A Few Things I've Learned
So now that I've been alive for 10,598 days, I have learned a few things in recent days from reading Dynamo: Triumph and Tragedy in Nazi-occupied Kiev
-The Dynamo team name (Dynamo Kiev, Dynamo Moscow, etc.) stems from the fact that in olden days, many professions had athletic clubs. Dynamo was the club name of police departments, sort of an FOP thing. Lokomotiv was the club of train workers.
-As was typical in Eastern Bloc countries, many of the key Dynamo players were police "employees," specifically of the NKVD, essentially the KGB precursor. They didn't necessarily make bank, but they didn't really have a job other than to play soccer. Once the Germans came in, this fact worked against the players. It didn't matter what they really did because on paper they were Communist party officers.
-It wasn't Dynamo itself that was the subject of the "Death Match" as much as it was FC Start, the Bakery #3 team that was more than half comprised of Dynamo players.
-According to the book, they weren't told to lose outright. Rather, it was conveyed ina roundabout sort of way that given the circumstances was probably just as good.
-If they had thought of teaching Ukrainian history of the first half of the 20th century through soccer, I think we'd have all paid more attention in Saturday school.
-Why did Ted Woloshyn call it "honk school?" That makes no sense. Where is Ted Woloshyn? Apparently on the radio in Canada and writing a column for Metronews in Toronto. His best joke: What month was Dolly Parton born in? December. Seriously, that really loses everything in the translation.)
-I have a hard time believing that FC Start's winning streak was such a nationalistic lightning rod in Nazi-occupied Kiev that it really endangered the German rule of the city.
-I have a hard time believing that both losses of the the Flakelf team (the team comprised of an anti-aircraft battery and international football ringers, not the Luftwaffe) were as much of a blow to the athletic-dominance-by-virtue-of-being-of-the-master-race theory as Jesse Owens winning gold at the Olympics.
-It was a former Kiev City player who didn't get signed by Dynamo who persuaded the German government that they had to do something about the Flakelf losses, mostly out of a pre-war grudge.
-By 1941, a Jewish roundup could not possibly have meant anything other than a mass execution, so why did the Jews in Kiev show up at Babi Yar? I didn't think Kiev was far enough west for the Nazis to be seen as any better than the Stalinists.
-Ukrainians either saw the Germans as no worse than the Stalinists or no better than the Stalinists, basically shades of the same dislike of both. Not so much a glass is half full or half empty thing as a this crust of bread is either half stale or half moldy.
This is all based on the reading of one book and watching a DVD on soccer horrors that featured the Death Match.
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