Basketball to forget the Shoa. Ralph Klein’s love of basketball

“We’re on the map”. The words of Tal Brody, Maccabi Tel Aviv’s naturalized Israeli American guard, still resonate in the Virton stadium, Belgium – the neutral venue decided for the match -, and followed the victory against Sergej Belov’s CSKA Moscow, decisive in the semifinal round of the Champions Cup in 1977. The team of Brody, in fact, Griffin and Berkovitz will then win the final against Mobilgirgi Varese, in its eighth of ten consecutive games in those years, which earned them five cups.

Maccabi’s coach was Ralph Kleinborn in Berlin in 1931 into a Hungarian Jewish family who, faced with growing anti-Semitism, moved to Budapest, where his father was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Instead, he and the rest of the family owe the narrow escape to one of the righteous of those years, Raoul Wallenberg, who together with three hundred and fifty people created a network capable of saving hundreds of Jews destined for concentration camps., thanks to Swedish safe-conducts and numerous hiding places. Like him, in Budapest, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca acted who replaced the Spanish consul, the Swiss Carl Lutz and the Portuguese Sanpaolo Garrido. Wallenberg managed, among many actions, to bribe the leaders of the Hungarian Nazi party who wanted to blow up the Jewish ghetto with 70,000 people inside. His reward was death in one of the Soviet gulags.

When fourteen-year-old Ralph comes out of hiding, he finds Budapest destroyed and Russian tanks on the banks of the Danube. A football lover, thanks to his father, he found his favorite sport in basketball, in a country that was also a powerhouse in water polo: physique, talent and futuristic approaches to the game mixed together would produce several generations of great sportsmen. In 1951, however, the Klein family decided to emigrate to Israel, where Ralph immediately became guard of Maccabi Tel Aviv, which he will coach on several occasions, and of the Israeli national team.

Author of 2,701 points in 160 games, as a coach and American basketball enthusiast, over the years he built teams capable of winning the national title and asserting himself in the Champions Cup. In 1977 the match against CSKA was not just sport. The USSR had imprisoned its savior, did not recognize Israel and prevented Russian Jews from emigrating. Generally those challenges ended in a forfeit because the Soviets didn’t show up, but not this time, the stakes were too high. After beating CSKA Moscow and then Varese, Maccabi won its first Euroleaguetoday are six. Ralph Klein in 1979 will lead the Israeli national team, which he coached at the same time as the club, to the European silver medal in Turin, losing the final against the Soviet Union; the twists of fate.

In 1983 the decision that, more than any other, has left a mark in his existence: to accept the bench of the national team of West Germany and Saturn Cologne. He is a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust who coached the German team. In that choice there was all his personality and his character, but behind that gesture, symbolic for some, there was the desire to leave above all a sporting mark and even if he did not win anything in those years he made German basketball grow capable with him to achieve unexpected results, such as eighth place at the 1984 Olympic Games and fifth place at the 1985 European Championship in Stuttgart.

Someone wanted to read in Ralph Klein’s choice a cathartic gesture – almost to close a circle of those who recovered a part of themselves that had been taken away from them by history –, the stitching of a scar, but some scars remain open forever and never there is sport or victory that can soothe them. If anything, Klein’s sporting life – who died on August 7, 2008 – was that of a man looking to fill a void, that perennial dissatisfaction that pervades perfectionists or those who continually want to challenge themselves with new and never banal tests.

He won the first basketball Champions Cup with an Israeli team, within the dominion of the USSR, Spain and Italy, he revived the fortunes of German basketball, he defeated the Soviets in the first time they raised their heads to recognize sportingly ( in basketball) Israel, reminding them where they are on the world map. He did it as a Jew, Hungarian and German, he did it with the love of basketball as his guiding star. It could be said that he has sublimated himself by finding in sport the only true banner in which to recognize and recognize himself.