It was boxer Harry Haft who struck the first blow. In the opening minutes, he stood firm against his opponent, rising star Rocky Marciano, who was in his 18th fight as a professional. He lost his rhythm in the second round and, in the first half of the third, he went to the canvas after suffering a sequence of accurate blows. Marciano, the unquestionable winner, would later win the title of world champion, in 1952, and would maintain it until 1956, when he retired with 49 victories, 43 of which were by knockout, and no defeats.
Haft would never fight again – that contest held at the Rhode Island Auditorium, on July 18, 1949, would be his last. After an impressive start, with ten straight victories, he ended his career with 19 fights, 12 wins and 8 losses, all by knockout. Afterwards, he opened a grocery store that would support him throughout his life.
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| Scene from “The Fight of a Lifetime” (2022), a film by Barry Levinson that tells the story of Haft.| Photo: Disclosure/Diamond Films |
But the truth is that his career as a fighter did not begin in August 1948, when he overcame his first opponent, Jimmy Letty. Haft had learned the profession during World War II. And in the cruelest way imaginable.
An inmate of the Auschwitz concentration camp, he was selected by a Nazi state police officer, the SS, named Schneider, to box at the nearby Jaworzno facility. He seemed to have the ideal body type for the mission and his right punches had the power to confuse his opponents. The rules of combat were simple: whoever finished standing survived and received an additional share of food and, eventually, a cleaner bed until they recovered from their injuries and prepared for the next sequence of clashes. There was no time limit for disputes. In other words, he was selected to fight in fights, as is still done today, clandestinely, with roosters and dogs.
Forced to fight for his life, Haft overcame an estimated 75 opponents, all imprisoned like him, including some who had become friends. When he entered the ring to compete against Rocky Marciano, he wore shorts with a Star of David embroidered on them. And he was always introduced to the audience as “the survivor of Auschwitz”. He used the codename to facilitate his identification with the public. But he was uncomfortable detailing how he had managed to survive.
Traumas and struggles
Born on July 28, 1925, in the Polish city of Belchatow, with the name Herschel Haft, he was two years old when his father, Maisha, died of typhus. He was raised among seven sisters, who received a Jewish education from their mother, Hinda – she kept weaving equipment at home and the children helped with the work, a very common occupation in the region.
His Bar Mitzvah was celebrated in 1938, one year before the occupation of Poland. That's when the persecutions began. Haft lived off small smuggling, which helped bring money and food to his family, in a context marked by the worst possible conditions of violence. One episode, in particular, left a deep impression on him. “My older sister had a daughter. Just two hours later, German soldiers took the baby and threw it into a truck. On this day, I lost my faith. He was a human being with just two hours to live, and he was ripped from his mother and discarded to die”, he would report in an almost two-hour testimony recorded in March 1995.
From 1942 onwards, he and his entire family found themselves detained and sent to different concentration camps. Haft was taken to Auschwitz, where he received his prisoner's tattoo. After a few weeks, he began to count on the protection of Officer Schneider, who prepared him to fight and organized a betting scheme. “We needed to entertain the Germans. I did what I needed to do and survived,” he said in his 1995 testimony.
When the camp in Jaworzno was dissolved due to the advance of the Red Army, the so-called death march began towards Germany. Haft escaped in April 1945. While escaping, he killed a German soldier who was taking a shower. He put on his uniform and spent the remaining weeks, until the end of the war, hiding from village to village. In one of them, he killed two elderly people who sheltered him on a farm – he suspected that his cover had been discovered.
For the next two years, he lived in a US-operated refugee camp inside occupied Germany. In January 1947, he won a Jewish boxing championship organized by the American army in Munich. In 1948, with the help of an uncle who lived in New Jersey, he emigrated to the United States. In November 1949, he married Miriam Wofsoniker, with whom he had three children.
Haft left Auschwitz, but Auschwitz never abandoned him. Until the end of his life, he suffered from constant nightmares and bouts of panic and violence. His screams in his sleep accompanied him until the end of his life and left a deep impression on his family.
Biography and comics
In 2006, the eldest son, Alan, published a biography of his father, Harry Haft - Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano (“Harry Haft – Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano”, without translation into Portuguese). Based on two days of testimonies, collected in 2003, which yielded 20 tapes, the book details boxing matches held, generally on Sundays. In general, Haft faced more than one opponent per round, most of them in a regrettable state.
“The first opponent was brought into the ring. Harry was shocked by his appearance. He saw before him a half-dead skeleton of a man. It was clear to him at that moment that there would be nothing fair in this fight. Harry was eighteen, big and strong. Schneider kept him well fed without excessive work or torture. Harry looked across the ring and saw the fear on his challenger's face, and he knew this man had not volunteered."
“Harry looked at the soldiers watching the ring. There was a strange sense of joy in the crowd. They were waiting for the show. It would be a sport to watch a Jew kill another Jew. Almost everyone was sitting down when the soldier acting as referee ordered: ‘Go’”, the report continues.
“Harry could see that his opponent was defenseless and hesitated. He could hear the soldiers shouting anti-Semitic slurs at them. Harry knew what they were shouting. They were rooting for him to kill the other Jew with his fists. He was sure they would shoot him if he refused. So he obeyed. The first time Harry knocked the other man down, the referee had to catch him. The second time Harry knocked him down, he was unconscious and was carried away. Schneider offered Harry a drink of his whiskey as a reward, but he refused. The fight barely lasted five minutes.” At this time, the sequence of victories led the Nazi audience to nickname Haft a “Jewish animal”.
Hollywood production
The book inspired a highly acclaimed comic book version. And, mainly, the film The Fight of a Lifetime, released in 2022, directed by Barry Levinson, the same director as Rain Man, Good Morning, Vietnam and Mere Coincidence, with actor Ben Foster in the lead role.
The production tells the horrors of the concentration camp, but also tells the story of the search for a bride, also detained during the war – he would eventually find her, in the 1960s, when they were both already married to other people and she was on the verge of death. The fight against Rocky Marciano, in fact, would have been scheduled as a way to achieve the necessary notoriety so that Haft's name would appear in the newspapers and the news would reach the girl.
As reported in a report in The New York Times produced at the time of its release, the production of the film involved descendants of other Holocaust victims, “including two actresses who are granddaughters of survivors, and the screenwriter, Justine Juel Gillmer, whose maternal grandmother served in the Danish resistance that rescued the majority of that country's Jews. Matti Leshem, one of the producers, is the son of a Czech who during the war was forging documents that were used to provide Jews with Christian identities. His father was unable to persuade his mother and sister to flee, and they perished in Auschwitz and Terezin.” As Leshem stated, “Harry Haft was the most extreme example of someone who had to create a morally unsustainable life for himself or die.”
Ben Foster's grandmother immigrated from Ukraine in the 1920s to escape Soviet persecution. And the director himself was attracted to the plot because it awakened his memories of the time when, for a few weeks, he slept in the same room as his great-uncle, Simcha. He was six years old and was impressed by the familiar: “Every night, he would wake up screaming and screaming in a language I didn't understand — over and over again. Some people are haunted and can't get over it, and it affects their relationships with the people around them.”
In 2007, months before he died of lung cancer at age 82, Haft was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. A journalist asked if he had any regrets. He looked at his fists and said, “My regrets are the lives that passed through these hands.”
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