Gigantic mural captures the legendary Hungarian football coach on the wall of Chelsea Stadium

Roman Abramovich, the Russian-Jewish owner of Chelsea, celebrates the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp in a spectacular and enduring fashion: the billionaire commissioned an enormous painting on the western facade of Stamford Bridge by an Israeli-born street artist in London. Solomon Souza’s 7 by 12-metre painting shows three football players whose fate is intertwined with the German death camp in Poland, reports 444.

(The process of painting the artwork planned to be inaugurated on January 15th can be viewed live here.)

Julius Hirsch was the first Jewish member of the German national football team. After his retirement in 1923, he coached children, then in 1943, he was taken to Auschwitz and then killed on arrival.

You probably heard about Ferenc Puskás before, but recently, he received a posthumous award, which you can read more about here. One of Hungary’s largest stadiums is named after him as well. If you want to see it and know how monumental it is exactly, then read this article.

Ron Jones, who died at the age of 102 in 2019, was not a professional football player. As a member of the British Army, he was captured in Germany in 1940 and was transported to Auschwitz as a prisoner of war after months of detours in Italy. He worked there six days a week in a munitions factory, but on Sundays, he played football as a goalkeeper of the prisoners’ team, sometimes against the Nazi guards. Anticipating the approach of the Allied forces, the Nazis forced Jones and the other inmates to march from Poland to Austria. During the 17-week forced march, more than 100 prisoners of war died, and the survivors eventually got released by the Americans.