BarcelonaAt the age of 17, Ludwig Guttmann spent the summers in a hospital volunteering. His parents were very proud of that boy who would soon enter college to study medicine. He would be the first to do so from the family, as the Guttmanns were modest people. Ludwig’s father distilled liqueurs by hand and his mother was a housewife. Also, they were Jews. And for many years the Jews had been locked in higher education, in the German Empire. But at the beginning of the twentieth century everything seemed to change and they had accepted it at the University of Wroclaw.
The Guttmanns lived in Königshütte, a then German city in the Silesian region now called Chorzów, as it is now part of Poland. A region where languages were mixed, such as German, Polish, Silesian and Yiddish. A mining city, with the air full of coal that thousands of men took out of the ground leaving their lungs. And it was one of those miners who changed Ludwig’s life in the summer of 1917 at the hospital where he volunteered. The miner had suffered a serious injury to his spine. When he cared for him, a doctor told him, “Whatever you do, in three weeks he will be dead.” Said and done. He died of sepsis. And the young miner’s face never left the head of Ludwig again, who would be called up a few weeks later and end the First World War at the front. At the end of the conflict, however, he was able to enter the Universities of Wroclaw and Freiburg, where he became part of an association of Jewish students that defended itself from anti-Semitic attacks by practicing sports such as boxing. Their slogan was that if they were attacked, they had a right to respond. Eye for an eye, unlike his grandparents, who used to lower their heads when they despised them. They were not, they were modern young people who understood sport as a tool to change society. Guttmann would be a disciple of neurologist Otfrid Foerster and focus his career on patients who could not walk. His studies focused on war veterans who had not suffered leg injuries but could not use them. Guttmann understood the complexity of the nervous system, of the spine. In a Hamburg hospital where he did an internship for a year, he had more than 300 young people who had returned from the war with mobility problems. Each, a story. Each, a different diagnosis. And many were able to walk better thanks to Dr. Guttmann.
When Hitler came to power, Guttmann was already Germany’s best specialist in back problems and mobility. Returning to his native Silesia, he had become a great expert on the subject. But as a Jew he was removed from office in a hospital in Wroclaw. He was only allowed to work in a Jewish hospital where he was ordered not to treat non-Jewish patients. In 1938, in fact, the skin was played during the Night of the Broken Glass, when it opened the doors of the hospital to Jews fleeing the SS. That same year, when they began deporting local Jews to extermination camps, the SS demanded that he explain the reasons why each patient was in the hospital. He was able to justify almost all of them, in many cases exaggerating. Only three marched on their way to death. Guttmann would never forget them. And he understood that the time had come to flee.
And the opportunity came in an unexpected way. In 1939 António de Oliveira Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, contacted the German embassy in Lisbon for help: one of his friends had serious back problems. Hitler promised to send him the best expert he had. And that was Ludwig Guttmann. Upon learning that he would be sent to Portugal, he contacted CARA, an association set up in the United Kingdom that aimed to help persecuted intellectuals and academics. During the stopover in London he escaped with his wife and two children.
The birth of the Games
In 1943 the British government asked him to join a new center specializing in spinal cord injuries at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckingham. In a few months, he was already the director of a revolutionary center, as he was committed to sports as a tool to help patients recover, improve and be able to prepare for work and not be cornered. “Before Guttmann, people without mobility were left out because they could no longer do anything. Guttmann understood that life went on “, recalled one of his disciples, the Catalan Miquel Sarrias Domingo. Guttmann would explain that what cost him the most was convincing the authorities to invest in his center, as there was the idea that “it was not worth it” to try to recover those patients. They were removed from society. “Our job is to make them have a place in society, not to be left out. To lead a normal life on a social level,” he would explain. Half-jokingly, he would go so far as to say, “Patients work to improve, but their most complicated task is to encourage visitors who come to see them. Patients have more courage than they do.”
After the war, Guttmann already had a British passport. And in 1948 he launched a competition for his patients inspired by the Olympic Games of that year in London. In all, 16 war veterans, 14 men and two women, all in wheelchairs, took part in an archery competition at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. It was the seed of the Paralympic Games. “The idea is for them to be international games, with more sports and nations,” Guttmann defended as early as 1948. In 1952 the hospital hosted a second edition of these games, the first with athletes from a another country: Holland and Israel. They were all still war veterans and they were all in wheelchairs.
Meetings with the International Olympic Committee were needed for the Paralympic Games to be born. The first were in Rome in 1960, with 400 athletes from 23 states. But it was not until 1976 that the Games were open to athletes with vision problems or amputations. Guttmann was able to see how the Games were growing and consolidating a model in which sport served to change the lives of patients. A philosophy that inspires centers around the world, such as the Guttmann Institute in Badalona, named in honor of this Jewish doctor by Guillermo González Gilbey, a doctor from Barcelona who in 1958 suffered a traffic accident that left him quadriplegic and that he was treated by Guttmann, the man who saved his life by leaving fascist leaders standing and who opened doors to thousands of people.
.
