Read it here: Otago Daily Times
Jewish Founder of Para-Olympic Movement remembered
My favourite Olympian was small, short-sighted and tubby. He could not run fast, swim or jump. He smoked a pipe, and everyone called him, “Poppa.” There is no evidence he ever participated in any form of competitive sport. But he profoundly understood, and changed, the meaning of the Olympic Games. Ludwig Guttmann, a pioneering German-Jewish neurosurgeon, invented the Paralympics. Guttmann knew that sport is about overcoming limitations, extending the physically possible, and acknowledging the extraordinary psychological benefit of sporting aspiration. He applied that understanding to the bodies and minds of men broken on the battlefields of World War II and in so doing, helped to revolutionise modern attitudes towards disability.
Poppa Guttmann knew about overcoming adversity. Born in a mining town in Upper Silesia in 1899, he worked after school in a hospital where he encountered a coalminer who had fractured his spine in an accident. When Guttmann began writing up notes on the young man, he was told: “Don’t bother, he’ll be dead in a few weeks.” And so he was.
That experience fused with another. As a medical student at Freiburg, Guttmann noticed the way that Jewish fraternities dedicated to sport gave their members extraordinary confidence and self-esteem. In 1933, Guttmann was fired from the medical faculty at Breslau University after Germany’s race laws prohibited Jews from treating “Aryans.” He became director of the neurological department of Breslau Jewish Hospital, but by 1939 the Gestapo was closing in. He smuggled most of his patients out of the hospital before they were rounded up, and then fled himself. Guttmann arrived at Harwich with his wife and children in March 1939.
The British medical establishment was quick to utilise his remarkable talents. In 1943 Guttmann was made director of a new spinal injuries centre at Stoke Mandeville, a hospital created in anticipation of casualties from the opening of the Second Front. At that time, the life expectancy of spinal-injury patients was two years.
Over the next five years, Guttmann treated hundreds of wounded and paralysed soldiers. His program aimed to reintegrate these disabled men and women into normal British life and he placed particular emphasis on sport, both as physical rehabilitation and as a path to rediscovering self-discipline, self-respect and team spirit.
The London Olympics of the 1948, the first games since 1936, rehabilitated a competition gravely and almost fatally damaged by the war. Rationing was still in force, and London still bore the scars of battle, as did some competitors. Jim Halliday fought in the retreat from Dunkirk and was then captured by the Japanese. He emerged from a POW camp weighing four and a half stone. Three years later he won bronze in the weightlifting competition. The Hungarian champion marksman Karoly Takacs injured his right hand in a grenade blast: he learnt to shoot with his left and won the rapid-fire pistol gold.
But traditional attitudes to disability were still entrenched. Jack Dearlove, father of the future MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, was Cox of the British rowing eight in the 1948 Olympics. Dearlove had lost a leg in a car accident and walked on crutches. The impediment did not prevent him steering his team to a silver medal, but it was not considered the sort of thing the public would like to see. He was told not to take part in the Olympic procession.
Yet, precisely as Jack Dearlove sat in the stands on the first day of the Olympics, Ludwig Guttmann was organising the first games for people with disabilities. On July 28, 1948, 16 former soldiers (including two women) with spinal injuries gathered in wheelchairs on the lawn outside the Stoke Mandeville wards for an archery competition.
By 1950 the “Stoke Mandeville games” had 130 international competitors; in 1960 the first Paralympic games (the name was applied retrospectively) were held in Rome.
A simple, brilliant, humane idea that started on a Buckinghamshire lawn is now the second-largest sporting event in the world, with seven different classifications of athletes, in addition to the Special Olympics for athletes with intellectual disabilities and the Deaflympics.
Guttmann (by then “Sir Ludwig”) died in 1980, but the selection of Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee, to compete in the Olympic 400 m race may be the final realisation of his vision: a disabled athlete so rehabilitated biomedical science that his disability is no longer relevant.
