Shaul Ladany walking at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp memorial in 2019. (Julian Stratenschulte\/picture alliance via Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Schaap spent time with Ladany at his home in Omer, Israel, in Tel Aviv, and in Germany \u2014 including taking a five-and-a-half hour train ride from Bergen-Belsen to Munich, where Ladany attended the German government\u2019s ceremony marking 50 years since the attack.<\/p>\n
Though it is timed to that anniversary, \u201cThe Survivor\u201d focuses on the survivor himself. It tells the story of Ladany\u2019s family, his journey through the Holocaust, to Israel, and then back to Europe in 1972 for the Olympics. Leaning heavily on archival images and clips from the news and from Ladany\u2019s personal life and athletic career, the episode seamlessly weaves the story together, bringinging the viewer back and forth in time.<\/p>\n
Born in Belgrade in 1936, Ladany survived a series of close calls throughout the Holocaust. First, when he was five years old, German forces bombed his family\u2019s home. Then, after the Ladanys fled to Hungary, they were captured by the Nazis in 1944 and sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where approximately 50,000 Jews were killed over the course of the war, including Anne Frank.<\/p>\n
Ladany was ultimately saved through the Kastner train, a series of cattle cars that brought over 1,600 Jews temporarily to Bergen-Belsen and then to Switzerland after a series of controversial negotiations with Adolf Eichman. Following the conclusion of the war, his family emigrated to Israel, where his athletic career took off. In 1963, he won an Israeli national title in race walking \u2014 the first of his 28 \u2014 and in the subsequent years would go on to break the U.S. record in the 50-mile-walk. Ladany also competed in the 1968 Olympics and multiple Maccabiah Games. <\/p>\n
Why race walking?<\/p>\n
\u201cYou need a certain type of mental attitude: a willingness to take punishment, to have a lack of comfort, and pain, to continue and continue,\u201d Ladany says in a 2012 CNN documentary on the massacre. \u201cI\u2019m not a psychologist, but was I stubborn, so I entered race walking? Or did I enter race walking, and become stubborn? It\u2019s the same in all long-distance events. Quitters don\u2019t win, and winners don\u2019t quit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, decades after escaping the continent, Ladany returned to Germany as an Olympian, representing Israel. On Sept. 3, 1972, Ladany finished 19th in the 50-kilometer walk. Less than 48 hours later, a group of armed Palestinian terrorists entered the Olympic village quarters of several of his teammates, ultimately taking multiple rooms hostage. Ladany\u2019s room was somehow spared, and he escaped.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou did not need one lucky event to survive,\u201d Ladany says in the ESPN documentary. \u201cTo survive you needed a series of lucky events. Fortunately for me, I had them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite all that Ladany has been through, Schaap said, he does not wear his emotions on his sleeve. In the film, Ladany shares that he is practically incapable of crying.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe that\u2019s how you survive, right?\u201d Schaap said. \u201cMaybe the way to survive emotionally, through the things that he\u2019s been through, is by internalizing things, and not externalizing them, and certainly that\u2019s what he says when he talks about not being able to cry. There is a stoicism, but not a cynicism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Saraceno put together an Israeli crew to film on the ground \u2014 partly for Ladany\u2019s comfort. At the same time, he began sifting through countless hours of news coverage from the 1972 Games \u2014 transcribing ABC News telecasts, filing and logging archival footage of competitions, opening and closing ceremonies, and Ladany\u2019s personal archives. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a historian, I\u2019m a sports historian, so I eat this stuff up, I love it,\u201d Saraceno said. \u201cI love getting my hands dirty, so to speak, I love doing all that grunt work.\u201d<\/p>\n
The film also features interviews with Israeli photojournalist Shlomo Levy and Olympian Zelig Shtorch, both of whom were at the 1972 Games, as well as Deborah Lipstadt, a noted Holocaust historian and current U.S. antisemitism envoy.<\/p>\n
In the decades since the massacre, Ladany became a grandfather and an engineering professor at Ben Gurion University. These days he still walks \u2014 but no longer competitively. <\/p>\n
As Schaap says in the film, every step Ladany has taken since his childhood has been \u201can act of defiance.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite the efforts of so many to eliminate him, to exterminate his people, to attack his team, he\u2019s still here,\u201d said Schaap. \u201cI think the message is that it\u2019s not just about surviving \u2014 the title of it\u2019s \u2018The Survivor\u2019 \u2014 but it\u2019s about how he has responded to these awful things, by living life to its fullest.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Survivor\u201d premieres Tuesday, Sept. 20, on ESPN and ESPN+.<\/p>\n
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