READ AVRAM GRANTS LIFE HISTORY......SUPRISING

Avram Grant’s story is an incredible one. We know
him as the quietly spoken man who took Chelsea to
within a John Terry penalty of the Champions
League title in 2008.
We know him as the boss at West Ham and the man
who gave the passionate speech to Portsmouth fans
on the brink of relegation and administration in
2010.
We know him as the man who has steered Ghana’s
national team to the semi-final of the 2015 Africa
Cup of Nations in Equatorial Guinea.
His own story – the son of a Polish Jew who married
the daughter of an influential Iraqi lawyer who was
forced to flee to Israel – is remarkable, but the
history of his family is as rich as it is tragic, as
heart-warming as it is heart-breaking and as
inspiring as it is dark.
Grant was aware his father had survived the
Holocaust , but knew very little of his previous life
until an unforgettable night as a teenager.
“I’d never heard a scream like it,” Grant tells me
at our Warsaw hotel. He was 15 years old and on
the balcony of the family home with friends. His
father was asleep inside but weeping and wailing
from his bed.
“I rushed to his room to see what was wrong. For
once my mother was not there to calm him down.
For the first time my father told me what really
happened in his childhood, why he screamed each
night in his sleep. Since that night I have always
needed to know more.”
Meir Granat had been born in the town of Mlawa,
one of three million Jews living in Poland before
the beginning of World War II.
In 1937, Meir’s father, Avram, fearing something
bad was going to happen, decided that the family
had to leave Mlawa. He took his wife and nine of
his 10 children on a three-year trek that would
take them across Poland, via the Warsaw ghetto,
and eventually to the remote region of Komi in
Russia.
“I always wanted to ask my grandfather why he
left here,” Grant explains as we sit in the major’s
office in Mlawa waiting for the arrival of some
family documents. “What did he see that others
missed? What did he see that [then Prime Minister
Neville] Chamberlain didn’t? He went to great
lengths to protect his family”.
One child, Hertsel, was hidden in a monastery.
Rachel and Estera were placed in an orphanage.
The rest were hassled and harried around Eastern
Europe. On one occasion the train they were on was
stopped and two more of Grant’s father’s siblings –
Koppel & Hannah – were taken away and never seen
again.
“They both died in Auschwitz,” Grant says with a
heavy heart. “The Germans took the rest of my
father’s family, and many other Jews, to Russia.
The train stopped again, but this time, when
everybody got off, it just left them behind in
temperatures as low as -40. They were all meant
to die.” Many did.
The former Chelsea boss continues: “They were
forced to live in the forest. Each day my father
would see new bodies on the floor – he was there
for almost four years.”
Grant’s aunt Sarah, 15 at the time, was the first
to die from eating poisonous mushrooms in a
desperate search for food in October 1940.
“My father buried his sister with his own hands,”
he says. One by one the family passed away –
crippled by the cold and hunger. “In total, my
father dug a grave for his father, his mother and
five other members of his family – all with his own
hands. Imagine that? What was going through his
head? I’ve been to this place, I had to go.
“People can get lost in the numbers. Six million
killed seems incredible – too many to contemplate –
but what fascinates me is how they survived day to
day.
“What did they think about in the morning when
they got up? How did they get by on a quarter of
a potato every other day? How did they not just
give up when they had no idea when it would end?”
That is what strikes you about Avram Grant – the
need to know. There are huge sections of his family
history that remain blank, but with each document
he finds the past is being pieced together.
On his first trip back to Mlawa in 2000 he found
the house where his father grew up. This time, as
we were handed the papers by the town hall media
officer, there was another discovery.
“My grandfather had a twin brother? This is
incredible. I can’t believe it,” Grant bows his head
and covers his eyes with his hands for a moment.
“Last time I came here I cried like a baby but I’m
stronger now. I need to ring my sister.”
This has been the pattern for many years. With
each discovery of a birth certificate, an address, a
new relative, Grant rings his sister, then his last
surviving uncle, then Avi – the son of his father’s
sister Estera, who is one 150,000 people buried in
the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.
“We now know where your grandfather lived. I can
take you if you like,” says Magda from the town
hall.
On the way, she explains that the house remains
unchanged from the 1930s. In fact, of all the
houses we saw in Mlawa, only three are as they
were 75 years ago – Grant’s grandfather’s house,
his dad’s house and the one next door. “It’s almost
like they were waiting for me,” Grant says, as he
fills a carrier bag of soil from his father’s old
backyard. “I will sprinkle this on his grave – it’s
Jewish tradition.”