Pistorius’ victory over amputation is the culmination of a battle started by the disabled veterans of World War II. For the Paralympics, like the Olympics of 1948, represent a conquest over war and the suffering it brings. It is still the case today: a significant number of military personnel injured in Afghanistan and Iraq have been selected for the London 2012 Paralympics, including the cyclist Jon-Allan Butterworth, who lost his left arm in a rocket attack on Iraq, and the rower Nick Beighton, who lost his legs in an explosion in Afghanistan in 2009. It is estimated that by 2016 as many as one in 20 of all Paralympics will be injured war veterans.
For Guttmann, the Paralympics was also a victory for real scientific research over Hitler’s perverted science. As Guttmann himself remarked: “since the Nazis drove out Jewish scientists, British science has got ahead of the Germans.”
Hitler not only wanted to eliminate Jews such as Guttmann, but also the disabled people he championed. In 1933, the Nazis had begun the forced sterilisation of the disabled, depicted as “useless eaters” with “lives unworthy of living.” Some 275,000 disabled people were murdered at “euthanasia centres” under the Nazi’s unspeakable T4 program.
But history has a sense of irony. By driving out this Jewish doctor, Hitler unintentionally set in train a course of events that would eventually led to the Paralympics, an institution that has done more than any other to undermine negative images of disability across the world. Poppa Guttmann ran a long, hard race against prejudice, but he won in the end.
Source: McIntyre, Ben (30 August 2012). The Press. Page 6.
Israeli language revival expert calls for native tongue title
A world-renowned expert on language revival says the loss of language is more damaging than the loss of land for indigenous peoples, and governments are likely to come under increasing pressure to compensate indigenous peoples for this loss too.
Palestinian youths attacked by Israeli lynch mob
Seven Israeli teenagers were in the custody of Jerusalem police Monday in connection with the recent assault on Palestinian youths at West Jerusalem’s Zion square which the Israeli authorities described as an attempted “lynching.”
Police said scores of Jewish youths were involved in the hate crime against the Palestinians late Thursday night which left a 17-year-old victim unconscious and hospitalized and three others injured.
After Attacks, Israeli Schools Confront Hate
Tamer Jbarah, a 17-year-old Palestinian student who speaks accentless Hebrew after years in a bilingual school that is about half Jewish, said he was not at all surprised when a mob of Jewish teenagers beat an Arab teenager unconscious this month while hundreds watched and did nothing to help.
Teachers invited to apply for subsidized Holocaust Seminar in Israel
Applications are invited from Teachers at senior secondary school or university level to a Holocaust Education Seminar in Israel.
The seminar will be held from 15-28 January 2012.
- Free course fees
- Free hotel accommodation
- Half of airfare covered
Applications close 1 October 2012.
Call (04) 801 9480 or email info@holocaustcentre.org.nz for more information.
Maori Students attend Science Camp in Israel
Five young Māori students representing New Zealand’s top young scientific minds will attend the prestigious youth science gathering at the Asian Science Camp to be held in Jerusalem next week.
The students currently studying at The University of Auckland have been selected to represent New Zealand and are supported by Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand’s Indigenous Centre of Research Excellence, and the Maurice Wilkins Centre. They will join nearly 300 other brilliant young minds from over 22 other Asian and Pacific countries.
Download our annual report FY 2012
Hi Folks
If you weren’t able to get to our AGM, you can download our annual report from here.
Our new website
Welcome to our new website. You will notice a few changes. The biggest is that our website address has changed. Its now www.nzfoi.org. We hope you enjoy the site and find it much more convenient and informative. Feel free to send us feedback at contact@nzfoi.org.
The last website was written as a Microsoft Word document and published directly to the Internet. It looked a little rustic but it served us for a 3-4 years.
With the new website we are able to:
- Accept donations and membership fees online
- Display video clips (see the video Dr Rony Berger showed at our last meeting here.)
- Show you our upcoming meetings more easily, complete with a map to show you where to go.
- A noticeboard for ad hoc items we want to bring to your attention quickly.
- A place to sign up for our monthly newsletter.
- Search the entire website by keyword. See the search box at the top right hand corner of the home page.
- More easily see how you can contact us. See the bottom left hand corner of every page.
Feel free to let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions on how it could be improved: contact@nzfoi.org.
