This latest addition to the mini-genre of chess pictures plays on the allegorical level as well as the strategic in an affecting, wartime chamber piece, set in a prison cell in 1939 Paris. Three "undesirable aliens" await investigation: they are Lodeck, an anti-Hitler German sea captain; Grünstein, a Jewish butcher who has come from Poland to Paris to collect an inheritance; and a naive Greek cook from Corfu who longs to serve the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II. To while away the time, the men whittle chess pieces from stale bread and, when that runs out, matzoh. Grünstein, the newcomer, and Lodeck, the champ, battle it out. Years later, Lodeck, whose memories form the flashback narrative, still longs to decipher the unbeatable Grünstein strategy. But more than that, he wants to know what the prison guard, who confiscated their chess men to add to his collection, ever did with old Grünstein himself....