Ehrlich was born in 1914, in a small village called Bukowsko in southern Poland, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. According to convoi77, a European biography project recording the individual stories of Holocaust victims, Ehrlich was the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, and was both circumcised and baptised. He probably first came to table tennis when he attended high school in Lviv, then part of Poland and called Lwów. By the late 1910s, table tennis was already established in Poland, after beginning in Victorian England in the late 19th century.
In 1902, as Wiesław Pięta and Aleksandra Pięta note, the Polish daily newspaper Kurier Warszawski, was already mentioning the popularity of the sport among the English and Parisians, who would play whilst having five-o’clock tea. They also mention that matches were played in England in the late 19th century – and associations established. Around this time, British aficionados, and inventors, experimented with new equipment including celluloid balls, which were first seen by the table tennis enthusiast James W. Gibb in America, and the modern racket of rubber which was invented by E.C. Goode.
In 1912, table tennis was first played in Łódź by a German entrepreneur, although it was initially considered recreation for children and abandoned. It was the British who were the trailblazers of the sport in the country: the English footballer George Kimpton took over as coach of Polonia Warszawa, and brought table tennis with him as a game to support footballers training in winter. Similarly, in Łódź, another more successful table tennis initiation began with the work of Lajos Czeizler, a Hungarian football coach, who worked with Łódzki Klub Sportowy, a Polish sports club. By the mid-1920s, table tennis matches were already being organised between clubs in Warsaw and Łódź.
A Jewish game in a divided city