Alojzy Ehrlich

Ehrlich was born in 1914 in the village of Bukowsko in southern Poland (then part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a component kingdom of Austria-Hungary). Some time later (exact year is unknown), he settled in Lwow and started playing table tennis, most probably in the mid-1920s, in the local Jewish sports club Hasmonea Lwow.

Together with Hasmonea, he won first team championships of Poland (Lwow, 1933), and became his country's top player. In 1934 Erlich and another player from Lwow, Władysław Loewenhertz represented Poland in an international match staged in Danzig where they defeated Germany 7–2. The same team, Erlich and Loewenherz with the addition of Simon Pohoryles, represented Poland in 1935 at the Swaithling Cup competition in London where they achieved second ranking in A Group. In the same year, Erlich reached the semifinals of the World Championships, and in 1935 he won bronze in the same competition. Three times—1936, 1937, and 1939—Ehrlich was vice-champion of the world, and he is among only four players who played in three finals without winning (together with Hungarian Laszlo Bellak Chinese Li Furong and Chinese Ma Lin)^[5] In 1936 in Prague, he lost to Stanislav Kolar from Czechoslovakia. In 1937 in Baden, he lost to Austrian player Richard Bergmann, and two years later in Cairo, he lost to Bergmann again.

In the early 1930s, Ehrlich, who spoke eight languages,^[6] moved to France, but remained loyal to Poland and represented his native land in subsequent tournaments.^[1]

During the 1936 World Table Tennis Championships, which took place in Prague, Ehrlich became famous after a record-breaking one-point exchange with Romanian player Paneth Farkas. The exchange lasted two hours and 12 minutes; after 70 minutes the score was 0-0.^[7] Both players suffered, but neither wanted to give up. Altogether, the ball crossed the net more than 12,000 times. After two hours, Farkas' arm began to freeze, and he lost the first point.^[7] The referee, Gábor Diner, had to be replaced during the match, because his neck was so sore.^[8][9]

During the Holocaust, Ehrlich was captured by the Germans and was sent to Auschwitz. He spent four years there and later at Dachau, and was saved from the gas chamber because the Nazis recognised him as a world champion.^[7][10] The Nazis assigned him the task of disposing bombs.^[11][12]

Marty Reisman claimed to have heard a story that while Ehrlich was in Auschwitz, he came across beehives and secretly smeared the honey across his chest so other prisoners would be able to lick it off his chest and not starve to death.^[11][13][14]