Friday, December 14, 2018

Endre Steiner, Concentration Camps and Budapest 1929

     Beginning with round 5, over in Germany the Alekhine - Bogoljubow World Championship Match was started and as a result a lot of attention was diverted from a major tournament being held in Budapest. 
     The Budapest tournament was a memorial of the foundation of the Budapest Chess Club founded by Jozsef Szen in 1839. There was also a tournament held in Budapest the year before. Capablanca won the 1928 tournament with an undefeated +5 -0 =4 and finished ahead of Marshall, Spielmann and Kmoch. 
     The winner of the below game which won the beauty prize in the 1929 tournament was Hungarian master Endre Steiner (June 27, 1901 - December 29, 1944), older brother of Lajos Steiner. 
     Endre played on 6 Hungarian Olympiad teams from 1924 - 1937, was =3rdnat Portsmouth 1923, 2nd at Trencianske Teplice 1928 and 1st at Kecskemet 1933. 
     Two-thirds of Hungarian Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1945. More than half a million people fell victim to the labor service, deportations, brutality of the Hungarian authorities, death marches, gassings in Auschwitz, mass executions and living conditions in the concentration camps. 
     Despite the loss of tens of thousands and the hardship inflicted by the Nazis, until March 1944 the majority of Hungary's Jewish community lived in relative security. The government of Miklos Kallay, who served as Prime Minister of Hungary during World War II from March 1942 to March 1944, passed a number of anti-Jewish laws and made anti-Semitic statements but rejected German demands for the deportation of Hungarian Jews. 
     This sense of security evaporated on March 19, 1944 when German troops occupied the country in an effort to prevent Hungary from going the way of Italy and abandoning the war effort. Germany also wanted to exploit the Hungarian economy to cover the increasing costs of the war. 
     A plan was also put into effect to rid the country of Jews. A few days following the occupation, a group of government officials zealously cooperated with the Germans and by late May practically the entire Jewish population was ghettoized and in the largest deportation operation in the history of the Holocaust, between May 15 and July 9, over 437,000 people had been transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 
     It's reported that Steiner died in a Nazi concentration camp near Budapest, but exactly where will probably never be known. There does not appear to have actually been a concentration camp in Budapest although there was a transit camp outside the city. 
     In Hungary Jews were kept in ghettos and labor camps and many were transported to concentration camps outside the country. As near as I could determine, there was a concentration camp named Terezin 30 miles north of Prague in the Czech Republic to which Hungarian Jews were transported and from there primarily to Auschwitz. His brother Lajos managed to avoid the same fate by moving to Australia in 1939.  

Budapest, Hungary, 1-16 September 1929 

1) Capablanca 10.5-2.5 
2) Rubinstein 9.5-3.5 
3) Tartakower 8.0-5.0 
4-5) Vajda and Thomas 7.5-5.5 
6) E.Steiner 7.0-6.0 
7-8) Colle and Havasi 6.5-6.5 
9) Przepiorka 6.0-7.0 
10-11) Canal and Monticelli 5.5-7.5 
12) Bosch 4.5-8.5 
13) Brinckmann 4.0-9.0 
14) Prokes 2.5-10.5 

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