Agnes Keleti, Holocaust survivor who won 10 Olympic gymnastics medals, dies at 103
As a teenager, Agnes Keleti’s athletic pursuits were interrupted by the Nazis, who murdered her father along with more than 500,000 other Hungarian Jews.
As a centenarian, she became a global sensation for not only surviving the Holocaust but returning to sports, resuming her gymnastics career to become one of Hungary’s most decorated athletes.
Keleti died Thursday at 103 in Budapest, to which she returned after decades in Israel — where she is credited with creating the country’s gymnastics program — to live near her son. She was one week shy of her 104th birthday.
“I was strong and I worked hard,” Keleti told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2019, when she was 98. “Nobody asked questions.”
She was referring to her success surviving the Holocaust by working as a maid under false papers. (Her mother and sister were saved by Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews before being abducted by the Russians.) But she could have been summarizing her athletic career, which remains unparalleled in an era of ultra-young gymnastics champions.
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