| Chess One 2005-01-15, 9:46 am |
| Dear Lawrence,
"Parrthenon" <parrthenon@cs.com> wrote in message
news:20050111203430.06900.00000070@mb-m29.news.cs.com...
quote:
>I am writing an obituary for Chess Life. Meanwhile readers might be
>interested
> in this fragment by Denker on Alekhine.
<snip>
quote:
> ON ALEKHINE'S PRO NAZI "chess journalism" - "I was the unfortunate
> witness, to
> verify that Alekhine's own handwriting penned those infamous articles. I
> knew
> both German and his handwriting. He wrote them. I told Albert Horowitz to
> go
> with a flat statement in Chess Review and also endorsed a world wide ban
> of
> Alekhine.... Here I made a grave error. Alekhine had been my friend.
Consult with Tom Dorsch on details - he sent me a note once about Alekhine
in a tournament - in the evening AA passing the door of a fellow player GM
[a Jew] rapped on his door and said something to the effect that the SS
would be around at 3am in the morning "to ask a few questions." His poor
fellow player stayed up all night in terror, unable to shake this thought
from his mind.
In the morning someone related this to AA who immediately went to the Jewish
player and apogised profusely! His poor taste... stupid joke... - AA did not
recover his composure for several days, and even then felt badly.
Whatever AA wrote in the Paris Zeitinger was not representative of his
actual regard for a fellow player and human being. But I do not come
immediately to the point.
Arnold would sometimes mysteriously e-mail me vewry crptic comments!! [lol]
He would say, following something I wrote, "Exactly, could not have said it
better." And I had to struggle to even remember what I had originally
said...
quote:
> You do not
> desert a friend. I should have stuck with him as he was dying in Lisbon
> and try
> to find the facts, the pressures of war on him.
This is it!
When I wrote something somewhere, about the general care of Brits after the
war for an abscure figure in chess, and his inclusion or exclusion, and to
Max Euwe's efforts to reinstate AA as 'the best form of revenge' from a
Jewish person
- but more to the point that no British person had seen a piece of fruit for
5 years, and that we were all still on war-time rationing [in fact sharing
the bread ration with Germany, whose peoplle were in even direr straights] -
this is when he wrote.
He was in the UK at the time and affirmed the mood of the people,
exhaustion! semi-starvation! confusion from stern to bow!
And the machinations of behalf some obscure ex-patriot Russian now living in
Portugal, was of such low import that it never made the event horizon for
ordinary people, or extraordinary poeple either.
quote:
> Nowadays I agree with Larry
> Evans who wrote in Chess Life that you have to be awfully careful about
> banning
> people in chess...people change, have horrendous mental problems
> sometimes..war
> time duress. We are all sinners and you can take that to the bank. Holier
> than
> thou does not work!"
You understate the issue, if anything. Post WWII in Europe was an awful
mess. Every country's economy wrecked. The fate of returned soldier's
psychological state and re-employment, all to the wind.
Americans recruiting SS and Abwehr for Secret Programs. Hordes of refugees
without hope of return to their homes or even their home country, and no
idea of any sort of future.
These things were avered by Arnold Denker who witnessed them directly, and
wrote me in e-mails; brief, but in entirely humanitarian appreciations of
the facts. He witnessed those who had been tested in the fire of the war,
and offered no judgement to the result, but a sort of compassion and
acceptance of the real life of his times.
I rather liked Arnold Denker.
Phil innes
quote:
> -- Larry Parr
>
|