The Olympic Football Martyrs (Part One)

By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (November 11^th 2021)

Tawdry Tales

Eduard Eelma, Harald Kaarmann, Heinrich Paal, Otto Silber and Hugo Vääs were the only members of the Estonian football team of 1924 to die in the horrific fashion detailed. But they were not the only Estonian footballers to have been executed or to have died in captivity in Soviet gulags. Nor were they the only Estonian Olympians to suffer such a fate.

The Baltic States and Poland in particular suffered greatly during the Second World War as they paid the price for independence with rapacious neighbours surrounding them. And that was reflected in Latvia too. One of their Olympian footballers suffered the fate of the Estonians too.

Kārlis Bone played for Latvia in the 1924 Olympic Games. They only played one match; they were thrashed 7-0 by the hosts, France, in the second round. Édouard Crut scored a hat-trick and Paul Nicolas and Jean Boyer bagged a brace apiece. The thrashing was the only participation that Bone had in the Olympics.

In June 1941 he was deported from Latvia to a prisoner of war camp in Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals. Yekaterinburg , the site of the execution of the last Tsar of the Russian Empire, Nicholas II and members of his family, is an important city there. Around five months after he was sent to the camp, Bone was dead. He was either executed as some claim or died due to the harsh conditions in the gulags.

Occupiers’ Justice

The Estonians and Latvians were not the only Olympian footballers to suffer occupiers’ ‘justice.’ They were victimised by the Soviet Union alone. Poland got it from both sides. While the Soviet Union’s NKVD had no qualms settling scores, nor did the Nazis and theirs included notorious war crimes such as the Warsaw Ghetto.

Poland only played one match in the 1924 Olympic Games Football Tournament, a 5-0 first round drubbing by Hungary. Former Juventus striker Ferenc Hirzer and attacker Zoltán Opata scored a brace apiece and József Eisenhoffer scored the other. Cracovia defender Stefan Fryc was one of the players in the Polish team of 1924 to be killed by occupying forces in the Second World War. He was one of the victims of mass murder by the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto in November 1943.

His attacking teammate at Cracovia, Leon Sperling, was Jewish. He also played at the Olympic Games and is one of Cracovia’s great players. Sperling was shot dead by Nazis in Lwów Ghetto in December 1941. Warta Poznań’s Marian Spoida also played in that match. He went on to coach Poland in the 1938 World Cup. Spoida was murdered by the NKVD in Lviv in the Ukraine by the NKVD in April 1940.

Adam Obrubański played for Wisła Kraków and ŁKS Ŀodz.After hanging up his boots he became an important figure in Polish football with the Polish Football Association and as a referee. Obrubański was a linesman in the second round match between Belgium and Sweden, which ended in an 8-1 rout of the Belgians. Rudolf Kock and Sven Rydell both scored hat-tricks and Charles Brommeson and Tore Keller scored the others. The lone reply for Belgium came from Henri Larnoe. Four years earlier Belgium beat Czechoslovakia 2-0 to win their first major title on home soil. It is therefore the worst defence of a FIFA operated international competition. Obrubański was also a linesman in France’s second round drubbing of Latvia in 1924.