A game with sharpened knives

In 1938, an Austrian physicist was saved from disgrace and danger by a revolutionary whose own sentence of execution had been commuted more than twenty years earlier. The physicist was Erwin Schrödinger, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1933, who had been forced to flee after the Nazis entered Austria. The revolutionary was the Irish leader Eamon de Valera. These are the extraordinary facts behind this extraordinary fiction.