New film portrays Jewish athlete cheated by Nazis (News Feature)

By Helen Maguire Aug 21, 2009, 2:44 GMT

Berlin - Attention in Berlin was briefly diverted from the 2009 World Athletics Championships to a high-jumper who was never allowed to compete for her country because she was a Jew in 1930s Germany.

Thursday night saw the premiere of a film about Gretel Bergmann, one of Germany's most successful female high-jumpers before the 1936 Olympics, held in the same Berlin stadium hosting the current games.

Bergmann never entered the stadium. Instead, her son Glenn Lambert says, the Nazi regime 'jerked her back and forth,' when the United States threatened to boycott the Games if Jews were not allowed to compete.

Born 1912 near the German city of Ulm, Bergmann escaped to Britain in 1934 when training conditions became nigh impossible.

When the US insisted Jews were admitted to the Games, the German government threatened Bergmann's family if she did not return to compete.

As one of the strongest athletes however, the Nazis couldn't allow Bergmann, a Jew, to be seen winning.

During training, they pitted her against a man who lived as a women and said Bergmann's performance was not sufficient, despite her having achieved the German record of 1.60 metres.

Barring Bergman from the event, the sports authorities sent her a ticket to view the event in the Berlin stadium, in a gesture which her son says was intended as an insult. She never attended.

'She went to some little town and she just cried for two weeks,' Lambert told German Press Agency dpa ahead of the premiere.

Bergmann later escaped to the US, where she still lives, aged 95, with her husband, a fellow athlete in Germany in 1936.

The film dramatizes aspects of Bergmann's story, developing a fictitious friendship between her and the challenger set up by the Nazis.

Bergmann said she approved of the dramatization, for which she was shown the script before filming, adding, 'Who wants to see someone high jumping for an hour-and-a-half?'

Bergmann is played by Karoline Herfurth, a German actress who also appeared in this year's Holocaust-related film, The Reader, and in the 2006 film Perfume.

Lambert said, although Herfurth looked 'nothing like my mother,' she brought her character to life. To slip into the role, Herfurth had pasted extracts from Bergmann's own autobiography into the script. 'For the first time in my life, I was incredibly ashamed to be German,' Herfurth said of the events she re-enacted.

Bergmann, who eventually visited Germany in the 1990s, was not able to travel from her New York home to Berlin for the premiere, as she did not want to leave behind her 98-year-old husband.

Lambert, who was attending the opening on his mother's behalf, said for her it was 'a mixture between painful and very gratifying to have her story recognized after all those years.'

Despite the injustices, Lambert said, his mother was one of the lucky ones.

'Nothing will make up for what happened, but it's just a tremendous thing for her to have this unexpected happy ending to her story,' he said.

The women's high-jump finals of the 2009 world championships were taking place while the film was having its premiere. German jumper Araine Friedrich won the bronze medal.