The Death's Head Chess Club (5 page)

9.

B
ISHOP
'
S
O
PENING

1962
Amsterdam

Apart from the first-round games that had yet to be concluded, Sunday was a day of rest for the contestants. Emil had a late breakfast and went out for a walk.

He had never been to a place like Amsterdam before. Its canals gave it a tranquillity that he had not expected – a quiet presence that had crept up on him, especially when the wind was still. The last flourish of winter was past and the trees that lined the canals were coming into bud. The sun peeked through the branches, throwing dappled shadows along the banks. People were up and working on house barges, giving them an airing and a fresh coat of paint, and the stalls at the flower market were full of daffodils and tulips.

Emil's walk led him further than he had been before, to Vondelpark. There, he rested for a while on a bench, watching the city go by. The young people on their bikes seemed particularly attractive, so carefree and full of life. It was well past noon when he decided to resume his journey, heading back towards Leidseplein.

The café, where he had become a regular visitor, was full of people out for a drink before Sunday dinner. On a row of tables outside, games of chess were in full swing. The old man he had played a few days before
was standing by one of them, in animated conversation with a priest, a tall man with silver-grey hair.

When the old man saw Emil he waved. ‘Good afternoon, my friend,' he said affably. ‘We were just talking about you – about the strange defence you played, you remember? The Son of Sorrow.'

The priest turned. His face was drawn, its complexion sallow. Emil's first impression was that he looked tired, that he was somebody who had become old before his time. But a smile transformed his features, making it warm and welcoming.

The priest pulled off a black woollen glove and extended a bony hand. ‘Hello,' he said, in a voice that was unexpectedly soft. No, Emil realized almost immediately, not soft – sickly. ‘I was hoping I might meet you. Old Marius here has been telling me all about you, and the game you played. You made something of an impression on him. And your picture was in the paper – did you see it? Your victory over the German Grand Master made quite a splash. I'm a fan of chess, though I'm not much of a player. I think it requires a mind with more subtlety than mine.'

Emil took the proffered hand, but his greeting died on his lips. He had met the priest before, he was certain of it. His eyes were shockingly familiar: a blue as deep as the summer sky over Tel Aviv; clear as crystal.

‘Hello,' he stammered finally, speaking in German without thinking. ‘Emil Clément.'

A waiter was taking orders and the priest beckoned him over. ‘Have you tried the advocaat?' he asked. When Emil shook his head he said, ‘You should. They make their own here – a family recipe. If it were not sacrilegious, I should be tempted to say it was divine.'

He ordered three glasses.

‘Forgive me,' Emil said, ‘but I am sure we have met before.'

‘Yes,' the priest replied, in a tone that suggested this was something he did not wish to discuss, ‘we have. But, if you'll permit me to say, I think that this is not the time nor place to talk about it. For now, let us enjoy our drinks and perhaps watch a game or two of chess.'

‘My parish is where the bishop lives,' old Marius announced proudly. ‘He was sent here to convalesce – from the missions,' he added.

‘Bishop?' Emil raised an eyebrow. There was no hint of exalted rank in the priest's apparel, which was plain black with the usual clerical collar.

‘Here it's purely an honorary title,' the priest explained. ‘My see is a long way from here – a province in the Belgian Congo.'

There was something in the priest's manner that Emil did not like, while his admission that they had met before was like an itch that he could not resist scratching. ‘You said we had met before—? I know for sure I've never been to the Belgian Congo. Have you ever been to Israel?'

‘No – but I think you might like the Congo if you were to visit. Leopoldville can be quite lively, and the interior has a reputation it tries hard to live up to.'

‘Reputation?'

‘Africa – dark and mysterious.' The waiter arrived with the advocaat. The priest raised his glass in a toast. ‘To Africa.' He sipped appreciatively. When Emil left his untasted, the priest continued, ‘I'm sorry – is it not to your liking?'

Emil set his glass down on a nearby table. ‘No. What is not to my liking is a pointed refusal to answer a perfectly straightforward question.'

‘I'm sorry,' the priest replied. ‘I didn't intend to give offence. I thought it was for the best. It was a long time ago.'

‘But where?'

‘Auschwitz.' The word was like an electric shock. Their eyes locked and suddenly Emil knew. He barely heard the rest of what the priest said: ‘My name is Meissner. Paul Meissner.'

