What it is like playing hockey in the shadow of Auschwitz

In Oświęcim,​ Poland,​ the​ route​ from the​ local hockey arena to the​ town’s only​ remaining synagogue snakes​ through​ eras.

A drive or a walk​​ — the distance between the two sites is only three kilometres — is the equivalent of strolling through a museum. On the left, halfway to the destination, is Lidl, a contemporary German discount supermarket with a roof topped with red clay tiles. Up the road, shielded by trees, is the Jewish cemetery. During the Second World War, it was destroyed by Germany’s Nazi government who constructed a camp on its grounds.

Down the street is an office of the 23-year-old telecommunication behemoth T-Mobile, its pink signage attached to the facade of a building that looks twice its age. Seventy-five years ago, across the street, Jews were being rounded up by German officers. Finally, a few hundred meters away, surrounded by two Catholic churches and a Kingdom Hall, a place of worship used by Jehovah’s Witnesses, is the small, quaint synagogue.

The reason the arena and synagogue are linked is beyond their will. The selection of Oświęcim as the largest mass murder site in history was a simple coincidence. It was a small city no one had really heard of before.

The history of hockey in Poland cannot be succinctly explained the way short stories like Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater” have done it in Canada. Hala Lodowa MOSiR — the home of the eight-time Polish Hockey League champions Unia Oświęcim — and the Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot synagogue are dichotomous but closely defined by the field dotted with barracks on the outskirts of town: the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. In a town so closely associated with the Holocaust, the arena and the hockey team act as the synagogue’s antithesis. They are the joy to its sorrow and the stitches to its wounds.

And yet, hockey and the synagogue both exemplify Oświęcim, Polish for Auschwitz. A place that has moved on, but will never forget.

In 2009, Polish-American professional hockey player Jakub Kubrak became one of only two North American-trained players to ever join Unia Oświęcim. Born outside of Warsaw and raised in Queens, New York, where he moved with his parents at the age of nine, Kubrak joined the Polish club after four years at Division III Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. The fans in Oświęcim were incredible, he said after his return. His teammates, most of them locals, had grown up together and cared for each other. It was the time of his life.

During World War II, Oświęcim was annexed by the Germans who changed the town’s name to reflect their origin and alphabet. Auschwitz-Birkenau, separated from the town by a train hub, served as a concentration camp and death camp. Prisoners, and those whose fate would be the gas chambers, arrived by cattle cars. Most of them were Jews. When the Final Solution, a plan by Germany’s Nazi government to exterminate the Jewish people, was put into place, SS chief Heinrich Himmler determined Auschwitz-Birkenau would be a killing facility. Approximately one million Jews were killed before the camp was liberated.

In 1957, twelve years after the liberation, the town’s hockey club was founded. It was highly successful from 1998 to 2004, winning the league championship seven years in a row. Since its last crowning, Unia Oświęcim hasn’t done better than a third-place finish and was even relegated to the second division for the 2008-09 season.

Before the trade deadline that season, Kubrak was shipped to Oświęcim from Sanok, where he first landed after leaving the U.S., and he helped the team move back up to the first division.

“It was the greatest experience,” Kubrak said of the promotion. “We celebrated that win for a couple of days after that, the city embraced it and they were very excited.”

Not lost on his mind was the history of where he was.

“My biggest moment came when I visited those places and just how shocking the things that went on there were, and just how you shouldn’t take anything for granted, to be grateful,” Kubrak said.

Because of the league’s size, there are only eleven teams, and its geographical disposition with all but one team in the south, trips to Oświęcim are frequent, and unique. For some North Americans, it was even unexpected.

“I had no idea there was a team in Auschwitz because the spelling is different so it didn’t really occur to me,” said Drew Akins, the former captain of the University of Minnesota-Duluth Bulldogs and a forward for Polonia Bytom in 2013-14. Much like Kubrak, Akins’ visit to the camp at first changed his perspective on his subsequent visits to face Unia Oświęcim.

“Going to play after that, it was a little bit eerie,” he said.

“I just kept looking out the bus window when we entered Oświęcim thinking how crazy it was that I was right here. Even getting off the highway to head into Oświęcim was very weird especially when you know this is where such awful things took place,” said Nathan Sliwinski, a Colorado native who played 59 games over parts of two seasons in Sanok and Katowice.

Former Niagara University forward Philip Nasca chose Poland because he was interested in playing in a country that would be “a huge culture shock.”

“Poland was just that,” Nasca said. “I got a very weird feeling every time we drove into (Oświęcim).”

Most players, like Sliwinski, have visited the camp. It’s an opportunity to better understand what happened all those years ago. For North Americans of Polish descent such as Canadian Justin Chwedoruk, or 2014-15 league-leading scorer Jordan Pietrus, the experience was also a response to the often-asked questions, “Why do people live here?” and “Why is Oświęcim normal?”

