The genocide also had victims from green fields: Who is József Braun?

The story of József Braun, who was murdered by the Nazis: From green fields to the concentration camp... The story of one of the most shameful events in human history.

Holocaust: The genocide, in which approximately 6 million Jews were systematically killed within the borders occupied by the SS forces led by Heinrich Himmler during the reign of Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler, is remembered every year on the 27th of January, on the commemoration day known as the "Holocaust".

József Braun (also known as József Barna; 26 February 1901 – 20 February 1943) was a Hungarian Olympic footballer who played as a half back. Braun began his career in Hungary before finishing it in the American Soccer League. He earned 27 caps, scoring 11 goals, with the Hungary national team. After retiring from playing, he coached for several years. Braun was killed in 1943 in a Nazi forced labor camp.

Would you like to get to know closely the football lover of black and white times who was murdered by the Nazis, shown as the 'Cristiano Ronaldo' of his time, and written in history as the best Jewish football player of all time?

BORN IN 1901

He was born in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, on February 26, 1901, and spent his childhood years in a poor working-class neighborhood of the city. During his school years among more privileged children, he was ridiculed for his poverty. Articles describing his life state that other children constantly made fun of him because of his poverty, and that his classmates said to him, "These poor people are dirty by nature." The nickname 'Csibi', which means street urchin in Hungarian, is inherited from those times. During those years, he became interested in football, and despite his father's objection, he spent his time after school playing football on the streets and improving his skills.

His fate changed when he turned 15, playing with older kids, and he was invited to the club's training sessions after one of the coaches of MTK Budapest, one of the biggest clubs in the country, saw him playing in a local park. In those years, MTK was known as the “Jewish team” and, in addition to the club's Jewish president, a number of prominent Jewish footballers were involved in the club's history, including Béla Guttmann, Gyula Mandi, and Henrik Nadler.

FOOTBALL PLAYER OF THE YEAR WAS ELECTED

The football player, who shone with his skills on green fields in a short time, was chosen as the "Football Player of the Year" in 1919. Articles describing his football style say that he blows like a hurricane on the right wing, that he resembles Cristiano Ronaldo when compared to today's football players, that he is incredibly quick, has excellent ball control, that he is a ball acrobat who is so talented that he can pass a man in the phone booth, and that he literally smells the goal.

Israeli sports journalist Ronen Dorfan describes the football player as the best Jewish football player he has ever seen in his life, who can perform all his duties on the green field with perfect talent. His data for those years are nine Hungarian league titles and two Hungarian Cups with MTK. In addition to his successes at the club level, he was selected for the Hungarian National Team at the age of 17, had 11 goals in 27 national matches, and was also one of the stars of the 1924 Olympic Games. Dorfan explains that this was a relatively high number of matches in the context of international football in the 1920s, when football was played with different rules and international matches were played less frequently due to geographical difficulties and financial constraints...

HE DIED IN THE CONCENTRATION CAMP

Unfortunately, Csibi's football career ended early and suddenly. He returned to the green fields at the age of 20 after a difficult injury period but had to hang up his cleats after another major injury in 1926, when he was 25 years old when medicine was not as developed as it is today. He attempted a comeback with two American teams (including the Jewish club Brooklyn Hakoah) in the late 1920s but to no avail. In the 1930s, he tried his luck in coaching and coached Slovenian Bratislava, but had to return to his hometown Hungary in 1938 as anti-Semitism increased.

The end of the story is sad, as you know, the years of World War II and Hungary's entry into the war as a member of the "Axis Powers" in 1941. The football player, who was in his 40s in those years, had to join one of the labor battalions of the Hungarian army on the eastern front, like many Jews. He was forced to dig trenches with his Jewish comrades like himself and fight as a conscript soldier in the face of the relentless fire of the Soviet army on the front line where death was rampant, but he was not among those lucky enough to survive. He was 41 years old when he died of hunger and cold in inhumane conditions in a Nazi-forced labor camp in Ukraine in 1943, after two years of compulsory military service. In the last photograph of the sad story, there is the image of Nazi soldiers waiting over his corpse to remove his golden teeth...

THE BOOK WAS WRITTEN

Today, József Braun's name is almost forgotten in Hungary. What remains of his heartbreaking story is the book bearing his name ('Csibi', Bela Senesh, first published in 1950) and the author's hope for assimilation into Hungarian society through football and sports. The author was a famous playwright and journalist in Hungary at that time, and the father of Hebrew poet and paratrooper Hannah Senesh, who was captured and killed by the Nazis during World War II. He also noted that 'Csibi' became his most famous work, and that the book was published in 1950. Let us remind you that it was translated into Hebrew by Avigdor HaMeiri in the 1990s.

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József “Csibi” Braun: The Tragic Story of a Jewish Soccer Star

https://blog.nli.org.il/en/csibi/