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May 2025
Chess in the Jewish Refugee camp Landsberg am Lech (1946) and in the Ghetto Terezín/Theresienstadt (1942-1944)
by Frank Hoffmeister
I. Introduction
When our member Siegfried Schönle read the autobiography of the Jewish painter Samuel Bak (“Painted in Words”, Boston 2001) he noted that the author refers to the second husband of his mother as a “chess player”. Mr. Nathan Markowski hailed from Lithuania and was interned in the Conzentration Camp in Dachau (near Munich) during the second world war in 1944-45. After his liberation, he had no home anmore, and stayed in the Jewish refugee camp Landsberg am Lech, located west of Munich (1946). During his research about Markowski Schönle also received a number of chess related documents from the Ghetto Terezin/Theresienstadt (near Prague). During Nazi occupation of Czechia, a great number of the Jewish population of the region was transported there. Most interestingly, Schönle found that a certain Isidor Schorr organised chess activities in the Ghetto from 1942 to 1944. The present book presents the outcome of his meticoulous research on both Markowski and Schorr, as well as associated persons. The book is written in the German language and contains many pictures and documents, printed as facsimiles, which have never been published before.
Following up on the first laudatory reaction from Konrad Reiss, published in November 2024 on our webpage (Schach im DP-Lager Landsberg und im Ghetto Terezín / Theresienstadt [Chess in the Landsberg DP camp and in the Terezín / Theresienstadt ghetto]), the low number of copies has already been sold out. As the book is thus not anymore publicly available, it is all the more important to sum up the main points in English. In my view, some substantive points made in this original and high-quality research deserve particular attention among international chess historians.