Maria was caught during one of her resistance jobs, and her entire family was punished and sent to Auschwitz.

Her family was murdered when they arrived, but Maria was sent to the camp simply because she had slowed up to look at something. She wishes she would have been murdered too.

The camp officer, Fritzsch, was the most evil person she had ever known. He enjoyed hurting people both physically and mentally. This officer also found out Maria played chess, and he made her play chess against other prisoners and himself.

Playing chess helped her stay alive even though she wishes she were dead.

THE LAST CHECKMATE describes the horrors the prisoners went through and how Maria kept on fighting as her friend Father Kolbe told her to do.

Maria tries to get Fritzsch in trouble so they will transfer him. She goes through more horrors when this happens.

She knows he is the one who had her family killed and vows to make sure he is punished after the war when she finds out he survived.

She met him and challenged him to a game of chess in the same place where he had treated her like an animal.

How will the game turn out? Will Fritzsch win as he always did even without his wartime power or will Maria triumph?

THE LAST CHECKMATE is very well written, very well researched, has a very clever use of a chess game within the story line, but very difficult to read as any WWII book.

An amazing, heart wrenching debut. 5/5

This book was given to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Last Checkmate, Gabriella Saab, author; Saskia Maarleveld, narrator
It is difficult to criticize a book that is written about the Holocaust, It is so sensitive a topic. However, the way this book is written, so lyrically, it seems to trivialize the tragedy of the event. There were no sun-kissed days in the Concentration Camps, to provide an example; there were terror-filled days for most of the victims.
Maria Florkowska, a Catholic, is active in the Nazi resistance movement at the very young age of 14. Her mother also works for the Underground, secretly saving Jewish children by providing them with new identities and homes, often in Church run orphanages. Irena, “Maria’s cousin”, is her trainer. After only a few months, Maria, not really fully trained or mature enough, makes a fatal mistake when she leaves her building on an errand for the resistance. Hidden inside the basket she carries are false papers that are used to smuggle victims of Hitler’s barbarism to safe places. When the German smashes the basket, she is discovered. Although she produced papers with a false name, her real name was provided by a neighbor seeking to save herself. The entire family is arrested, even Maria’s younger siblings. Although she is tortured, she reveals little information, but they are all sent to Auschwitz to be murdered as political prisoners. Maria is somehow separated from her family, and when the entire family is murdered, she is not with them. As a cruel joke, she is sent to be with the men and is forced to go through the strip naked searches and shaving in front of not only the guards, but the other male prisoners. She is then forced to live in the barracks with them. There are no women’s barracks there until Ravensbruck is built and so few women were allowed to live.
There are several people that influence her fate. One is a Jewish interpreter, Hania. She does whatever is necessary to “organize” things in order to keep herself and her brother alive, even if it means sleeping with the guards. She is another woman in the men’s camp because she speaks five languages. When she befriends Maria, a Gentile/Jewish bond is born, although Hania uses the word Shiksa, which is a pejorative Yiddish term, as a nickname for Maria, supposedly meant affectionately. Another is the man who murdered her family, the Camp Director Fritzsch. Maria finds some comfort from a Friar who tries to offer solace to her when she loses her faith. Father Kolbe provides her with a rosary to replace the chess piece that her father had given her as a talisman. Fritzsch deliberately crushed it when it was discovered. Her “cousin” Irena is a sharp-tongued, resistance worker who often puts her own life in danger in the service of others, even though she often chastises Maria.
During her internment, chess was Maria’s salvation and her burden. She was forced to play with the cruel Fritzsch. He murdered her first opponent when he lost, just to impress upon her that the game was a life and death endeavor for her. The cruelty of the Germans is highlighted, and I learned of one other barbaric torture method used by the Nazis that I had not heard of before. Innocent prisoners were chosen to die in a special block where all food and drink was denied until the died. It was slow and horrible death, although few deaths in the camps were merciful.
The novel seems to stress and emphasize the efforts of gentiles to stop Hitler’s atrocities, in contrast to the popular view that anti-Semitism was present and prevalent in Poland, before and after the war. The book seemed intent on showing that Jews and Gentiles got along with each other and did not exhibit the anti-Semitism so often promoted in books. It seemed intent, also, on showing that the church did not steal children, which is another theory often promoted in books. Rather, the church saved them and returned them to their surviving parents, after the war, and did not conduct Baptismal conversions. For me, the book did not drive these concepts home authentically or realistically. The author used language that seemed far too poetic when describing the conditions in the camps.
The story goes back and forth in time from Maria’s capture in 1941 to her escape in 1945 and is sometimes repetitive. The ending required me to truly suspend disbelief. As I read the book, I wondered what the impetus was that inspired the author to write this book. Was it based on true events? I have read a lot about the Holocaust, but this book did not ring as true as many other novels about it. Jewish words, yenta, kindele, kvetch, schlemiel, schmuck, oy vey, oy gevalt, and spitting three times to ward off evil, were overused, and it seemed disingenuous to present such a stereotype of the Jewish people. Hania was not treated as kindly by the author, as the Friar was who represented gentiles. Also, although the Holocaust cannot be truly trivialized in reality, because of the heinous things done during that period, the overly melodramatic way the novel was presented seemed to make it seem like just a story, not a real event with horrible consequences.
The overuse of the term prisoner 16671 did fully bring across the point that prisoners in some camps were further dehumanized by the Nazis. They were forced to submit to a wrist tattoo with their identification number, and they no longer had names. However, the story was simply not as forceful as it could have been. It overused the number ID, sometimes, especially at the end, to the point where it was sometimes almost inappropriately comical. In addition, far too much power to affect events, was given to a young, naïve teenager. Too many coincidences took place with relatives finding each other and resistance workers showing up in unexpected places to save the day. The particular incident that truly was not believable for me, was the idea that Maria’s mother just happened to be the one that provided a safe haven for Hania’s children. Unless the author wants us to believe that there were so few in the resistance, and so few prisoners, that these coincidences easily emerged, I think she missed the mark. She tried to ccover too many bases. Further Poland had the largest resistance movement, and although the book is not about Jewish prisoners in the camps, Auschwitz was not a comfortable place for anyone. Perhaps her use of language that seemed trite was overly influenced by the age of her characters, since the story is about a very young volunteer. It is also possibly that she wanted to drive home another side of the story about the Holocaust, to offer some explanation about the behavior of Polish citizens in a more positive way.
Rather than a poetic presentation of a book about the Holocaust, I would have preferred a scholarly one, but that may be because I am Jewish and do not like the Holocaust almost dismissed casually, or trivialized in any way, simply to make a novel good reading.