Seen & Heard: Holocaust impact on Arizona basketball players, staff; talk from 'Jewish Jordan' Tamir Goodman

JERUSALEM – After Alan Brussel gave a passionate interpretation of the  for nearly an hour Friday, Przemek Karnowski walked alongside the tour guide and lifted up his T-shirt.

Just enough to reveal a tattoo on the side of his torso, that is.

“Do you know who this is?” Karnowski said.

Despite his intimate knowledge of the Holocaust history, Brussel said he did not. Karnowski, the former Gonzaga big man from Poland who became a graduate assistant coach last season, was displaying a nearly foot-high tattoo of Witold Pilecki, a Polish army captain who voluntarily went to the Auschwitz concentration camp to start a resistance.

Pilecki smuggled out reports of atrocities via prisoners who escaped but his story of heroism didn’t surface until after the fall of the Berlin Wall, because the Polish communist regime censored mention of his name in public record.

“Until 1989, the Germans and Russians said he was a Polish traitor and he fought against the Polish people,” Karnowski said. “Then after communism was done, they cleared his name.”

The way Karnowski described it, Brussel was hardly the only one who didn’t know much about him.

“His story is not well-known even in the Polish community,” Karnowski said. “People know who he is, but they don’t know the whole story.”

As a native of Poland, Karnowski said he has learned plenty about the Holocaust. But he still found out more Friday.

“Some of the details he said were cool to see,” Karnowski said. “But going to camps in Poland and stuff like that, it’s eye-opening. (In school) you learn a lot, not so much about World War I but about World War II for sure.”

Lithuanian perspective

UA freshman Motiejus Krivas said he also was taught plenty about the Holocaust while growing up in Lithuania, the Baltic country that borders Poland.

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But there was something about the videos and photos that stuck out to him Friday.

“We learned about it in school but it was interesting to learn some new things about it,” he said. “It was hard and disturbing. In school you learn mostly from the books. You don’t see so many visions like this.”

Shabbat

Because Shabbat requires stopping work from sundown Friday until nightfall Saturday, it doesn’t really work too well for basketball players. Friday night and Saturday day games or practices are out.

But Tamir Goodman, once a Baltimore phenom called the “Jewish Jordan” by Sports Illustrated, turned it into an advantage anyway.

Goodman, who addressed the Arizona and Kansas State teams that are touring the Middle East on Friday, achieved his goal of becoming the first player who wouldn’t play on Shabbat to play on a college basketball scholarship.

Maryland offered him one but Goodman said he’d have to play for the Terps on Shabbot, the Jewish day of rest. So he caught on instead at Towson University.

“The coach called me up and said ‘The guys read about what happened to you and maybe we can help you out,’ ” Goodman said. “They managed to change the schedule for me and I’m forever grateful.”

Goodman left Towson after a coaching change but moved to Israel and lived with his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.

“That was the greatest opportunity of a lifetime,” Goodman said. “I got to live with my hero, my grandmother, my favorite person in the world, and play professionaly. It was amazing.”

Goodman wound up playing seven years in Israel professionally and decided to stay. He now has five children and a number of business ventures, including development of an anti-microbial net. He also works with Athletes for Israel, which is sponsoring the visits of Arizona and Kansas State this month.

Exclusive coverage of UA hoops Mideast Tour — only in the Star and at Tucson.com/Pascoe