Memory can play strange and sometimes unfortunate tricks. For Emil, the name was like a key that unlocks a door that leads to another, which in turn leads to another, then another, and so on, back, year after year, to the point in time before which his memory could not bear to travel: the spring of 1944. He saw the bishop as he had seen him then; and again, before he had disappeared. He remembered the crystalline blueness of his eyes, the certainty of his superiority, his imperturbable confidence. And now he had reappeared, as if the illusionist who had made him disappear nearly two decades ago had, at this very instant, decided to bring him back. Time stopped, anticipating the applause that would surely follow such mastery of the art of conjuring. And he was wearing the garb of a man of God – surely another trick? If Meissner had turned up wearing his SS uniform, it could hardly have been more shocking. Meissner had been a prince in the kingdom of liars, so this new identity also had to be a lie. No other explanation was conceivable.

Emil froze. He looked uncertainly from the bishop to the old man, to the other people milling around the front of the café. His brain sought frantically to find the words he had wanted to say to this man for nearly twenty years, but they would not come. Instead, he felt light-headed. The pavement seemed to take on the properties of a fairground mirror pulling his vision in and out of focus. He put out a hand to steady himself on a table edge but it slipped and with an almost inaudible gasp he fell, knocking drinks and plates from nearby tables onto the paving stones. At the edge of his consciousness he was aware of shouts of alarm, but they were
distant, not part of his universe, from creatures that inhabited a dream world whose cries were foreign and unintelligible.

He heard again the lamentation that was the cry of Auschwitz.

10.

T
HE
D
ESTINY OF A
P
OISONED
P
AWN

April 1944
Kommandantur building, Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-I

Eidenmüller drove the
Kübelwagon
through the entrance to the
Stammlager
, passing beneath the blackened iron arch wrought with the words ‘
Arbeit Macht Frei'
, before turning left to follow the road to the
Appelplatz
. He stopped to allow Obersturmführer Meissner to step down outside a two-storey building above which flew the emblem of everything the camp stood for: a black swastika in a white roundel on a scarlet banner.

The officer leaned heavily on his walking stick to push himself out of the car. ‘Wait for me,' he said. He had an appointment with the Kommandant. He did not expect it to take long.

Inside, Meissner got quickly to the point: ‘I have a suggestion to make, sir, that some may find shocking. Some might consider it disloyal but, please believe me, my motives are purely to do with the efficiency of the camp.'

Liebehenschel was intrigued. ‘Shocking
and
disloyal? And all in one day. I can't believe that of you, Meissner.' He smiled and opened an intricate silver box that stood on his desk. ‘Cigarette?'

Meissner took one and lit up. He exhaled a cloud of smoke upwards. ‘The thing is, sir, that in order to sustain an acceptable work output, a
certain amount of food is necessary. This holds true whether the worker is a German, a Russian, a Pole or a Jew. I'm afraid that the physical condition of many of the prisoners is poor at best, and this affects their ability to do strenuous work.'

Meissner's words prompted a searching look from his superior. ‘You are quite right, Meissner,' the Kommandant replied. ‘That is why our doctors work tirelessly to identify those who are no longer capable of doing what is required of them and have them eliminated.'

Meissner drew deeply on the cigarette. ‘You'll forgive me for saying so, sir, but that approach is inefficient. It means that at intervals – which occur far too frequently – new workers must be inducted who have to learn skills that their predecessors had already acquired.'

‘I take it you have a suggestion?'

‘Yes, sir. I propose that the food ration be increased. That way we could get more work out of them for longer. It would be much more productive than the present system.'

The Kommandant flicked at the sleeve of his tunic, removing specks of ash that had fallen from his cigarette. ‘You were right to bring this to me, Meissner,' he observed. ‘With food at home strictly rationed, some of your colleagues would undoubtedly consider the idea of giving more food to Jews to be disloyal, and would be shocked that it had been suggested by a fellow SS officer. But I fully appreciate your motives.'

Meissner nodded, but did not tell his commanding officer what had brought about this sudden interest in prisoner rations. He had been taking some air a few days before, at the same time that the prisoners were being marched back from the Buna factory. A man had stumbled and fallen. The
Kapo
in charge had halted the squad and kicked and beaten the fallen man unmercifully.

Meissner had intervened. ‘You won't get any work out of him if you kill him,' he'd said.

The
Kapo
had removed his beret and stood to attention. ‘With respect, Herr Obersturmführer,' he had retorted, the sneer in his voice imitating that of many of the SS NCOs, ‘that's all they're fit for. He's nothing but a dirty, lazy, idle Jew. Plenty more where he came from.'

