Chess in the German POW Camps

Source: Ha'Mashkif, Dec. 20th, 1944, p. 2

As part of our new year's resolution, we hope to finally also get back to speed from the generous amount of material correspondents with us give us. One frequent correspondent had found, looking at old Palestinian and Israeli magazines, quite a lot of interesting material. Here is one of his more interesting finds.

The article is about Jewish soldiers fighting for the British Empire as part of the Palestinian brigade, recently released in a prisoners' exchange from a German military prison camp in Lamsdorf. Amazingly, they do not report mistreatment due to their Jewishness, and their description of camp life does is actually rather humane.

They returned to Palestine with a chess set made in the camp 'by Russian prisoners for the colonel who was the camp commander'. In July 1944 the camp organized a chess league tournament -- a four-man team for each prisoners' nationality -- and the Palestinian team won. They add that the prize, the chess set, was given to them by a British Officer POW with 'apologies from the camp commander', whose 'position and race forbid him from awarding the prize personally'.

The prisoners were lucky to be released when they were. Soon afterwards, as the Red Army approached, the camp was evacuated westward in one of the many notorious 'death marches' during the winter of 1944/1945.