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Some interesting points here. In the end, despite his privileged earlier life, Zweig was Jewish and I think he deserves a fair amount of slack to be cut because of that. He would have known full well what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, which of course is why he had got out of Austria.
I think it is not possible for us, unless we belong to some other persecuted minority, to understand just what it must have been like to be a European Jew in the early 1940s. Even those who managed to get out probably still had family and friends who were caught up in the Holocaust.
When I was a young adult, a member of a group to which I belonged was the only child of a Jewish couple who managed to get out by good luck. They and he were the only members of their families who survived.
After the War, a lot of Holocaust survivors came to Australia, and many to Melbourne, so I have a very small inkling of what it must have been like from visiting the Holocaust Museum here, talking to people and reading accounts of their lives.
Having said that, I personally found it a bit hard to believe that someone as apparently thick as Czentovich had the subtleties of mind to become a chess champion.
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