Meissner had stared at the
Kapo
, his eyes drawn to the green triangle on his jacket: a criminal. So serious were his crimes that he had been sent to Auschwitz, where, in accordance with the perverse rules of the camp, criminals were put in charge of honest men and women.

Meissner had addressed the prisoner. ‘What have you had to eat today?'

The prisoner had hung his head and not replied.

‘He doesn't speak much German, sir,' the
Kapo
said. ‘Italian.'

‘Then translate, goddammit.'

The prisoner's voice could barely be heard. He'd had a ration of bread and a bowl of soup. No doubt the soup had been taken off the top of the cauldron and was thin, not like the thick soup at the bottom, where the chunks of potato and turnip settled. The
Kapo
and his cronies kept that for themselves.

Meissner had been furious. He had been charged with increasing the output of the labour camps but the poor food and capricious brutality were working against him all the time.

Now, Liebehenschel steepled his fingers thoughtfully. Meissner had a point, but the system for feeding the prisoners was long established – calculated to induce slow starvation among the Jewish slave labourers. There was nothing he could do to change it, no matter how much it might improve productivity. But he had to give the appearance of taking Meissner's concern seriously.

‘Very well, Meissner, I'll speak to Dr Wirths about it. More than that, I cannot do.'

‘He's the
Standortarzt
?'
¹

‘Indeed.' Liebehenschel gave his subordinate a look that said he was dismissed, but Meissner did not move. ‘There's more, Obersturmführer?'

‘I've been checking the documentation relating to the acquisition of food. The records indicate that, in fact, enough food is purchased every day to provide an adequate number of calories for each prisoner. If the food isn't going to the prisoners, where is it going?'

The Kommandant sighed. Meissner was certainly tenacious, like a dog with a bone. Rather than answer immediately, he stood up and walked to the door, gesturing for Meissner to follow. In the doorway he paused and, turning to face the junior officer, said: ‘You've never been to Kanada, have you, Meissner?'

April 1944
Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-III, Monowitz

Alarm is spreading through the camp. Typhus. It skulks in the shadows at every door looking for a way in. It is a pestilence feared by all. In the washrooms, there are signs in many different languages:
One louse is enough to kill you
– for that is how typhus ensnares its victims and spreads its foulness through the camp. The signs are among the many absurdities of Auschwitz, because the procedures for the prevention of lice are laughable. For the inmates, hot showers and soap are as rare as a visit from the Pope, yet lice are a deadly enemy, so when the inmates have time, they scour each other's bodies for the tiny creatures, squeezing the
life out of them between two fingernails. But now, it seems, there is an outbreak in Block 51.

Of course the camp is better informed than the SS doctors: all the inmates know the outbreak started two days ago. A man from 51 went to the infirmary after evening roll call. At first the symptoms are inconclusive. A day later, there were two more men from 51 with the same symptoms.

The SS doctors take no chances. On their command, the fate of the men is sealed: all three are sent to the gas chamber. This is to be expected. The sick men are resigned to their fate, and nobody lifts a finger to help them.

And now heavily armed SS men are marching through the camp, many of them with dogs. The camp bell is ringing, a sound that drowns out the camp's own frantic warnings. When the bell rings before sunrise it means: ‘
Out of bed. Rouse yourselves. Up, up, up!'
; when it rings at any other time of day, it is a command to return to your block and stay there.

In every block the inmates cower.

Emil is playing chess in Block 46 when the bell rings. He is winning but that is hardly surprising: since the
Blockältester
deigned to allow him to play, he has won every game. Nobody says a word when he leaves and walks like an automaton to his own block. Widmann, the
Blockschreiber
, is conducting a roll call. His pencil marks a tick against Emil's number. Inmates crowding around the door keep watch. It is the same in every block. The watchers shout into the block, reporting what is happening. The SS men march past without a glance in their direction. ‘They are going past, they are going past.' The shouts are almost jubilant with relief. Bit by bit, more information trickles in from the door.

‘They have stopped at Block 51.'

‘They have sent the dogs in.'

‘Now everybody is coming out.'

‘They are marching them away.'

The SS doctors outside Block 51 come not as healers, but as executioners. Without regard for whether they are infected or healthy, all the inmates in the block are sent to Birkenau. Only the
Blockältester
and the other criminals who run the block for the SS are allowed the luxury of going to the infirmary. They will have to take their chances, but at least they are not going up the chimney.

