London 2012 Olympics: British Holocaust survivor Ben Helfgott's story inspires medal hopeful Zoe Smith The pair have one thing in common: they both have a bronze medal from the Commonwealth Games. Otherwise, as Smith discovered after listening to Helfgott speak, their experiences could hardly be more different. "Yeah, his story is so inspirational," she said. It kind of shows me how easy I've got it. If he could do it after being through such awful times, I should be able to do the same starting from such a great background as I have. Really, we have no idea, do we? She is right there. Helfgott's narrative is astonishing. Told in a calm, soft lisping lilt, it tells of suffering, pain and loss unimaginable to those of us fortunate enough to be born in times of tolerance. But it also speaks of the all-embracing redemptive possibility of sport. He was nine when the Germans invaded his homeland of Poland. His family lived in what was to become the Warsaw ghetto and almost immediately he suffered the awful consequence of Nazi occupation: his mother and younger sister were shot. His father spent nearly four years ducking, diving and smuggling in the ghetto before the pair - and Ben's other sister - were eventually deported to the concentration camps. Arriving at Theresienstadt, he assumed he had been sent to hell. The people, he thought, "looked like the living dead." Set to manual labour, he was strong and healthy enough to avoid the gas chambers for nearly two years. His father, too, almost made it. Only to be shot escaping from the camp the day before the war ended. After liberation, young Ben was brought to Britain by Jewish charities, one of 752 orphaned survivors known as "the Boys." He was initially sent to Windermere to recuperate. "That first night I slept in sheets," he recalled, "it was heavenly." So began a long love affair between the refugee and host country. "I'd always been a great Anglophile," he explained. I collected stamps as a boy and I got hooked on the British Empire stamps. I'd go to the cinema to watch British films. My favourite film was The Charge of the Light Brigade with Errol Flynn. And it was in Britain, three years after he arrived, that he first picked up a bar. I was in a youth club when I saw this bar with 140lb on it and I asked if I could lift it. I'd lifted heavy weights in the concentration camp, but never before like this. The coach in charge said no, you don't know what you're doing. But I was persistent. I lifted it and rather startled him. He said I was a natural. So natural, in fact, within a few months he had broken the British record. But his natural talent was allied to a ferocious competitive streak. "The Nazis stole my opportunity," he says. When I was given it back in England, I was determined to make the most of everything that came my way. He did that all right. Employed as a manager of a shop in north London, he trained after work, then went home and read till three every morning, determined to educate himself. "Amateur is not the word," he says. I never in my life received payment. I believed in the phrase to be a good sport. I wanted the challenge, but would never take short cuts. Twice he even disqualified himself when he broke the rules on movement in a lift. "My coach said to me after one: "You silly man, no one had noticed." I said, I couldn't help myself. I always believed in fairness. I believed in the English ideal. He saw in his sport further scope for self-improvement. I knew I could never be world champion. I talked to those from the communist countries and they were full time sportsmen. We couldn't compete. But it didn't bother me because I did it for fun. Weightlifting gave me an opportunity to travel. I went to places ordinary people couldn't go in the 1950s. Particularly behind the Iron Curtain. In 1955 I went to a competition in Warsaw. There was absolutely nothing left of what I knew. Ninety-eight per cent of the Jews in Warsaw were killed. I went to see where we lived, where my mother was killed, where my sister was killed. His memory remains filled with such thoughts. And it makes you wonder, listening to him talk of his sporting life, whether it was his competitive instincts that kept him alive in the death camp. "I'm convinced now it was not my sporting ability that helped me survive," he said. Only one thing got me through that hell on earth: luck. I was lucky always to be in the right place at the right time. Or maybe it was that I wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ever since it has been my duty as the one who survived to tell the world what happened to those who were not so lucky. Friday Jan 27 is Holocaust Memorial Day, dedicated to the memory of victims of Nazi persecution and those from subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. Visit www.speakupnow.org.uk