Accidental Saviors

by Jack A Saarela

  What he saw in the dim candlelight was not a drunken vagrant, however, such as the one he had discovered trespassing in the building on another occasion. This figure scampered backward on its behind and cowered under Niska’s stare. Its eyes were open as large as two silver Reichsmarks and emitted a look of panic and fear. The person, whoever he or she was, had found some old newspapers in the attic, apparently, and spread them out on the dusty wooden floor to make a bed. One stocking was torn, but otherwise, the figure was dressed in almost new shoes and fashionable clothes—female clothes, even though they were wrinkled. Part of her chest was daringly exposed to the upper part of her snow-white virgin breasts, which heaved as she breathed anxiously.

  The girl’s shiny black hair covered her shoulders and neck like a silk scarf. Her small hands, in fists, were smudged with dirt, and her carmine-colored lips were slightly apart. From her dark hair and facial structure, Niska judged that she must be a young girl, possibly Jewish. She put her hands over her face to hide it from Niska’s view.

  Niska tried to calm the fearful girl by speaking to her in as soft and mild a voice as he could make it.

  “You will freeze here, girl. The attic is no place for one as slight as you, and with only such dainty clothing.”

  Slowly, the girl lowered her small, delicate hands from her face.

  “Sir, I have nowhere else to go.” Her voice quavered like a child’s.

  “Not your home? With your mother and father?”

  The girl just shook her head slowly. As if begging for pardon, she looked into Niska’s eyes.

  “You can’t stay here. Come, my apartment is nearby.”

  Niska was half-surprised when she pulled herself tentatively off the floor and started to walk slowly toward him at the trap door by the flickering light of the candle.

  Niska didn’t usually care what others thought of him. But he hoped, now that the girl had complied with his coaxing and descended the ladder behind him, none of his neighbors were up and about in the corridor at this late hour to see their middle-aged neighbor leading a scantily clad young girl into his flat.

  A couple of minutes later they were sitting in Niska’s cramped living room, the girl in an overstuffed Victorian armchair. She was trying to hide her ruined stocking with her other leg. Her fists were still clenched on her lap. She shifted her position in the chair nervously several times.

  Niska went to his tiny pantry of a kitchen and made a couple of sandwiches with the rye bread he had in the ice box, probably stale by now, he feared. There was no milk, so he poured out a couple of glasses of red wine.

  She almost attacked her sandwich as though she hadn’t seen one in a long time. When she noticed Niska regarding her, she blushed. She released her small hands from their clenched pose. Niska could see a network of minor scratches on them, some of which were still oozing blood. He led her to the closet-sized lavatory and handed her a clean towel.

  “On the shelf there to your right you’ll find some soap. And a brush if you need one,” Niska said as he closed the door behind him, leaving her to her privacy.

  When she had re-entered the living room and assumed her seat in the armchair, she didn’t pick up the remainder of her sandwich, but sat observing Niska.

  “I haven’t even asked you your name. I apologize. Mine is Niska, Algot Niska.”

  She looked a little confused by what to her ears must have sounded like a very foreign name.

  After a while, almost as if not sure she should divulge her name to this stranger, she said diffidently, “I am Hannah. Hannah Hirtschel.”

  “Eat, for God’s sake then, Hannah Hirtschel,” Niska urged. “It’s for you. I can see you haven’t eaten for quite some time. Make yourself at home, please. Nobody is going to disturb us here.”

  Hannah almost threw herself at the sandwich. Niska was caught up in pity for the girl. He stepped back into the kitchen and made a couple of more sandwiches.

  “I was out for dinner this evening,” Niska explained, for no apparent reason. “The food tastes good even if it’s late. I’m really hungry even though I finished a large dinner barely an hour ago.”

  Niska hoped that casual conversation might allay her fears. It seemed to work.

  “I haven’t eaten for three days,” she confessed.

