The Death's Head Chess Club

by John Donoghue

  ‘I had no idea. I assure you there was no note of it on his Häftling-Karte.’

  Disgusted, Meissner turns and walks away. The junior officer calls after him. ‘Herr Hauptsturmführer, you should take care that people do not start to call you a Jew-lover.’

  24.

  THE TORRE ATTACK

  1962

  Amsterdam

  A man is standing on Gerard Doustraat, outside the synagogue. He has a kippah on his head but hesitates to go inside. The building’s purpose is obvious from the Star of David set in the window at the top of the gable, yet still he hesitates. He feels he has no business there. But he has an overwhelming urge to pray, and has learned that it was in this very synagogue that Rosh Hashanah was celebrated in 1943, before the last Jews of Amsterdam were deported to Auschwitz.

  He senses a connection with this place, but he wonders whether it is because of the time he spent in Auschwitz, or whether it is because he is simply a Jew who cannot escape his people’s history.

  A man comes out. He has an iron-grey beard and wears the wide-brimmed hat of an Orthodox Jew. ‘Good morning,’ he says, in Yiddish.

  The man in the street has not spoken Yiddish for nearly twenty years. ‘Good morning,’ he replies in Hebrew.

  ‘Welcome,’ says the Jew, extending a hand. ‘Shmuel Jacobsen. I’m the rabbi here. Are you new to the area, or visiting?’

  ‘Visiting,’ the man replies absently.

  ‘Would you like to come inside?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The rabbi has business elsewhere, but is reluctant to leave if this person who has found the synagogue needs his help in some way. Eventually the visitor breaks the silence.

  ‘A friend of mine is dying. Cancer. I feel very bad about it. I don’t know what to do.’

  The rabbi gives a reassuring smile. ‘Why do you feel bad about it? You are not the cause of his cancer. You should perhaps do your best to bring him comfort during his last days, and when he is gone you should rejoice in his memory, but you should not feel bad about it. It is the will of God.’

  ‘I can’t help it. The last time a friend of mine died I was not the cause of it then either, but I have carried the guilt of his death with me ever since. It has been a heavy burden. I do not wish to carry it twice over.’

  ‘Would you like to come inside? Talking about it might help.’

  The visitor shakes his head. ‘No. Thank you. I’ve been talking about it for days already. So far it hasn’t helped. I was drawn to this place, but now I’m here it doesn’t feel right.’

  The rabbi brings his hands together, his fingers steepled, like a Catholic saying a prayer. He taps his lips with the tips of his fingers, wondering. The man is obviously troubled. ‘Doesn’t feel right?’ he asks. ‘That’s quite something for a Jew to say about the synagogue.’

  For long moments the man looks away: at his feet, up the street, searching the trees for birds, anything but meet the rabbi’s calm gaze. ‘It’s complicated,’ he replies.

  ‘Complicated?’ The rabbi’s eyebrows lift and he smiles. ‘Everything about being a Jew is complicated.’

  The man shakes his head. Slowly, he rolls up the left sleeve of his coat to reveal a tattoo on his arm. Six numbers: 163291.

  The rabbi sighs. Understanding dawns. ‘Which one?’ he asks.

  ‘Auschwitz.’ In his mind’s eye, the man sees the concrete posts and barbed wire of the camp standing between them, a barrier that is all the more impenetrable because its physical presence is long gone.

  ‘We should talk,’ the rabbi says. He puts a hand on the man’s upper arm and guides him inside.

  June 1944

  Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-III, Monowitz

  It is two days since Yves was executed. Now everybody knows what happened. With two others, he had stolen a basketful of bread from the kitchen and was taking it around the camp to the Muselmänner, those prisoners who had yielded to despair. It was a plan doomed because of its crazy folly. Nearly every Muselmann ignored the bread that was held out to them: they did not know what it was they were being offered. They were beyond any help that an extra ration of bread might bring.

  It was inevitable that the three men would be caught and punished. Emil wonders if that was why Yves did it: determined to hold fast to the last threads of his dignity, refusing to allow another to decide whether he lived or died. Emil aches with guilt. If he had not made the bargain with the Hauptsturmführer in the first place . . .

