A Risky Trip Outside the Protective Cocoon

They are not expected to change that history in the coming Euro 2012 event, but before they set out for Poland and Ukraine, history will visit the players.

On Thursday, two survivors of the Holocaust were to visit Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, John Terry and company in the players’ hotel in the English countryside. A week from now, before England’s first Euro game against France, the players will see for themselves the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps and a factory that was operated by Oskar Schindler, who saved hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust. Both sites are located close to the team’s tournament base in Krakow.

It is always a problem of how to occupy athletes’ free time when they are not playing or training. England’s players are often poor travelers, and when the team underachieved at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, one of its excuses was that it was bored by the regimen of the team’s then-coach, the Italian Fabio Capello.

England reverted to hiring an Englishman as coach when Roy Hodgson replaced Capello less than one month ago. Hodgson, 64, is the one of the most-traveled soccer managers of his time, having coached in Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Finland and the United Arab Emirates.

He has seen life, but not as Zigi Shipper and Ben Helfgott have seen life, and death.

They will address the players on the incomparable horror of their past. Shipper somehow survived five years at Auschwitz during Josef Mengele’s time there. Now a grandfather and an Arsenal supporter in London, Shipper visits schools to enlighten youngsters about the darkest past.

Helfgott, his fellow survivor, represented England in two Olympic Games as a weightlifter. The pair came out of the Lodz ghetto, “escaped” death many times in their adolescence and became Londoners after the war.

What will they tell England’s star players? How will Rooney, the best of the English but a player banned from the first two matches of the Euro because of his inability to control his temper, respond to hearing about lessons from the Holocaust? How might Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, at 18 the baby of the England squad, relate to being told of what happened in the concentration camps simply because of the prisoners’ Jewish heritage? Oxlade-Chamberlain’s father, himself a former England national team winger, has been advised that it would be unsafe for him and his family to sit in the stadiums of Ukraine and Poland because they have dark skin.

“We haven’t learned much, have we?” asked Shipper rhetorically. “How can human beings be like that? I saw them rip children out of the arms of parents, kill babies in the daytime, and then in the evening sitting down with their wives and children with music at dinner. I will never understand it.” And never forget. That is the message that Shipper — a fan of England’s players — is preparing to address.

“The players are very, very important people,” Shipper said. “People will listen to them more than they will to me. They are role models, and they can do a lot.”

As someone who has visited Auschwitz alongside athletes in the past, I see it as a gamble. There are young players who cannot handle the emotions from such an experience, players whose reactions will range from deep horror to flippancy.

That, in itself, risks division within the group. There are also coaches who want only to wrap the 23 players they are in charge of in a cocoon of what they call total concentration. They shut out the world, clamp down on distractions and isolate the team and its reserves into the single-minded pursuit of taking the next month game by game.

Hodgson is not that kind of a coach. He is well read, well traveled and well spoken in five languages. But he has had barely a week to acquaint this particular group of players with his match preparations.

His forte in the past has been to take often limited groups of players, as in Switzerland and Finland, and by honing their methods and integrating them as a team, get them to advance further in competitions than anyone expected.

In that respect, Hodgson is possibly the right man at the right time for England. Except for Rooney, Oxlade-Chamberlain and wingers Theo Walcott and Ashley Young, England is pretty much a hard-working squad of limited skills.

With the exception of 1966, when England won the World Cup on its home soil, the mother nation has always struggled to fulfill expectations.

So in one month, Hodgson must try to get his philosophy across, and get a disparate bunch of players from different clubs to think only of one thing: Victory, for as far as they can go.

It is being said, and is always said, that England’s league is so fierce and so physical that the players arrive at summer tournaments worn out by the rigors of a 10-month club season. It is also apparent that all of them are millionaires, and some dream of being on the beaches rather than toiling in the short break they get between seasons.

Broadening their minds, opening them up to Auschwitz and Schindler’s factory, can change their perspective on life. But it is a huge step out of the five-star hotels into the horrors they will see there.

England’s Football Association is making a commitment to the Holocaust Educational Trust that goes beyond a short visit to the death camp. “This educational partnership,” said the F.A. chairman, David Bernstein, “brings together the important work of teaching future generations about the horrors of the Holocaust, using the ability of football to interest and engage young people.” The aim is laudable — if the players can cope with it.