Walking through the house, Grant remembers
everything from his father’s description. “This is
where my grandfather worked on making leather,”
he says, pointing at a shed. “And this is where I
like to think my father played football, but I don’t
know for sure,” he chuckled. “I’m the only one in
my family who likes football.”
Before we left Mlawa, there was one final poignant
reminder of the family’s grim past. In the town
hall, we’d learnt that Grant’s grandfather had
another brother called Bunem, who had decided to
stay in the town rather than leave in the late
1930s.
In the car he receives a phone call. “That’s why my
grandfather left,” he exclaims as he finished the
call. Bunem had been rounded up by the Germans.
He, his wife, and their five children had all been
taken to Auschwitz and been gassed. “My
grandfather’s plan was a crazy one, but at least
some survived. My father had to bury more than
half his family, but if they hadn’t left Mlawa I
would not be here today.”
The following day we travelled to Auschwitz
ourselves. Grant could have flown but chose to go
by train. He continues: “It’s a journey I feel I had
to make. The last time members of my family were
on a train to Auschwitz it was very different –
crammed into a carriage and certainly no cup of
coffee.” As we step off the train he breathes
deeply and whispers to me: “And now, we go to
hell.”
What strikes you about Auschwitz is the size of the
place and the silence, almost as though it’s
designed to make you stop and think. There are no
birds in the sky – almost no noise at all. Nearby
Birkenau was simply a killing machine – home to
four giant gas chambers, each of which was
brutally efficient and could asphyxiate 2,000 people
at a time. Their business was death.
The Nazis destroyed much of the camp as they
fled, but the train line that delivered over one
million people from all over Europe to their death
is still in place. As you stare at the barbed wire
and watchtowers that stretch as far as you can
see, you can’t help but be stunned by the scale of
the crime.
As we stand by gas chamber two, Grant ruminates:
“I wonder how they did it? How do you murder
others and then go home to your family? How do
you burn someone alive or clean up the bodies of
children and then go back to your own children and
tell them what you did that day?”
Many Holocaust survivors ask the same question. He
continues: “My father grew up an orthodox Jew,
but lost his faith during the war because of what
he went through. I think it’s easy to understand
why. It’s impossible to bury half your family and
remain unchanged.
“I spoke to Roy [Hodgson] recently and I told him
that when England come to Auschwitz during Euro
2012 I would love to be part of it and take them
around. The players need to know what happened.
We all need to remember, otherwise we’ll soon
forget the scale of the horror. No-one leaves here
the same person. You can’t.
Avram Grant by the grave of his father's sister
Estera in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.<br />
“I first came here in 1988 when I was manager of
Hapoel Petah Tikva. The next day one of my team,
the left-back, was unable to play. After standing
in the gas chamber, he said ‘boss, I can’t do it’. I
will never forget that. Thankfully the others were
inspired and we won 3-0.”
Each year he returns to Auschwitz with Holocaust
survivors for the ‘March of the Living’, but his
father has never gone back to Poland. “He couldn’t
face it,” says Grant. “Too many bad memories.”
Despite everything, Meir Granat remained a calm
and gracious man until his death in October 2009.
“He never hated anyone,” Grant explains, almost in
disbelief: “He always told me there were good
people as well as the bad. He never held a grudge,
never wanted revenge.
“To see him during the day you’d never know what
he went through. I know because of the screaming
in the night. I know because I knew my father. I
can still hear him screaming sometimes. There are
no words to describe the sound.”
Grant puffs out his cheeks and a broad grin
crosses his face. “You know these last few days
have changed things – I know so much more than I
did. I will never stop searching but I feel more
peaceful about it all,” he adds.
As we walk under the infamous Auschwitz gates
that read ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work Brings
Freedom), he again becomes emotional: “My own
son, Daniel, came here last year. He called me
from this point and asked what his grandfather
would want him to do.”
With tears in his eyes, Grant recalls: “I told him to
look at the sky in this horrible place and smile.
That’s what he did. My father was always smiling,
always seeing the best in people, always positive,
always optimistic. I could never understand how.”
That’s what I will take from my trip to Poland with
Avram Grant. I’ll never forget the look on his face
when he saw the birth certificates in Mlawa or the
smile when he walked around the garden his
grandfather played in as a child.
The images and silence of Auschwitz will stay with
me forever but my enduring memory will be
Grant’s father, a man I never met but now feel I
know so much about. If Meir Granat could be
optimistic with all that he saw, surely we all can.