  A voice tells him that Yves would be dead anyway: one more day of hard labour would have finished him off. He would have been carried back to the camp by his workmates, already dead or destined for the next Selektion. But Emil cannot listen to this voice. The voice of reason has no place in Auschwitz. It is overwhelmed by the twisted logic that tells him that, in addition to his mother and his children, he is now responsible for the death of his friend and he must carry the burden of it to his grave.

  Emil has been summoned to see the Hauptsturmführer again. He does not wish to go but cannot refuse. A Kapo he does not know marches him to the building and the two of them wait in a corridor, Emil with his face to the wall. After a while the orderly arrives. He gives the Kapo a cigarette and tells him to smoke it outside.

  Once the Kapo has gone, the orderly speaks to Emil. ‘I don’t know that I should be speaking to you,’ he says. His voice sounds harsh to Emil, rough and uneducated. ‘Seeing you are nothing but a stinking Yid. But my boss is interested in you. Why, I don’t know, but he is, and he’s my boss, so I’ve got to go along with it. But he’s a good sort, my boss, so I don’t like to see anyone trying to put one over on him. He says you struggled to beat Hauptscharführer Frommhagen. Tell me, is he right? Did you struggle or did you make it look harder than it was?’

  ‘I struggled,’ Emil replies, speaking to the wall.

  ‘So how d’you think you’ll manage playing one of the officers? ’Cause that’s what the boss has got in store for you next.’

  ‘I–I don’t know,’ Emil stammers. ‘It depends.’

  ‘Depends, does it? What exactly does it depend on?’

  ‘If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘It depends on whether the angels speak to me.’

  The SS man bangs Emil’s face against the wall, making his nose bleed. ‘Fuckin’ Kike,’ he says angrily. ‘I should have known I was wasting my time.’

  1962

  Gerard Doustraat, Amsterdam

  The rabbi leaves Emil to wait in a small room furnished with a couch, chairs and a coffee table. It is a place where couples come to talk about their wedding arrangements and the bereaved make plans for funerals. He returns with two cups of tea and hands one to Emil. ‘Tell me about your friend,’ he says.

  ‘Which one? The one who is dead or the one who is dying?’

  ‘Does it matter? Either of them; both of them. Whatever you think is important.’

  ‘My friend who died,’ Emil says, ‘was my bunk mate in Auschwitz. We arrived on the same transport. He was starving to death. I tried to save him. I made a pact with a German, one of the SS, but still they killed him. It was 1944, a summer’s day. For him there was no chevra kadisha to care for his body, no tahara, no readings from the Torah, no kevura. His body was thrown into an incinerator. There were no seven days of mourning and no matzevah to mark his passing. As far as I know, he has no relatives to light the yahrzeit candle. I am the only one who remembers him.’

  The rabbi lays a hand on Emil’s arm. It is a gesture of consolation, of shared grief, of natural compassion. ‘And your friend who is dying now,’ he says, gently. ‘Is he also someone from Auschwitz?’

  Emil raises his eyes to the rabbi’s. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘but not in the way you think.’

  ‘How then?’

  It is too easy for Emil to revisit this sorrow: if the sky has a certain colour to it, especially at dusk; or if he finds himself in a large crowd; an orchestra playing Mo
zart; or something as simple as stale bread: all these things can trigger the memories that surge forward, uninvited. He sees three suspended bodies silhouetted against the sky, the ropes seemingly as insubstantial as silken thread. He sees Meissner talking to a fellow SS officer; he sees the multitude of prisoners surrounding him, subdued by yet another savage demonstration of the power of the SS; he sees the barbed wire that surrounds the Appelplatz and the SS barracks beyond. His vision of all of these things has remained crystal-clear, as if he were still there, yet he cannot recall the faces of his own children. He sees them only as he saw them for the last time, as they walked into the shadows, hand in hand with their grandmother, not looking back, and he remembers his last words to them: ‘Be good for Granny.’

  ‘It is the SS officer with whom I made the unholy pact.’

