Ben Bril: The Dutch Jewish boxing champion sent to Nazi camps by Olympic team-mate
But while some of his friends carried on brawling, Bril turned his hand to sport."For some boys, it was hard fist-fighting for gamblers, but other young Jews joined clubs. They were popular because the training and the matches were an escape from daily routine, also [from] daily poverty.
As he got older, Bril found work in a butcher's shop, and used his new job to help develop his sport. At the time, says Rosenfeld, he didn't fully understand what had happened, but it later became clear that he was blacklisted by anti-Semites on the Dutch national boxing committee. It was at about this time that Bril started wearing the Star of David on his shorts, to match the ring he had won.
For Braber though, Bril's act of identifying himself in that way, in 1930s Netherlands, is "very significant". But their lives, and those of everyone in the country, were turned upside down by the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. In May 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands. This sparked the creation of a number of Jewish defence groups, some centred around the sports clubs like the one of which Bril was a member.A previous incursion two days earlier had resulted in attacks on Jewish homes and businesses, and there was a fear, says Braber, that synagogues would be the next target.
Although Braber was told by a friend of Bril's that Bril was involved - and many men he knew certainly were, including his trainer and a number of fellow boxers - it is unlikely that the champion took part directly in the fighting.But the brief confrontation in Amsterdam's Waterlooplein square, with Jewish fighting groups at the core - "a form of Jewish resistance unique in Europe," says Braber - was a stark demonstration of how life in the city had changed.
That number included Bril and his family. As Braber points out, the decision to hide was a perilous one: "'Can we stay together, can we get help, are these people trustworthy?' All these types of things you have to think about." De Vooren has described Olij as "a notorious Jew hunter" who committed "the worst kind of betrayal in Dutch sport". After the war, he served nine years' imprisonment and died in 1975, while his son Jan was said to have fled to Argentina.There is one moment that stands out from Bril's life in the war beyond all others. It was a moment fraught with danger, but one in which he acted instinctively.
"[Ben Bril was] the only man I saw during two and a half years in concentration camps - or heard of - who risked refusing to carry out a formal order of the SS," Braber quotes the head of Vught's Jewish administration as testifying after the war.But Bril would also have to fight in the camps, both in Vught and in Westerbork. As a famous boxer he was a target - someone who the guards might want to see in action.
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