B20 O THEGLOBEANDMAIL| WEDNESDAY,MARCH11,2020
E
va Szekely, an Olympic cham-
pion swimmer and an athlet-
ic hero in her home country
of Hungary, narrowly escaped be-
ing murdered by fascists before
she could achieve greatness.
Already a promising swimmer
as a girl, Szekely (pronounced
“SAY-kay”) was forced off her
swim team in Budapest in 1941 be-
cause she was Jewish. Fascist forces
within Hungary made things pro-
gressively worse for Jews there,
well before the Nazis occupied the
country in 1944.
An official in the Arrow Cross
Party, a Hungarian fascist organi-
zation that controlled the country
with Nazi support, at one point or-
dered Ms. Szekely to march to the
Danube River, where fascists killed
about 20,000 Hungarian Jews that
winter. Her father told her to lie
down and act too ill to move, then
he tried a different tactic.
“For some heavenly influence
my father said, ‘Don’t take her, she
is the swimming champion of
Hungary and one day you will be
happy you saved her life!’ ” Ms.
Szekely told the University of
Southern California’s Shoah Foun-
dation Institute in videotaped tes-
timony in Hungarian subtitled in
English.
Ms. Szekely recalled staring into
the official’s eyes, one gray, one
brown, before he let her live. She
survived and fulfilled her father’s
prophecy, winning a gold medal in
the 200-metre breaststroke at the
1952 Olympics in Helsinki and a sil-
ver in the same event at the Olym-
pics in Australia four years later.
Ms. Szekely died on Feb. 29 at
her home in Budapest. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by
Gergely Csurka, the media manag-
er for the Hungarian Swimming
Association, in an e-mail.
Amazingly, Ms. Szekely found a
way to train during the war. Ac-
cording to her entry in the Ency-
clopedia of Jewish Women, she en-
dured part of the war in a crowded,
Swiss-run safe house in Budapest,
where she ran up and down five
flights of stairs 100 times every
morning.
She entered international com-
petition soon after the war ended
in 1945, and won dozens of swim-
ming titles beginning in 1946. Shefirst competed in the Olympics at
the 1948 Games in London, where
she came in fourth in the 200-
metre breaststroke.
Two years later Ms. Szekely had
a chilling encounter after winning
an international swim meet in
Hungary. She was told that in addi-
tion to her gold medal she would
receive a special prize from an im-
portant officer of the communistpolitical police.
She said that the officer handed
her the trophy as she stood atop a
dais, they made eye contact, “and
it was that Arrow Cross man, with
his different color eyes! I thought I
would fall off the platform!”
Early in Ms. Szekely’s competi-
tive days she met Dezso Gyarmati,
an extraordinary water polo player
who helped Hungary win five
Olympic medals, including gold at
the 1952, 1956 and 1964 Games.
They married in 1950.
At the 1952 Olympics, Ms. Szeke-
ly set an Olympic record in the
200-metre breaststroke with a
time of 2:51.7 and was part of a
dominant Hungarian women’s
swim team, which won gold in four
out of five events. She and Mr.
Gyarmati had a daughter, Andrea
Gyarmati, in 1954.
Before they left for the 1956
Olympics in Melbourne an anti-
communist revolt, quickly quelled
by the Kremlin, roiled Hungary
and prevented athletes from train-
ing in the last weeks before the
games.
Ms. Szekely and Mr. Gyarmati,
an outspoken supporter of the up-
rising, had left Andrea behind and
were racked with anxiety – Ms.
Szekely reportedly lost more than
10 pounds during the Olympics.
She still managed to win silver in
the 200-metre breaststroke, be-
coming the only member of the
once-formidable Hungarian wom-
en’s team to earn a medal in the
1956 Olympics.
Many Hungarian athletes opted
to remain in Australia or defect to
other countries once they learned
that the Soviets had prevailed in
Hungary, but Ms. Szekely and Mr.
Gyarmati returned home to their
daughter. They defected to the
United States after a visit to Vienna
in 1957, but soon returned to Hun-
gary to care for Ms. Szekely’s aging
parents.
Ms. Szekely retired from com-
petition not long after the 1956Olympics, and became a pharma-
cist and swimming coach. One of
her most successful students was
her daughter, Andrea, who went
on to an Olympic swimming ca-
reer of her own, winning a silver
medal in the 100-metre backstroke
and a bronze in the 100-metre but-
terfly at the 1972 Games in Munich.
