellen Burka would have preferred to stay in the Netherlands. After a few years, Jan Burka left the family and in 1954 the couple divorced. Ellen Burka was now a single mother. For decades, she didn't tell anyone she was Jewish and raised her daughters in an Anglican way . She did not talk about her camp experiences and told the girls that the grandparents had died in a car accident. She didn't tell them what had really happened until the mid-1960s. She visited the Netherlands several times, and in 2010 she celebrated the 80th anniversary of their friendship with Elsbeth Meijer. Ellen Burka died in Toronto in 2016 at the age of 95.

Athletic career

In 1946 and 1947 - between her pregnancies - Ellen Burka won the competitions that are seen as the forerunners of the Dutch championships, which were officially held for the first time in 1950. After emigrating to Canada, she started working as a trainer in Toronto. She has taught at the Toronto Cricket Skating and Curling Club and the Granite Club . She found Canadian ice skating too rigid and too technical and introduced elements of ballet and modern dance into the choreography of her athletes.

Ellen Burka trained her daughter Petra, who won bronze at the 1964 Winter Olympics and became world champion in 1965 . In 1968 she became the trainer of Toller Cranston , who won six Canadian national titles and an Olympic bronze medal in 1976 , and who was particularly known for the high artistic level of his freestyle performances. In 2009 he called Burqa "a goddess in the world of figure skating". She also trained Dorothy Hamill , Elvis Stojko and Sandra Bezic / Val Bezic , Patrick Chan , Tracey Wainman , Christopher Bowman and other World Cup and Olympic participants. She took part as a trainer at the Winter Olympics seven times and at the World Championships 25 times. She remained active as a trainer into old age.

In 1978 Burka was appointed a member of the Order of Canada : "For the elevation of ice skating to an art form and for imaginative choreography on the ice". In 1996 she was inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame , the Canadian Figure Skating Hall of Fame , the Etobicoke Sports Hall of Fame, and the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame . In the Netherlands, she was honored with the Blijk van Erkenning (mark of appreciation) in 2014 by the national ice sports association KNSB at the Jaap Edenbaan in Amsterdam for her services to figure skating .

Family history

Stumbling blocks for Rose and Paul Danby and for Clara Dambitsch-Daniel in front of Veronesestraat 3 in Amsterdam
The former family home where Margaret Danby later practiced

A great-uncle of Ellen Burka was Adolphe Saalfeld (ca. 1865-1926) from the German Oranienbaum . He was a chemist and a perfumer . Around 1888 he went to Great Britain and ran Sparks, White & Company Ltd there . He and his wife Gertrud adopted his niece, Rose Goldstein, whose parents - the mother Gertrude Goldstein was a sister of Saalfeld - had died early. In 1907 the Berlin-born Paul Josef Dambitsch, the father of Ellen Burka, was sent to Manchester to do an apprenticeship with Adolphe Saalfeld. He met Saalfeld's niece Rose, and the two married in 1910. Rose and Paul Dambitsch's first daughter, Margaret, was born in England in 1911, followed ten years later by Ellen in Amsterdam.

In 1912 Adolphe Saalfeld booked a first-class ticket for the Titanic ; he wanted to attract new customers in the USA. His son-in-law Paul Dambitsch accompanied him to Southampton to see him off and to visit the ship. On this occasion, Dambitsch wrote a letter to his wife, Rose, which was the first letter sent from the Titanic . Adolphe Saalfeld carried a suitcase with 65 bottles filled with essential oils . After the ship collided with an iceberg , he managed to board lifeboat 3 and had to leave his sample case behind. He was accepted by the Carpathia and returned to England. His family reported that he could never sleep properly again, so instructed his chauffeur to drive him through the empty streets at night before he could doze off. He never recovered mentally from the experience of the ship's sinking and died in 1926 at the age of 61. In 2000, during a salvage expedition near the wreck of the Titanic, a leather bag with the inscription A. Saalfeld & Co., Manchester, was found on the ocean floor . In the bag there were metal containers with Adolphe Saalfeld's 65 glass vials, only one of which had broken, presumably only during the rescue.

Paul Dambitsch was interned as a German citizen on the Isle of Man during the First World War . In 1919 he was offered the job of managing director of a Kempinski restaurant in Amsterdam, and the family moved from Great Britain to the Netherlands. He also founded the wine import-export company Kempinski Inc. and PJ Danby Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals . In 1935 he changed his name to Danby . Due to his international business contacts, he felt safe after the occupation of the Netherlands and refused to bring himself and his family to safety. In July 1943 he and his wife, mother and himself were deported and murdered in the course of the Holocaust .

