She smiled at me – yes, she smiled, so there were still people capable of a kind smile – then put an admonishing finger to her lips and walked quietly on. But I couldn’t obey her. I hadn’t seen enough of the miracle yet. I tried to force myself upright in the bed to watch her go, to look at the miracle of a kindly human being as she walked away. As I tried to haul myself up by the edge of the bed, however, I found I couldn’t do it. Where my right hand usually was, and my fingers and wrist, I felt something strange instead: a large, thick, white wad of fabric, obviously an extensive bandage. At first I stared uncomprehendingly at this white, thick, strange thing on my hand, and then I slowly began to grasp where I was, and wondered what had happened to me. I must have been injured, or else I’d hurt my own hand. I was in a hospital.

‘At midday the doctor came, a friendly, elderly man. He knew my family name, and mentioned my uncle the imperial physician so respectfully that I immediately felt he was well-disposed to me. As we talked, he asked me all kinds of questions, particularly one that surprised me – was I a mathematician or a chemist? I said no.

‘ “Strange,” he murmured. “In your delirium you kept crying out such strange formulae – c3, c4. We could none of us make anything of them.”

‘I asked what had happened to me. He gave a rather odd smile.

‘ “Nothing serious. An acute irritation of the nerves.” And he added quietly, after looking cautiously around, “Not surprising, after all. You’ve been here since March the 13th, haven’t you?”

‘I nodded.

‘ “No wonder, then, with their methods,” he murmured. “You’re not the first. But don’t worry.”

‘From the way in which he soothingly whispered this, and thanks to his kind expression, I knew I was in good hands here.

‘Two days later, the kindly doctor told me frankly what had happened. The jailer had heard me shouting out loud in my cell, and at first thought someone had come in and I was quarrelling with him. But no sooner did he appear in the doorway than I had rushed at him, uttering wild cries which sounded like, “Will you make your move, you rascal, you coward?” I had tried to seize him by the throat, and finally I hit out so frantically that he had to call for help. As I was being dragged off in my rabid state, I had suddenly torn myself free, rushed to the window in the corridor and smashed the pane, cutting my hand – you can still see the deep scar here. I had spent my first few nights in hospital in a kind of brain fever, but the doctor thought my senses were perfectly clear now. “To be sure,” he added quietly, “I won’t say that to those gentlemen, or they’ll have you back in there. Trust me, and I’ll do my best.”

‘I have no idea what that helpful doctor told my tormentors, but at least he got what he hoped to achieve: my release. He may have said I wasn’t responsible for my own actions, or perhaps by now I was of no importance to the Gestapo, for Hitler had occupied Bohemia, so as far as he was concerned that was Austria dealt with. I had only to sign an undertaking to leave our native land for ever within two weeks, and those two weeks were so full of the thousands of formalities that former cosmopolitans need in order to travel these days – military papers, police papers, tax certificates, a passport, a visa, a health certificate – that I had no time to think about the past much. It seems that mysterious powers work to regulate our brains, automatically switching off what might burden and endanger the mind, for whenever I tried to think back to my time in that cell the light in my head went out, so to speak; only many weeks later, in fact only here on this ship, have I found the courage to remember what happened to me again.

‘And now you’ll understand why I acted to your friends in such an unseemly and probably bewildering manner. I was walking through the smoking-room entirely by chance when I saw them sitting at the chessboard, and I was instinctively rooted to the spot by surprise and horror. For I had entirely forgotten that chess can be played with a real chessboard and real chessmen; I had forgotten that two completely different people sit opposite each other in person during the game. It actually took me a few minutes to realize that the players were basically involved in the same game that, in my desperate situation, I had tried playing against myself for months.