Attila Petschauer (14 December 1904 – 30 January 1943) was a Hungarian Olympic champion sabre fencer of Jewish heritage.[2]
Petschauer was born in Budapest, and was Jewish.[3][4][5]
He fenced first at a salle in Budapest opened in 1885 by Jewish maestro Károly Fodor (Mózes Freyberger) from the age of 8 to the age of 20, and then trained at Nemzeti Vivó Club (NVC) which was established by the Zionist lawyer Marcell Hajdu.[6] He won four Hungarian National Youth Championships.[6]
He was a member of the Hungarian fencing team in the 1928 and 1932 Olympics. Petschauer was regarded throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s as one of the world's top fencers.[7][8] Between 1925 and 1931, at the saber world championships he was three times a silver medalist and three times a bronze medalist.[9]
In Amsterdam in 1928 at the age of 23 he was part of the gold medal-winning Hungarian team in sabre, winning all 20 of his competition matches. In the individual sabre competition, Petschauer won the silver medal.[10][6]
In the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Petschauer was again part of the champion Hungarian sabre team.[6] The Hungarians won the gold medal in team sabre, and Petschauer finished 5th in individual sabre.[10]
Petschauer was arrested by the Nazis in 1943 and sent to a forced labor camp in Davidovka, Reichskommissariat Ukraine.[11][7][12][13]
Some claimed that Petschauer was tortured and murdered under orders of a Hungarian officer, a fellow former Hungarian Olympian named Kálmán Cseh, during his service in a Hungarian-Jewish Forced Labor Battalion.[14][12] A fellow inmate, Olympic champion wrestler Károly Kárpáti, recalled: “The guards shouted: ‘You, Olympic fencing medal winner . . . let’s see how you can climb trees.’ It was midwinter and bitter cold, but they ordered him to undress, and then climb a tree. The amused guards ordered him to crow like a rooster, and sprayed him with water. Frozen from the water, he died shortly after.”[15][12][16][17]
A fictionalized account of his life and death was dramatised in the 1999 film Sunshine, starring Ralph Fiennes.[10][18]
Recent research by historians Csaba B. Stenge and Krisztián Ungváry show that according to the records of the Hungarian Royal Army, Petschauer died of typhus in a Soviet POW camp.[19]
He was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1985.[14]
The Attila Petschauer Event was begun in 1995 as a memorial to Petschauer by his relative, Dr. Richard Markowitz.[16][20] It is known across the United States as one of the top sabre events.[21]
