Escape from Nazis got Olly his Welsh cap

The Six Nations has never been short on journeys of a miraculous nature but this one might just trump them all, from its murderous start to its thunderous finish.

It began at the height of the Second World War in the Slovakian town of Zilina with the Nazis herding the Jewish population into trains taking them to a place in Poland called Auschwitz.

Josef Kohn’s relatives perished there and this story, like millions of others told down the years, would have ended in 1942 had the young Dr Kohn not escaped from another concentration camp. He made it all the way to England, settled in Shropshire and opened a practice in Whitchurch.

He married a local girl, Mary. A generation or so later, their son, Simon, married Sheri in Bristol where the eldest of their three boys, Oliver, was born almost 40 years ago. He grew up to be a ‘big, hairy-arsed’ rugby player, good enough to hack it at professional level for 12 years at Plymouth, Bristol and, most notably, Harlequins.

For at least 11 of those years nobody in the Welsh game paid a blind bit of notice. Not even the Welsh Exiles, renowned for their detective work on the genealogical front, knew of his eligibility, leaving the path clear for someone else to make the connection.

Two strange events conspired to make Olly Kohn the one and only international rugby player to be discovered on social media. His fellow Harlequin, Ugo Monye, put out a tweet revealing Kohn’s ancestral link to Wales traced back to his maternal grandmother.

And that, most conveniently, appeared shortly before an acute shortage of fit second rows left Wales in some danger of losing the Six Nations title they had won in Grand Slam style the previous season. The list of crocked locks for the opening match, against Ireland at home, left them without Alun-Wyn Jones, Luke Charteris, and Bradley Davies.