Discovering a new place in London
I’ve lived and worked in London for 40 years, but from time to time i still discover a new place of interest. This week, it was the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide.
I went there to view a small exhibition on the Berlin Olympics of 1936, obviously timed as a counterpoint to the London Olympics of this summer. As always, I learned new things.
I had not known that, for the Olympics after the Great War in both 1920 and 1924, Germany was excluded but, that, when the country was readmitted to the Games in 1928, it achieved the second highest collection of medals.
Most people know about Jesse Owens, the black American athlete who at the Berlin Games upset the Nazi propaganda of Aryan racial superiority. But I did not know about Helene Meyer, a German Jew who was compelled to leave the country and take part in the Berlin Olympics as an American competitor.