Polish sportspeople in exile: Alojzy Ehrlich
Table tennis player Alojzy Ehrlich was one of the biggest stars of Lviv’s Jewish club, Hasmoneia, in the inter-war period. He had an extraordinary talent for learning foreign languages – in fact, he spoke at least seven!
Alojzy Ehrlich was born in 1914 in Komańcza, in the Podkarpacie region, into a Polish-Jewish family. He came into contact with his beloved sport – table tennis – in Lviv, where he attended secondary school. He left for France permanently in 1930 but continued to represent Poland in the sport. And with excellent results. He reached the quarter-finals of the World Championships in 1933 and won the bronze medal two years later. He became very well known among Polish fans, which was clearly demonstrated by the fact that in 1934 he made it into the top ten of the ‘Przegląd Sportowy’ poll of the best sportsmen (8th place). However, his greatest successes were yet to come. In the second half of the 1930s, he won the title of world vice-champion three times.
In 1936, during the World Championships in Prague, there was a famous duel between Alojzy Ehrlich and the Romanian Paneth Farkas, in which a ball exchange lasted 2 hours and 12 minutes! This remarkable record was entered into the Guinness Book of Records. This confrontation contributed to the introduction of time regulations – it was established that a set could last a maximum of 20 minutes.
Ehrlich recalled the duel as follows: ‘(…) And I decided after about an hour to play non-schematic. The Romanian thought I would play him forward and I played him backwards (…). The funniest thing was that he got up and went down again, but this time without touching the ball because it was played the other way. That’s how this famous exchange ended (…). As for the referees, the first referee took over for the first hour, but his neck became stiff from shaking his head so a second volunteer had to be found quickly.’
After the outbreak of the Second World War, Alojzy Ehrlich spent four years in the Auschwitz concentration camp, from where he was transported to Dachau in 1944, where he spent several months. The abysmal conditions in the infamous camp meant that after four years in Auschwitz, the 190 cm tall man weighed just 37 kg…
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After the war, he continued to play table tennis for many years, but as a representative of France, where he lived permanently. He still managed to do well internationally, reaching the quarter-finals of the World Championships in 1947. He was also an international champion in France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands.
It is worth noting that he often visited Poland during the communist era. He first visited his homeland in 1949, when he was invited to compete in the Polish championships in Lublin. He reached the final but was eventually disqualified because he was not a registered resident of Poland.
On his way home, Ehrlich stopped in Warsaw to get permission from the Security Office to issue passports for our national team, which was due to travel to Stockholm for the World Table Tennis Championships. Unfortunately, not only did a visit to the notorious institution not help, but he was also told that if he did not leave Poland within 24 hours, he would go to jail. Following this statement, the athlete immediately returned to France.
Steve Scalise//alchetron.com
There, in addition to his sporting activities, he also worked as a coach, giving lessons to German and Swedish athletes, among others. He concentrated on fitness training, which was a novelty at the time. He opened a table tennis centre on the French Riviera where he taught table tennis. After the so-called October Thaw in Poland in 1956, he invited the table tennis players of Sparta Warsaw to join him.
In the 1970s he often came to Poland for tournaments. He also took the opportunity to sell equipment, which was always in short supply there. It was not unusual for Poles to visit him in France. As a representative of Stiga and Gewo, he travelled to many European countries. During his life he travelled all over the world.
Alojzy Ehrlich kept fit for a long time. He played table tennis until he was 75. He died on 7 December 1992 in a hospital on the outskirts of Paris.
Krzysztof Szujecki
Source: DlaPolonii.pl