  The rabbi’s hand falls away from Emil’s arm. ‘And your survival – was that a result of this pact?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not your friend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And did this officer have anything to do with your friend’s death?’

  Emil shakes his head.

  ‘But neither did he prevent it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can see how you may owe a debt of gratitude to this man for your life. But friendship – that is a different matter.’

  ‘As you say, a different matter.’ Emil gets to his feet. The memories are threatening to overwhelm him. ‘Thank you, rabbi,’ he says.’

  ‘I hope I have been of some help.’

  ‘I hope so too.’

  There is no quick route from Gerard Doustraat to the Singel Canal and the Kerk de Krijtberg, and the walk takes Emil some time. He is not alone on his journey. For companions he has both the living and the dead; voices he cannot quieten, words that howl in his consciousness.

  Friendship – that is a different matter.

  The rabbi is right. There can be no friendship with Meissner. How could there be?

  There is no forgiveness. I cannot forgive.

  No. There are some things that are beyond forgiveness; some things that are beyond redemption. Sometimes it takes courage not to forgive because it is easier to forgive, but it is not the right thing to do.

  Your forgiveness cannot help me, Watchmaker.

  Damn Meissner. What had possessed him to interfere? He had no right.

  I would rather make a pact with the Devil.

  These words ring in his mind like the bell of an ancient church tolling for the souls of the departed. Yves had seen everything with extraordinary clarity. He would never have countenanced an accommodation with the Nazis and their henchmen.

  There is no why.

  But there is. The why is Auschwitz and the tens upon tens of thousands who starved, suffered and were murdered. If the dead could speak, would they forgive? And he can almost hear them: all those who waited patiently to go down into the gas chambers, those who collapsed from starvation or who were beaten to death, those who succumbed to the depths of winter or the bullets of the SS on the death marches: their voices clamour to be heard.

  I can help you to understand that the power of forgiveness will bring healing for you.

  No. I do not need to be forgiven. I did nothing wrong.

  My life is not yours to bargain with.

  The memory of those words is like a betrayal. They cut through all the familiar certainties he has erected to protect himself.

  Forgive me.

  Two simple words that are etched into his memory, diamond bright, never dimming. Now they call to him: remote voices broadcast on a Tannoy, a choir singing a lamentation, a crowd at a football match, cheering; no one voice is discernible, until he finds himself again at his wife’s bedside in the days before she died. The voice is hers. You have nothing to be forgiven for, he tells her, helplessly; you are blameless.

  How did she understand what he did not?

  He finds himself on the bridge that crosses Vondelpark and realizes he is not far from Leidseplein. He has no idea how much time has passed since leaving the synagogue. It feels like hours. He stops, his hands gripping the metal railings that line the bridge, holding tightly. He wants to shout, to the cars and vans going past, to the cyclists, to the people strolling in the park below. He wants to shout, ‘Enough! Leave me be! Let me have some peace. Haven’t I suffered enough?’

  Suddenly, the wind that has been shrieking through his mind stops. The clamour of the voices ceases. The only sound is the breeze soughing through the trees nearby. He is left with a single thought: the why of Auschwitz. The dead are waiting. He has a duty to serve them, but their suffering is at an end. He cannot suffer for them. Nor would they want him to. They would want him to live.

  He does not consciously come to any decision. It simply happens. What he said unwittingly to the rabbi is true: A friend of mine is dying. Since Auschwitz, he has been afraid to allow any bonds of friendship to grow, but now they have taken him by surprise. Emil is engulfed by a surge of emotion: he feels lighter, certain, free. He cannot say how it has happened, but he knows it to be true.

  Paul Meissner is his friend.

  1962

  Kerk de Krijtberg, Amsterdam

  The housekeeper showed Emil into the bishop’s room. The curtains were pulled closed and the room was in semi-darkness.

  ‘He’s quite weak,’ she said in a low voice. ‘He wakes for a short while and then falls asleep again. I think it’s the laudanum.’ She turned to go. ‘Try not to get him too excited. If you need anything, I’ll be in the kitchen.’

