As of: February 2, 2024, 10:44 p.m
By: Korbinian Kothny
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Marcel Reif is one of the most famous sports commentators in Germany.
He gives an emotional speech about his father in front of the Bundestag.
Berlin – Anyone who has ever watched a football game on television in Germany knows his voice: Marcel Reif.
At the latest with the goal in Madrid in 1998 and the resulting improvised, moody moderation with colleague Günther Jauch, the now 74-year-old rose to the Olympus of German sports commentators.
Reif gives a speech to the German Bundestag
With the Champions League final in 2016, Reif ended his career as a commentator on German television.
But the native Pole hasn't completely disappeared from the screen.
To this day, Reif can be seen
again and again as an expert or in his twice-weekly
Bild podcast “Reif is live”.
The sports journalist put on a completely different kind of performance this Wednesday (January 31st) in front of the Bundestag.
Reif spoke on the occasion of the 79th day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism on January 27th.
His father was a Polish Jew and probably only survived the Holocaust because Berthold Breitz got him off a train that was going to the concentration camp in Auschwitz.
Reif experiences a carefree youth - because his father is silent
Many of Reif's relatives died.
“An uncle, an aunt, a cousin remained, all the others were murdered,” Reif told the Bundestag.
Not so his father, who later gave his children a happy life - also because he didn't talk about the past.
“Not a word about everything he had experienced.
He didn't speak and I didn't ask.
Above all, it was my fear of having to endure unbearable things.
Images of the horror of what had been done to my father.
The truth was clear enough.
“I didn’t have any grandparents, and I knew why,” Reif said of his youth.
When anti-Semitic tendencies spread again in Poland in the early 1950s, the Reif family moved to Germany via Israel.
“My sister and I grew up in the country of the perpetrators; it was a happy and carefree youth.”
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Marcel Reif gave a speech to the Bundestag, Annalena Baerbock was in tears.
© picture alliance/dpa |
Michael Kappeler |
Kay Nietfeld
Maerbock's speech moves Foreign Minister Baerbock to tears
Even if Reif's father didn't talk to his son about the past, he always gave him an appeal: "I remember more and more every day how often he gave me this sentence.
Sometimes as a reminder, sometimes as a warning, as advice or even as a reprimand.
Just three words, in the warm Yiddish that I miss so much: 'Be a human.'
Your silence, your joy of life despite everything.
Your unbroken ability to give so much love and care and this phrase 'Be a human being'.
Thank you, Dad, for that.” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, among others, shed tears at these words.
According to his own statement, Reif only really accepted the past 50 years later in conversations with his mother.
“It sealed what my father had wanted: It could not be that his children were also haunted and tormented by the terrible shadows that had darkened and destroyed his childhood and youth,” reports the commentator legend.
So Reif was allowed to just be human during his childhood - as his father had wanted.
(
kk
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