The Last Checkmate is a novel written by Gabriella Saab. This is another in the long list of Holocaust fiction. The theme of chess that runs throughout this book, as a connection for the young girl who has been brought to the concentration camp. Marie Florkowska, is a Polish teenager who is working for the resistance. She is captured and tortured to find out her accomplices. Then she and her family are sent to Auschwitz. She is escapes immediate death when Karl Fritzsch, the camp deputy notices a chess piece she has been carrying.

Marie is able to survive by playing chess. Fritzsch keeps her alive having her play chess with himself, other officers and prisoners for his entertainment. Interestingly this is a story of a Polish citizen who did not agree with the Germans taking over Poland and killing off all the Jews there. Marie and her family were working with the underground to save Jewish people.

This is another historical novel in the Holocaust genre. It is interesting that this plot shows us how the Polish were prisoners were treated in the camps. This is a book that takes the reader back and forth between a young girl's experience in a concentration camp and afterwards trying to exact revenge on her oppressor. An interesting story but it would have been better in my opinion if it had been based on a real character. Though there is some historical accuracy and and some characters based on real people, the main character is not based on a real person which I think would have made this a better story.

I enjoyed this book but did not find it as compelling or as realistic as many other World War II novels I've read. While this novel appears to be appreciated by many and it seems most readers admired and enjoyed it, I did not share that opinion. I found that the chess part was a stretch and was used mainly as a writing tool. Some of the plot points did not seem consistent with other accounts of Auschwitz - there were coincidences, convenient reunions and ways to sneak goods and activities past the guards that I couldn't accept and I found these details distracted me from the plot. The use of chess and checkmate also felt artificial and forced and did not ring true to me. A great attempt and well written book but not one of my favorites.

This was one of the best historical fiction books I’ve read on the holocaust. My husband agreed with me and we would recommended it to all.

This was an excellent book! Maria is a Polish resistance member who is caught and imprisoned in Auschwitz. This tells of her time while being imprisoned and after. As heartbreaking as it is to read this was well written and I loved the extra information at the end.

This book was one of the best I have read this year.
This is the story of Maria, a girl who dreams of being a women's chess champion while working for the resistance in Warsaw during the war. She ends up captured and we learn of her time in Auschwitz - the awful things she endures and sees and how she survives.
It definitely makes you feel all the emotions as you read it While reading it, I kept thinking it felt so real, which made me have to set it down and take breaks. I highly recommend reading rhe Author's Note at the end because she explains where she got her information and that a lot of it is based on facts.
While there are a lot of difficult situations and events in this book, I highly recommend it. The author has done a great job of making you feel what really happened and helping us to both sympathize and rejoice.
One note - she does sometimes overuse chess game references and analogies, but that is the basis of the book, so I understand why.
Thank you to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for my copy of this in exchange for an honest review.

This extremely well-researched and well-written WWII historical novel recounts the inspiring story of Maria Florkowska, a 14 year old resistance worker from Warsaw. Involved in saving Jewish children, she and her family are arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Her family is murdered, but she survives in Auschwitz for four years because the camp deputy Karl Fritsch saves her to play chess for the entertainment of the guards. The author skillfully weaves real historical people and events into the narrative. This heartbreaking work describes the suffering, cruelty, and horrible conditions experienced in the camp, but shows how one courageous girl learned to survive with the love and help of her friends.

It is hard to believe this is a debut novel. Like many of the other books I’ve read about the WWII concentration camps, this one will stay with me for a long time. Maria is just 14 years old when she is sent to Auschwitz along with her family for being part of the resistance. She ends up playing chess for her survival.

I have a love hate relationship when a book is set in multiple periods in time, but the author did a great job weaving it together. This book is well written and the characters are rich and complex. I was so invested in what would happen.

There are so many adjectives I could use to describe the book. Courageous, powerful, engaging, compelling, intriguing and I could keep going, but I am sure you get the picture. This is worth the investment and I highly recommend it.

Maria, at the age of 14 years is sent to Auschwitz. Upon her arrival she is briefly separated from her family but the separation is long enough that they are executed. While her life is spared, she fights every day for the next four years for survival. The circle of friends she develops, the game of chess and her work with the resistance will sustain her until her release. There are many books of the period but this one is so very special. The characters and what they endure and survive will work their way into your heart.

This is a meticulously researched and beautifully written novel about the most horrific time in recent history - certainly the worst for Maria, the main character, who is taken to Auschwitz with her family as punishment for her resistance work. Once in Auschwitz, she loses track of - and then loses - her family, while becoming the pawn of a Nazi officer who taunts her by forcing her to play chess, a game she loved for its connection to her father.

The story is written in several timelines, but the story is skillfully told so that the reader never loses track. I had to put the book down for several weeks for reasons unrelated to how much I was enjoying it, and when I picked it up again, I was immediately drawn back into the story.

For those who think they can't hear to read one more book about WWII, read something else to clear your head, and then give The Last Checkmate the chance it deserves. It's not the same old WWII novel.

This novel has echoes of Queen’s Gambit, the Netflix series that reinvigorated chess for seemingly half the population. But whereas Queens Gambit concerned itself with fashion, sex ,and chess competition between genders, The Last Checkmate treads on much more serious ground, taking place as it does in Auschwitz during World War II.

Here we meet Maria Florkowska, a teenager from the Polish resistance, who gets caught and is punished by being sent to Auschwitz with her parents and siblings. Suddenly, what was once for Maria an abstract, almost fun, game of playing spy, becomes deadly serious. No sooner do they arrive in Auschwitz than Maria’s family is put to death, and Maria escapes only because a Nazi camp deputy by the name of Karl Fritzsch happens to notice a chess piece that Maria drops.