  Emil pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down. Meissner’s eyes were closed. He seemed to be in a deep sleep. Emil bowed his head. Understanding dawned on him: this was the place for him to pray, not the synagogue.

  He started to speak, quietly. ‘I went to a synagogue today, the first time in years. I thought I had questions for which only God would have an answer. I was wrong. I had the answers myself, only I did not know it. I found the answer in a word I spoke without thinking – I told somebody that you were my friend. Such a small word for such a big thing. As soon as the word was uttered I knew the truth of it, like a shaft of light that pierces a dark sky.

  ‘I had a friend who died in Auschwitz, the best friend I ever had. I tried to save his life but he would not let me, he would not abandon his dignity. He was hanged as punishment for stealing food. Do you remember? You were present at his execution; I saw you. Do you remember what we spoke of the next time you summoned me to your presence? It was not an easy exchange of words.

  ‘I remember being marched into your office. I had blood dripping from my nose. You saw it and glared at your orderly. “He fell,” the orderly said. I could see from the look on your face that you did not believe him. You dismissed the orderly and offered me your own handkerchief.’ Emil fell silent for a moment. ‘You would not have known how beautiful it was to feel again clean, white linen between my fingers. I was reluctant to soil its purity by using it to wipe away the blood. I wanted to keep it so I could take it out occasionally as a reminder of what it was like to be clean. And I remember what you said—’

  ‘I am sorry about your friend.’ The words came out in a hoarse whisper as Meissner reached a trembling hand across the bedspread to take Emil’s. ‘That’s what I said, didn’t I?’

  Tears clouded Emil’s eyes. ‘Yes, Paul. That’s what you said.’

  June 1944

  Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-III, Monowitz

  ‘I am sorry about your friend,’ the officer says, for a second time.

  Emil says nothing. He holds the handkerchief to his nose.

  ‘I did not break my word to you,’ the officer continues. ‘It seems there was an administrative error.’

  ‘Pardon me – an administrative error?’

  ‘Quite so. It is unfortunate, but these things happen in times of war. I’m sure you can understand.’ The officer’s speech is stiff and formal, as if he is aware how hollow his words must sound. ‘But
you must have something to show for your victory. I will see to it that the status of protective custody is entered in your record instead.’

  ‘Unfortunate? Is that all you can say? My friend is dead.’ Emil looks to see if the orderly is listening, but he is gone. ‘You make it sound as if I had been playing for a toy at a fairground. I was playing to save my friend’s life and now he is dead.’

  The officer’s voice remains tightly controlled. ‘I kept my side of our bargain. Your friend knew what he was doing. I am not to blame if he was so careless with his life. I have treated you fairly.’

  Emil cannot believe what he is hearing. Does this officer not know that they are in Auschwitz and that there is no such thing as being treated fairly?

  ‘May I have permission to speak honestly?’

  The officer gives a slight nod.

  ‘You say you have treated me fairly. If you were treating me fairly you would have greeted me with respect, offered me coffee, a cigarette. There is a gulf between us that is impossible to bridge. Why am I even here? I have been convicted of no crime, yet my children were taken from me and are most likely dead; my wife, too, may be dead. I am a slave forced to live and work in the most primitive conditions in return for starvation rations, and you say you have treated me fairly—? You are indifferent to me and to my fate and to the fate of all the thousands who suffer and die every day.’

  Meissner can see the truth in Emil’s rebuke, but to admit as much is impossible. ‘I did everything I could, but the matter is now closed. No purpose can be served by discussing it further.’

  ‘Then why did you summon me?’

  ‘I want you to play another game of chess.’

  ‘Why? So you can dupe me again?’

  ‘Do not provoke me, Watchmaker. I did not dupe you the last time. The matter was out of my hands. I have almost been accused of being a Jew-lover.’

  Emil does not reply. His nose has stopped bleeding. He folds the handkerchief and tries to hand it back. Meissner waves it away.

  ‘About this other game of chess,’ he says. ‘This time you will play against one of the officers.’

  Emil will not be taken in a second time. ‘I will not do it.’