In this question – and in the answer – lay the fate of several lives. “Who knows how to box?” a Nazi soldier asked the group of people who had just arrived at Auschwitz. The question hovered in the air for a few seconds, sandwiched between shouts, orders, and false promises. Surrounded by extremely thin people with sunken eyes. The newcomers don't know it, but they're treading on ashes.
Prisoner Noah Klieger, number 172345, raises his hand. He doesn't know why he did it. There is something in the environment that urges him to do this. “I had a feeling. It was something visceral. I didn't think with my brain, I did it with my gut. “I told myself that if they wanted boxers, it was for a good reason,” Klieger himself explained 75 years later to the journalist José Ignacio Pérez, author of the book KO Auschwitz (Córner).
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Boxing was a sport with great prestige during National Socialism. In Mein Kampf, Hitler praised him in a way that most likely endeared him to officers and soldiers. More than a million people were murdered in concentration camps in Poland. Amidst this extinction, this lack of humanity, life made its way through small cracks that became the path to survival for many. In Auschwitz there was a boxing hall with a ring and sandbags. A gym in a place designed for mass human destruction. A place where battles were fought and hundreds of SS members took part. Something that, almost all survivors agree, is difficult to understand for someone who has not experienced it. Using the written and oral statements of several concentration camp survivors, the author reconstructs the shocking story of the prisoners who had to box to save their lives. A story about the chain of small miracles that led to some of them surviving.
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