A family’s tale

A bronze chess set tells a family’s tale

Carolyn Webb
April 2, 2009

THEY may appear a jumble of rooks, pawns and bishops, but this chess set tells the story of Phillip Wierzbowski’s life.

The 32 bronze, Roman-style figurines are among the few items salvaged from Mr Wierzbowski’s Healesville house that burnt down in the Black Saturday bushfires.

A North Ringwood couple, Jeff and Desma Noble, heard about the tragedy from a mutual friend. Professional jewellers, they are cleaning and polishing the 29 pieces that are charred but intact, and having three badly damaged ones recast.

Apart from his father’s gold wedding band, the chess set is the only physical memento of Mr Wierzbowski’s late parents: everything else, including his father’s architectural drawings and video footage of his mother, was lost in the blaze that tore, twice, through the eight-hectare property, 10 kilometres north of Healesville.

Akrivi Partheni was just 16, but claimed to be 18, when she came to Australia in 1955 for an arranged marriage to Polish immigrant Mark Wierzbowski.

Mr Wierzbowski earned money making house models while studying architecture at university. The couple settled in Greendale Road, East Doncaster, and had four children. It was 1971 before Akrivi saved enough to return to Greece for a tearful reunion with her mother at Piraeus.

Mrs Wierzbowski took along Phillip, then 11, and he witnessed her buying the bronze chess set in an Athens shop, a gift for her husband.

Mark Wierzbowski had been in the Resistance fighting the Germans in World War II, but for 17 years, on Saturday nights in the Wierzbowskis’ lounge room, his chess partner was a German neighbour, Karl.

Over peanuts and the odd sherry as they played, Mark and Karl would talk politics, photography, “but never about the war”, says Phillip, who learned to play chess by watching them.

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