“Poles had to start over. Figure out what the heck they were going to do, and rebuild their country. For the Polish people, it’s like ‘What are we supposed to do? It’s over now. Now we have to start our country over,’” Pietrus said.

Chwedoruk’s grandparents left Poland for Canada just before the Second World War. His grandmother was one of the survivors on board the SS Athenia, a transatlantic liner that was the first U.K. ship sunk by Germany during the war.

“It’s something that’s hard to see, but I think should always be kept there. The old adage is ‘You have to remember history so as not to repeat it,’” Chwedoruk said.

The town’s quietness and its cavernous stoicism are on the mind of a lot of players. But, as Vice.com earnestly put it following a visit to the town, “Auschwitz is also just a town with a shopping mall and a KFC.”

The situation was a lot different during the war. The town was depleted and deeply affected by the German occupation, said Wioletta Oleś, the director of a local museum. A week after the Germans entered the town, a curfew was imposed from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m., the town’s name was changed, the synagogue was burned down and the names of Polish streets were removed. The town’s Jews — around 60 percent of the population — were initially asked to wear armbands and lost their businesses. In March and April 1941, they were moved to ghettos in Będzin, Chrzanów, and Sosnowiec, but most of them were eventually killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. A very small number of Jews returned to the town after the war. The Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot synagogue is one of the last traces of Jewish heritage left.

“You think of Auschwitz being out there in the middle of the bush. You have these preconceived ideas that no one has actually told you, but you come up with them in your mind,” said Pietrus. “Well, if this were to happen, if so many people were brutally slaughtered, then it must have been in the middle of nowhere for no one to know about it.”

The notion of the camp’s presence floats over the city but is rarely discussed in the community or in dressing rooms.

“My impression was, it was nothing that was out of the ordinary with the players, from my perspective,” Akins said of his Polish teammates.

“I never ask (players about the camp) because for me the most important thing is hockey. I don’t know how they would react, it’s a tough question. It’s history, but terrible history,” said Radosław Kozłowski, a hockey writer born and raised in Oświęcim whose uncle was Unia’s goaltender in 1992.

Nonetheless, for some, like Joe Harcharik, a globetrotting 29-year old Iowan who played for Orlik Opole in 2014-15, the thought of playing for Unia was unreal.

“It’s just sickening to think that the human race acted like that once upon a time, it’s hard to fathom. I can’t imagine playing in that town,” he said.

As for Nasca, he chose not to visit the camp. “For me, it was tough to justify going to see something so sad and gruesome.”

According to Kozłowski, Kubrak is one of only two North Americans to have ever worn Unia’s crested turquoise and white jersey. Only a handful of North Americans have ever played in Poland, and most of them have Polish blood. Players can obtain Polish citizenship and join the national team — an attraction for many — if they can play in the country for two seasons, a challenge in itself. In 2017-18, the Polish national team featured Connecticut-native and former Montreal Canadiens draft pick Mike Cichy, Brantford, Ont.’s Alex Szczechura and goaltender John Murray, of Lancaster, Penn., one of the best goaltenders in Poland.

“It’s all about how much (the team) can afford,” Harcharik said of why more North Americans hadn’t signed in Oświęcim.

From 1998 to 2005, the team was supported financially by Synthos, a chemical company whose head office is across the street from the arena. The loss of Synthos as Unia’s main sponsor hurt the team. The league’s model rewards teams with big pockets and those who see their home-grown players leave and become successful elsewhere. It’s akin to European soccer, Kubrak pointed out. Teams are “brokers for players,” he said.

Unia is currently owned by the city, a system used by most teams in the league. One of the only privately-owned teams, KS Cracovia — commonly known as ComArch Cracovia because of its sponsor, the IT company ComArch — has won six of the last eleven league championships.

Kubrak attributes the league’s functioning and the owners’ mentality to Poland’s past hardship. The country has been crippled by world wars, and communism, from which emanated an “old school mentality, especially in the people that are running the businesses, that are making the decision: ‘I have to pad my pocket first.’”

Issues with players not receiving their pay on time with various teams are extremely frequent to the point where many North Americans had to fight their team in court or wait for their cheques for months.

“That’s just how it works. Guys get screwed over all the time, contracts can be ripped up in your face, nothing is a guarantee,” Harcharik said.

“At the moment, there are maybe four teams where the payment is on time,” Kozłowski added.

In July, Kubrak returned to Poland for the first time since his one season in his home country in 2008-09. He now works in asset management and lives near Portland.

“For a guy to give back to his country and the country that he grew up in and to go play pro hockey, that’s a big kind of dream,” Kubrak said.

As for Oświęcim, its residents will stay close to his heart, but he knows the complicated feelings that come with thinking about the town.

“It’s a great place to be. It just has a lot of baggage and how you handle the baggage is really up to you. You can embrace it, and embrace the fans and enjoy it for what it is. Or you can kinda go against it. That’s for everybody to decide.”