Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust Hardcover – September 22, 2016

The cover was correct but it contained a completely different book!

Cover on backwards making book upside down

Dr. Kevin Simpson has produced a work with "Soccer Under The Swastika" that provides welcome depth to the complexity of World War II, allowing for a more personal, and thus more powerful, understanding of what took place in Europe from 1933 to 1945, much like other recent efforts have. (Robert M. Edsel’s “The Monuments Men” or Simon Kuper's "Ajax, the Dutch, the War: The Strange Tale of Soccer During Europe's Darkest Hour" come to mind.)There's no shortage of literature about World War II, but books like "Swastika" provide incredible detail that's missing from macro approaches to the war or the Holocaust.One tragic story among many documented by Simpson involves Hartog “Han” Hollander, an early European pioneer in sports broadcast journalism. In the 1930s, when the Dutch national soccer team played, families gathered around their radios to listen in as Hollander relayed the action.Hollander reported from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the Nazi games, receiving a signed certificate from Hitler himself, a notable achievement for a Dutch Jew. It turns out, the letter meant little. Hollander and his family were murdered upon arrival at the Sobibór death camp in Poland, along with 2,400 others on a transport.Simpson's book illustrates Jews confronted with choices that were really no choice at all. It was as if pure evil, like a heavy tapestry, descended, choking off all light.But we learn that's not entirely true either... inside these camps, something else happened. Despite the death and indescribable suffering of millions, games remained a part of life. Camps organized their own soccer matches, even forming leagues that were quite competitive considering many Jewish footballers were already inside.It’s a bit jarring to the senses that something as comparatively trivial as sport took place in camps where such evil also occurred. And, frankly, I’m still not sure how human spirit musters the will to organize football matches (or the orchestras or chorales that performed) in the first place. Yet, more than one survivor described it as a way of reclaiming just a sliver of humanity amidst the most inhumane of environments.The generation that survived is quickly passing away, which is what makes books like this all the more important, putting ink to paper, and in the process, placing a very human face to the victims of one of the world’s greatest evils.

The story of the Holocaust is one that we can never stop telling or we will be doomed to see those horrors repeated. In his book, Simpson does an incredible job of personalizing the story of the European side of WWII... I found it incredibly powerful. I saw WWII through a whole new - and very interesting - lens.Somehow, the picture of those moments of normalcy as Jews gathered to play soccer in the concentration camps - sometimes against their captors - highlighted the horrors of concentration camp life even more. How does a society get to the point where exterminating people on the basic of their genealogy is somehow accepted? How do you play a game with a person one day and the next send them to the gas chamber?The book is fascinating. You will love this book if you love history or sports or both. And as the last survivors of the concentration camps pass on, I believe we must keep telling their stories so that atrocities like this are never allowed to happen again.