When Eva Loeffler volunteered as a ball girl during a rudimentary wheelchair sports tournament for World War II veterans in 1948, she had no idea the contest would grow into the Paralympic Games. Sixty-four years on, Loeffler is honorary mayor of the Paralympic Village, welcoming 4,200 athletes to the world’s second-biggest sports event in terms of participation after the Olympics. On Tuesday, the disabled sports movement will return to where it all began — Stoke Mandeville Hospital in southern England — for the start of a 24-hour torch relay to the Olympic stadium in east London.
Loeffler’s father Ludwig Guttmann, widely hailed as the father of the Paralympics, was a German Jewish neurologist who escaped Nazi Germany.
He took his young family to England, where he pioneered the use of sport as therapy for soldiers injured in World War II.
“They were young, they were soldiers and they got very bored just sitting around in hospital,” Loeffler, 79, told AFP in an interview just outside the Olympic Park, where the opening ceremony takes place on Wednesday. “So he started getting them to do sport.” Guttmann had been set to become the top neurosurgeon in the German city of Hamburg when Adolf Hitler’s regime banned Jewish doctors from working in non-Jewish hospitals in 1933.
He became the director of a Jewish hospital in what is now Wroclaw in western Poland. After “Kristallnacht” — the co-ordinated anti-Semitic attacks across Germany on November 9, 1938, which saw thousands of Jews sent to concentration camps — he saved some 60 people’s lives by admitting them to his hospital. Guttmann’s wife was so worried that he would be dragged off to a camp himself that day, their daughter recalled, that she sent him to work wearing a thick coat and heavy boots.
The family finally fled to England in 1939 with the help of a charity, although a number of their relatives were not so lucky. They were among the estimated 1.3 million people, most of them Jews, who perished at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland. “He realised things were so bad that if we stayed in Germany, we wouldn’t surivive,” Guttmann’s daughter said. Once in England, Guttmann found work setting up the world’s first specialist spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville, treating wounded soldiers. “Nobody else wanted to do it,” said his daughter. “They felt it was a lost cause at the time, because the patients died.” But Guttmann soon set about introducing radical new policies such as turning over patients to prevent bed sores, stopping operations on the spinal cord — and encouraging the veterans to play sport. “He had opposition from the patients, nursing staff, from the other doctors and from the administrators because his treatment was totally new and different,” said Loeffler.
N. Korea’s disabled come in from the cold: North Korea is making its debut at the Paralympic Games, a potential sign of change in a country where, according to activists, disabled people have faced enforced isolation and sterilisation.
Sixteen-year-old swimmer Rim Ju-Song, a left arm and left leg amputee, is the reclusive, nuclear-armed nation’s first and only athlete in the London Games, which open on Wednesday. He will compete in the 50m freestyle S6 event. Nine officials from the North Korean delegation were at the Olympic Park in east London on Monday and said they were looking forward to being involved, although they were unsure about how the teenager would fare. “He has been training very hard but I don’t know what will happen,” Kim Sung-Chol, the team doctor, told AFP, adding that Rim, who was given a wildcard entry, had not competed internationally to get to the qualifying standard.
“But the main thing is that we are participating to experience the Games, then next time, if we can improve further, then maybe at the next Paralympics (in Rio de Janeiro in 2016) we can be involved more,” he said in English. North Korea won four gold medals and two bronze at this summer’s London Olympics, finishing 20th in the overall medal table to register the country’s best performance since Barcelona in 1992. The athletes returned home to a heroes’ welcome on August 17, with cheering crowds lining the streets of the capital Pyongyang before Premier Choe Yong-Rim and other top officials hosted a banquet reception, according to state media. Vice Premier Kim Yong-Jin said in a speech that the gold medallists had glorified “the great era of Kim Jong-Un”, who took over as the country’s supreme leader after his father Kim Jong-Il’s death in December 2011. The communist state has featured in international sport for many years, most notably the 1966 football World Cup where they reached the quarter-finals, losing to Eusebio’s Portugal 5-3.
Founder’s ‘far-fetched’ dreams come true
