At number 4 Vidámvásár Street in Cinkota, a village on the outskirts of Budapest that eventually became a neighborhood engulfed by the capital, there is no plaque. Neither head Stumbling block, the small cobblestones created by German artist Gunter Demnig to remember the victims of Nazism. Cobblestones with the names of the people killed or deported, right at the entrance of the home where they lived. But there are none in this corner of Cinkota, near the train station, where György Silberstein lived. Blackberries, the only footballer in the history of Barça who was killed by the Nazis in an extermination camp, and who lost his life in the Holocaust because he was Jewish.
The story of Silberstein, retrieved in 2017 in an excellent article in the publication Football Notebooks of CIHEFE, remains little known. This footballer only managed to play one official match dressed as Barça, a 1-2 victory in the Girona field corresponding to the Championship of Catalonia, the 1934-1935 season. Szeder came from Soroksár SC, a modest club in the south of Budapest with whom he had won the Cup. Its history has not yet fully recovered, however.
Living with a serial killer
György Silberstein was born in Cinkota on February 23, 1914. His parents, David Silberstein and Irén Goldmann, must have told the little György the stories of World War I, as his father fought at the front, where he was seriously injured. By 1916 he was already back home, released from service and decorated as a lieutenant for his valor in combat. David Silberstein returned to Cinkota just in time to see live the events that made his street famous. It must have been an experience that marked them. The Silberstein lived in a large two-story building they shared with other families. The central part was a pharmacy and they ran a butcher shop right next door. And through the back door of the building was access to a skating rink where a man named Béla Kiss had rented a house. Well, Kiss was a serial killer.
In 1916, the police discovered the remains of women’s bodies inside barrels in the garden of the house where the future Barça player lived. They were owned by Kiss, who had a small business dealing in metals, which is why he needed fuel that he kept in the barrels. Authorities decided to confiscate everything because they needed it in times of war, but inside the barrels they found human bodies. An undetermined figure of between 7 and 21 bodies of women, whom Kiss seduced and murdered. Each barrel had a written figure. Stories about the motives, how he murdered and why he kept the bodies in the garden, filled pages of the newspapers, which spoke of the Cinkota Vampire.
The case took hundreds of journalists to the Silberstein house, at 4 Lajos Kossuth Street, now called Vidámvásár. Kiss, by the way, was in a field hospital on the Serbian front because he had been wounded fighting. And when they went to look for him, he escaped and no one knows what became of him. He was said to have been seen in New York, Paris or Budapest. As he never testified, the mystery continues to surround a case that has inspired books and films, in Hungary. Be that as it may, no plaque remembers Kiss’s victims. But neither did the Silberstein on the site of a house that no longer exists. There is now a supermarket.
The Silberstein were not Orthodox Jews, although the Barça player’s grandfather was the singing teacher in the local synagogue. Hungary had become one of the countries in Europe with the most Jews, as at the time Hungarian nationalism had opened up to this community, because it allowed them to enjoy more political weight. More and more Jews embraced the Hungarian language and integrated into this culture, without imagining that over the years they would turn their backs on them. Thus, Silberstein adopted the pseudonym Szeder as early as the 1920s to hide that he was Jewish. It was very common, after World War I, for Jewish families to use Hungarian surnames.
The Silberstein were modern people. And György’s sister, Olga, won various swimming competitions. Like much of Hungarian youth, sport was a tool of liberation, of modernity. And the son chose football, playing for a local team until he was signed by Soroksár when he was still a minor. In the 1933-1934 season, Soroksár surprised by reaching the cup final against BKV Előre SC. Szeder, 19, would score in the 2-0 win of a round-robin final, which required a tiebreaker match, won by Soroksár. His only title.
His good performances allowed Ferenc Plattkó, the Hungarian who had defended the Barça goal and was then the coach at Les Corts stadium, to hear about him. So he signed him on October 10, 1934. Szeder would make his debut in a friendly between Barça and Espanyol substitutes, playing on the left wing in attack, and he would win the opportunity to make his official debut against Girona a October 21, 1934, in a team with renowned footballers from Vantolrà, Raich and Escolà. And, in fact, Szeder scored one of the two goals of Barça’s victory at the Vistalegre stadium with Girona, where Domènec Balmanya, the future Barça coach, played. Little did they imagine those players as the story would pass them by. Many would end up in Mexican exile during the Civil War, such as Vantolrà. And Szeder would lose his life in World War II.
Szeder would repeat ownership in a friendly against Girona itself (2-2) and then in a defeat at the Iluro de Mataró (3-2), where he would score another goal. But things started to go wrong when the Hungarian Federation demanded the return of the footballer, because he had not processed his federation leave. To avoid legal problems, Barça made him play friendlies surrounded by substitutes, where he could not shine, like a 3-5 defeat in Les Corts on December 8. A day later, Barça’s substitutes were thrashed 7-1 in a friendly at Terrassa, with Szeder starting alongside another Hungarian, Berkessy. In total he would play an official match and four friendlies, in which he would score two goals.
Deceived by a representative
In the end, Barça fired him and paid for his ticket back to Budapest on December 20, 1934. But Szeder would stay a few more weeks in Barcelona, and spend New Year’s Eve in Catalonia, where he would give interviews to the local press explaining his case. He complained that a “football manager” named Paul Fabian who was engaged in “arranging matches and selling players” had negotiated his signing but that, on arriving in Barcelona, he had seen that the press said it had cost 25,000 pesetas and he had not seen a penny, thinking he was coming with the paid trip, to earn a chance.
Eventually, he would return home to defend the shirt of modest teams, such as Budafok, although he would also play one season at Újpest FC. In 1939 he was on trial in the French Antibes, but would return home, where little by little the far-right regime that ruled Hungary was imposing increasingly restrictive measures against Jews. Among other things, Jews could no longer continue to play football and clubs presided over by Jews, such as MTK, were banned on the pretext that they had made a Pole play with a fake passport. Szeder would continue to play until at least 1942, but little is known of what he did afterwards.
In 1944 Nicolau Horthy, Hungarian president, unilaterally negotiated peace with the Allies. Hitler, angry, occupied Hungary and put at the head of the new government Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the Arrow Cross Party, which began the mass deportation of more than half a million Jews. Silberstein would die on May 1, 1945 in the Birnbaum camp in Poland, just as Soviet troops were already entering Berlin and Hitler had taken his own life. He narrowly survived. Other information, however, explains that he died because of a mine when he was already returning home, crossing Austria.
In 1990, her cousin Eva Klein, who lived in Toronto, Canada, visited the Jerusalem Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, to leave an inscribed testimony of her dead relatives. In Yad Vashem are kept records of all the people killed by the Nazis, although many names remain to be remembered, because in some cases entire families died. Klein was in charge of filling in for Silberstein, the only Barça player to die in the Holocaust. Almost his entire family did not survive. The mother had already died, but her father and sister were killed. Also Olga’s husband and 9-year-old daughter, as well as her aunts and Ernő Goldmann, who had been her first football coach at Cinkota. The man who had made him love the sport, which led him to play, even if only for one day, an official match with Barça.
In 2013, by the way, Johan Cruyff filled with his hand, with a pen, three cards in Yad Vashem. The records of Judith, Regina and Rozette De Metz, three sisters-in-law of an aunt of the former player, who had married Jonas De Metz, a Dutch Jew.
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