The Last Checkmate: A Novel

Written by Gabriella Saab

Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld

A PopSugar Best Book of the Year!

Readers of Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz and watchers of The Queen’s Gambit won’t want to miss this amazing debut set during World War II. A young Polish resistance worker, imprisoned in Auschwitz as a political prisoner, plays chess in exchange for her life, and in doing so fights to bring the man who destroyed her family to justice.

Maria Florkowska is many things: daughter, avid chess player, and, as a member of the Polish underground resistance in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, a young woman brave beyond her years. Captured by the Gestapo, she is imprisoned in Auschwitz, but while her family is sent to their deaths, she is spared. Realizing her ability to play chess, the sadistic camp deputy, Karl Fritzsch, decides to use her as a chess opponent to entertain the camp guards. However, once he tires of exploiting her skills, he has every intention of killing her.

Befriended by a Catholic priest, Maria attempts to overcome her grief, vows to avenge the murder of her family, and plays for her life. For four grueling years, her strategy is simple: Live. Fight. Survive. By cleverly provoking Fritzsch’s volatile nature in front of his superiors, Maria intends to orchestrate his downfall. Only then will she have a chance to evade the fate awaiting her and see him punished for his wickedness.

As she carries out her plan and the war nears its end, she challenges her former nemesis to one final game, certain to end in life or death, in failure or justice. If Maria can bear to face Fritzsch—and her past—one last time. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063141957

Gabriella Saab

Gabriella Saab graduated from Mississippi State University with a bachelor of business administration in marketing and now lives in her hometown of Mobile, Alabama, where she works as a barre instructor. While researching The Last Checkmate, she traveled to Warsaw and Auschwitz to dig deeper into the setting and the experiences of those who lived there. The Last Checkmate is her first novel.

Reviews for The Last Checkmate

[DeborahMorton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So seldom to books bring me to tears but the words used were so powerful I could almost imagine the smells, the pain and the heartbreak of these characters. They were all so richly described I felt I knew them. Such a book should be read so we never forget the horrors of war and how it touches us all as humankind.

[waldhaus1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The story of a young polish woman part of the resistance during works war two. She is imprisoned at Auschwitz. Her family is killed and she struggles to cope with camp conditions.

[lorikboyd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Much love for this book! A different view on the atrocities of the Nazi’s and the resilience, strength and fortitude of the people caught up in a madman’s diabolical scheme. Told from a 14-18 year old Polish Catholic girl point of view. Maria is living the horrors of her Jewish neighbors plight. She and her family are resistance workers, working undercover to save the young children of the Jewish people being sent to the concentration camps. She is caught, beaten and she and her family are brutally punished as political prisoners. This story revolves around what the prisoners need to do to survive, for Maria it’s to play chess with the worst of her captors. The will to survive is strong, people will do whatever the need to do to survive, and under these circumstances, no one will judge. Friendship, family, love, resilience, memories are at the forefront of this beautifully written book. A complex game that was passed on from father to daughter with love and served to keep Maria mentally strong in dealing with the horrors. The friendships that evolved, especially between Maria and Fr. Maximilian Kolbe (a favorite saint of mine, and ironically the Paton of my church and school) gave a fictional light to a historical figure. The bond of friendship between Maria, Hania and Irena was beautiful to watch enfold. Beautifully written, heartbreakingly sad, and so well researched, truly a work of love. Make sure you read the Author’s Note! I leaned so much from this book. I found it compelling and hard to put down. I look forward to reading this author again. Thanks to Ms. Saab, William Morrow/Custom House and NetGalley for this ARC. Opinion is mine alone.

[heatherlinc · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am definitely going against the trend with this review of "The Last Checkmate", and I don't like being too negative about novels set in Auschwitz, but this one did not ring true. There were too many contrivances and I felt I was just reading a fictional story instead of events that were horrifically real. Despite the cruelties and deprivations Maria had to endure during her four years in Auschwitz, the sense of desperation and dread was missing. Nor did I bond with Maria as a character. She often annoyed me with her 'plans' and instead of being totally invested in her survival, I found it easy to but the novel down at the end of a chapter. I never had the urge to read 'just one more'.However, on a positive note, I did like the friendship that developed between Maria, Irene and Hania. The three women showed tremendous courage and their bond gave them a reason to stay alive.My favourite character was definitely Father Kolby, who, I discovered later when reading the Author's Notes, was an actual person and was canonised for his work before the war and during his time in Auschwitz. He was truly a remarkable man."The Last Checkmate" wasn't a bad book but I do think it lacked the atmosphere and emotional depth that I expect in these novels. I am a huge fan of historical fiction, especially those set during World War II, but this one never fully won me over, hence the 3 star rating.

