Bridging Two Worlds

This is a rare account of the horrors of the WWII death camps from someone who experienced them. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Prague, Hoffman lost his entire family in the Holocaust. The story of his own ordeals, and how he managed to survive Auschwitz, makes for chilling reading. No one could experience what Hoffman did and be unaffected, and a good part of the book recounts his struggles to establish a normal life after being relocated to post-war England. An important part of his recovery was discovering his talent for the game of bridge, and becoming a professional player.

Author Biography

Martin Joseph Hoffman (15 November 1929 – 15 May 2018) was a Czech-born British professional bridge player and writer.

Hoffman was born in Prague, in what was then the First Czechoslovak Republic. His father and mother were Herman and Toby. He had a younger brother and two sisters. When he was not yet nine years old, he and his brother were sent to stay with his mother’s parents in the Carpathians, where they studied the Torah. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, his parents were deported to Theresienstadt, where they died. Hoffman, his brother, and his grandparents went into hiding; but in 1944 they were arrested and transported to Auschwitz. A Sonderkommando advised Hoffman to pretend that he was 18, even though he was not yet 14. He was later moved to the Monowitz-Buna, Gross Rosen and Birkenau sub-camps of Auschwitz; and from there he was sent on a death march towards Buchenwald. In 1945, he was liberated by American Army troops, who adopted him as mascot, with the honorary rank of sergeant.

After the end of the war, he was relocated to a rehabilitation hostel in England, near Windermere. While on a holiday from there, in Torquay, he was befriended by a family from Finchley; they offered him a job as a diamond cutter, took him in, and taught him to play whist. He rapidly became addicted to the game. He took up bridge only because some Russian friends asked him to make up a four, and he found the game even more interesting than whist. The diamond trade was not good in the 1950s, and he turned to card-playing for a living; he was a host, that is, a player retained by a bridge club proprietor to make up a table whenever needed but who kept some share of his winnings. He did not play in a duplicate bridge event until the remarkably late age of 35. He and his partner won the event by a wide margin; and he realised for the first time that this was a game he could succeed in as well as enjoy. From then on, he began to offer his services as a paid partner in Europe and beyond, and became widely known as a formidable competitor. He was for many years called the best duplicate pairs bridge player in Europe, if not the world.