{"id":420420,"date":"2020-03-02T15:21:50","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T22:21:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/?p=420420"},"modified":"2020-03-02T16:00:13","modified_gmt":"2020-03-02T23:00:13","slug":"passages-eva-szekely-holocaust-survivor-olympic-champion-passes-at-92","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/passages-eva-szekely-holocaust-survivor-olympic-champion-passes-at-92\/","title":{"rendered":"Passages: Eva Szekely, Holocaust Survivor & Olympic Champion, Passes At 92"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eva Szekely<\/strong>, the 1952 Olympic 200m breaststroke champion and Holocaust survivor, has passed away at the age of 92. She was the first winner of an Olympic breaststroke crown who swam with a butterfly action: overarm recovery was ended when butterfly became an official stroke of its own on the way to the 1956 Olympic Games.<\/p>\n

The Hungarian was Magyar swimming royalty. Andrea Gyarmati<\/strong>, the 1970 double European champion and 1972 two-times Olympic medallist whose father was also an Olympic champion, water polo player Dezso Gyarmati<\/strong>, paid tribute to her mother in a 2018 column at 24HU. All three are International Swimming Hall of Fame<\/strong> inductees.<\/p>\n

She wrote of being born more into a dynasty than a family, but one in which laughter and happiness was the order of the day:<\/p>\n

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“At home, learning was the primary task, playing sports, even if you sometimes took it seriously, was not a livelihood. You had to figure out what you wanted to work on and get to the right schools. And for a good outcome, \u00a0sport was a gift and a reward for us, not a mandatory job. So, when I turned four, I could go to the swimming pool, where I had a good time, and all my friends were there. In other words, there was no craze for “we must excel in sports” (which many people have often assumed without asking any of us).\u00a0The image they were trying to project on to us, the cruel woman [Eva Szekely] torturing her baby in the water, was as far from reality as Mako was from Jerusalem.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

“However, there were things that Mum didn’t pardon, and she brought us up the right way, and today I am grateful for what she taught me, brought to me, made me aware of: mastery.”<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/article>\n

In the days when Olympic gold was more common among teens, she broke the mould by winning her crown at the age of 25 in Helsinki, Finland. At 29, she almost did it again but it was silver at Melbourne 1956.<\/article>\n

Inducted into the International Hall of Fame in 1976<\/strong><\/a>, Szekely had been expelled from the national swimming team a decade before she became Olympic champion: she was Jewish and lived at a time when the Nazis murdered around six million Jews as part of their “Final Solution”. In Hungary, three quarters of the Jewish population was wiped out. Eva survived. In 1941, Szekely’s swimming was halted by the discriminatory Third Jewish Law, which meant that she was confined to Jewish quarters and barred from most contact with non-jews and activities such as sport.<\/p>\n