I guess many of you will remember the movie Escape or Victory (1981) in which the German soccer team faced a team made up of prisoners of war during World War II and in which the dilemma of taking advantage of the match for a massive escape or defeating the Germans on the field was raised game, because, as almost always happens, reality surpassed fiction.
In the early 1930s, the Stalinist regime, with its collectivization program, had caused a terrible famine that killed more than 7 million Ukrainians (Holodomor or Ukrainian Genocide ); so when the Germans began the invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941, some Ukrainians supported them seeing them as their saviors from the clutches of the tyrant Stalin . Even so, most fought alongside the Red Army in the defense of kyiv, where after two months of siege they suffered more than 700,000 casualties between dead, wounded and prisoners. The brutal regime imposed by the Germans in the occupied territories turned their initially supporters into opponents. The Germans, aware of this situation, decided to ingratiate themselves with the Ukrainian people and created a soccer championship between several local teams. One of these teams, the FC Start , was made up of several Dynamo kyiv players who, after the occupation, worked in a bakery. FC Start defeated all the local teams and even others made up of Hungarians and Romanians. And here the Germans saw their opportunity to demonstrate their superiority… in sport. In kyiv, on August 6, 1942, a match was played between FC Start and a team of German Luftwaffe pilots. What was going to be a sign of the supremacy of the Aryan race turned, to the joy of the Ukrainians, into a humiliation... FC Start won 5-1 .
Death Party
But that was not going to be like that. The rematch was arranged three days later and everything was thoroughly prepared:the best German players were recruited, the referee was a member of the SS, before the start of the match they received a visit in the locker room to tell them what to do and the consequences of his hypothetical victory … In addition, the stadium was taken over by the SS to control the euphoria of the public. The teams jumped onto the field of play and made the corresponding salutes:the Germans raised their arms shouting Heil Hitler and the Ukrainians, for their part, looked like they were going to follow the recommendations when they extended their arms… but they put their hands to their chests and shouted Long live sport to the delight of the spectators. Despite the disastrous arbitration, the Ukrainians reached the end of the first half winning 3-1. During the break, they received another visitor remembering the danger their lives were in if they won. When they were left alone, they discussed what to do… if we cannot fight them with weapons, we will defeat them on the soccer field and, moreover, we will restore hope to our compatriots. They jumped onto the field of play and won by 5-3. The public exploded with joy and the SS began, as they knew how to do, to lower the euphoria . What would happen to the players now?
Within days of the match, the players were rounded up by the Gestapo and taken to the secret police barracks on Korolenko Street, where they were interrogated and tortured. They were later deported to the Babi Yar extermination camp. . At this point there are several versions but they all agree that three players were executed:Nikolai Trusevich (goalkeeper and team captain), Alexei Klimenko (the player who, shortly before the end of the game and with an empty goal, turned 180º and shot towards the center of the field) and Ivan Kuzmenko . Trusevich's last words are reported to have been "red sport will never die «. In 1971, a sculptural monument was erected at the Zenit stadium in kyiv in memory of those heroes.