  “Such things are not rare these days,” Niska said with a mouth full of food. “These are difficult times. But I am sorry you have not eaten.”

  She was twirling a lock of her hair absentmindedly with a finger of her left hand. Niska sensed that she was self-conscious about being watched. He got up to brush his teeth and fetch some clean bedsheets for the girl.

  When he returned and resumed his seat she looked different somehow. Suddenly, she got up out of the armchair, and with only her slightly torn blouse and her thin underwear on, she approached Niska with a strange look in her eyes, distant, but with a practiced expression of tenderness and gratitude.

  She knelt beside Niska’s chair and whispered, “You are such a good and kind person, Sir. I cannot in any way compensate you...but if you want...”

  Niska lurched back; he had no doubt what the girt intended.

  “You little fool!” he said perplexedly. “What are you doing? I am old enough to be your father!”

  Niska rose out of the chair and held her hard by her shoulders, pushing her slight body away from his.

  “You’re just a child, Hannah,” he said.

  He covered her all the way up to her neck with the coverlet on his spartan couch, as if to protect her from every evil thought… maybe his own.

  She stepped back bewildered. Niska gathered his scattered thoughts and feelings strewn about the room. It took him a while to make sense of the sudden, unwelcome change in Hannah.

  Why would a fifteen-year-old girl offer herself unbidden to a total stranger, a man well over fifty? There was a time long ago when I might have found the prospect titillating, but not now, not under these circumstances, not with this poor waif. What kind of life has she been leading?

  “Now, be a nice girl and sleep well and dream only sweet dreams,” he said to her awkwardly. “I’m sorry that I have no other bed to offer you. You’ll need to make do with the armchair.”

  Hannah looked embarrassed and confused at first. Then a smile of relief and happiness spread over her face. To Niska, she looked like what she really was: a young helpless child in an evil and cruel world.

  “It’s much better than the hard floors of the attics I’ve been sleeping in.”

  Niska turned off the light in the living room, and exited to his own bedroom, as though he couldn’t retreat there fast enough. He said, “Gute Nacht, Hannah.

  The following morning, Hannah was awake in her armchair as though waiting for him to emerge from his bedroom. He laid out a small breakfast of slices of rye bread and canned fish on the scarred wooden coffee table.

  “Usually, when a woman spends the night in my flat, I ask her to tell me more about herself,” Niska said with a friendly, knowing smile.

  Hannah caught Niska’s drift. She had trusted him thus far so, apparently, she felt she had nothing to lose by reciting a synopsis at least of her story.

  She had been raised in a small town in the eastern part of Germany near the border with Poland. Her mother had died when she was eight years old. Suddenly, out of nowhere, her father was charged by the local SS with spying. His barber shop was confiscated and given to a gentile barber in the Aryanization program.

  “My Papa was grateful that Mutti didn’t have to endure such humiliation.”

  Niska shook his head slowly, remaining silent.

  “Papa and I tried to escape to Poland. But we were apprehended at the border. Papa was wounded by a couple of shots by border guards on the German side. He died in the holding cell a few days later.”

  Her eyes became misty as she related the story.

  “And you? How did you survive?”

  “I was taken to a camp. An awful camp for Polish prisoners, e
ven though I am not Polish. It was called Ravensbrück. You’ve heard of it?”

  “Yes, unfortunately I have.”

  A few days after she arrived there, an SS officer approached her and whispered to her, “Fräulein, there is a way for you to leave from here. This is no place for you. I can tell you are German. You should be comfortable. I can arrange for you to have accommodations, good food, and warmth. You are a beautiful girl. That is good. How old are you?”

  “I’m fifteen, sir,” Hannah said in a trembling voice.

  “Good. From now on, let us say that you are eighteen years old. It is better. So remember, whenever someone asks you your age, always say that you are eighteen.”

  Hannah was sent to a beautiful house in the nearby village of Furstenberg. To her, the house resembled a small hotel with individual rooms. One room on the first floor looked like a dim private dining room with a bar.

