Salamo Arouch

Origins and early life

Salamo Arouch was born on 1 January 1923 in Thessaloniki, into a Jewish family of that city, one of five children of a stevedore who taught him to box as a small boy and with whom he worked for a time on the docks.

Work and career

He fought his first amateur bout at fourteen, in 1937, at the Maccabi club of Thessaloniki, a Jewish youth centre and gymnasium, and afterwards boxed in the colours of Aris Thessaloniki. He took the Greek middleweight title in 1938 and the All-Balkans middleweight title in 1939, and stood at twenty-four wins and no defeats, every one of them by knockout, when he was called up into the Greek army and won three more the same way.

In 1943 he and his whole family were loaded into a boxcar; they reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on 15 May and he was tagged prisoner 136954. The camp looked for boxers among the new arrivals, and he was set to fight other prisoners two or three times a week for the entertainment of German officers: a bout ran until one man went down or the watchers grew bored, and the one who lost was sent to the gas chamber or shot. By his own count he fought 208 times there and was never beaten, drawing twice while he was recovering from dysentery; he weighed about sixty kilos, was often matched against far heavier men, and once put down an opponent of a hundred and thirteen kilos in eighteen seconds.

He was taken out of Auschwitz on 17 January 1945 and worked at Bergen-Belsen until the Allies came; his parents, his brother and his three sisters were all killed, and it was while searching that camp for them in April that he met Marta Yechiel, seventeen years old and a survivor from his own city.

Personal life

They went to Israel together, married in November 1945, raised four children and settled in Tel Aviv, where he ran a shipping firm and spoke publicly about what he had lived through; his unbeaten run ended at last on 8 June 1955, knocked out in the fourth round by the Italian Amleto Falcinelli.

Later years

He advised the makers of Triumph of the Spirit, the 1989 film in which Willem Dafoe played him and much of which was shot inside Auschwitz, returning to the camp with them, and he died on 26 April 2009.