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Editor's note: "Winter People" is an annual series by columnist Lorraine Ahearn that appears Sundays between Thanksgiving and the end of the year.

There is a move in chess that is game-changing, if not game-ending.

A lone pawn, an expendable foot soldier, makes his way square by square across the board. In the shadow of the larger chessmen, he goes unnoticed, posing no threat.

Yet reaching the other side, he is promoted to the most prodigious piece on the board: a second queen, or almost any element he chooses, moving at will, deciding the fate of kings.

Who better to perfect the move than Ernest Miller, age 99?

Born in central Germany to a Jewish mother, he outlived the "Thousand Year Reich," a work prisoner who in the end fled the Eastern Front to the Western Front on foot, to reach the first American outpost. There, three words transformed him.

"You may pass."

But for our purposes, for the moment, what matters is that Ernest Miller is today a member in good standing of the Friends Homes chapter of the United States Chess Federation.

He is going blind and now plays from memory against an unseen opponent. Which, in a roundabout way, gives him a curious advantage.

Often, his opponent does not see the short pawn making his way across the board. Miller, playing from memory, never forgets.

"The pawn is easily hidden behind a bigger figure," muses Miller in his careful, precise diction. "That can be, sometimes, my Waterloo."

Chess, like existence, is a game of experience, and concentration.

***

Ernest Miller's unseen opponent is sitting in his own apartment this morning at Friends Homes at Guilford retirement center feeling a peculiar sense of lightness.

Why is this?, he wonders.

Andrew Westhead is 100, the older of the two chess partners. He is reading Seneca at the moment - but the paperback version instead of the hardback, trying to downsize his belongings, doing a good job of it.

He once had a wireless keyboard for his LG flat-screen, but one online session led to another. Whole afternoons were gone. Who has the time? He is clearing off the bookshelves, emptying file drawers, down to bare essentials, just the tools he needs.

There is a compass and a drafting triangle, his leather bookmark collection, a framed piece of music from the first Rachmaninoff prelude he learned to play, and a heavy brass paperweight from his old job at GE. This is the only thing he took with him, and it has no papers under it.

"Lately I feel this contentment, and I can't explain it," Westhead says. "This is the best part of my life."

Like the winter trees outside his courtyard window, by now rid of every last leaf to afford a wider view, Westhead is looking from a distance, and zooming in at the same time. If time is short, he does not waste it by hurrying.

Over lunch, he and Miller deliberate on anything, everything. The chemical composition of sea salt versus kosher. The cost of Canadian newsprint and the future of The New York Times. The supply and demand for hops. The great cathedrals of Europe. The constitutional provisions governing the transfer of power.

And chess. Not to forget chess.

Westhead has 16 games going with 14 people, by mail. He exchanges letters weekly with players he has never met, would never recognize in person. They start by repeating the last move and giving the reply - "bishop to D3," say, and "knight to A7" - and then they go on to other topics, from political rants to economic observations to the migratory patterns of New Jersey waterfowl.

In the thick binders of such letters he keeps for his records, there have to be moves that Westhead would take back in retrospect. Then again, how is it possible to undo one move, without changing the entire outcome?

"I probably would have been much more cautious," he begins, then takes that back. "You have to gamble. You have to take some risks. Otherwise it's entirely defensive."

Which leads him back to chess. He was preparing for this weekend's usual game with Miller, in which the two face off in the library chess room at Friends Home to re-enact chess grandmasters' games of the past, studying their strategy.

This Saturday, it would be Garry Kasparov versus Nigel Short, 1994, Amsterdam, a variation on the French Defense. Kasparov prevailed, naturally, even after blundering his queen in an early round, but it's not Westhead's cup of tea. A fool's defense. Better to lose a few.

***

At the beginning, it had to look hopeless, unwinnable from Ernest Miller's perspective. He was a mere peasant, a "bauer," the German word for "pawn," watching Poland fall to Hitler's armies in three weeks in the fall of 1939 and, the following spring, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France fall in three months.

Miller was still a child when his mother died - before she could be "resettled," in the euphemistic parlance of the Reich. This left him alone, a pariah, half-Jewish by the Aryan laws of purity, needed for forced defense work.

First, it was in service of the occupation of France and the Luftwaffe's Battle of Britain. Miller was shuttled to a work camp in Cherbourg, where they built launching platforms for the V1 bomb. After D-Day, they were rushed east to Beauvais, to try to defend the rail resupplies.

As the Reich grew increasingly desperate to hold on to Fortress Europa, Miller and his fellow prisoners were sent to an abandoned limestone mine. There, the Nazis, running out of petroleum, sought to convert coal into gasoline.

It was too late. The Red Army was at the door, and as the German guards stripped off their uniforms, donned civilian clothes and vanished into the countryside, Miller had a choice to make. Europe after Yalta was being partitioned, squared off like a chess board.

Miller had lived under the brown shirts. Did he now want to live under the red?

So he walked west, 20 or 30 miles to the first outpost where they spoke English. He got a job with the American military command. Wrote to his relatives in New York and Philadelphia. And in September 1946, boarded one of a thousand ships built to transport a million U.S. troops to Europe.

It was sailing the other way now, sailing west, where he would meet Naomi, have two children and grandchildren, and live to be an old man. Nothing lasts a thousand years. But 100 would be a good, round number.

Until then, he plays from memory and his opponent is unseen. He is the pawn who wears the crown.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com