Football celebrity Wayne Rooney has twice visited Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp where more than a million Jews were murdered. And the man seen by many as something of a tearaway off the pitch was reduced to tears by the experience.
His first visit took place in 2012 when the England team were in Poland for the European Championships that summer. And he was back there with wife Coleen as part of a forthcoming Disney+ reality TV series called The Real Rooneys in which the star reveals that he is technically Jewish.
“I recently found out that my mum’s mum, me nan (grandmother), her family was Polish Jewish. I’m Catholic but I’ve always asked questions like: ‘Why aren’t we Jewish?’”
The surprising revelation of his roots comes in a feature article of the Daily Mail written by former Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard, who accompanied Rooney and his team-mates on the 2012 visit backed by the Football Association in a bid to boost Holocaust education among youngsters.
“And I can report first-hand that he was a model of decorum, intelligent curiosity and thoughtfulness,” Pollard writes.
When outside the so-called Death Block, where prisoners were tortured and left to starve, he witnessed the former Manchester United star “dab his eyes.”
As they stood beside the display of 40,000 shoes removed from the corpses of the victims, neither of them could bear to look. But Rooney told him: “I’m a parent and it’s tough to see what happened here. You see the amount of children who died. You see the children’s clothes and shoes. It’s really sad.”
And he added: “I wanted to see it for myself. What happened here puts football into perspective.”
Pollard concluded: “He is an unlikely ambassador for the memory of Auschwitz, but perhaps all the more powerful for that.”
Charles Gardner is author of Israel the Chosen, available from Amazon; Peace in Jerusalem, available from olivepresspublisher.com; To the Jew First, A Nation Reborn, and King of the Jews, all available from Christian Publications International.