Ellen Danby's sister Margaret was a doctor from 1939 and practiced in Oss , where she was the only woman to become a member of the Jewish Council there. She tried to save as many people as possible from deportation by declaring them too sick to be transported, mostly in vain. In July 1943 she had to go into hiding herself; she stayed with the Manders family in Schaijk and survived the occupation. After the war she practiced as a family doctor in her parents' house at Veronesestraat 3 in Amsterdam, in front of which three stumbling blocks for her parents and grandmother were later laid. In 1981 Margaret Danby founded the Nederlandse Migraine Stichting . She died in 1990. After her death, the family found the letter in a shoe box that Paul Dambitsch had sent to his wife on April 10, 1912 on board the Titanic . On April 23, 2016, the letter went up for auction for £ 15,000.

reception

In 2008 the Toronto Jewish Film Festival premiered the film Skate to Survive , a documentary about the life of Ellen Burka made by her daughter Astra. In January 2015, a Dutch TV station broadcast a film about her life story in the sports history series Other Tijden Sport . For this documentary, Ellen Burka returned to Amsterdam to visit her former family home and the Westerbork transit camp.

Publications

  • With John Mardon and Kiyo of Holiday Studio: Figure Skating . Don Mills, Ont .: Collier-MacMillan Canada; New York: Macmillan, 1974.
  • Anne Udaskin & USC Shoah Foundation: Ellen Burka oral history (interview code: 475) . USC Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles 1995.

Web links

Commons : Ellen Burka  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Danby, Ellen Ruth (1921-2016). In: resources.huygens.knaw.nl. Accessed August 5, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Clara Dambitsch-Daniel. In: joodsmonument.nl. Retrieved August 9, 2020 (Dutch).
  3. ^ Paul Josef Danby. In: joodsmonument.nl. Accessed August 9, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Rosie Danby-Goldstein. In: joodsmonument.nl. Retrieved August 9, 2020 (Dutch).
  5. ^ Ad van Liempt: Gemmeker: commandant van Kamp Westerbork . Balans, 2019, ISBN 978-94-6003-978-2 , pp. 111 (Dutch).
  6. ^ A b c Beverley Smith: Burka opens doors to her life. In: theglobeandmail.com. February 26, 2009, accessed August 10, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Elite coach Ellen Burka made figure skating an art. In: theglobeandmail.com. September 23, 2016, accessed August 10, 2020 .
  8. ↑ a b Ellen Burka dies at age 95: Hall of Fame figure skating coach survived the Holocaust, revolutionized her sport and kept working in her 90s. In: nationalpost.com. September 13, 2016, accessed August 10, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Ellen Burka, Dutch-born Canadian figure skater and coach, Died at 95. In: historygreatest.com. September 14, 2016, accessed August 10, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Kunstrijdster Ellen Burka-Danby (95) overleden. In: ed.nl. September 3, 2016, accessed August 10, 2020 (Dutch).
  11. ^ Adolphe Saalfeld: Titanic Survivor. In: encyclopedia-titanica.org. November 13, 2017, accessed August 5, 2020 .
  12. ^ Adolphe Saalfeld: Titanic Survivor. In: encyclopedia-titanica.org. November 13, 2017, accessed August 10, 2020 .
  13. ↑ Sandra Sperber, Marc Pitzke: In New York, more than 5500 "Titanic" finds are being auctioned. In: Spiegel Online . March 30, 2012, accessed August 9, 2020 .
  14. ↑ Ioannis Georgiou: 20 years - The wreck of the Titanic. (PDF; 2.6 MB) In: Titanic Post. Journal of the Titanic Association Switzerland. No. 55 March 2006, accessed August 10, 2020 .
  15. ↑ RMS Titanic / Judaeica: An extremely rare letter written onboard Titanic b. In: invaluable.com. April 23, 2016, accessed August 9, 2020 .
  16. ↑ Lokaal Nieuwsnet: Speciale Sprokkeling op 4 mei bij heemkundekring Schaijk-Reek. In: arenalokaal.nl. Retrieved August 10, 2020 (Dutch).
  17. ↑ Stiekeme report, roodvonk en Joodse nuns. In: datisoss.nl. May 2, 2018, accessed August 10, 2020 .
  18. ^ Stumbling Stones Veronesestraat 3 - Amsterdam. In: tracesofwar.com. June 20, 1943, accessed August 10, 2020 .
  19. ↑ De Nederlandse Vereniging Hoofdpijn (NHV) - History en bestuur. In: nederlandsehoofdpijnvereniging.nl. September 2, 2013, accessed August 9, 2020 .
  20. ↑ Margaret Danby. In: joodsmonument.nl. February 17, 2014, accessed August 10, 2020 (Dutch).
  21. ↑ Vicky Smith: First written letter on the Titanic before ship set sail goes up for auction. In: mirror.co.uk. April 8, 2016, accessed August 10, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Burqa, Ellen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dambitsch, Ellen Ruth (maiden name); Danby, Ellen Ruth (maiden name after change in 1935)
SHORT DESCRIPTION Canadian-Dutch figure skater and trainer
BIRTH DATE August 11, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam
DATE OF DEATH September 12, 2016
PLACE OF DEATH Toronto