The fascists came for Eva Szekely in the winter of 1944, when she was 17. “I was told to lie down and say I was sick,” she remembered. “‘Come on! Get going!’” their leader shouted. “Then my dad told him: ‘She is sick, can’t you see, she cannot walk!’ and he said back: ‘She doesn’t have to walk far.’” Only to the nearby banks of the Danube, where they were doing the killing.

“And then from some heavenly influence my dad said: ‘Don’t take her, she is the swimming champion of Hungary, and one day you will be happy you saved her life. Tell him your name.’ And he looked at me, and I looked at him,” he had one grey eye and one brown eye, “and I said my name. This is how I stayed alive, that Dad told him I was a swimming champion and he would still remember me.”

Szekely died last Saturday. She was 92. She broke six world records, won 44 national titles, a gold in the 200m breaststroke at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952 and a silver in the same event at Melbourne in 1956. “Despite my successes I was regularly defeated on one point,” she wrote later. “No community ever embraced me fully, although I felt in my heart and soul I was part of my community it was always made known to me that I was an outsider.”

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Szekely decided she wanted to be a swimmer in 1936, while she was listening to the coverage of the Berlin Olympics. She heard Ferenc Csik win the 100m freestyle. “Then and there I made a resolution – I, too, would be an Olympic champion.” She joined her local sports club, and soon after was part of the team who won a national open water title. Two months later she was kicked out for being “an undesirable”. She was 14 but already used to antisemitism. At school she had fought with a boy who had drawn a cartoon “Erger, Berger, Schossberger – every Jew is a scoundrel! Get out!”

Her father told her it was only temporary. “I was a Hungarian and when all the madness was over one’s religion would make no difference.” But for the next five years “the madness reigned”. She was banned from competing. Still, she grew more obsessed with her childhood dream. It became her reason to live. When the Germans came “they decided we should be exterminated, I decided I should win the Olympics”. She was recruited into a labour battalion but escaped by leaping onto a passing streetcar during a forced march through the city. She returned to her family, who were now living in a two-room safe house.

Szekely kept fit by running the stairs, five storeys up, five storeys down, 100 times a day. They called it a safe house, it wasn’t. There were 42 people living in those two rooms. By the time they were liberated there were only 10 left alive. When Szekely won her gold in 1952 she wasn’t just swimming for herself but for those 32, the thousands more who were shot on the banks of the Danube and the millions more who died in the camps.

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She married the great water polo player Dezso Gyarmati, who led Hungary to victory in three Olympics in 1952, 1956, and 1964. For the second of those Games, in Melbourne, the couple left their baby daughter Andrea behind in Budapest. The revolution broke out while they were away. Szekely was so sick with worry she lost 5kg fretting. She still won silver. Next year the family defected to the US but they didn’t stay. They returned home to look after her parents. And after that the authorities said only one of them would be allowed to travel to the 1960 Olympics in Rome.

So Szekely quit swimming, and became a coach. Her philosophy was that “sport was a gift and a reward, not a job”. Her daughter grew up to be an Olympic medallist herself. She won silver in the 100m backstroke and bronze in the 100m fly at Munich in 1972. Eva was there with her during the Black September massacre. She had even had coffee with one of the victims, the wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, the morning before he was killed trying to fight off the terrorists. He had told her he had not wanted to go to Germany but “the boys had begged him to come.” He died trying to protect them.

No community ever embraced me fully. It was always made known to me I was an outsider Eva Szekely

In the years afterwards, Szekely made a point of speaking out about her experiences. According to the Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, “while few, if any, active or retired Hungarian Jewish athletes were open about their religious identity, Szekely had the courage and determination to go public with her Jewishness”.

In one TV interview she spoke about the anti-Jewish laws of the 1940s and referred to “those who could document non-Jewish origin as far back as their grandparents. “That was no problem for me, I did not have to go back as far as my grandparents. Unequivocally, I was a Jew.”

In 2004 Szekely was named as one of Hungary’s Athletes of the Nation. In 2011 she received a prestigious Prima Primissima award. Did that make her finally feel embraced? In 2017 she was alive to see Viktor Orban’s antisemitic attacks on George Soros, part of a rising tide of antisemitism across Europe and in Hungary in particular.

One last story. In 1950 Szekely took part in an international meet on Margaret Island in Budapest. “I swam very, very well there. When they announced the winners of the 100m freestyle I stood up. They said the gold medal would be given to me by the chairman of the swimming association and a special prize would be given to me by the major of the communist political police.

“And imagine, there I was standing on the top of the dais with a vase in my hands and the man looks at me …” She realised she had seen him before when she looked into his eyes, one grey and one brown.