Zygmunt helmsman

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Zygmunt Steuermann (born February 5, 1899 in Sambor , Austria-Hungary , today Ukraine ; † December 1941 or 1943 in or near Lemberg ) was a Polish national football player and victim of the Holocaust .

Life

In the Austro-Hungarian monarchy

Zygmunt helmsman was the fourth and youngest child of assimilated Jewish family as a subject of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I was born. His father was a doctor of law and temporarily mayor of his hometown Sambor. German and Polish were spoken in the family. His older sister Salomea (Salka) appeared as an actress on German-speaking stages in Austria-Hungary and was later successful as a screenwriter in Hollywood under her married name Salka Viertel . His second sister Rosa (Ruzia) got an engagement at the Schiller Theater in Berlin , later she married the director Josef Gielen . His older brother Eduard Steuermann later made a name for himself as a composer , pianist and music teacher . Zygmunt got the nickname "Dusko" in the family.

At the beginning of the First World War , the family left Galicia for fear of the Cossack associations of the tsarist army , which were notorious for their pogroms against the Jews, and settled in Vienna , where Zygmunt attended a grammar school and passed his school leaving examination. In 1917 he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian Army and was deployed in an artillery regiment in Slovakia .

Republic of Poland

After the defeat of the Central Powers in the war, the Zygmunt Steuermann siblings stayed in Austria or in the German Empire . He himself returned to his hometown, which was now part of the re-established Polish state , and took on Polish citizenship . He volunteered as an officer candidate for the newly formed armed forces . In 1919/20 he took part in the Polish-Soviet War .

After the end of the war, he settled in Lemberg (Polish: Lwów ). At first he lived on the donations from his father, because he could "not choose a real profession". He also received awards from his soccer clubs as well as for other sporting achievements; so he won several local tennis championships .

After finishing his career as a football player in the mid-1930s, he stayed in Lviv. He ignored invitations from his eldest sister, who had emigrated to California , to also move to the USA . He also turned down the offer, with a Zionist group in the under British mandate standing Palestine to go.

In World War II

Due to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact , what was then eastern Poland was occupied by the Red Army in the second half of September 1939 . At the end of October 1939 it was annexed by the Soviet Union after a rigged referendum . To avoid the deportation to Siberia , which mainly affected members of the Polish elite, Steuermann took on Soviet citizenship and returned to his hometown of Sambor.

In California, his sister Salka tried in vain to allow him to leave the country. She even brought in the US ambassador to Moscow, Laurence Steinhardt , who himself came from a Jewish family. Zygmunt Steuermann was not given permission to travel from Sambor to Moscow , while his mother was allowed to do so. She got a US visa and was able to leave the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railway .

In contrast to the thousands of Jewish residents who fled eastwards with the Soviet organizations after the German attack on the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa ) on June 22, 1941, the helmsman stayed in Sambor, which was occupied by the Wehrmacht . According to Polish historians, he was deported to the Lviv ghetto and shot there in December 1941. After the war, however, two survivors of the German occupation reported to his sister Salka independently that he had jumped off a train in 1943 that was supposed to take Jews to a concentration camp , but SS guards shot him immediately.

Sports career

Against the resistance of his parents, who viewed football as "hooliganism", Zygmunt Steuermann joined the local Korona Sambor club at the age of twelve. After the family moved to Vienna in 1914, he played there first in the youth team of Gersthofer SV , then with Germania, and finally with the amateur sports club , the club of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie.

Polish League

After the World War and military service in the Polish armed forces, he signed a contract with his first club Korona Sambor in 1920 and took the position of center forward . After a year he moved to ŻKS Lwów (Jewish Sports Club Lemberg).

From 1923 on he played for Hasmonea Lemberg , the strongest Jewish football club in Poland. In 1925 the Polish Football Association (PZPN) imposed sanctions on Hasmonea for violating amateur status. Nine players were banned and fined for prohibited “professional gamblings”. The helmsman could not prove any misconduct.

In 1927 Hasmonea was one of the founders of the Polish league , but had to relegate after two years from the top division. The 1.83 meter tall helmsman, who weighed 85 kilograms and had an extremely powerful shot, became his club's top scorer: he scored 41 goals in 52 league games.

In 1929 he moved to Legia Warsaw , but returned to Hasmonea after only one year.

National team

In his first appearance in the national team in 1926 against Turkey in Lviv, he managed the first hat trick in the history of the national team in a 6-1 victory . In his second and last international match against the USA in 1928 , he was able to avert a Polish defeat with his penalty goal to make it 3: 3 in the last minute. President Ignacy Mościcki sat for the first time in the VIP box of the Warsaw Stadium .

Second World War

In autumn 1939, Steuermann rejoined his home club Korona in the Soviet-occupied Sambor. However, the Polish club was dissolved by the Soviet secret police NKVD and a little later, with Soviet leadership, it was re-established as Dinamo Sambor. Steuermann played for him until shortly before the Wehrmacht invaded the region at the end of June 1941.

literature

  • Salka district : Unteachable heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010. pp. 338-343, 399.
  • Thomas Urban : Black Eagles, White Eagles. German and Polish footballers at the heart of politics. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-89533-775-8 , pp. 97-101.

Web links

  • Entry in the Central Database of the Names of Holocaust Victims at the Yad Vashem Memorial
  • Photo, Przegląd Sportowy, September 25, 1926, p. 6. ( online )
  • Caricature, Przegląd Sportowy, 23 June 1928, p. 4. ( online )

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Thomas Urban: Black eagle, white eagle. German and Polish footballers at the heart of politics. Göttingen 2011, p. 101.
  2. ↑ a b Salka district: Unteachable heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010., p. 399.
  3. ↑ a b Salka district: Unteachable heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010. p. 15.
  4. ↑ Salka Quarter: Unteachable Heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010. p. 105.
  5. ↑ Salka Quarter: Unteachable Heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010, p. 116.
  6. ↑ Salka Quarter: Unteachable Heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010, p. 166.
  7. ↑ Salka Quarter: Unteachable Heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010, p. 227.
  8. ↑ Salka Quarter: Unteachable Heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010. p. 262.
  9. ↑ Salka Quarter: Unteachable Heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010, p. 343.
  10. ↑ Salka Quarter: Unteachable Heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010., p. 341.
  11. ↑ Salka Quarter: Unteachable Heart. Memories of a life with 20th century artists. Frankfurt a. M. 2010., p. 37.
  12. ^ A b Thomas Urban: Black eagle, white eagle. German and Polish footballers at the heart of politics. Göttingen 2011, p. 97
  13. ↑ Andrzej Gowarzewski: Lwów i Wilno w ektraklasie. Katowice 1997, p. 180.
  14. ↑ http://www.worldfootball.net/teams/legia-warszawa/1930/2/
  15. ↑ http://www.weltfussball.at/teams/legia-warszawa/1931/6/
  16. ↑ Przegląd Sportowy, September 18, 1926, p. 1. http://buwcd.buw.uw.edu.pl/e_zbiory/ckcp/p_sportowy/1926/numer037/imagepages/image1.htm (the editorial team has several Mistakes made: The two photos with Turkish players were exposed the wrong way round. And the names of the Polish team are listed from left to right and not, as noted in the caption, from right to left. So the helmsman is second from the right.)
  17. ↑ Przegląd Sportowy, June 16, 1928, p. 1. http://buwcd.buw.uw.edu.pl/e_zbiory/ckcp/p_sportowy/1928/numer024/imagepages/image1.htm .
personal data
SURNAME Helmsman, Zygmunt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish soccer player
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Sambir , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH December 1941 or 1943
Place of death near Lviv , Poland