REINO UNIDO : sobre las Para Olimpiadas y CARA

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Sir Ludwig Guttmann, and how a small British charity helped bring the Paralympics to the world

This evening at 9 p.m. BBC 2 will be showing ‘Best of Men’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/9450182/Paralympics-founder-Sir-Ludwig-Guttmanns-legacy-celebrated-in-BBC-drama.html, a drama about Sir Ludwig Guttmann, a Jewish neurosurgeon refugee from Nazi Germany whose pioneering work at Stoke Mandeville hospital led to him being hailed as the ‘Father of the Paralympics’.

Because the BBC have focused on Sir Ludwig’s work in the UK, the dramatic story of his life in Germany in the 1930s, of his courage in standing up to the worsening Nazi persecution of Jews, and of his eventual escape to Britain with his family in early 1939, is not told.

But without the help of a small UK charity, set up in 1933 by Britain’s leading academics and scientists, the Guttmann family would probably never have made their escape, Sir Ludwig would have been killed, thousands of spinal injury patients in Britain and across the world would have continued to languish and die in hospital beds, and the Paralympics, in their present form, might never have happened.

The charity, now called the Council for Assisting Refuge Academics, or CARA, still exists.  At an event in the House of Lords this summer Sir Ludwig’s daughter, Mrs Eva Loeffler, warmly thanked CARA for obtaining visas for the Guttmann family and for providing her father with the financial support which made it possible for him to continue his research: ‘Without CARA’s help, we would all have perished in the Nazi concentration camps. Instead, my father’s dream of the Paralympics came true.’  And in the words of eleven times Paralympic Gold winner Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, “Without CARA my life would have been utterly different – without Sir Ludwig Guttmann’s belief in disabled people, I absolutely believe I wouldn’t be here.”

'I urge those who want to make it possible for CARA to continue helping people like my grandfather to go to CARA's website and show their support.'

Mr Mark Loeffler, Consultant Surgeon


NOTA BENE: I was CARA's beneficiary in 1979-1982
Marta R. Zabaleta, D. Phil.