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Of course chess then, under the paw of the Third Reich, is played not only by Keres. Unsurprisingly the talented young SS officer Klaus Junge (1924–45) travels from tournament to tournament, but there are others who participate fervently too: the Estonian (later American) Paul Felix Schmidt (1916–84), then the international master, author of a book about chess, chemist and university professor; a German born in Kiev (then part of Russia), Efim Bogolyubov, a zealous (obedient) member of the Nazi Party as early as the 1930s and a committed anti-Semite. It is said that Bogolyubov was the background player (denunciator) in the hunt for Jewish chess players (his rivals), who would then end up in concentration camps.
Others play their hearts out for the Reich: the Swede Erik Lundin (1904–88) and the grandmaster Gösta Stolz (1904–63), then the Polish-American Samuel “Sammy” Reshevsky, in fact the wunderkind Szmul Rzeszewski (1911–92), then the war criminal, the Latvian-Australian Kārlis Ozols (1912–2001), who is directly connected to the story of Leila, with the story of that Leila, who, as Ada told me, had called again, who forty years after we parted is still pursuing me, and the biggest kingpin of chess among them — the famous Alexander Alekhine (1892–1946). Chess tournaments take place between 1940 and 1944 in Munich, Salzburg, Stockholm, Lidköping, at the Bad Oeynhausen spa, but also in the occupied Polish Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) and, most perversely of all, in Warsaw and Kraków (Tournament of the General Government), under the patronage of the great lover of chess, of men and women, Venice, painting and Chopin, fine wine, smoked salmon and game, SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Frank, king of the General Government with some twelve million inhabitants and four main concentration camps, into which he, SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Frank, delivers, in a precisely planned order, the entire Polish intelligentsia and its nobility, artists and priests, athletes, teachers and political activists, entrepreneurs, social workers and judges, Poles and Jews, in a word all educated people racially, nationally and ideologically unacceptable to the Third Reich. Hans Frank is satisfied; the work is going well, according to plan, so he allows himself moments of relaxation. This anti-Polish campaign, AB-Aktion (Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion), or rather, Operation Intelligenzaktion (carried out by: Einsatzgruppen and Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz), led by Hans Frank as an “initial, mild” action to realize his notion of transforming Poland into “a heap of excrement that will produce bread, wheat and workers,” in just a few months, from the autumn of 1939 to the spring of 1940, it produced excellent results: more than sixty thousand Poles were arrested, many ended up in concentration camps, having been tortured, and some seven thousand members of the intelligentsia were secretly massacred in hidden locations throughout the country, a large number in a forest near the little town of Palmiry, not far from Warsaw. The chess player Izaak Appel (1905–41) simply vanishes, as does Izaak Towbin (1899–1941), today probably transformed into the moss of the Palmiry forest. In camps and prisons, in pits, in raids or holdups, in the street, Hans Frank, that crazed lover of chess, that fanatical devotee of beauty, and, in the end, by 1943, that visionary entranced by the Catholic faith had sorted all of Poland, and therefore also its chess players, his potential partners, his “chums.” But at that time chess players were disappearing everywhere in the countries of the Third Reich and in the USSR.
Lists, particularly when they are read aloud, become salvos, each name a shot, the air trembles and shakes with the gunfire. Lists of the dead — the murdered — are direct and threatening. They beat out a staccato rhythm like a march, out of them speak the dead, saying Look at us. They offer us their short lives, their faces, their passions and fears, the rooms in which they dreamed, the streets they loved, their clothes, their books, their medical records. But, we have our own dreams and our own faintheartedness and a new age, we don’t have time to concern ourselves with the dead/murdered. Chess, a game of liquidation, chess-playing liquidators, what irony.
The Holocaust — in addition to the chess players who stand behind me as I play with Ada, who whisper to me Not that one, not that move, others too surge into our gloomy Rovinj space, from everywhere, from Poland, from Austria, from Czechoslovakia, from Hungary, from Ukraine and Belarus, and after them come those from Stalin’s USSR, oh yes, and then there’s a crowd, we’re surrounded by statues, granite effigies with living eyes. Those eyes are dry and their gaze is hard, we are surrounded by monuments with lips that move, from which a threatening soundlessness falls like a breeze onto our stone floor. Then there is not enough air. And the light is extinguished.
