Among the lesser-known atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II were boxing matches that forced emaciated Jewish prisoners to fight each other to the death for the amusement of the German SS officers.
Like gladiatorial combat in the Roman Empire, these could go on indefinitely until one bare-knuckle left the other bloodied and unconscious, so weakened that he was useless as a forced laborer and would be taken to a gas chamber or crematorium or shot on the ground. place. As the officers cheered the winner, his prize could be an extra dollop of food so he would have the strength to fight again.
Whatever satisfaction the winner felt when he relieved his hunger pangs, he had to grapple with his guilt for carrying out his tormentor’s command by brutally murdering another person, usually another Jew. But like the main character of ‘Sophie’s Choice’, he faced an impossible dilemma: If he lost, he probably would have been killed.
A new film, “The Survivor,” directed by Barry Levinson and starring Ben Foster, which opens Wednesday, the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day, on HBO and HBO Max, tells the story of one of these boxers: Harry Haft, an illiterate crook from a Polish industrial town near Lodz and one of eight siblings. He survived much of the war beating up opponent after opponent, 75 fights in all, in a coal mine subcamp of Auschwitz.
After the war, Haft took the skills he had acquired in the camps with him to America. He hoped that newspaper articles about his professional boxing matches would be read by a fiancée whose disappearance haunted him or by the siblings and other family members he had not been able to trace.
The highlight of his two-year career was a 1949 match in Providence, RI, against Rocky Marciano, who was on his way to becoming World Heavyweight Champion, the only one to retire undefeated at the time. Dressed in purple Everlast pants with a Star of David stitched on them, 24-year-old Haft continued into the third round when a barrage of punches from Marciano flattened him. Haft later claimed he threw the fight after three gunmen came to his dressing room and threatened his life.
Yet he was never able to temper the anger that consumed him that he had suffered, including the deaths of his mother and six of his siblings. Haft was short-tempered, hitting and kicking the older of his two sons for minor misconduct, verbally assaulting his wife and daughter and often threatening to kill himself if things didn’t go well, his eldest son, Alan Scott Haft, said in a video call. When his daughter, Helene, decided to marry a non-Jew, he knocked out the windows of his house.
“I’ve had my share of beatings,” said Haft, who is now 71. “My sister had her share of abuse. My mother apologized for everything by saying, ‘It’s his background.’ Who wanted to hear about his background!”
The Holocaust has shadowed the lives of several members of the creative team behind the film, which is based on Alan’s 2006 biography of his father, including two actresses who are the grandchildren of survivors, and screenwriter Justine Juel Gillmer, whose maternal grandmother in the Danish underground that saved most of that country’s Jews. Matti Leshem, one of the producers and the man credited with bringing Haft’s story to the screen, is the son of a Czech man who during the war forged documents used to give Jews a Christian identity. His father could not persuade his mother and sister to flee, and they perished in Auschwitz and Terezin.
“He only told me that story once,” Leshem said in an interview. “You can understand why I wanted to make the film. Harry Haft was the most extreme example of someone having to create or die a morally unsustainable life for themselves. His PTSD is not surprising.”
Levinson, the Oscar-winning director of ‘Rain Man’, ‘Wag the Dog’ and other films, said he was drawn to the script, by Gillmer, because of his memories of the time when his great-uncle, Simcha, was hanged on a crib in Levinson’s bedroom for two weeks. By the age of six, he was too young to hear that Simcha was a concentration camp survivor or to understand what that meant.
“Every night he would wake up screaming and screaming in a language I didn’t understand — over and over,” Levinson recalled in a telephone interview. “They didn’t call these nightmares PTSD. They brushed them aside as ‘the past is the past’. But some people are tormented and can’t get past it and it affects their relationships with the people around them.”
With ‘The Survivor’, he said, he wanted to explore how an experience such as a war or a concentration camp colors the rest of a life.
The movie star, Ben Foster, is not a survivor’s offspring; his grandmother emigrated here in the 1920s to escape the pogroms in Ukraine. Nevertheless, he took his obligation to capture Haft’s contradictory nature so intensely that he underwent a striking physical transformation. He lost 62 pounds in five months so he could play the skeletal but still wiry camp inmate, then put all that weight and more back on so he could stay true to the physique of the chubby middle-aged Haft, who for most of his working life had fruit and vegetable stores in Brooklyn.
While the subject of boxers in concentration camps is obscure, it was so cinematically compelling that there are three other films based on the lives of men who boxed for survival, said Rich Brownstein, author of a recent book reviewing 400 Holocaust films. The first, released in 1989, was “Triumph of the Spirit” starring Willem Dafoe as a Jew, Salamo Arouch, who had been the Greek Middleweight Champion before the war and fought 200 fights in Auschwitz.
“The Survivor” takes a few artistic liberties. Haft became the protege of an SS officer named Schneider, who hoped that Haft would vouch for his benevolence if the Allies were victorious. The film shows Haft killing Schneider after escaping a harrowing march between camps as Allied soldiers approached. But he didn’t kill Schneider. He killed an unnamed SS man to put on his uniform as a disguise. He also killed a peasant couple that he feared would turn him in.
Harry Haft had been trying to get Alan to write his story since Alan’s college days, and he finally forced the matter. In 2003 he visited his son in Tampa and in two days he released his history on 20 volumes, which became the essential source for the 2006 book. His father, he said, hoped that his son, through the brutality of his life and appreciating the impossible choices he had to make would understand why Haft was so tormented.
“He wanted to apologize for being such a bad father,” Alan said.
His father also did not shake off the guilt for what he did to his opponents as a boxer in the concentration camps. Alan recalled that in 2007, a few months before Harry died of lung cancer at age 82, Harry was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. A reporter asked him if he was sorry. He looked at his gnarled fists and said, “I regret the lives that have gone through these hands.”