Annie Undra

Anny Ondra, a Polish Jewish film star in Germany, is present in the novel chiefly through the story Pirulo tells about her and Max Schmeling. Her safety becomes the measure of Schmeling’s courage and, years later, the standard against which Adrián Gallardo confronts his own complicity at Klooga. Though she does not appear directly in the scenes described, the story of her rescue gives Adrián’s memory a moral force that the violence around him cannot erase.

Identity and Introduction

Anny is introduced as Schmeling’s wife, an actress whose fame in Germany does not protect her from persecution. Pirulo, the Madrid boxing trainer who had once met Schmeling, tells Adrián that she is Polish and Jewish. The danger is made sharper by the contrast between her public success as a German film star and the fact that Nazi authorities keep the couple under close watch. Her identity is not incidental background: it is the reason Schmeling must choose whether to accept the regime’s terms or defy them.

Pirulo’s earlier recollection of her is admiring, vivid, and plainly filtered through his own enthusiasm. He praises her beauty and describes her as a fitting partner for Schmeling, dwelling on her fair appearance, blue eyes, and figure. That portrait is the trainer’s voice and gaze, not Anny speaking for herself. The novel later returns to the image of a Jewish woman in radically different circumstances, turning Pirulo’s remembered description into a painful point of recognition rather than a glamourous anecdote.

Schmeling’s Protection of Her

Pirulo recounts that, when the Nazis intensified their persecution of Jews, Schmeling managed to send Anny to the United States together with his trainer, who was also Jewish. Schmeling did not simply send her away alone: he arranged for the trainer to accompany her, an act that extends his protection to another person in danger. Pirulo remembers Schmeling’s action as a deliberate risk taken on behalf of those the regime targeted.

The decisive gesture comes in Schmeling’s ultimatum. He told the authorities that if they would not allow Anny to return to Germany and live with him, they would lose their world heavyweight champion; he was prepared to leave for America and continue boxing as an American. In Pirulo’s telling, the champion’s fame gives him leverage, but the point is how he uses it. He puts his standing and future in the sport at stake for his wife, rather than treating his success as a reason to remain safely obedient.

Pirulo draws an explicit lesson for Adrián: a person need not be cruel to become a champion, and greatness can coexist with care for others and willingness to take risks for them. The advice is offered in a boxing context, but it reaches beyond athletic honor. Schmeling’s example separates achievement from brutality and makes moral courage, not victory alone, the quality Adrián is asked to remember.

The Memory at Klooga

Years later, Adrián encounters a group of prisoners at Klooga, among them a young woman whom guards leer at and taunt. The woman turns her head to look at him. In that instant, the earlier story returns: her bearing recalls the woman Pirulo had described, and the sound of the trainer’s voice seems to replace the drunken, slurred manner in which he had once told the story. The memory is not a detached recollection. It interrupts Adrián’s perception of the scene and makes him see the condemned woman as a person, not merely another figure in the group about to be killed.

As she raises her head toward the sky and covers her face with her hands, Adrián understands the gesture as a farewell to the world, its trees, and its birds. She rocks, sobs, and prays while trying to preserve the privacy of that last ceremony from her executioners. The novel places this composed act of self-protection beside the guards’ obscene gestures: her dignity persists in a setting designed to reduce the prisoners to exposed, powerless bodies.

Pirulo’s words about Schmeling return alongside the sight of the woman. Adrián remembers the champion standing up to the Third Reich for Anny, even though he had every reason to avoid trouble. The recollection becomes an accusation directed inward. The phrase, “What have you done, Adrián?” gives form to his recognition that he has failed the moral test embodied in Schmeling’s choice. His memory of Anny does not undo what is happening at Klooga, but it makes evasion harder: the example he once dismissed as a story is now inseparable from what he witnesses.

Narrative and Moral Significance

Anny’s importance lies in the way the novel lets one story travel across time. In Madrid, Pirulo’s account is a lesson from a trainer to a young boxer, illustrated by photographs of Schmeling and by the champion’s reputation. At Klooga, the same lesson returns in the presence of a Jewish woman facing death. The contrast transforms the anecdote: what once seemed remote to Adrián becomes a standard for judging conduct in the immediate present.

The sequence also gives Anny a place within a narrative largely organized around men’s actions and memories. She is first described through Pirulo’s admiring appraisal and then recalled through the resemblance Adrián perceives at Klooga; neither scene gives her an extended spoken account of her own life. Yet the danger she faces is not merely a prop for Schmeling’s heroism. Her persecution supplies the stakes of his decision, while the later woman’s gesture of farewell restores the individual human presence that the machinery of massacre tries to erase. Through Anny’s remembered story, the novel links protection, fame, and moral choice—and shows how an example of solidarity can survive even when the person who first carried it into another’s life is far away.