Ben Helfgott

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2007

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast, but this is about something else you might enjoy.
0:05.4	My name's Katie Lecky and I'm an assistant commissioner for on demand music on BBC Sounds.
0:10.7	The BBC has an incredible musical heritage and culture and as a music lover, I love being part of that.
0:17.4	With music on sounds, we offer collections and mixes for everything, from workouts to helping
0:22.7	you nod off, boogie in your kitchen, or even just a moment of calm. And they're all put together
0:28.7	by people who know their stuff. So if you want some expertly curated music in your life,
0:34.9	check out BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Krista Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.
0:41.8	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:44.9	The program was originally broadcast in 2007.
1:15.7	Music My castaway this week is Ben Helfgot, a concentration camp survivor whose inspirational journey has taken him from the horrors of Nazi-occupied Poland to the heights of Olympic glory.
1:23.0	When he left the Theresenstadt concentration camp in 1945, he was 15 years old and a walking skeleton.
1:30.7	Within 10 years of arriving in the UK, he was representing his adopted country on the world sporting stage at weightlifting.
1:35.6	His physical strength is matched by an extraordinary emotional fortitude.
1:41.9	His mother's sister and father were murdered by the Nazis, along with 27 other members of his family.
1:46.8	His response was not only to make the most of every opportunity that came his way,
1:50.3	but to make sure that the world would never forget the genocide.
1:55.9	Ben Heathcott, can you start by explaining how it was that you found yourself on board a plane flying into Britain in the months after the war had ended?
2:00.2	Well, what happened was I stopped in Tresenstadt, where I was liberated,
2:05.4	and I was told by my friends with whom I was liberated, that they would be going to England.
2:10.8	Well, when I heard that they'll be going to England, I mean, that was something that was music to my ears,
2:17.6	because England, as far as I was concerned,
2:21.0	was the country that I loved from my early childhood.
	...

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