This is a match played in the field of sadness.
The story of a promising young football player who one autumn afternoon, wearing the Blaugrana shirt, scored a brilliant goal against Girona. A Hungarian boy for whom, from that goal on, everything went wrong.
His name was György Silberstein, but his parents – Europe, dirty with anti-Semitism, was walking towards darkness – changed his Jewish surname for another Hungarian one: Szeder, a name he played with in his very brief passage through Boat.
I was 20 years old. It was October 21, 1934 and he was playing his first official match with the Culers: the Catalan Championship, which gave access to the Spanish Cup. Girona hosted Barça at the now-defunct Vista Alegre stadium, and the stands were bursting at the seams.
Szeder played on the left wing in place of Cabanes, who was suffering from an ankle injury, and in that first match he scored one of the two goals scored by Barça. Girona's goalkeeper, Iborra, recognized that his shot was fantastic. But it was only a mirage. "It's a shame about the two goals they scored against me - declared Iborra-. This Szeder is a puzzling individual. Anyone watching him play would say he doesn't know what a ball is. But he stood out and scored a brilliant goal."
That magnificent goal was of little use to him. "Frankly bad", said El Mundo Deportivo of his game. "As an acquisition, it's all an acquisition", he finished with irony about the signing. "Very gray", confirmed La Vanguardia.
Szeder came from Soroksár SC, a modest club in the south of Budapest that – to everyone's surprise – had just won the Hungarian Cup: he had scored a goal in the final. Joining Barça was not leaving Hungary entirely: the coach – Plattkó – and a defensive pivot, Berkessy, were Hungarian.
He signed the contract in the Culler offices at 331 Consell de Cent street – destroyed four years later by fascist bombs – and his dream began to twist when the Hungarian Federation demanded that he return for not having processed his leave federative To avoid legal problems, Barça made him play friendlies surrounded by substitutes. "Young guys 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 at Iluro de Mataró). Behind his failure floated the eternal ghosts of football: bad luck, federal paperwork, a shady agent and the 25,000 pesetas that Barça paid for him and that no one knew where they were. He had arrived "excited" from Budapest and was returning home with the feeling that someone had tricked him without knowing very well who.
He went from glory to obscurity. From playing one afternoon with footballers who would touch the sky like Vantolrà, Raich or Escolà to returning to modest Hungarian teams, with a frustrated test at FC Antibes. He was a loser, but, without his losers, Barça would not be what it is. He managed to play until 1942, when Europe had already started a fire.
In his only official match in the Barcelona squad, Szeder also played with Zabalo, the legendary Barcelona defender. Impossible to imagine, while they were sharing the ball that afternoon, that the two would also end up sharing the pain of the blackest game in Europe. In 1940 Zabalo – of British nationality due to having been born in South Shields – was arrested by the Nazis at the Parisian Hotel de La Paix and imprisoned in a concentration camp in the north of France. And Szeder was killed at the end of the Holocaust.
Szeder's story, still to be written, was brought to light in 2017 by a short 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 provided new information about it in another excellent article, and there his memory was parked.
Szeder, a deportee, was killed by the Nazis on May 1, 1945 – the day after Hitler committed suicide – and it is not clear whether it was in Międzychód, Poland, or if he was killed by a mine when, exhausted, broken, he was returning home through Austria.
His name is inscribed at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, as well as that of almost all of his family. There is also the name of Ernö Goldmann, his first football 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 just for a day.
Cap Stolperstein, the stones in memory of the victims of Nazism, remember him on his street in Budapest. Away from the noise, Barça set itself the goal of placing one at Camp Nou months ago.
"I confess that it is very rare at night that I do not dream of spectacular goals, beautiful and mine", writes Jorge Valdano in Sueños de fútbol. And from the very brief dream of the Hungarian Jew, we have that spectacular moment, beautiful and his: the shot he made in the 29th minute of the second half in a Catalan Championship match.
That brilliant goal that, wearing the Blaugrana shirt, marked an autumn afternoon in Girona.
Eternity is exactly that.