Fritzsch keeps Maria alive for his own amusement. What keeps her going is the search to find out how her family was killed and who killed them.

And so she plays Fritzsch in chess despite the uncomfortable surroundings: “Somehow, I feel like the girl surrounded by men in his roll-call square, all eyes on her while she engages in chess games against the man who would lodge a bullet in her skull just as soon as place her in checkmate.”

When she later suspects it was Fritzsch who killed her family, she vows to live long enough to get revenge. At first, she is one of the very few girls in Auschwitz but, as the war goes on, she is joined by others from her hometown and the girls and women form an underground network of support along with some men.

One of the novel’s central characters, the man who helps Maria realize her reason to continue living, is a Catholic priest who lives with a grace Maria cannot comprehend. He willingly gives up his food and ultimately gives up his life, trading places with a man who has children. It is largely due to his words, memory, and compassion that Maria decides she must keep putting one foot in front of the other.

As one might imagine, there are unimaginable horrors visited on the prisoners throughout the book which makes for some difficult reading. There are only so many torture-filled scenes that any reader can take, which is why the device of the underground network works so well. It provides some shred of humanity for the reader to hold onto.

The girls, women, and a few men sometimes ruminate on what life will be like when they are freed and return to their former lives in Warsaw. But for Maria, whose entire family has been wiped out, returning home without them is not something she looks forward to.

“A life beyond Auschwitz was what I’d imagined these past two years,” she thinks. “It was an encouraging thought, but, as I pictured myself back in Warsaw, I couldn’t erase my family from the image. We were together, as we’d been before. It was a wonderful dream, but that was all it was. Survival was easier to fight for when all it required was living from one day to the next; when it required a new life in a place once familiar and reassuring, now devoid of loved ones, of security, of vivacity, of home, it felt impossible.”

The chapters seesaw between the years 1942 and 1945 so we know that Maria does survive and lives to challenge her nemesis Fritzsch to one more game of chess. It is not the only game going on. There is psychological warfare between the two and, although Maria now seemingly has the upper hand, Fritzsch is still capable of pushing all her buttons.

The reader holds their breath as the tension rises, the games proceed, and the endgame begins.

This novel distorts the actual facts of Auschwitz in order to present a story that might appeal to younger readers or to those readers who enjoyed the TV series THE QUEENS GAMBIT. Many of the plot details are fanciful. The author presents the Polish citizenry as uniformly protective of Jews whereas this is a complex question not easily resolved. Unfortunately the book is intended for an audience that is the least likely to be aware of the facts and the controversy.

Thank you to William Morris, The Book Club Girls, and NetGalley for the review copy of The Last Checkmate.

I’m having trouble rating this one as I hate to give 4 or 5 stars due to the subject matter, but it was so touching and moving that I hate to give it anything lower.

Having never been in a situation even remotely similar to what these people suffered I didn’t really relate to any other of them. I can’t even imagine. I will say that I was rooting for Maria from the start.

Excellent book ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Trigger Warning: PTSD, Physical abuse (interrogation and Auschwitz)
The Last Checkmate is a sort of dual timeline story set during the course of 4-5 years where the story of Maria is told in present and of her past memories. Set in Warsaw, Auschwitz and Birkenau this novel is a fictionalized story of 14 year old Maria, a Polish resistance member.
Though this novel is fictionalized some characters appearing in this novel are real people who played an active role in the resistance movement rescuing millions from the concentration camps. Do not read the author's notes at the end of the novel if you do not want spoilers. This is the author's debut novel and it is a well researched novel. The novel keeps your interest all throughout. Imagining a 14 year old girl in a concentration camp is hard and heartbreaking and the author has done an amazing job with Maria who has to navigate a place like Auschwitz only through her intelligence. Like any game of chess this novel is riveting and all the moves start making sense as the story starts unfolding. The Last Checkmate is a story of courage, survival, friendship, love and justice. Some portions of this novel are painful to read but these incidents make the novel more real. 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.

I was pleasantly surprised by this debut novel. I really enjoyed the writing style (although I felt overall the book could have been shorter by about 100 pages) and would read more from this author in the future.

The 14 year old Maria grows up fast because of the war and the part her family plays. There were times I doubted her motivation but then realized I could never begin to understand the thoughts and experiences she goes through. This novel really captured my attention from the beginning as it showed me another chapter in the horrors of WW2 and the strength the people had to have in order to survive.

Thank you to William Morrow and Net Galley for the chance to read!!

Thank you William Morrow for gifting me an eARC of this book via NetGalley to review. There was a lot happening in this novel that helped moved the story along, but the characters weren’t developed enough for me to have an emotional attachment to them, which meant certain events didn’t seem as tragic as they were meant to be. If WWII historical fiction is your genre, or if you’ve been looking for more books that involve chess after The Queen’s Gambit, you might enjoy this one more than I did. This book is available now.

his book was well written and clearly well researched, but at the same time the situation and Maria's experience felt far fetched. I was never in fear for her or her friends and had a hard time connecting to her as a character. In addition the dual (sometimes triple) time line felt unnecessary and clunky. I give the author thumbs up for the effort, but for me the book was lacking.

Received a copy of this to read and review in advance of publication via Net Galley.

Really enjoyed this book. A true story of courage , determination and passion for life. Lessons learned from an early age lead the character to preserve the will yo go on.

An absolutely fantastic book! Heart wrenching, but well done. This book gave me all the emotions!!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. All opinions expressed are completely my own.

Great historical novel. Beautifully written. Well developed plot and characters. I would highly recommend this book