HARRY HAFT is not a name many boxing fans will recognise — which is a shame because this is a man who endured more than anyone who’s ever laced up the gloves, who was quite literally forced to fight for his own survival. 

Born Herschel Haft in Belchatow, Poland in 1925, Haft was Jewish and during the Nazi occupation of his country he was incarcerated just shy of his sixteenth birthday. He was then held at various camps before ending up at Auschwitz in 1942. There he was beaten, starved, and seemingly destined for death. However due to his natural strength and impressive physique — half starved notwithstanding — Haft was provided with a lifeline by an SS camp overseer who selected him to take part in bareknuckle fights against other inmates for the entertainment of the officers.

These fights were held at the Jaworzno concentration and labour camp, an Auschwitz sub-camp whose inmates worked at the coal mine located there. 

Though it might make for a tidy good versus evil narrative to paint Haft as a saint in land of sinners, real life is more complex, as are human beings — especially when forced to navigate an environment in which death is a constant companion.

In this vein, Haft, while assigned to the job of sorting through the possessions of camp inmates, began stealing diamonds for one of the German officers. He was caught during a routine barracks inspection, after which he was beaten severely almost to the point of death. He refused to implicate the officer concerned and the latter intervened to save him, arranging for him to be sent to Jaworzno.

Each month at Jaworzno around 200 inmates, worked to exhaustion in the mines, were sent to the gas chamber. Haft also spent time doing hard labour there, but when he began fighting he was assigned to lighter duties. The only stipulation was that he win his fights.

This he did against 76 opponents according to his son Alan Haft, who wrote a book about his father — Harry Haft Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano. 

The fights took place on a Sunday against three or four different opponents and the winner was declared when the other man could no longer stand. “It was actually boxing to the finish,” Harry Haft himself later recounted. “One of us had to lay down. It was not professional fighting or amateur fighting. It was just entertaining the Germans. I knew how to do it and I survived.”

The losers in these brutal bouts were sent to hospital, from where if they did not recover in a few days they were transferred to Auschwitz death camp to be slaughtered.

Due to his fighting prowess, the SS officers at the camp named Haft “The Jew Animal”. He was a young man fighting for his own survival in the full knowledge that he was consigning each man he defeated to death. The psychological damage such a grim dynamic must have wrought over time is unfathomable, as is the bestial character of the ideology responsible for it.

According to his son, Harry Haft also witnessed cannibalism when he was moved to a concentration camp in Flossenburg, Germany, in response to the Red Army’s advance into Poland. Locked in a barracks hut with starving prisoners, he watched as they began to kill and eat one another to stay alive.

Haft managed to escape in April 1945, and was on the run for a number of months. During this period he killed an SS soldier he came across bathing by a river. Haft took the man’s uniform and eye patch and passed himself off as an injured German soldier to a couple who ran a farm nearby. They gave him food and shelter but the next morning, after the husband began asking awkward questions, Haft killed the two of them, believing they were about to turn him in to the Germans.

He finally ran into a unit of American soldiers, to whom he identified himself by drawing a Star of David on the ground and showing them his concentration camp number tattoo. He was saved and found himself in a displaced persons camp.

Haft left postwar Germany in 1948 at the age of 23, boarding a ship to New York with the aim of becoming a prizefighter. Prior to heading stateside, Haft had entered and won a boxing competition in Germany organised by the US Army, taking the heavyweight title. By the time he arrived in the States he’d already lived a life of such adversity and drama, it could only either break his will or mould it into gnarled steel. Clearly in Haft’s case it was the latter.

The high water mark of his boxing career came, as the title of the book by Alan Haft refers, when he fought the legendary Rocky Marciano in 1949 in Rhode Island. Alan Haft states that his father knew going into the bout that he didn’t stand a chance and only did so knowing it would get his name in the newspapers. This, Harry Haft reasoned, might help him trace his teenage sweetheart Leah, whom he’d lost during the war, along with members of his family and friends from Poland, whom he hoped would come across his name and recognise him.

Haft was stopped by Marciano in the third round, after which he retired from the ring. He went on to work in a series of jobs before setting up his own fruit and veg stall in New York, later expanding the business to the point of running a number of fruit and veg stores. 

He married in 1950 and fathered three children. After retiring, he moved to Florida with his family, where he died in 2007 from cancer. Sadly, though unsurprisingly given what he experienced and endured, Harry Haft, according to his son, was an abusive father, who would erupt into psychotic episodes. “He never managed to escape the memories of the concentration camps,” Alan Haft later wrote. “He struggled with nightmares throughout his life…and by today’s standards, I was a battered child.”

A movie on Haft’s extraordinary life was released in April this year. Called The Survivor and based on the book by Alan Haft, it aired on HBO. Directed by Barry Levinson, it starred Danny De Vito, John Leguizamo, and Ben Foster as Harry Haft.

No romantic comedy this.