The other inmates start to breathe again. They do not care whom fate has selected for death on this day, as long as it is not them. It is not because they are naturally cold-hearted. It is simply the way of things in Auschwitz. They deceive themselves, telling one another: ‘It was their time; it is going to happen to us all eventually. Who has the strength to think about when it will be our time, as long as it is not now?'

A deep sense of shame runs through the camp. It has witnessed another barbarity. Its very conscience is defiled by what it has seen. It can no longer tell good from evil: there is no good, there is no evil – only life or death. Over 200 men are put into trucks and taken away. They will be forced into one of the gas chambers or shot. A day later their cold ashes will be scattered over the surrounding fields.

Emil finds Yves. Never before have they seen an entire block taken away to be murdered.

‘It is an act of depravity,' Emil says, in the privacy afforded by their bunk space. ‘Those were good men, healthy. These SS – some of them are doctors. Do they feel no shame?'

‘Of course not,' Yves replies. ‘If they did, they could not do what they do; it would be intolerable to them.' He is silent for a short while, then adds, ‘Somebody must remember this day, to be a witness to it.'

Emil puts his head in his hands. He starts to weep, silent sobs shaking his body.

‘What is it, Emil?'

The watchmaker searches his friend's eyes, as if hoping for forgiveness. ‘I am scared that I have been infected by their corruption . . . if I were to look back on this day, it would be to say it was a day I played chess. This –
horror
– is too much to ask me to remember.'

Yves takes his friend's hands in his own. ‘You mustn't think like that. This is not
your
shame to bear, but theirs. They do it because we are nothing to them. We are worthless. We are no longer even human beings. We are less to the SS than sacks of beans or potatoes. That is the truth of this place.'

But Emil is not satisfied. ‘How did we become so worthless?'

‘Have you not understood, Emil? Are you so caught up in your mystical other-world of pawns and kings that you have not seen that we are on a journey to nothingness?'

April 1944
Kanada, Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-II, Birkenau

Meissner surveyed the scene before him with seemingly calm detachment. He was in a large warehouse. Inmates scurried in with heavily loaded hand-carts, emptied their contents onto a large pile in the centre of the floor, then out again to return with a fresh load. An army of people, mostly women, some in camp uniforms, others in ordinary civilian clothes, delved into the pile, sorting it into a variety of categories: shirts, trousers, coats, dresses, jackets, hats, shoes, underwear, spectacles, suitcases, handbags – the last gleanings of the loot stolen from Jews from across Europe. Around the edges of the warehouse were mountains of these goods, waiting to be redistributed.

It was difficult not to show amazement at the scale of the plunder that was taking place before his eyes.

‘Trains arrive daily,' the Kommandant said, in a low, matter-of-fact tone, ‘sometimes two a day. Typically we can expect a thousand to fifteen hundred head on each train. They are compelled to leave their belongings on the unloading ramp. When they are inducted into the camp, they are relieved of their clothes and small possessions, like wristwatches or jewellery. Everything becomes the property of the Reich. It is all brought here to Kanada. All sorts of things find their way here. There is one Scharführer who spends every day doing nothing but sorting foreign currency. Every month it is sent to the Reichsbank where it is exchanged for Reichsmarks and the proceeds come back to the SS. Another is an expert jeweller who picks out choice items and grades precious stones. Gold and silver items are melted down.'

‘Why is this place called Kanada?' Meissner asked.

Liebehenschel responded with a world-weary sigh. ‘Because Kanada is a place of untold riches.'

‘Why are you showing me this, sir? Does it have something to do with the discrepancy between the food that is purchased and the food that is distributed?'

The Kommandant stood aside to let a hand-cart pass. ‘I'm afraid to say, Meissner, that not all members of the SS are as incorruptible as you. Some months before your arrival, the Concentration Camps Inspectorate initiated a commission of inquiry into corruption. Theft on a grand scale by SS officers was suspected. Some had their hands so deep in the honey pot that they were unable to get themselves clean again in time.'

He looked at Meissner. ‘What I'm trying to say is that I'm sure there is still plenty of thieving going on, but it's more discreet, and on a
considerably smaller scale. We try to control it by not allowing junior ranks to spend long periods of time here, but even officers are not always as trustworthy as they should be. Some of them collude with the prisoners – as you might have guessed. Valuable items that the prisoners find among the clothes and baggage are traded for food or privileges. What is happening with the rations in Monowitz is insignificant in comparison.'