Harry Haft was just a teenager when he was sent to Auschwitz. Once he arrived, the Nazi guards found out that he had some boxing experience — so they ordered him to fight his fellow prisoners in harrowing boxing matches where the loser would be executed.
Forced to literally fight for his life, Haft never lost a single match, even though he would have known many of his opponents because the Nazis regularly sent people from the same town to the same concentration camps. From 1943 to 1945, he was forced to fight at least 76 people, none of whom he ever saw alive again.
Only in April 1945 did Haft manage to escape during a death march away from the camp — by killing a Nazi soldier and stealing his uniform. Haft then spent weeks running from village to village. Trained to fight to the death, he even killed an elderly couple who offered him shelter after he suspected they'd discovered that he wasn't really a Nazi. By the time he made it to Allied-controlled Germany, he weighed only 110 pounds and spent the next two years recovering in a refugee camp. But by 1947, he decided to fight again and immigrated to America to become a professional boxer — where he took on some of the biggest names in the sport.
« Photo 1 : Ben Foster as Harry Haft in the 2021 film The Survivor. »
Harry Haft (also known as Herschel Haft; born Hertzko or Hertzka Haft on 28 July 1925 in Bełchatów, Poland;[ died 3 November 2007) was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp where he boxed fellow inmates to survive. He was briefly a professional boxer in post-war Germany, and boxed as a light heavyweight in the United States from 1948–1949
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