Max Schmeling

Max Schmeling is a world heavyweight champion whose importance in the story lies not only in his fame but in what Adrián Gallardo learns of his conduct: Schmeling risked his standing in Nazi Germany to defend his Jewish wife, Anny Ondra. The story first reaches Adrián through his boxing trainer, Pirulo, and later returns in memory at Klooga, where the example of a champion who protected another person sharpens the shame of Adrián’s own choices.

Identity and Reputation

Schmeling enters Adrián’s life through the Madrid boxing world. In November 1939, he visited the Gimnástica Ferroviaria with Ondra during a propaganda tour arranged by the Nazi embassy. Pirulo, a former professional boxer, posed with the famous visitor for photographs. It was not a real bout or even a training session: the two men pretended to spar for the cameras, then posed together smiling. Yet Pirulo kept the pictures carefully wrapped in tissue paper in his wallet, treating them as among the most precious mementos of his life.

Pirulo’s admiration rests on more than celebrity. He remembers Schmeling’s strength, power, and intelligence, and praises him as a gentleman. He also enthuses about Ondra’s beauty, but the story later makes clear that this conventional admiration is not the point that endures. What matters is the account Pirulo tells Adrián about the danger Schmeling accepted for his wife.

The Madrid Example

When Pirulo takes Adrián as a pupil, the young boxer searches the Sunday Rastro market for a picture of Schmeling. He finds a hand-colored trading card, though the dark-haired man pictured does not match the blond, light-eyed champion he had expected. The reverse identifies Schmeling as world heavyweight champion in 1930. The seller asks an exorbitant price, and Adrián pays without bargaining, not realizing that bargaining is expected. He runs back to his boardinghouse and sets the card beneath a bedhead slat.

For the two years Adrián lives in Madrid, the card watches over his sleep. Schmeling becomes an absent presence in the young man’s routine: a champion to admire while Pirulo trains him at the Gimnástica Ferroviaria. Adrián follows the demanding regimen, even when Pirulo moves him from light heavyweight to heavyweight to compensate for his lack of agility. The discipline does not make him a champion, but it gives the image at his bedside a lasting place in his imagination.

Pirulo’s admiration also has a moral dimension. He tells Adrián that Ondra was a Polish Jew who had become a film star in Germany. After the Nazis’ violent attacks on Jewish people and businesses, Schmeling arranged for her to leave for the United States with her Jewish trainer. He then made clear that if his wife could not return to Germany to live with him, he would leave for America and continue boxing as an American. Pirulo presents this as proof that greatness need not require cruelty: a champion could care for others and risk his own position on their behalf. He urges Adrián to remember the lesson.

The Memory at Klooga

Adrián does not forget Pirulo’s story, but after leaving Madrid he pushes it into the dusty recesses of memory. At Klooga, as Jewish women are brought toward their deaths, the remembered account becomes immediate again. One woman turns her head toward him; Adrián recognizes in her composure the steadiness Pirulo had described in Schmeling’s wife. She covers her face with her hands, trying to shield her final leave-taking from the eyes of her executioners. The memory of Anny Ondra is no longer a story about a film star or a boxer’s marriage. It has become a way of seeing the woman about to be killed.

Schmeling returns in Adrián’s mind as the champion who had everything to lose and still confronted the Third Reich rather than abandon his wife. Pirulo’s voice accompanies the recollection, insisting that a person can be good and still reach the highest level. The story places this remembered example against Adrián’s conduct as he witnesses the killing. The old trading card and the boxer who once watched over his sleep now stand as measures of a courage Adrián lacks; the thought forces the question of what he is becoming, rather than allowing the label of champion to settle the matter.

Narrative Role and Significance

Schmeling is not a participant in the Klooga scene; he is a remembered moral counterexample through whom Adrián’s conscience takes shape. Pirulo’s account first supplies a model of masculine sporting honor that differs from strength exercised as domination: the champion’s stature is shown by the risk he accepts for another person. The book then brings that model back at the point when Adrián is confronted with the consequences of violence against Jewish prisoners.

The contrast does not absolve Adrián. Remembering Schmeling makes the gap between a celebrated identity and an honorable act harder to evade. At the Madrid boardinghouse, the champion is a picture beneath a bed slat; at Klooga, he becomes the measure by which Adrián recognizes the moral weight of what he sees. His significance lies in that recurrence: a story of loyalty once received as an anecdote returns as an accusation, exposing how admiration can be remembered without being followed.