Budapest: Through 20 laps of Budapest’s grand Heroes’ Square Jemima Montag thought not of her own painful drive to win a world championship medal but how incomparable her painful walk was to her grandmother’s walk to freedom from a Holocaust death camp.
Montag’s greatest sporting achievement, winning silver in the 20-kilometre race walk at the world championships on Sunday, was all the more emotional because it took place in central Europe. She thought with each step, each swing of her arms, of her grandmother’s escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“Yeah, it feels special. I feel especially close to her being in a country where a lot of Holocaust survivors came. She fled to Paris after the war and then came to Melbourne … We lost her just before the Tokyo Olympics. So it’s been a couple of years now,” Montag said.
Montag wears a bracelet cut down from a necklace her grandmother, Judith, owned.
“But this bracelet when it moves up and down my arm, it’s just a direct, like physical reminder each lap that yes, this is hard, but what she went through you can’t even compare.
“One of the things that I wrote on my bottles for my helper to read out to me was no regrets. And, you know, Nana and my grandpa went through undescribable torture for years to give my dad and then me an opportunity to give this life a crack. And I want to give it a crack. I don’t want to settle for fourth again.
Read the article by Michael Gleeson in The Sydney Morning Herald.