Zygmunt Steuermann

Zygmunt Steuermann (5 February 1899 – December 1941) was a Polish footballer who played as a forward[1] and is one of the most renowned members of the Hasmonea Lwów Football Club.

Life

Born in Sambor, then in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, Steuermann was Jewish[2][3] and a member of a Polonized Jewish family. His older brother was pianist Eduard Steuermann.[4] His older sister was the actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel. As a child, he was nicknamed Dusko.[5]

At the age of 12 he joined the local Korona Sambor. During World War I, he fled to Vienna, where he continued his training in a variety of sport clubs, including Gersthof Wien, Germania Wien, and Amateure Wien. After the war he returned to Poland and in 1920 started a semi-professional career in Korona Sambor. During the following year he moved to Lwów (modern Lviv, Ukraine), where he joined the ŻKS Lwów sports club. In 1923, he was transferred to Hasmonea Lwów, the most important Jewish football club in Poland and one of the four Lwów-based clubs playing in the first league.[6] He remained one of the most notable players of that club until 1932, when he joined Legia Warsaw.

He also played twice in the Poland national team, scoring four goals: three in a match against Turkey in 1926[2] and one against the USA in 1928.[7][8] He was one of only two first-timers in the history of the Poland national team to score a hat-trick in the first match, the other being Józef Korbas (in 1937 against Bulgaria).

During the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 he fled Warsaw and settled in his hometown, which was then annexed by the USSR. He returned to Korona Sambor, which was soon afterwards closed down and recreated as Dinamo Sambor by the Soviet authorities. Following the Nazi take-over of eastern Poland, he was arrested and sent to the Lemberg Ghetto, where he died in December 1941 aged 42.

Clubs

References
  1. "Zygmunt Steuermann". National Football Teams. Benjamin Strack-Zimmermann. Retrieved 17 February 2021.
  2. Bolchover, David (6 May 2019). "Remembering the cream of Jewish footballing talent killed in the Holocaust". The Guardian – via www.theguardian.com.
  3. "Ahead of match with Israel, Poland honors murdered Jewish sport legend". JPost.com. Retrieved 8 July 2023.
  4. Melnyk, Lidia (2021). "Steuermann, Gimpel, Baller – Between the Vienna Dream and Hollywood Reality: World-Famous Jewish Pianists and Their Routes From Galicia to Vienna and the USA". In Pijarowska, Aleksandra (ed.). Music – The Cultural Bridge: Essence, Context, References (PDF). Wrocław: Karol Lipiński Academy of Music. p. 113. Retrieved 30 June 2022.
  5. Rifkind, Donna (28 January 2020). The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood. New York: Other Press. p. 171. ISBN 978-1590517215. OCLC 1099570013. Retrieved 26 June 2022.
  6. Beck, Eldad (8 August 2010). "Anti-Semitism feared ahead of Euro 2012". Ynetnews.
  7. Rifkind, Donna (8 September 2020). The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Other Press, LLC. ISBN 9781590517215 – via Google Books.
  8. Bifulco, Antonia (6 September 2017). Identity, Attachment and Resilience: Exploring Three Generations of a Polish Family. Routledge. ISBN 9781351789509 – via Google Books.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.