  A dark, elderly lady, rather world-weary and not terribly friendly, led her to a room on the second floor. The door to her room had a number on it as did the other rooms. The corridor was covered by soft red carpet.

  “This will be your room now,” the woman told Hannah. “You’ll find linens and towels in the closet. And use all the toiletries and lotions and perfumes on the counter that you like.”

  Hannah sensed the woman looking her up and down as if evaluating her.

  “You look awfully young. How old are you?”

  Hannah remembered to say she was eighteen.

  The woman didn’t look very convinced.

  “Ah, I see. You also? So is everyone else in here. Of course, that is not any of my concern,” she said as she closed the door and left.

  For a couple of days, Hannah was undisturbed. In the closet she found a couple of dresses, but strangely, no underwear. On the shelves were only a couple of fashionable silk camisoles, stockings with leg straps, and bras.

  The next morning, she discovered that her own clothes had disappeared. She complained about the scanty wardrobe to the older woman who brought breakfast in a tray.

  “Your own clothes are in the laundry,” the woman replied indifferently. “You’ll just have to be satisfied for now with what’s there in the closet.”

  An hour or so later the old woman returned with two pairs of shoes for Hannah. One pair had low heels, almost like slippers, the pair she was wearing in the attic when Niska discovered her. The other pair was shiny black and had French stiletto heels. Later in the day she was given a bracelet, earrings, and a couple of rings.

  On the second morning, for some reason Hannah couldn’t understand, she was photographed by a very uninterested, disheveled man. The dress she wore had a low, revealing neckline, which made her look older than her fifteen years. The photographer had her pose in some of the more daring positions she had seen in some of the magazines the boys had smuggled into the schoolyard at home. One was with her in her pajamas lying face-down on top of the bed, another a close-up of her neck and shoulders with a part of her breast exposed.

  These details about her experience practically poured out of Hannah. But then suddenly, she stopped, averting her eyes from Niska, her gaze riveted to the floor of the flat. After a pause, she launched back into her narrative.

  “I am embarrassed to talk about this, Sir.”

  “I understand. But please, go on.”

  “One night, at around 22:00, there was a knock on my door. I was just getting dressed to go to bed.”

  “You have company,” the old woman announced from behind the closed door, “a Luftwaffe officer. For God’s sake, remember to behave politely toward him. And don’t forget that he is a captain serving our people.”

  The young, handsome guest arrived in the room a short time later, dressed in a uniform consisting of a blue-gray single-breasted, open-collared jacket, white shirt and black necktie, and blue-gray trousers held up by a black belt. Most impressive to Hannah, and most intimidating, too, were the shiny black leather boots on his feet.

  “He looked as proud as a peacock,” Hannah continued. “I was afraid of him, but he smiled at me in a way that disarmed my fear. I felt almost naked in my pajamas. He sat down beside me on the sofa. I moved instinctively a few centimeters closer to the armrest at the end of the sofa. Then he poured some wine into two glasses. I was also given a couple of glasses of cognac, which caused me to cough. That made the officer laugh gently.”

  “‘You are a very attractive young lady,’ the officer said to me as he moved closer and put his arm on the top of the sofa and then lowered it so that it draped my shoulders. He told me I was not old and ugly and dirty like the Polish women in the other rooms.

  “He then leaned over and tried to kiss me and placed his hand roughly on my breast. I tried to resist, but he was too strong. I even threatened to scream for help if he didn’t behave himself, but the captain only laughed.

  “‘Go ahead and try it,’ he said. ‘You’ll notice that there is no help to be had.’

  “Finally, the officer cursed in German and violently threw me down onto the bed.”

  This hell continued for several days before Hannah finally realized what kind of place she had been brought to. When she later became acquainted with several of the other women, she discovered that they had experienced worse, especially the Poles.

  “And Jews like me,” Hannah added.

