Lessons from the life of chess man Otto Hardy

WHEN I was growing up in Loughborough in the 1960s, my parents bought a house from Otto Hardy, who worked as a teacher of German in Coalville.

He was also a chess enthusiast, taking part in various tournaments, including at national level, and wrote books on the subject, as well as a chess column in the Loughborough Echo. My mother typed many of his texts, which included chess notation that was complicated to type. Otto would visit my mother to bring the material for typing but I rarely saw him as I was away at school and later at university.

I have lived in Vienna for many years, working for UN organisations. One day my mother told Otto I had gone to work in Vienna, whereupon he said he came from Vienna. Because of Otto’s interest in chess, I occasionally sent my mother chess articles out of an Austrian newspaper to pass on to him. In a letter of thanks, Otto mentioned his last address in Vienna, which he left while still a boy. It happened to be in the street where I had previously lived.

When Otto died, there was an obituary in the Echo and a couple of obituaries by his chess colleagues appeared on the internet. On the basis of the obituaries, which mentioned his departure from Austria with his younger brother in 1938, on a Kindertransport to Sweden, I thought I would be able to find a record in Vienna of where he and his family lived in the 1930s and what happened to them.

I was wrong: nowhere could I find the name Hardy. I soon came to the conclusion of course that Hardy was not his original family name. I tried searching for him under similarsounding German names but I still found nothing. His original surname could have been anything, so I suspended my search.

As I was now interested in the Kindertransports that had been organised to rescue the children of endangered families from the Nazis, in 2022 I visited an exhibition on the theme at the Jewish Museum in Vienna. The exhibition catalogue included a chapter on the evacuation of children to Scandinavia.

I wrote to the author, a historian, telling her what I knew about Otto and his brother Ernst. Bingo! She found two brothers with these names on a Kindertransport list their family name was Zilzer.

It appeared that the boys’ parents had left Vienna separately and joined each other again in England while the boys were being looked after by a family in Uppsala. Following a successful attempt to obtain permission for them to travel to England, in 1943 the boys were reunited with their parents, who had settled

in Sheffield. Otto studied at the University of Sheffield before taking up teaching. Brother Ernst studied at the University of Cambridge and later at the University of Birmingham, becoming a minister with the Methodist Church.

Otto was born on December 14, 1927 and died on April 4, 2010; Ernst was born on July 12, 1929 and died relatively young on July 22, 1975. Of their several aunts and uncles in Austria, at least one managed to escape to a safe country but three were murdered by the Nazis. Their names are among the 65,000 engraved on the 180 granite stones forming the Shoah Wall of Names Memorial in Vienna.

Nascent fascist discrimination against individuals or groups can take many forms in a modern secular democracy and therefore we all need to know how to recognise its first signs and act together to nip it in the bud, again and again, wherever it appears, so that no political movement can emerge to make some families fear for their lives.

Steven Flitton