“Shitty is bragging.” Helmut “Sonny” Sonneberg is always happy to answer this when asked about his health. Most of the time, their counterparts look amazed or piqued, but they shouldn’t worry. Most of the time Sonny is doing well, considering his advanced age of 90, he is impressively fit. But he describes himself as a “shameful mouth” and can passionately “cheat like a local”.
When I met him for the first time four years ago, in just a few minutes he gave me half a dozen topics that he encountered in society, in the media and, of course, in football. At the time, I called him “Julius Caesar the complainer pensioner” – and he was very good at handling this irony.
What Jews had to endure
The thought that life has brought bitterness into the mind of this senior might become more solid when you take a closer look at Sonny’s biography. Even just reading or writing about his childhood makes you shudder: The day after the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938, when the Nazis openly hunted down Jews, Sonny received three shocks: the neighborhood baker’s wife enlightened him (his mother couldn’t cope emotionally ), that his name was different from the rest of the family, that his father was not his biological father and that he himself was Jewish.
Sonny was seven years old at the time and had very little use for this information. Actually nothing. What is that supposed to be – Jew? But soon he had to learn in the most painful way what Jews had to endure: the Nazis separated him from his family, Sonny was sent to a children’s home, where Hebrew was mostly spoken. Later he was no longer allowed on the street, no longer in school, no longer in contact with other children. “I was walled in like I was alive,” he says of that time.
The worst years of his life
For seven years he had no friends – and actually no real life. When he looked out of the window of his “dungeon” he heard chants like “When the Jewish blood squirts from the knife” from the opposite Hitler Youth home. He was spat on, punched and kicked in the street.
He himself says that those were the worst years of his life. The horrors continued: the poverty during the war years, hunger, life in the bunker or on the streets, the bombs, and then the deportation to Theresienstadt. After his return, he weighed only 27 kilos – at the age of 14. Sonny’s sister, Lilo Günzler, described the blows of fate impressively in her book: “Finally Talking”.
Parallels to Reiner Calmund
Yes, all of this – or probably only a part of it – can break a person, make him bitter and drive him out of basic trust in a society. How did the “Smiths” sing? “The life I’ve had can make a good man turn bad”. Alone – and everyone who gets to know Sonny better notices this: He is not bitter or angry. But on the contrary. He is warm-hearted and sensitive, he cares for those close to him, he has kept his wits about him.
Sonny would manage to talk Reiner Calmund to the wall himself. And maybe there are parallels: Calmund’s irrepressible chatter comes from the fact that as a child he explained the world to his blind grandfather. And perhaps Sonny’s talkativeness can be better understood with his earliest experiences. Anyone who has had almost no one to talk to for years is much more likely to recognize exchange with others as freedom.
17 jobs, 1 club
After the war and the bad times, Sonny has enjoyed his freedom in many ways. In total, he held 17 different jobs, as a taxi driver, at the fire brigade, at the airport or in his pub. He found great fulfillment when he drove the book bus for the city library – after all, books had been his surrogate friends when the Nazis wanted to lock him away from the world.
But Sonny probably found the greatest freedom and fulfillment in football – and at Eintracht Frankfurt. He joined the club right after the war, the chairman initially complained that Sonny was still too weak. But he managed to put on the kilos, he played with a “spread leg”, i.e. the injuries from Theresienstadt, and initially cycled behind the first team on his bike.
Eintracht as a “second family”
At the 1959 championship, he drove to the final in Berlin in a Beetle, painted the car and his shirt. In addition, he wore a top hat with the club crest, which his sister had made for him. At the zone border, the officials shot in the air, in Berlin a doctor knocked out a tooth and at some point Sonny carried the big players on his shoulders. Throughout his life he followed the club everywhere.
“Eintracht Frankfurt is my lifeblood, my second family,” says Sonny. Not only has the club given him joie de vivre and friends; he also contributed to Sonny’s bravest achievement: breaking his silence about the Holocaust after decades.
Sonny has a good
Eintracht museum director Matthias Thoma moved him gently and sensitively in small steps to talk about the actually unspeakable. In recent years, the association has positioned itself clearly against discrimination, racism and anti-Semitism like few others.
And so this story – allow the ambiguity – is one about unity. About a German life. The Nazis wanted to snatch this from Sonny, but his biography also stands for football, its importance, for Frankfurt and the history of this country.
hr-sport has Sonny’s moving story in the documentary “Sonny – a story about the Holocaust, Eintracht and Frankfurt” summarized. When he sat in the car after one of the five days of shooting, which he had completed in an incredible way for a 90-year-old, back home to his beloved Emmi, he sometimes said: “I know many my age who have already died. I don’t really know why I’m still doing so much. Maybe God thinks I’ve got a good one because of the whole thing.” And you can say: Sonny has at least one good.
MR
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Status: 01/27/2022, 1:44 p.m