Shaul Paul Ladany (Hebrew: שאול לדני; born April 2, 1936) is an Israeli Holocaust survivor, racewalker and two-time Olympian. He holds the world record in the 50-mile walk (7:23:50), and the Israeli national record in the 50-kilometer walk (4:17:07). He is a former world champion in the 100-kilometer walk.
Ladany survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944, when he was eight years old. In 1972, he survived the Munich Massacre. He is now a Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management at Ben Gurion University, has authored over a dozen books and 120 scholarly papers, and reportedly speaks nine languages. He lives in Omer, Israel.
Asked if it would be fair to call him the ultimate survivor, Ladany laughed and answered: "I don't know about that. What I can say is that in my life there has never been a dull moment."
Ladany was born to a Jewish family in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He has two sisters, Shosh (two years older) and Marta (five years younger, actually his first cousin, adopted by his parents when she was six months old). He and his wife Shosh were married for 58 years, until her death in 2019, and have a daughter Danit and three grandchildren who live in Modi'in.
During the Holocaust in Europe, Ladany's maternal grandmother and grandfather were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, where, Ladany has said, they "were made into soap."
In April 1941, when he was five years old, the Germans attacked Belgrade and the Luftwaffe bombed his home. His parents fled with him to Hungary. There, when he was eight years old they tried to hide him in a monastery for safekeeping, warning him to keep secret the fact that he was Jewish. He was terrified the entire time that he would be discovered, but says that after that experience he wasn't afraid of anything.
In 1944, the eight-year-old was captured by the Nazis with his parents, and shipped to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Many of his family were killed. But in December 1944, he was saved by American Jews who had paid a ransom to have a number of Jews, including him and his parents, released from the concentration camp, where 100,000 Jews had already been killed.
I saw my father beaten by the SS, and I lost most of my family there... A ransom deal that the Americans attempted saved 2,000 Jews and I was one. I actually went into the gas chamber, but was reprieved. God knows why.
Describing the concentration camp, Major Dick Williams, one of the first British soldiers to enter and liberate the camp, said: "It was an evil, filthy place; a hell on Earth." Ladany was one of the few of Yugoslavia's 70,000 Jews who survived the Holocaust. He visits the concentration camp every time he is in Europe. He was also there for the 50th anniversary of liberation, and when a Bergen-Belsen museum was dedicated.
He was brought on the Kastner train from Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland. After the war ended, he and his family moved back to Belgrade. In December 1948, when he was 12 years old, the family emigrated to Israel, which had just become a nation state.
Ladany received his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1960, and an MSc from Technion in 1961. In 1964, he earned a Graduate Diploma in Business Administration from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1968, he was awarded the PhD in Business Administration by Columbia University, followed by postdoctoral research at Tel Aviv University.
Ladany began his competitive career as a marathon runner in Israel, when he was 18 years old. He later said "in the 1950s, when I started running, people also thought I was a nut. Jews didn't run. They would laugh." He also said that "People thought of it only as punishment for soldiers." In his mid-twenties in the early 1960s, he switched to race walking. Ladany walked his first race in 1962. Commenting on the sport, he said "You need a certain type of mental attitude: a willingness to take punishment, to have a lack of comfort, and pain, to continue and continue. I'm not a psychologist, but was I stubborn, so I entered race walking? Or did I enter race walking, and become stubborn? It's the same in all long-distance events. Quitters don't win, and winners don't quit."
In 1963, he won the first of his 28 Israeli national titles. In 1966, he broke the oldest U.S. track record, which had stood since 1878, in the 50-mile-walk. In April 1968, he again broke the U.S. record in the 50-mile-walk, with a time of 8:05:18 in New Jersey. In 1968, at the age of 32, Ladany competed in his first Olympics – the 1968 Olympics – in the 50-kilometer walk (31 miles, 121 yards) in Mexico City. He finished in 24th place, with a time of 5 hours, 1 minute, and 6 seconds. He trained and competed without a coach.
At the 8th Maccabiah Games in July 1969, he won a gold medal in the 3-km walk (13.35.4). Then at the 1973 Maccabiah Games, he won the 10-km walk and the 50-km walk. In early 1972, Ladany set a world record in the 50-mile walk in a time of 7:44:47, shattering the world mark that had stood since 1935. In April 1972, he lowered his world record to 7:23:50, in New Jersey; a world record time that still stands today.
He also holds the Israeli national record in the 50-kilometer walk, at 4:17:07, which he also set in 1972.
In September 1972, he returned as the sole male member of the Israeli track and field team, to compete in the 50-kilometer walk in the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany. He said he wanted to show the Germans that a Jew had survived, and he wore a Star of David on his warm-up jersey. When he was congratulated by locals on his fluent German, he responded: "I learned it well when I spent a year at Bergen Belsen". Asked about competing in Germany, the Holocaust survivor said: "I don't say I have to hate Germans. Of course not the younger generation, but I have no special sympathy for the older generation who have been accused of what happened in the Nazi period."
Ladany finished his race in 19th place, with a time of 4 hours, 24 minutes, and 38 seconds. Asked how he felt, he replied: "Arrogant because of what the Germans did to me; proud because I am a Jew". He then returned to the athletes' Olympic Village and went to sleep.
In the early hours of September 5, 1972, the Munich massacre began. Eight rifle-carrying Palestinian terrorists, who were members of the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, broke into the Israeli quarters in the Olympic Village to take the Israeli Olympic delegation athletes and coaches hostage. The terrorists captured wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg. They shot and killed Weinberg, and threw his body out of a window onto the sidewalk.