Harry Haft was born in Bełchatów, Poland, and he was only 14 years old when Germany invaded the country in 1939.
As a teenager, he was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. When the Nazi guards found out he had some boxing experience, they forced him to fight other prisoners in brutal matches. The loser of each fight was killed.
Haft had no choice but to fight to stay alive. He never lost a match, even though many of the men he fought were people he knew—since prisoners from the same town were often sent to the same camps. Between 1943 and 1945, he was made to fight at least 76 prisoners. He never saw any of them again.
In April 1945, during a death march as the Nazis evacuated the camps, Haft escaped. He killed a Nazi soldier and took his uniform, then spent weeks running from one village to another, trying to survive.
By the time he reached a part of Germany controlled by Allied forces, he weighed just 110 pounds. He spent the next two years recovering in a refugee camp.
In 1948, when he was 22, he moved to the United States with help from an uncle in New Jersey. There, he became a professional light heavyweight boxer to earn a living.
A movie about his life, called The Survivor, came out on HBO on April 27, 2022 — which is also Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.