Ms. Szekely accompanied her
daughter to Munich, where she
met a member of Israel’s Olympic
delegation shortly before Palesti-
nian terrorists killed him, 10 other
Israeli athletes and coaches and a
West German police officer.
Two years after the Munich at-
tacks, Ms. Szekely spoke in a na-
tionally televised interview about
how she had responded in the
early 1940s to questions about her
background.
“Unequivocally, I was a Jew,”
she said.
Eva Szekely was born in Budap-
est on April 3, 1927, to Andor and
Maria (Schwitzer) Szekely. Her fa-
ther owned a shop that sold metal
goods, her mother was a home-
maker and Eva’s fascination with
swimming began when she was
quite young.
“Water was the real world where
I really felt comfortable and abso-
lutely safe,” she said in an inter-
view provided by the Hungarian
Swimming Association. “I usually
said that I should have been a fish.”
Her love of competitive swim-
ming grew after a fellow Hungar-
ian, Ferenc Csik, won a gold medal
in the 100-metre freestyle at the
1936 Olympics in Berlin.
She studied pharmacology at
Semmelweis University and what
is now the University of Physical
Education in Budapest.
Her marriage to Mr. Gyarmati
ended in divorce. In addition to
her daughter, she leaves a grand-
son, Mate Hesz, a talented water
polo player; and a great-grand-
daughter.NEWYORKTIMESNEWSSERVICESWIMMERSURVIVEDHOLOCAUST,
WENTONTOWINOLYMPICGOLD
ShewasnearlykilledbyHungary’sArrowCrossParty,untilanactofmercyfromanofficialallowedhertolive
andsetarecordinthe200-metrebreaststrokeatthe1952GamesinHelsinkiEVAS?EKELY
ATHLETE,¤2DANIELE.SLOTNIK
EvaSzekelyisseeninHelsinkiduringthe1¤}2OlympicGames.Ms.
SzekelywaspartofadominantHungarianwomen’sswimteam,which
wongoldinfouroutoffiveevents.POPPERFOTO/GETTYIMAGESOBITUARIES
D
avid Gardner was a lovely
man and a firm believer in
the need for theatre study
and production in postsecondary
institutions. When someone at
Hart House got the bright idea
that the University of Toronto
would be better served if Hart
House Theatre was converted in-
to a lecture hall and study room
for students, there was an imme-
diate uproar and a Committee to
Save Hart House Theatre was
formed which I co-chaired with
Mr. Gardner.
Soon, letters of support began
to pour into the president’s office
at Simcoe Hall from former stu-
dents, donors and Governing
Council members, along with
many prominent names in Cana-
dian theatre, film and television –
all of whom had strong connec-
tions to the theatre and many
known personally to David.
At the peak of the brouhaha,
Dr. Gardner was interviewed by
the CBC. When asked what he
would do if the university moved
forward and closed Hart House
Theatre, he answered in his soft,
mellifluous voice: “Well, it will be
over my dead body.” The Univer-
sity of Toronto abandoned the
idea and Hart House Theatre is
now celebrating its 100th anni-
versary season.RobinBreon,formeradministrator
fortheUniversityofToronto’s
MuseumStudiesProgramDavidGardnerIREMEMBER
DAVIDGARDNERN
exhmije Hoxha, who joined with
her husband, Enver Hoxha, the
communist dictator of Albania, in
overseeing an oppressive regime
that isolated the country after the Second
World War, executed dissenters and drove
the economy into the ground, died on Feb.
26 at her home near the capital, Tirana. She
was 99.
Her death was announced by her son Ilir
Hoxha and confirmed by Agence France-
Presse and other news outlets.
In the decades after the war, Ms. Hoxha
was a top Communist Party official in her
own right in her small mountainous Bal-
kan country, Europe’s most secretive and
poorest. When her husband was incapac-
itated by ill health, she became more influ-
ential, controlling Albania’s secret police
and orchestrating purges, arrests and show
trials.
Of the many spouses of dictators, the Al-
banian writer Ismail Kadare said, she was
“the most evil, the most perverse.” The
Guardian called her “Europe’s last unre-
pentant Stalinist.” Her foes settled for
“Lady Macbeth.”
