Ben Helfgott

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2007

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is the Holocaust survivor Ben Helfgott. His inspirational journey has taken him from the horrors of Nazi-occupied Poland to the highs of Olympic glory. He was nine years old when Germany invaded and at that point, he says, his childhood ended. He spent the next three years in a ghetto while his mother and younger sister were among those rounded up and shot by the Nazis. He was then deported to a series of concentration camps and, when he was eventually liberated from Theresienstadt, he was 15 years old and little more than a skeleton. He joined a group of 700 orphans who were brought to England to form a new life.

He went on to become a successful businessman and a champion weightlifter - but his physical strength is matched by an extraordinary emotional fortitude. Not only has he made the most of every opportunity that came his way but he has spent his life campaigning to ensure those who died are properly commemorated.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Nessun Dorma by The Three Tenors Book: The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell Luxury: A bar with two discs for weight training.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My castaway this week is Ben Helfgot, a concentration camp survivor whose inspirational journey has taken him from the
0:35.0	horrors of Nazi-occupied Poland to the heights of Olympic glory. When he left the
0:40.3	Treshing-Stat concentration camp 1945. He was 15 years old and a walking skeleton.
0:47.1	Within 10 years of arriving in the UK, he was representing his adopted country on the world sporting stage at weightlifting.
0:55.0	His physical strength is matched by an extraordinary emotional fortitude.
0:59.7	His mother, sister and father were murdered by the Nazis, along with 27 other members of his family.
1:06.2	His response was not only to make the most of every opportunity that came his way, but to make
1:10.8	sure that the world would never forget the genocide.
1:14.0	Ben Helfcott, can you start by explaining how it was that you found yourself
1:18.0	on board a plane flying into Britain in the months after the war had ended.
1:23.0	Well, what happened was I stopped in Tredenstadt where I was liberated,
1:28.0	and I was told by my friends with whom I was liberated that they will be going to England.
1:34.0	Well, when I heard that they will be going to England, I mean that was something that was music
1:40.1	to my ears because England, as far as I was concerned, was the country that I loved
1:46.7	them from my early childhood.
1:48.8	And so I found myself on the plane to England. And how come you were invited to England at that point? Why was there a plane taking you there?
1:57.0	Well, there was a committee that approached the home office to bring in the survivors to this county.
2:05.0	So the home office gave permission for a thousand children
2:08.0	to be brought to this county.
2:10.0	And the first lot of 300 were in the statestadt that we were the first group to come over.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.