Emanuel Brouwer

For a many years, the exact identity of this Dutch gymnast was unknown, merely being listed as “E. Brouwer”. Emanuel Brouwer, was like many other Jewish men in Amsterdam at the time, trained as a diamond cutter. He joined gymnastics club Spartacus, which was not specifically Jewish, but had many Jewish members for which gymnastics was an important part of their lives. Coached by club director Jan de Boer, Brouwer joined the Amsterdam selection of gymnasts in 1905. When De Boer was asked by the Dutch federation to form a team for the 1908 London Olympics, Brouwer was selected, along with fellow Spartacus members Isidore Goudeket and Jonas Slier.

The Dutch team did not perform as well as they themselves expected, partially because they had prepared much shorter exercises than was required of them under Olympic rules. However, the gymnasts also greatly enjoyed the night life of London, which likely did not help their performances. Two years later, Spartacus, with Brouwer, competed at the Gymnastics competition held in honor of the 1910 World Expo in Brussels and won first prize.

In 1917, Brouwer opened his first cigar store - rolling most of the material himself. Despite bankruptcies, he would continue to hold a cigar store through the 1930s, when he started selling his wares on the market. During the German occupation in 1942, Brouwer was removed from his home in Amsterdam and transported to transition camp Westerbork. As he was married to a non-Jewish woman, he was eventually allowed to return home on the condition that he underwent sterilisation. Helped by their status of “mixed race”, Brouwer, his wife and children all survived the war. His son Miel, who had competed in the 1940 Dutch Athletics Championships, did spend most of the War either in prison, in forced labor and ultimately in concentration camp Mauthausen. Most of Brouwer’s other relatives, as well as many of his fellow club members like Goudeket and Slier, were murdered in one of the Nazi death camps. Brouwer himself became unable to speak following a brain haemorrhage in 1949, and a second stroke in 1954 was fatal.

Brouwer’s great-grandson Erik published a book about Brouwer’s life, and that of Goudeket in 2009, called “Spartacus” after the club at which both were members.