Albania was initially allied with the So-
viet Union after the war, but Enver Hoxha
soon severed that relationship. He estab-
lished ties briefly with China, but those
frayed after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976,
and Albania remained isolated from the
outside world.
Mr. Hoxha, who died in 1985, banned
travel abroad, private property and reli-
gion. Hundreds of churches and mosques
were demolished. His policies caused
widespread poverty and misery.
While their countrymen starved, the
ruling couple lived in luxury in a com-
pound with an indoor swimming pool.
They “enjoyed supplies of Italian salami,
French wines, western cigarettes and the
services of French medical doctors,” The
Guardian reported. “They were believed to
own a number of houses, as well as 25 re-
frigerators, 28 color televisions and 19 per-
sonal telephone lines.”
The Hoxha regime, which lasted from
1945 to 1991, did not tolerate dissent. More
than 6,000 of its opponents were executed,
“That was more painful to me than En-
ver’s actual death,” she told The Guardian.
“It was shocking to think that people could
be so barbarous.”
Nexhmije Xhuglini was born into a fam-
ily of ethnic Albanian Muslims on Feb. 8,
1921, in Bitola, in what is now the Republic
of North Macedonia. She met her future
husband, who was about 13 years her se-
nior, at a clandestine meeting of the Alba-
nian Communist Party in 1941 and em-
braced his revolutionary ideas, which were
based on the teachings of Marx and Lenin.
She was elected to the General Council
of the Albanian National Liberation Move-
ment and fought alongside her future hus-
band against Albania’s Italian occupiers
during the Second World War. Mr. Hoxha
emerged as the communist guerrilla lead-
er, and after ousting the fascists, he be-
came the de facto head of state.
The couple married in 1945.
Ms. Hoxha was elected to the Secretariat
of the Albanian Women’s League, a branch
of the Communist Party, and served as
chairwoman from 1946 to 1952 – one of the
few spouses of a communist leader to hold
power in her own right. She led her hus-
band’s propaganda machine, becoming di-
rector of the Institute of Marxist-Leninist
Studies, and helped run Albania’s secret
police.
After Mr. Hoxha’s death, his hand-
picked successor became president, and
his widow served for five more years as
chairwoman of the Democratic Front, an
umbrella organization that did the bidding
of the Communist Party. From that perch,
she defended her husband’s regime and
edited more than 70 volumes of his
speeches. She was forced to resign from
that position in 1990, and two years later
went to prison for five years for embezzle-
ment. She was never charged in connec-
tion with the executions or the purges.
In addition to her son Ilir, she leaves her
daughter, Pranvera; another son, Sokol;
and several grandchildren.
Ms. Hoxha long maintained that she
had no regrets. “What should I be ashamed
of?” she asked Agence France-Presse in an
interview in 2008. “There is nothing I
should feel guilty for.”NEWYORKTIMESNEWSSERVICEthe remains of more than 5,000 of them
dumped in secret mass graves, according
to the International Commission on Mis-
sing Persons and Albania’s Institute of In-
tegration of Ex-Politically Persecuted,
which began exhuming and identifying
bodies in 2019.
The regime sentenced about 103,000 Al-
banians to prison based on politically mo-
tivated convictions and sent 65,000 people
to labour camps, according to the institute.
“Not only did she help him purge politi-
cal opponents and collaborators, but also
their children and people she had known
and had even held in her arms,” Ani Koko-
bobo, a native Albanian and chairwoman
of the Slavic department at the University
of Kansas, said of Ms. Hoxha in a phone in-
terview.
Dissenters were brutalized for triviali-
ties.
“When her husband died, commanders
forced prisoners to send letters of condo-
lence to Nexhmije,” Prof. Kokobobo said.
“Those who refused were punished with
solitary confinement or an extension of
their sentences.”
Ms. Hoxha took it as her mission to de-
fend her husband’s reputation and bur-
nish his image. In 1991, she was distraught
to see anti-communist demonstrators pull
down a 39-foot-tall bronze statue of her
husband in Tirana.NEXHMI EHOXHA
DICTATOR,¤¤‘LadyMacbeth’ofAlbaniahadareignofterror
KATHARINE..SEELYE
NexhmieHoxha