Here, some chess players, victims of Nazism:
Leon Kremer (1901–40)
Jakub Kolski (1900–41)
Yakov Vilner (1899–1931)
Abram Szpiro (1912–43)
Leon Schwarzman (1887–1942)
Emil Zinner (1909–1942)
Henryk Friedman (1903–1942)
Henryk Pogorieły (1908–43)
Eduard Gerstenfeld (1915–43)
Heinrich Wolf (1875–1943)
Léon Monosson (1892–1943)
Wilhelm Orbach (1894–1944)
Endre Steiner (1901–44)
Izidor Gross, Kislőd, Hungary, b. 25 June 1860, d. transit camp Jasenovac, 1942, the Croatian chess grandmaster and cantor of the Jewish community in Karlovac.
In 1940, after a police (SS) raid on the Warsaw chess club, the 59-year-old Polish chess champion Dawid Przepiórka is murdered, while other chess masters end their days, some in mass executions, some in concentration camps: Achilles Frydman, Stanisław Kohn and Moishe Lowtzky. Salo Landau (1903–44) also died in the gas chamber of some Nazi concentration camp in Poland, while his wife and daughter disappeared the same year in Auschwitz. Intensive chess playing and the anticipation of feeling Stalin’s fatherly hand on one’s shoulder, that combination can make a man really go mad. It is said that during a tournament in Łódź in 1938, Achilles Frydman, stressed out by losing matches, and just before his match with Tartakower, who had been waiting for him at the table for fifteen minutes, ran naked through the hotel, shouting Fire! After that he was put into a lunatic asylum.
There are too many of them. So many lives of which the center was a small wooden board with sixty-four black and white squares over which they played, as it turned out in the end, their lost battles.
Murderers in the service of the secret police forces, and the secret police themselves, love forests, in forests and woods they love shooting people in the back of the head and letting them topple in free fall into pits, it is such clean work and does not require much commitment. Throughout the world there are many forests through whose beautiful canopies the breath of the dead sways. And the disintegrated bodies of those dead people nourish the soil, where edible mushrooms and asparagus then grow. The soil is moist, soft and supple. In forests.
Chess players.
The Nazis do not only liquidate Polish chess players, not at all, the honor is bestowed wherever the SS boot treads. The famous Czech chess player Karel Treybal (b. 1885) is falsely accused of hiding weapons for members of the Resistance Movement, and after a brief trial is liquidated in 1941 in Prague. His body is never found. And so on, not to extend the story, which of its own accord stretches in space and time here and there, left and right, forward and backward, endlessly.
As early as 1940, in Kraków, in “his” magnificent fortress-palace of Wawel, Hans Frank played host to the grandmaster Bogolyubov, who was meant to run a chess school with the then world champion Alekhine. Toward evening he would leaf through his rich collection of chess literature and, when his work cleansing terrain (Polish land, of Poles) allowed, he would play a game or two with some invited grandmaster. At the Nuremberg trials, in 1946, Hans Frank was condemned to death and hanged.
That jolly squadron amused itself in the occupied countries of the Third Reich. Frank’s chief of police Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, when arrests in Poland became somehow routine, indeed tedious, joined the “Prin
z Eugen” 7th SS Mountain Division, in which he lived, in which the Volksdeutsche spoke German, even Serbian, would you believe, in which the Croats spoke Croatian, they all understood each other and slaughtered civilians and partisans in unison. All right, in 1945 Krüger killed himself somewhere near Bleiburg, so there’s nothing more to say about that. Besides, Krüger didn’t play chess.
Krüger was replaced in Frank’s group by a tall 47-year-old police commander (Höhere SS-und Polizeiführer), the monstrous Karl Heinrich Wilhelm Koppe, who deported Poles and Polish Jews en masse to camps and, so as not to get irritated in his work by unnecessary delay, liquidated many of them at once, in the open. He was particularly irritated by psychiatric patients, and showered 1,558 of them with gas. He wasn’t especially enamored of consumptives either, because they posed a serious threat to the whole pure-blooded German population, so he summarily removed some thirty thousand (30,000) of them from this world. At the end of the war Koppe did not kill himself, no chance, but he did not play chess. Koppe took his wife’s surname (so as not to be recognized) and in Bonn managed the Sarotti factory, known for chocolate confectionery, and settled down and grew increasingly fat. The fact that Koppe was arrested in 1960 is irrelevant, because he was released two years later, just as he was two years after his second arrest in 1964, ostensibly because of poor health, when he was accused of collaborating in the mass liquidation of 145,000 people. Poland sought his extradition, but Germany said, Keine Chance, nein, and that was that. Koppe died in 1975, in Bonn, blessed, buried and carefree.
