How to Delay Your Own Death — by Playing Chess

My Father's Chess Set

I remember, it must have been late autumn, or maybe already the first days of winter.

The door to the kitchen stove was open. With tears in her eyes Mother was throwing chess pieces into the fire. Father's visit had just ended. It must have been winter outside, otherwise there would have been no heat in the stove and that damned flame inside that was devouring the chess pieces like little people. As Mother nervously, tearfully, threw them into the stove, some of them returned to the floor covered in soot, as if they were being returned baked and fried to remind the former concentration camp inmate of the Konzentrationslager Osnabrück. And maybe they were coming back from the fire because of my tears, because my Mother was burning the present my Father gave me. The chess pieces were burning, like little children, really — especially those little pawns who would first glow, as if they were covered in a mortal sweat, and then disappear in the flames, losing any shape. And my mother was crying, pushing them into the fire, begging me,

"You'll be wasting your life with this! You can't do what the Father did! That's why he gave it to you!"

I knew it was not true what the desperate mother said by the open stove. For years, my Father confessed to me how he delayed his own death by playing chess. Chess was his only way to escape all the evils of this world he lived in. Ever since those days in the cold barracks of KZ Osnabrück when the hunger was too much to bear. When about forty of them, in the long barracks, having sealed all the openings with blankets, huddled in pairs on narrow ledges, by the thin and scarce light of the flickering candles, the officers from several countries would play chess. These officer slaves, former leaders of their armies, back then in the cold nights of Germany and in dead silence — made their moves at the board as the only proof that they were still alive. Bending over a piece of baked earth or rotten potatoes, holding it in their hands hurt from the cold they postponed — what mattered most to them that night — the thought of their own death!

◙ excerpt from a story by Slaven Radovanovic, the Serbian writer, playwright and essayist, first published in 'Nas Trag', No 10

FURTHER READING: Gulag Chess

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Chess set of chewed bread from the Dachau concentration camp

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