Kurt Epstein

Kurt Epstein ( born January 29, 1904 in Roudnice, Austria - Hungary, † 1 February 1975 in New York City ) was a Czechoslovakian water polo players.

Life

Kurt Epstein grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, who operated a tannery. He attended high school, hit the reserve officer training during his military service in 1924 and was stationed in Prague. Epstein was a good swimmer and a member of the Czechoslovakian national team water polo player. In 1928 he participated in the Olympic Games in Amsterdam and retired with his team in the first round of. Despite the German anti-Semitism and the call for a boycott of the Maccabi World Union, he also participated in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, his team lost against the team of Nazi Germany and retired after just one win in the first round of. He consoled himself with the fact that the " Negro " Jesse Owens had shown the racists.

In the German defeat and occupation of Czechoslovakia he was mobilized as a reserve lieutenant in Terezin. His entire family was a victim of the Holocaust. Epstein was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto, in Auschwitz and in a forced labor camp in Friedland ( Jizera Mountains ).

After the war he married Franciska, a Prague Holocaust survivors, and had with her two sons and a daughter. He was for a short time a member of the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee, but emigrated to the Communist takeover in 1948 in the U.S., where he could professionally take difficult foot.

His daughter Helen Epstein is a professor of journalism and author based in New York.