Leen Sanders

Leen Sanders
Data
Birth Name	Emphasizes Joshua Sanders
Weight class	medium weight
nationality	Netherlands
birthday	June 11, 1908
place of birth	Rotterdam
Date of death	April 8, 1992
Place of death	Rotterdam
Combat Statistics
Struggles	75
Victories	40
Knockout victories	6th
Defeats	19th
draw	16

Leendert Josua Sanders (born June 11, 1908 in Rotterdam , † April 8, 1992 there ) was a Dutch boxer and survivor of the Holocaust .

Athletic career

Leen Sanders was born the fourth of ten children to Jozef and Sara Sanders. From the 1920s onwards, his father ran a waffle bakery in Rotterdam, and his mother rented handcarts and trucks . At the age of 14, Leen Sanders wanted to emulate his older brother Bram, who ran a boxing school in Rotterdam, and become a boxer. The boxers from Rotterdam were dominant in the Netherlands at that time, as there was a ban on boxing matches in Amsterdam from 1921 to 1940 (as in some other Dutch cities) ( Amsterdamse boksverbod ). In 1926 Sanders won the Dutch amateur lightweight championship , two years later the featherweight championship. He played his first international fight in November 1926 against the British Eddie Hutton in the middleweight division and won with a knockout. In 1928 he turned professional against the opposition of his parents, who were not very happy about the boxing ambitions of his older brother Bram . In 1929 he became Dutch lightweight champion and lost the title the following year to Bep van Klaveren , who also came from Rotterdam and had become Olympic champion at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam (the Amsterdam boxing ban was lifted for two weeks) . In 1933 Sanders won the national welterweight title and was then seven times in a row Dutch middleweight champion. In 1936 he became European runner-up after a defeat against Felix Wouters from Belgium . He won his last national title in 1940 against Luc van Dam .

In total, Sanders played 75 professional fights, of which he won 40, six of which by knockout; he himself never went knockout. He boxed all over Western Europe and wore a Star of David on his sports trousers out of pride in his Jewish origins . When he was supposed to box again for the European championship against the German Gustav Eder , whom he had defeated twice in the late 1920s, in 1936 , he refused, since in Germany the anti-Semitic ideology of the National Socialists was meanwhile a state reason.

In Auschwitz

A few months after Leen Sanders' fight against van Dam in February 1940, Rotterdam was bombed by the German Air Force , completely destroying the house in which he lived with his family. In August 1942, Leen Sanders and his family hid from the German occupiers, but were betrayed four months later. On January 11, 1943, he was eight, together with his wife and two sons and ten years from the Westerbork transit camp in the Auschwitz-Birkenau deported. The two children were gassed immediately after arriving in Auschwitz on January 14th , his wife on April 30th. Seven of his siblings, including his brother Bram, and his parents were murdered in the Holocaust.

Registration card from Leen Sanders as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp Dachau

In the camp, Sanders was recognized by a member of the camp SS who had seen him boxing in 1936 and was given a special position. He fought boxing matches and gave training for the guards. Sanders used this special position and his position as Kapo to make life easier for his fellow prisoners. The resistance fighter Bill Minco wrote in his book Koude voeten, begenadigd tot levenslang , in which he reported on his time in various concentration camps: “Dat ik Auschwitz en de te volgen period overleefde, heb ik te thank aan de Rotterdamse bokser Leen Sanders, die dankzij een boksende SS-er enigszins een uitzonderingspositie innam, en die mij als mede-Rotterdammer bij voortduring de hand boven het hoofd hield. "(German:" That I survived Auschwitz and the following time, I owe the Rotterdam boxer Leen Sanders, who, thanks to a boxing SS man, took a somewhat unusual position and constantly held his protective hand over me. ”) So he provided his fellow prisoners with food and clothing that he had“ organized ”for himself at risk. In January 1945, the prisoners were taken to the Dachau concentration camp brought by Sanders returned there after the liberation of the camp to the Netherlands. Of his family, only himself and two of his brothers survived the Holocaust.

After the war

In 1946, Sanders married a friend of one of his sisters and won two boxing matches, one in Amsterdam, where the boxing ban had since been lifted. In the same year they left the Netherlands and emigrated first to Aruba and later to Los Angeles . He ran a bar in Aruba with little success, but in Los Angeles he got by with cleaning services for schools. Until the 1970s, however, he had to fight for financial recognition from the Dutch state, which was also not due to him because he had meanwhile exchanged Dutch for US citizenship .

At the age of 77, Leen Sanders and his wife returned to the Netherlands from homesickness. He died on April 8, 1992 at the age of 83 in his hometown.

Web links

• Leen Sanders in the BoxRec database
• Leen Sanders in the BoxRec Encyclopaedia

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} leen sanders - terug in Rotterdam (1985), page 1. (No longer available online.) Joodsamsterdam.nl, p. 1 , archived from the original on October 6, 2014 ; Retrieved October 1, 2014 (Dutch). 
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Leen Sanders. (No longer available online.) Joodsamsterdam.nl, archived from the original on October 6, 2014 ; Retrieved September 30, 2014 (Dutch). 
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Nico Van Thyn: The boxer Leen Sanders ... my dad's hero. nvanthyn.blogspot.de/, January 25, 2014, accessed on September 30, 2014 (English). 
4. ↑ De boksende angel van Auschwitz. (No longer available online.) Erikbrouwer.de, archived from the original on October 6, 2014 ; Retrieved September 30, 2014 (Dutch). 
5. ↑ ^{a b c} leen sanders - terug in Rotterdam (1985), page 2. (No longer available online.) Joodsamsterdam.nl, archived from the original on October 6, 2014 ; Retrieved October 1, 2014 (Dutch).