SHAUL LADANY

Shaul Paul Ladany is an Israeli Holocaust survivor.

He also survived the 1972 Munich massacre at the Summer Olympics.

He is eighty-six years old.

As time goes along, naturally, fewer of these souls are here.

Most of them are gone, with their extended families clinging to their histories.

Ladany’s history is full, to say the least.

His is a life of remarkable resolve, with tenacity of purpose a personal bold-faced signature.

Eighty years ago, much of his personality was forged in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp–forever infamous–11 miles north of Celle.

In Munich, Ladany’s story was bookended by another notorious crime, perpetrated decades later, at the 1972 Summer Olympics.

He has endured the very worst that humanity could offer, often eluding death, while maintaining extraordinary grace.

“You did not need one single lucky event to survive,” he remarks.

“But to survive, you needed a series of lucky events.”

Shaul Ladany was a special athlete.

His gift for endurance coupled with a seemingly limitless capacity for pain, defined him.

He learned this about himself when he served in the Israeli army; he was in his early twenties.

Long army marches were instructive in a myriad of ways.

Back then, in the early days of Israel, (the mid-to-late 1950s), army marches were covered on radio and closely followed by the public.

They were as much cross-country races as they were training exercises.

“The Israeli press called me the king of the marches because I was so fast,” he remembers now with great, button-bursting pride.

He honed his skills by walking incessantly–compulsively–to the tune of more than 20 miles daily.

Every day.

Internet memes of today might show Ladany furiously pacing the country’s roads–arms pumping as if they were about to fall off–one foot always in contact with the ground.

A generation of Israelis grew accustomed to the sight.

In the mid-1960s he moved to Manhattan to study business administration at Columbia.

It was there that he discovered world-class race-walking talent, which upped his game.

The training was not a means to an end, but the end itself.

Eventually, he’d graduate with a PhD and go on to a long and distinguished career as a professor in Israel.

His work was important to him.

But he needed walking.

And he still does.

“It’s clear that it–[the Bergen-Belsen horrific and tragic ordeal]–forged my character, my behavior for the rest of my life,” Ladany reflects.

“What you need in sports to succeed is pain, discomfort, difficult times and very difficult situations.

I had it.

It motivated me to not [allow] the possibility that others control my life.”

Shaul Ladany doesn’t cry.

“I keep the sorrow to my inside.”

And “I never retreat.”

A few weeks after flying home to Israel following the 1972 Olympics, Ladany found himself in Lugano, Switzerland, about 250 miles from Munich.

He was there to compete in the 100-kilometer race-walking world championship.

He won.

For all these decades–and for all the horror he’s endured–Shaul Ladany’s every step has personified devotion and defiance.

He wins.

You couldn’t kill all of us.

I’m still here.

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in September 2022.]