[n.w.moors-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a fictionalized account of a young Polish resistance person who gets caught and sent to Auschwitz in the early part of WWII. Her family is executed, but she is left alive because one of the camp's officers wants her to entertain the inmates by playing chess, a game she excels at.It's a good but heartbreaking read. The author utilizes several historical characters though she manipulates timelines or scenes for the benefit of her main character, Maria, who is fictional. Ms. Saab mostly does a good job of depicting the horrors of the camp, though I quibble somewhat at having Maria living at the camp when it was all-male political prisoners (women and children were executed). That seemed a bit forced but necessary for this character's story. The book alternates between Maria's time in the camp and a final chess match with the Nazi officer at the end of the war. It was a device that didn't work quite as well for me, especially the results of that match, but again it's a minor quibble. The Last Checkmate is a thought-provoking read about courageous people.

[thewanderingjew_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Last Checkmate, Gabriella Saab, author; Saskia Maarleveld, narratorIt is difficult to criticize a book that is written about the Holocaust, It is so sensitive a topic. However, the way this book is written, so lyrically, it seems to trivialize the tragedy of the event. There were no sun-kissed days in the Concentration Camps, to provide an example; there were terror-filled days for most of the victims.Maria Florkowska, a Catholic, is active in the Nazi resistance movement at the very young age of 14. Her mother also works for the Underground, secretly saving Jewish children by providing them with new identities and homes, often in Church run orphanages. Irena, “Maria’s cousin”, is her trainer. After only a few months, Maria, not really fully trained or mature enough, makes a fatal mistake when she leaves her building on an errand for the resistance. Hidden inside the basket she carries are false papers that are used to smuggle victims of Hitler’s barbarism to safe places. When the German smashes the basket, she is discovered. Although she produced papers with a false name, her real name was provided by a neighbor seeking to save herself. The entire family is arrested, even Maria’s younger siblings. Although she is tortured, she reveals little information, but they are all sent to Auschwitz to be murdered as political prisoners. Maria is somehow separated from her family, and when the entire family is murdered, she is not with them. As a cruel joke, she is sent to be with the men and is forced to go through the strip naked searches and shaving in front of not only the guards, but the other male prisoners. She is then forced to live in the barracks with them. There are no women’s barracks there until Ravensbruck is built and so few women were allowed to live. There are several people that influence her fate. One is a Jewish interpreter, Hania. She does whatever is necessary to “organize” things in order to keep herself and her brother alive, even if it means sleeping with the guards. She is another woman in the men’s camp because she speaks five languages. When she befriends Maria, a Gentile/Jewish bond is born, although Hania uses the word Shiksa, which is a pejorative Yiddish term, as a nickname for Maria, supposedly meant affectionately. Another is the man who murdered her family, the Camp Director Fritzsch. Maria finds some comfort from a Friar who tries to offer solace to her when she loses her faith. Father Kolbe provides her with a rosary to replace the chess piece that her father had given her as a talisman. Fritzsch deliberately crushed it when it was discovered. Her “cousin” Irena is a sharp-tongued, resistance worker who often puts her own life in danger in the service of others, even though she often chastises Maria.During her internment, chess was Maria’s salvation and her burden. She was forced to play with the cruel Fritzsch. He murdered her first opponent when he lost, just to impress upon her that the game was a life and death endeavor for her. The cruelty of the Germans is highlighted, and I learned of one other barbaric torture method used by the Nazis that I had not heard of before. Innocent prisoners were chosen to die in a special block where all food and drink was denied until the died. It was slow and horrible death, although few deaths in the camps were merciful.The novel seems to stress and emphasize the efforts of gentiles to stop Hitler’s atrocities, in contrast to the popular view that anti-Semitism was present and prevalent in Poland, before and after the war. The book seemed intent on showing that Jews and Gentiles got along with each other and did not exhibit the anti-Semitism so often promoted in books. It seemed intent, also, on showing that the church did not steal children, which is another theory often promoted in books. Rather, the church saved them and returned them to their surviving parents, after the war, and did not conduct Baptismal conversions. For me, the book did not drive these concepts home authentically or realistically. The author used language that seemed far too poetic when describing the conditions in the camps. The story goes back and forth in time from Maria’s capture in 1941 to her escape in 1945 and is sometimes repetitive. The ending required me to truly suspend disbelief. As I read the book, I wondered what the impetus was that inspired the author to write this book. Was it based on true events? I have read a lot about the Holocaust, but this book did not ring as true as many other novels about it. Jewish words, yenta, kindele, kvetch, schlemiel, schmuck, oy vey, oy gevalt, and spitting three times to ward off evil, were overused, and it seemed disingenuous to present such a stereotype of the Jewish people. Hania was not treated as kindly by the author, as the Friar was who represented gentiles. Also, although the Holocaust cannot be truly trivialized in reality, because of the heinous things done during that period, the overly melodramatic way the novel was presented seemed to make it seem like just a story, not a real event with horrible consequences. The overuse of the term prisoner 16671 did fully bring across the point that prisoners in some camps were further dehumanized by the Nazis. They were forced to submit to a wrist tattoo with their identification number, and they no longer had names. However, the story was simply not as forceful as it could have been. It overused the number ID, sometimes, especially at the end, to the point where it was sometimes almost inappropriately comical. In addition, far too much power to affect events, was given to a young, naïve teenager. Too many coincidences took place with relatives finding each other and resistance workers showing up in unexpected places to save the day. The particular incident that truly was not believable for me, was the idea that Maria’s mother just happened to be the one that provided a safe haven for Hania’s children. Unless the author wants us to believe that there were so few in the resistance, and so few prisoners, that these coincidences easily emerged, I think she missed the mark. She tried to ccover too many bases. Further Poland had the largest resistance movement, and although the book is not about Jewish prisoners in the camps, Auschwitz was not a comfortable place for anyone. Perhaps her use of language that seemed trite was overly influenced by the age of her characters, since the story is about a very young volunteer. It is also possibly that she wanted to drive home another side of the story about the Holocaust, to offer some explanation about the behavior of Polish citizens in a more positive way. Rather than a poetic presentation of a book about the Holocaust, I would have preferred a scholarly one, but that may be because I am Jewish and do not like the Holocaust almost dismissed casually, or trivialized in any way, simply to make a novel good reading.