Why have I strayed so far? The paths of human thought really are mysterious.
But still, Alexander Alekhine (1892–1946). Alexander Alekhine, born in Moscow, is among the greatest chess players of all time and also among the most loathsome. At the board a fierce, frequently aggressive player, in life an insecure, obsessive conformist who ran around the world like a lunatic, searching for protection under the skirts of various parties and wives/mothers. For him chess was a refuge, a sanctuary, a cocooned personal reality, a salvation and protection from “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Immediately after the First World War, the Cheka arrested him and accused him of counterespionage, that is, for contact with the White Army, and for the nth time he set out his chessboard, fled into its embrace, while it enfolded its child Alekhine on its breast and rocked him, to and fro. In 1920, Alekhine was the star of the First Chess Championship of the USSR, he worked as an interpreter for the Comintern and as a secretary in the Department of Education, he divorced his Russian baroness wife and married a Swiss journalist thirteen years older than him, thanks to her he was granted permission to leave Russia, and then, in Paris, he left her, Annelise Ruegg, too, and flew around the world in pursuit of his obsession, the hard-to-beat Capablanca. Just as many chess players become cunning strategists in their play, elegant or cruel attackers, refined but crude opponents, in reality, which often passes them by, they somehow melt away and life crushes them vengefully. It was the 1930s. Now a Frenchman, Alexander Alekhine, the hero of a tale outside time, swoops down on the politics of the USSR and the Soviets proclaim him an enemy of the people, and since they could not immediately dispose of the World Chess Champion, the NKVD liquidated his brother, Alexei Alekhine, who went nowhere, ran away from no one, just occasionally played chess in his homeland.
Then comes 1933. The Reichstag is burning, the Nazis arrest their political opponents, the National Socialists seize power, Hitler proclaims the Third Reich, Dachau receives its first “guests,” the Gestapo is founded, with the help of students and their professors, throughout Germany between eighty and ninety thousand books are publicly burned, and that is just the introduction, where books are burned, in the end they will burn people, as Heine warned as early as 1821. In 1933 Heine’s books were burned too, but who, in the heat of general euphoria, is going to listen to the voice of reason? Through its history, bit by bit, Croatia too loses its mind and now it is quite mad. The dumpsters from the 1990s full of “undesirable” books, the films about Madonnas, those orthographies and differential dictionaries, that dispersal of the population, that months-long camp for war invalids under a circus tent in the city center and their gliding down the streets like members of some dark sect in black T-shirts, with enormous white crosses on their chests warning of a potential inquisition for the execution of those who think differently — what a show! — people accused of war crimes being greeted euphorically, the paranoia, the songs, the black uniforms, the gravestones glorifying Ustasha criminals, the foreign currency, the checkerboarding of pavements, the yelling and, in the midst of that insupportable din, a general, deadly silence. Okay, that’s not the topic now.
What is the topic?
So, in 1933 warning notices are stuck on shop windows, germans, do not buy from jews, a law is introduced on eugenic sterilization, the foundation of new political parties is prohibited, Germany announces its departure from the League of Nations. In 1927, Alekhine, having beaten the hitherto unbeatable Capablanca, becomes world champion, in 1934 he is married for a fourth time, this time to the chess player Grace Freeman, sixteen years his senior, Jewish, but with British citizenship, he returns to France from Portugal and, in order to protect his wife and her vast assets (including six cats which laze about among those assets), he begins to collaborate with the Nazis. Alekhine writes anti-Semitic articles in French, Dutch, and German newspapers in which he maintains that the Jews play limply and gutlessly, while Aryans play aggressively and courageously (which did not impress either Himmler or Goebbels, because Mrs. Grace Freeman’s château was plundered anyway), and, as a citizen of Vichy France, he participates in tournaments organized by the Nazi chess association, the Großdeutscher Schachbund.
