IN one of the coldest winters Poland had experienced, a young South African called Aaron ‘Okey’ Geffin had time on his hands and lofty thoughts in his head as he pondered his bleak future.
He was 21, he was a British army prisoner of war of Germany, and in 1943 there was no clear indication as to how World War Two would pan out.
Geffin, a Johannesburger, had joined up with many South African youngsters at the outbreak of the war in 1939. They were youngsters keen for adventure and absorbed into Britain’s Eighth Army. Soon they were sent to northern Africa to fight the illustrious Afrika Korps, who were commandeered by the famous general Erwin Rommel.
Around 12 000 South Africans were killed in the conflict, most of them in the deserts of Libya and Egypt, and in the Battle of Tobruk much of the Eighth Army was taken prisoner.
Thousands of South Africans were interned in prisoner-of-war camps, along with many Australians and New Zealanders. Boredom would become a danger to mental health, but the South Africans had some guiding lights in their number, including a Durban school teacher called Bill Payn.
Payn was already a living legend because he had famously run the Comrades Marathon in his rugby boots in 1922.
Wonderfully, he had stopped at pubs along the way for gainful refreshment, and at the three-quarter point, he imbibed what he called “rocket fuel” offered to him by a saviour who had materialised out of the blue. It was a mysterious female benefactor who proffered a peach brandy that propelled Payn to the finish.
Payn volunteered for World War Two at age 46 and, along with Geffin, was taken to Stalag XX-A in Poland when Rommel routed the British at Tobruk.
Payn had played for the Springboks in two Tests against the British Lions in 1924 and had played many a game as a flank forward for Natal.
The Maritzburg College old boy had become an institution as a teacher and rugby coach at Durban High School, and when he saw thousands of young men despondent in their imprisonment in Poland, he organised rugby tournaments to keep them busy.
It was Payn who organised a tri-nations tournament between South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. He noticed a major talent in a stocky prop called Geffin.
Now Geffin was harbouring a secret that, if revealed, would have meant his instant death. He was Jewish and this was the horrific time of the German holocaust against the Jews.
Had the German warden known this, Geffin would have been executed. They did not find out and over the next two years, Payn coached Geffin into becoming one of the greatest Springboks of them all.
Payn noticed that Geffin could kick a rugby ball a mile and for two years – until the end of the war in April 1945 – Geffin practised the art of goal-kicking under Payn’s watchful eye.
That endless training would bear bountiful fruit in 1949 when the Boks at last resumed international duty.
The All Blacks had been due to tour in 1946 but it would take three years before the massive disruption of World War Two calmed to a point where sports tours could resume.
The Kiwis were obsessed with beating the Boks because, in the last series between the countries, the 1937 Boks had won a series 2-1 in New Zealand.
So Fred Allen’s All Blacks docked in South Africa determined to avenge their loss of 1937. But in their way was Okey ‘The Boot’ Geffin, who for two years had practised his goal-kicking in the endless hours of life in a prisoner of war camp.
Okey simply could not miss and the All Blacks would lose all four Tests in what became known as the “All Blacked out series”.
The Kiwis went home winless in a six-Test streak against the Boks dating back to 1937 and the next time they beat the Boks was in 1956.
So, when Siya Kolisi’s Boks take on the All Blacks this afternoon in Cape Town, and the talk is of them emulating the Springbok team of 1949 by winning four Tests in a row, think back to a cold, lonely Jewish South African named Okey Geffin and how he refined the art of goal-kicking while surrounded by watchful German machine guns.