Doomed by the encroachment of dark 20th-century history but significant in its time, the sports club known as Hakoah Vienna gave Austrian Jews a rallying point in their culture.
The club was founded in 1909, at a time when the Jewish population of Vienna had significantly grown, but was still the target of enormous prejudice. The new documentary “Watermarks” focuses on one element of Hakoah’s success, a women’s swim team that dominated its sport in the 1930s.
Director Yaron Zilberman located the surviving members of the swimming team, interviewed them, and brought them back to Vienna for a reunion dip in the pool.
From their memories, and Zilberman’s research of the era, we get a portrait of Jewish life in Vienna before the Holocaust, a fascinating and fraught time. “We were out to show the Austrian people how good Jews could be,” remembers one woman.
The swimmers of Hakoah (the word means “The Strength” in Hebrew) saw great success in Austria and in international Jewish games organized in Palestine. One of the interviewees, Judith Deutsch, quickly became a record-setting champion, and was invited to the 1936 Olympics.
Those games, of course, were held in Hitler’s Berlin, and intended to be a display of Aryan superiority. Deutsch and two other Jewish swimmers refused to attend, which resulted in her being banned from competition in Austria.
The film rightly describes Deutsch’s decision as a courageous one. But one could debate how great it would have been if she had competed and won. When the American black athlete Jesse Owens won his gold medals at Hitler’s Olympics, it was probably the greatest moment in 20th-century sports.
After Hitler took over Austria, welcomed by the Austrians, Hakoah was finished. The women had to disperse – some to the Middle East, some to England, some to America. But thanks to a newsletter maintained over the decades, Hakoah members stayed in touch with each other, keeping the spirit alive.
If anything, “Watermarks” actually could have been longer, and gone into more about the soccer clubs that first established the Hakoah name. But maybe that’s for another film.
It’s not a movie about sports, but about survival. Picking an interesting metaphor to describe the hardships of emigration, one former athlete says, “You sink or swim – and when you’re young, you swim.” As this movie shows, they’re still swimming.
Hakoah Vienna swim club members, back in the day.
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