On a spring day in 1938, as storm clouds gathered over Europe, 17-year-old Rolf Friedland stood outside Berlin's Olympiastadion, his heart racing. The German-Jewish teenager wasn't there just to catch a glimpse of soccer stars. For Friedland, this moment held the promise of survival.
As England's soccer team filed out after their match against Germany on May 14, Friedland spotted his chance. Approaching defender Bert Sproston, he made an urgent plea that would alter the course of his life. In that brief encounter, amid the echoes of cheering crowds, a lifeline was thrown.
"If I don't get out of here, they're going to kill me," Friedland had thought, his son Alan recounts. It was this frightening reality that drove the young man's creativity and courage.
Sproston, moved by the desperation in the young man's eyes, carried Friedland's story back to England. What followed was a daring gambit that unfolded in several crucial steps:
1. Sproston, using his connections in the soccer world, helped arrange a visa for Friedland to come to the UK. The visa was officially granted under the pretext of Friedland attending a friendly soccer match in England.
2. With this lifeline in hand, Friedland boarded a train from Berlin to London. The journey was fraught with tension, each mile carrying him closer to safety and further from the tightening grip of Nazi Germany.
3. Friedland crossed the threshold to safety mere weeks before Kristallnacht unleashed its terror across Germany. As synagogues burned and thousands were rounded up, Friedland found himself on British soil, saved by an athlete's compassion and his own audacious plan.
In Britain, Friedland adopted the name Ralph Freeman and started a new life. The timing of his escape was crucial. By leaving Germany in 1938, he avoided the worst of the Nazi atrocities that would soon follow, including mass deportations and the Holocaust.
In the annals of pre-war Europe, Freeman and Sproston's story stands as a testament to humanity amidst horror. While England's team had controversially offered the Nazi salute before the match, Sproston's personal act of kindness provided a counterpoint to the politics of appeasement.
As Europe teetered on the brink, two men from different worlds forged a bond that would outlast the coming storm. Their connection, born on the fringes of a soccer pitch, blossomed into a lifelong friendship. To the day Sproston died in 2000, he and Freeman remained in close contact, their families intertwined by this remarkable history.
"I just think that if all of us could just act with decency to other people in the way that Bert behaved towards my dad, then the world would be a better place," Alan Freeman reflects.
In a time when the darkness of history threatened to engulf everything, Sproston's simple act of listening and acting on behalf of a stranger made the difference between life and death – even in history's darkest chapters, individual acts of decency can illuminate the way forward, changing lives and shaping destinies in ways that echo through generations.
* CNN contributed to this article.
