Hedy Bienenfeld

Austrian swimmer Hedy Bienenfeld won the bronze medal in the 1927 European Championships 200 metres breaststroke. At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics she was eliminated in the heats in the same event. At the 1932 and 1935 Maccabiah Games in Mandatory Palestine, she won a combined total of five gold medals, one silver, and one bronze medal.

In 1924 at the age of fifteen, Bienenfeld won her first competition “Quer durch Wien” (Across Vienna) over 5 km in the Danube, and the following year she finished second behind her lifelong rival and later close friend Fritzi Löwy. Bienenfeld won nearly all national breaststroke titles in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1930, she married her swimming coach, Zsigo Wertheimer.

Bienenfeld became a popular swimsuit model in several magazines. She was also the inspiration for the character “Lisa” in the novel Der Schüler Gerber (The Pupil Gerber) by well-known writer Friedrich Torberg, which was published in 1929. Torberg was in love with Bienenfeld at the time.

After the 1938 Nazi German “Anschluss”, with being Jews, Bienenfeld and her husband fled to London the following year, and in 1940 to the Isle of Man. Finally, they moved to the United States that same year and worked as swimming instructors and later as real estate agents. In 1952, they both received US citizenship. After the death of her husband in 1965, Bienenfeld returned to Vienna and helped her friend Löwy who battled with breast cancer.