Roman Cantor

Roman Cantor

Roman Józef Kantor (born March 1912 in Łódź , Russian Empire , † 1943 in Majdanek concentration camp ) was a Polish fencer .

Life

After finishing school, Roman Kantor moved to Paris in 1924 to complete his training there. He was extremely athletic and was active in athletics , played tennis and soccer . In France he also started fencing training; as a weapon he chose the sword . In 1929 he took third place at the student championships in Paris and sixth place at the French open fencing championships. From 1931 to 1932 he trained in England and with an Italian teacher in Germany.

In 1934 Kantor went back to Łódź, became a member of the local army sports club and two-time city champion with the team. In 1935 he became champion of Warsaw and contributed to a Polish victory over the German team. According to a sports note in Vienna 's Die Voice , Kantor became a Polish fencing master in 1936. After he had finished second in the open championship of Lemberg , he was nominated for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin . There he reached the semi-finals both individually and with the team. In December 1936 Kantor moved to the Łódzki Klub Sportowy . There he was also two-time city champion in the individual and in the team (1938 and 1939), was champion of the Nordic countries in 1938 and Polish runner-up in 1939. In May 1939 he and other Olympic participants from Łódź took the Olympic oath for the 1940 Olympic Games .

When the German attack on Poland began , Kantor, who was of Jewish origin, fled to Lemberg , which had fallen to the Soviet Union as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact . There he won the Soviet championship in 1940. When Lemberg was also taken by the Germans in 1941, he obtained the passport and nationality of a South American country and waited in the Warsaw ghetto , where he lived with his wife on Sapiezynska Street, for permission from the German authorities to leave the country. Instead, he and other people living there were deported by the Germans to the Majdanek concentration camp in 1942, where he was used as a forced laborer at Ostindustrie GmbH (OSTI) . In 1943 his trail is lost there; the fate of his wife is also unknown.

Web links

• Roman Kantor in the database of Sports-Reference (English; archived from the original )
• Cantor, novel. www.lodzjews.com, archived from the original on October 28, 2006 ; Retrieved April 26, 2014 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ There are different information about the date of birth: 2nd ( yadvashem.org ), 15th ( sports-reference.com ) or 20th March ( yadvashem.org ).
2. ↑ Jewish fencer becomes Polish master ( Memento of the original from April 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in: The Voice (Vienna), June 16, 1936, p. 6 
3. ^ Paul Taylor: Jews and the Olympic Games: the clash between sport and politics: with a complete review of Jewish Olympic medallists . Sussex Academic Press, pg 106 2004, ISBN 1-903900-87-5 , p. 268.