The mathematician and philosopher (and Jew) Emanuel Lasker, who holds the title of World Chess Champion for seven years, flees from Germany to England, from England to the Soviet Union, from the Soviet Union to the United States, a generally maddened, maddening flight (his sister does not manage to flee, her last station is Auschwitz), and there, in New York, Emanuel Lasker dies at the beginning of 1941. Now that there are no active Jewish chess players on the horizon of the caliber of Emanuel Lasker, Alekhine again expects the crown. In September 1941, Ehrhardt Post of the SS organizes the Munich Europaturnier, at which of course Alekhine appears, on the table beside the chessboard there is a small flag of the great Reich, just to be clear. Present are some of the leaders of the National Socialist Party and individual members of the Wehrmacht, those who like chess. Here too is Goebbels, Hans Frank comes from Kraków, a reception is arranged for the players and important guests. Waiters in white gloves circle with silver platters, oh, what an array: Mumm champagne, Hine, Delamain, Gautier and Croizet Cuvée Léonie French brandies, the most expensive French wines, all in glasses of fine Czech crystal; there are appetizers — pickled artichoke hearts, asparagus tips, little venison balls, steak tartare, foie gras, black and red caviar, there are grilled scampi tails arranged on little rounds of soft white bread, with a thin golden-yellow crust that rustles like silk under the palate. Yes, and strawberries are served, and on low Serviertischen lie boxes of Havana cigars and little cobalt dessert dishes filled with candied fruits and chocolate pralines à la crème au nougat, aux pistaches, napolitain, de dèmes, de brillant à la vanille royale, au sultan, mostly products of Poland’s famous Wedel brand. As he watches Alekhine’s match, Hans Frank consumes vast quantities of cognac and waits for a report on the Warsaw ghetto, after which he orders the maximum daily consumption of two hundred (200) calories per head of the population in the “forbidden city.”
Seventeen kilometers northwest of Munich, in Dachau, ailing camp inmates, those incapable of work, 3,166 of them, have already been selected and shortly thereafter are moved to Schloss Hartheim, where they are gassed to death.
The second half of 1941. The following year, Alekhine plays at the Europameisterschaft in Munich, at which, let it be known, the colors of the In
dependent State of Croatia are being defended by the Croat Braslav Rabar. On the other hand, the chess grandmaster and hazzan from Karlovac, Izidor Gross (b. 1860), does not go to any tournaments, but in 1942 straight to Jasenovac concentration camp, where together with his son and daughter-in-law he is treated to the operetta Mala Floramye, since they can no longer sing themselves. Meanwhile, when first the Democratic Federation of Yugoslavia and then the Federal National Republic of Yugoslavia come “to this region,” Braslav Rabar plays at the Balkaniad in Belgrade in 1946, at the 9th Chess Olympiad in Dubrovnik in 1950 he wins two gold medals, and so on, there are tournaments in Helsinki, in Amsterdam, then comes the Socialist Federation of Republics of Yugoslavia and — oblivion. So, it’s all right. So, it might even be possible to turn a blind eye to the fact that while the war is going on Alekhine competes in seven Third Reich chess tournaments. It’s just a game, after all. After the war, Alekhine is accused of collaborating with the enemy, he is no longer invited to international chess competitions, but with time the “punishment” begins to melt until it melts right away. At the beginning of 1946, the leaders of the British Chess Federation agree to organize the match postponed before the war between Alekhine and Botvinnik (Capablanca, Alekhine’s obsession, dies in 1942), a match for the title of new World Champion, and convey this information to the now seriously penniless and cirrhotic Alexander Alekhine, who is sitting already dead in his room (number 43) in the cheap Hotel Parque in the little Portuguese town of Estoril. In the official report of the Portuguese police, the cause of Alekhine’s death is given as choking on a piece of meat, which, of course, sounds naïve. Even now his death has not been explained. Some maintain that Alekhine was killed by members of the French “legion of death,” others, such as his son, believe that Stalin’s hand of justice came for him. Ten years after his death, in 1956, Alekhine is moved, with the sponsorship of FIDE, from the little graveyard in Estoril to Montparnasse in Paris, where I visited him when I spent time there (at the cemetery and elsewhere) on some other business.