The Sudetenland’s occupation is the political turning point Dr B associates with his release from Gestapo custody in Vienna. It may have made his case seem closed, ending the immediate threat of interrogation but not the psychological consequences of solitary confinement: months later, he was still trying to understand whether the chess he had played alone had remained a game or crossed into madness.

Political Context and Release

Dr B says the Gestapo detained him not as an ordinary political prisoner but as someone from whom it hoped to extract money or incriminating information about monasteries and supporters of the Austrian imperial house. He was held at the Hotel Metropole, the Gestapo headquarters, where a private room served not as humane accommodation but as a method of isolation. His account places his eventual release against the changed political circumstances surrounding the Sudetenland. The doctor who examined him after his breakdown helped secure his release, though Dr B does not know exactly what the doctor told his captors. He offers two possible explanations: the doctor may have declared him mentally unsound, or the Gestapo may have lost interest in him after Adolf Hitler occupied the Sudetenland and considered Austria’s case closed. The account does not settle which explanation is correct; the political event is presented as a possibility, not a confirmed cause. Release came with a condition. Dr B had to sign a promise to leave his homeland within fourteen days. The deadline was consumed by the practical requirements of travel, including military and police papers, tax documents, a passport, a visa, and a health certificate. These formalities kept him occupied, leaving little time to reflect on his imprisonment.

The Cell and Its Aftermath

The Hotel Metropole room had a bed, armchair, washbasin, table, and barred window, but its apparent comfort concealed an engineered absence. Dr B was locked in, denied reading and writing materials, and deprived of ordinary contact; the warder was forbidden to answer questions or speak. With only a few objects to look at, he found his thoughts circling repeatedly around the same questions and the unknown contents of his interrogators’ files. The interrogations intensified this uncertainty. Dr B could not tell what the Gestapo already knew about the funds and documents he had handled, or what others might have revealed. Each answer seemed dangerous: admitting information could expose someone else, while denying too much could incriminate him. Returned to the same room afterward, he replayed his answers and imagined what the interrogators had recorded. The political context explains the pressure behind his detention, but the isolation made the questioning continue in his own thoughts long after each session ended.

Chess, Memory, and the Return to Play

A stolen chess almanac eventually gave Dr B a way to organize the otherwise empty days. At first he struggled to understand its notation and reconstructed a board on his check-patterned bedcover, using crumbs for pieces. He learned the collection’s 150 grandmaster matches in stages, first playing them out with the makeshift pieces and then visualizing the positions without either the crumbs or the bedcover. A routine of two matches in the morning, two in the afternoon, and a review in the evening gave the days a structure. That discipline restored his concentration and helped him resist the interrogators’ misleading questions. But chess also became inseparable from the confinement that had made it his refuge. After his release, Dr B largely avoided thinking about the cell; he says that attempts to recall it seemed to leave his mind blank. Only weeks later, aboard the ship, did he find the courage to remember and describe what had happened. When he encountered a real chessboard on the ship, the physical pieces initially seemed strange after months of playing through notation in his imagination. He intervened in a game because he instinctively recognized what he thought was a dangerous move, then worried that his solitary chess had been a fevered substitute rather than ordinary play. The Sudetenland’s occupation may have ended the Gestapo’s interest in his case, but it could not resolve that uncertainty. Dr B agreed to play only one match as a test, explicitly fearing that renewed play might draw him back into the obsessive state he associated with his imprisonment.