[susan0316 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Marie was just 14 years old when she started working with the resistance in Warsaw. Even though she was so young she felt that she needed to do what she could. When she is arrested, her parents and the rest of her family were also arrested. After time in a prison in Warsaw, the family is sent to Auschwitz in a cattle car. She and her family were all sent to the line of the people who were to be executed but when she lost her family in the crowd, she managed to get into the line with the people who would be saved to be workers. The superintendant of the camp sees a small chess piece fall out of her pocket and decides to let her live so that he has a chess partner. He makes her play chess with some of the various guards in the camp but he enjoys toying with her when they play. She knows that as soon as he gets bored with her, she'll be executed. Maria gives us a very close look at what she went through at the camp - from morning roll calls to how she spent her days working for endless hours. Her main goal is to find out who murdered her parents and when she gets more information, she vows to find them and kill them. At the end of the war, will Maria be able to 'checkmate' the person who killed her family?The Last Checkmate is a debut novel from this author and I can't wait to see what she writes next. This book is very well written and researched. With the brave main character, Maria, she gives us a young woman who was much stronger and braver that she realizes. Even though the book covers a dark time in history, my feelings at the end were of peace and strong hopes for the future. If you enjoy WWII historical fiction, this is a book that you need to read.Note: Be sure to read the author's notes at the end. Many of the characters in this book were based on real people. She not only gives us information about these people that the book is based on but also tells what happened to them after the war.Thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions were my own.

[susan.h.schofield · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a heart wrenching and amazing story of a teenage girl, Maria, who sent to Auschwitz and uses her ability to play chess to help save her life. While it is fiction, the book is very well researched and it is very well written. I look forward to reading more from Gabriella Saab. Thanks to Goodreads for the ARC.