Noah Klieger

Noah Klieger ( he , נח קליגר; 31 July 1925 – 13 December 2018) was an Israeli journalist and sports administrator. Klieger, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora and Ravensbruck, covered trials of Nazi criminals after the end of World War II, besides working as a sports journalist in Israel. He also was the president of the basketball club Maccabi Tel Aviv and chairman of the FIBA's media council. In 2010 he was awarded the FIBA Order of Merit, and in 2012 became a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. In 2015, Klieger was inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame for his contributions.

Early life

Klieger was born in 1925 in Strasbourg. His older brother Jonathan was born in Germany, but their family later relocated, first to France, and then to Belgium in 1938.

After the start of WWII, when Belgium fell under Nazi occupation, 13-year-old Klieger helped found a Zionist youth underground organization. Members of his group passed messages between adult underground cells, helped obtain ration stamps, and smuggled Belgian Jews to Switzerland. Overall, Klieger's cell successfully smuggled some 270 Jews to this neutral country. However, when his own turn came to leave Belgium in 1942, he was caught at the border by the Germans.

Klieger was interned for a period of time in the Mechelen transit camp and in January 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz. There he contracted pneumonia and expected to be murdered, but, as Klieger recalled later, he personally addressed chief physician Mengele and other physicians who accompanied him and succeeded in persuading them that he still could be of use. One of the doctors agreed to send him back to barracks. Later he was saved from extermination by an extraordinary stroke of luck: one of the SS officers running the camp turned out to be an avid boxing fan and decided to form a boxing team of Auschwitz prisoners. Despite having no previous boxing experience, 16-year-old Klieger volunteered to join the team. Other team members who did have such experience in the pre-war world read his bluff but helped him stay on the team, withholding their own hits and allowing him to hit them. Together with his teammates Noah was fed better than other prisoners and sometimes even received soup from the officers' mess. They were also exempt from work in the afternoon hours so that they could train. In all other respects, they were treated no better than other prisoners and sometimes even harsher, to show them that their athlete status did not carry privileges.

When the Red Army started closing on Auschwitz in January 1945, the remaining prisoners were transferred on foot to Germany. After a three-day long death march the survivors, including Klieger, were sent to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. There he succeeded in fooling the Germans for the second time by pretending to be a precision mechanics expert and was sent to the underground plant producing missiles. On April 4 he was once again sent by foot with the rest of the prisoners to another concentration camp, this time Ravensbruck. This death march took 10 days, but on April 29 Klieger and other Ravensbruck prisoners were freed by the Red Army.

Journalism career

After returning from the camps Klieger started a career as a journalist. As a reporter he covered Nazi criminal trials in Belgium, France, and Germany. In Belgium he reunited with his parents, who also survived Auschwitz; his father Abraham started publishing a German-language magazine for Belgian Jews, and Noah translated articles in this magazine to French.

When Klieger learned about Aliyah Bet, an illegal immigration operation allowing European Jews to come to the Mandatory Palestine, he joined forces with the organizers. In 1947 he became one of the illegal immigrants aboard the ship ''Exodus 1947'', initially as a passenger and later as a crew member. Shortly after he arrived in Mandatory Palestine, the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine started, and he joined the Haganah as a volunteer. In the 1948 Arab–Israeli War he took part in Operation Danny, then was included in the "French commando" squad and finally became a soldier of the Negev Brigade and fought in the South.

After the end of 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Klieger resumed his journalistic career. He became a '' L’Équipe'' correspondent in Israel in 1953 and also one of the founders of the first sports section in an Israeli newspaper. From 1957 he was a staff member of the mainstream daily ''Yedioth Ahronoth'' for which he also wrote a personal column till the age of 90. In particular, he covered the trials of Adolf Eichmann