  “A certain older officer became a ‘regular,’ a gray-haired retired lieutenant-colonel, he said he was. He called me, ‘meine Rosenknöpfchen,’ my Little Rosebud. He did rather strange things with me, but I wasn’t afraid of him as I was of the others. He took off his clothes, and I took off mine, just as I had learned was expected of me. But he didn’t try to touch or penetrate my private parts like the others. He couldn’t, because his small thing remained limp through the whole visit.

  “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I had learned what to do with the other men. But this was strange, I thought.

  “He just continued to look at my naked body lying on the bed while he stood up over me and tried to rub his thing. It didn’t seem to help. It seemed to take a long time for him to finish. I was afraid that the old woman would come to the door and tell me some officer or soldier was waiting and to hurry up and finish. But thankfully, the old lieutenant-colonel finally gave out a weak groan, kind of like a muffled imitation of the other men when they reach that point. Only, his hands were completely dry. Not a drop fell on the bed or the floor or my body.

  “‘Thank you, meine kleine Rosenknöpfchen,’ he said softly as she handed me my bra and panties. None of the others ever did that. ‘I know this was probably confusing to you, not to mention very demeaning for me. But you are very dear and beautiful.’”

  The old lieutenant-colonel came by her room several more times, and each time, the routine was similar. Hannah was relieved that she didn’t need to fear an unknown disease with him, just pose patiently and passively allow him to admire her naked body until he was finished. Afterwards, he was always very kind to her.

  “Once, in a moment of weakness, I confided to him my real age,” Hannah confessed. “I don’t know why. But I started to regret it as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

  “‘The bastards!’ he exclaimed. I was surprised and even a little afraid, because I had never seen him angry before. ‘How dare they do this?’ he asked. ‘That bloody Himmler!’

  “I thought that he was confused and that he meant ‘Hitler.’ I didn’t know who Himmler was.”

  “No, you heard correctly,” Niska said. “The brothels are Heinrich Himmler’s doing.”

  “The man just ranted on. ‘Himmler’s too unmanly even to make love to his own wife. But he opens up these dens of iniquity all over the Reich so that his officers can have their lust satisfied. Doesn’t he know there are fifteen-year-old girls in these places? The bastard!’

  “I was afraid that he was unsatisfied with me and would report his displeasure to the old woman, even though I had always done as he requested. Perhaps no
w I would be sent to another and altogether worse place.”

  The old officer, though, had grown helplessly, dementedly in love with Hannah. And what was more, the old man was angered that other men had access to her. He was protective of her. That other men visited her was an affront to his grandfatherly instinct to shield her.

  “‘Meine Rosenknöpfchen,’ he confessed one evening to me. ‘I have been thinking about your situation. I am a man who can arrange things, you know. I have enjoyed my visits with you. But you do not belong here. My intention is to rescue you from this miserable cave.’

  “This set off alarms in my mind, of course.”

  Hannah did not know what the lieutenant-colonel said, or paid to the old woman to get to her to give permission for Hannah to leave the premises with him. He was a fixture at the house. Perhaps the old woman surmised that such an old man wouldn’t pose a danger to the girl. But one morning, after another of their strange but tender sexual encounters, he led her to his home not far away. The old man had never harmed her. But Hannah wasn’t sure if this was some kind of carefully veiled abduction of her that would not end well.

  “In his comfortable study, he showed me the photographs on top of his large piano. He pointed out his late wife. I could tell from his voice that he missed her. I felt so sorry for him.

  “That evening, when the old, kind officer fell asleep on the sofa, I saw my chance to escape. I liked the old man, but he had been, after all, a German soldier in the war. I didn’t know if, after he used me, he would turn me over to the SS. So I fled the house and hid in an empty cart at the railroad station—you know, the kind of cart they use to carry mail and other cargo to the freight cars? When I awoke the next morning, I discovered that I was on a freight train. But I had no idea of where it was going. Without knowing it, they must have loaded me onto the train with the other freight.”