Noah Klieger

Noah Klieger (; 31 July 1925 – 13 December 2018) was an Israeli journalist and sports administrator. Klieger, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora and Ravensbruck, covered trials of Nazi criminals after the end of World War II, besides working as a sports journalist in Israel. He also was the president of the basketball club Maccabi Tel Aviv and chairman of the FIBA's media council. In 2010 he was awarded the FIBA Order of Merit, and in 2012 became a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. In 2015, Klieger was inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame for his contributions.

Early life Klieger was born in 1925 in Strasbourg. His older brother Jonathan was born in Germany, but their family later relocated, first to France, and then to Belgium in 1938.

After the start of WWII, when Belgium fell under Nazi occupation, 13-year-old Klieger helped found a Zionist youth underground organization. Members of his group passed messages between adult underground cells, helped obtain ration stamps, and smuggled Belgian Jews to Switzerland. Overall, Klieger's cell successfully smuggled some 270 Jews to this neutral country. However, when his own turn came to leave Belgium in 1942, he was caught at the border by the Germans. Later he was saved from extermination by an extraordinary stroke of luck: one of the SS officers running the camp turned out to be an avid boxing fan and decided to form a boxing team of Auschwitz prisoners. Despite having no previous boxing experience, 16-year-old Klieger volunteered to join the team. Other team members who did have such experience in the pre-war world read his bluff but helped him stay on the team, withholding their own hits and allowing him to hit them. Together with his teammates Noah was fed better than other prisoners and sometimes even received soup from the officers' mess. They were also exempt from work in the afternoon hours so that they could train. In all other respects, they were treated no better than other prisoners and sometimes even harsher, to show them that their athlete status did not carry privileges. and also one of the founders of the first sports section in an Israeli newspaper. From 1957 he was a staff member of the mainstream daily Yedioth Ahronoth In particular, he covered the trials of Adolf Eichmann and Ivan (John) Demjanjuk held in Israel, and frequently published pieces about Holocaust survivors.

Awards and recognition In 2010, Klieger was awarded the FIBA Order of Merit. His story of survival in the concentration camps has been told in a documentary film Box for Life.