On Monday it will be 78 years since the Nazis murdered the Jewish soccer player György Silberstein. No Stolperstein – stone in memory of the victims of Nazism – remembers him in Budapest. Far from the noise, Barça plans to place one in the Camp Nou
This is a match played on the field of sadness. The story of a promising young footballer who one autumn afternoon, wearing the Blaugrana shirt, scored a brilliant goal against Girona. A Hungarian boy who, after that goal, everything went wrong.
His name was György Silberstein, but his parents – Europe, dirty with anti-Semitism, was walking towards darkness – changed his Jewish surname to a Hungarian one: Szeder, the name with which he played in his very brief stint at Barça.
I was 20 years old. It was October 21, 1934 and he was playing his first official match with the Catalans: the Catalan Championship, which gave access to the Spanish Cup. Girona received Barça in the now-defunct Vista Alegre stadium, and the stands were packed.
Szeder was playing on the left wing to replace Cabanes, who suffered an ankle injury, and in that first match he fired one of the two goals scored by Barça. That his shot was fantastic was recognized by the Girona goalkeeper himself, Iborra. But it was only a flash. “Too bad about the two goals they scored against me,” Iborra declared. This Szeder fellow is a puzzling individual. Anyone would say watching him play that he doesn't know what a ball is. But he stands out and has scored a brilliant goal ”.
That magnificent goal was of little use to him. "Frankly bad," El Mundo Deportivo described his game. "As an acquisition, it is quite an acquisition," he finished with irony of the signing. “Very grey”, confirmed La Vanguardia.
Szeder came from Soroksár SC, a modest club from the south of Budapest that – surprising everyone – had just won the Hungarian Cup: he had scored a goal in the final. Joining Barça was not leaving Hungary entirely: Hungarians were the coach –Plattkó– and a defensive midfielder, Berkessy.
He signed the contract on October 10 at the culé offices at 331 Consell de Cent street – destroyed four years later by fascist bombs – and his dream began to go wrong when the Hungarian Federation demanded his return for not having processed his withdrawal from the federation. To avoid legal problems, Barça made him play friendlies surrounded by substitutes. "Young boys whose game couldn't match mine," he complained.
Barça terminated his contract on December 20 and bought him a return ticket to Budapest. He had only played that official match and four friendlies (in which he scored a goal against Iluro de Mataró). Behind his failure floated the eternal ghosts of football: bad luck, federation paperwork, a shady agent and the 25,000 pesetas that Barça paid for him and that nobody knew where they were. He had arrived “excited” from Budapest and returned home with the feeling that someone had deceived him without really knowing who.
He went from glory to obscurity. From playing one afternoon alongside footballers who would touch the sky like Vantolrà, Raich or Escolà to returning to modest Hungarian teams, with a frustrated test in French Antibes. He was a loser, but without its losers, Barça would not be what it is. He managed to play until 1942, when Europe had already been shot.
In his only official game in the Barcelona squad, Szeder also played with Zabalo, the legendary Blaugrana defender. Impossible to imagine, while they shared the ball that afternoon, that the two would also end up sharing the pain of the blackest game in Europe. In 1940, Zabalo – a British national because he was born in South Shields – was detained by the Nazis in the Parisian hotel La Paix and locked up in a concentration camp in northern France. And Szeder was killed at the end of the Holocaust.
Szeder's story, yet to be written, was brought to light in 2017 by a brief but revealing article in Cuadernos de Fútbol de Cihefe signed by Fernando Arrechea, Jordi Mas, José Alberto Salas and Eugen Scheinherr. Three years later, the journalist Toni Padilla contributed new data in another excellent article, and there his memory remained parked.
Szeder, a deportee, was assassinated by the Nazis on May 1, 1945 – the day after Hitler committed suicide – and whether it was in Międzychód, Poland, or was killed by a mine as he, exhausted, broken, was returning home, is unclear. house through Austria.
His name is inscribed at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial, as well as that of almost his entire family. Also inscribed is the name of Ernö Goldmann, his first soccer coach, the one from the neighborhood, the man who made him love the sport that would lead him to play an official match with Futbol Club Barcelona. Even if it was only for a day.
No Stolperstein, the stone in memory of the victims of Nazism, remembers him on his street in Budapest. Far from the noise, Barça set itself the goal of placing one at the Camp Nou months ago.
"I confess that the night that I don't dream of spectacular, beautiful and mine goals is very rare," writes Jorge Valdano in Sueños de fútbol. And from the very brief dream of the Hungarian Jew we still have that spectacular moment, beautiful and his: the kick he gave the ball 29 minutes into the second half in a match in the Catalan Championship.
That brilliant goal that, wearing the Blaugrana shirt, he scored one autumn afternoon in Girona.
Eternity is exactly this.
