“You were fortunate that whoever ‘they’ are didn’t turn you over to the police, or the SS.”
“When the train halted at a station to pick up the mail in the cover of night, I jumped out of the car on the other side. I had only these flimsy clothes on. People looked at me curiously, but luckily, I didn’t run into any police or men from SS or Wehrmacht. One kind old lady told me where I was when I asked her. I was in Wandlitz. I walked on country roads through the darkness to Berlin.”
“You must have been exhausted from all that walking.”
“For several nights I wandered the streets of Berlin. I felt like a tramp, with no food or a place to sleep. I didn’t know what to do, where to turn. I was thoroughly drained and in despair—like an orphan, which is what I am, I suppose. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on living. Then one evening, I happened upon the door to your building. Thankfully, someone had carelessly left it unlocked. Maybe it was even you?”
Niska’s eyes were getting misty as he listened to her report. He thought of his own daughter, Eeva, back in Finland, just a few years older than Hannah, whom his precarious legal situation prevented him from returning to Finland to see. As a seaman, he knew, of course, about brothels, that they existed, and that some women made a living working in them. But the thought of the girl before him, so much like his own daughter, seized and hoodwinked into becoming a sex slave, both angered him profoundly, and saddened him to the core.
“What will you do with me now?” she asked him, almost as a matter of course, as though she assumed that she was at the mercy of yet another man. “Give me up to the SS?” She was still twirling the lock of her hair girlishly.
Niska felt a sharp pang of disappointment in himself. The girl had no paperwork to identify her. If he tried to smuggle her into Poland, or any country, for that matter, the border guards would detect immediately from her appearance that she is a Jew. It would be pointless to try to convince them that she was his daughter, so little did she exhibit classic Finnish features.
“I can buy you a train ticket back to your town in the east, if you like.”
“My family is gone. I don’t really have anyone there anymore.”
“Do you have others anywhere, grandparents, perhaps, or friends of the family, who might be able to take you in?”
In asking this, Niska felt a sliver of shame because he knew that given the madness of those unforgettable nights of November 9 and 10, it was quite possible, if not likely, that her grandparents or family friends had been rounded up by the SS.
“I do have a great-aunt, in Bautzen, I think, near the Polish border. But I have not spoken with her for many years. I am not sure she still lives there, or even if she is still alive.”
“Well, for now, it’s the best we have.”
Without giving them any explanation, Niska borrowed some clothing from a family on the fifth floor that he knew had a daughter about Hannah’s age. Fortunately, Hannah fit into them as if they were her own, and the two walked together to the HauptBahnhof. They had to be careful as they walked, needing every now and then to step over shards of glass and charred pieces of furniture that had yet to be cleared off the sidewalks after the nights of Brownshirt fury. Hannah looked apprehensive; Niska was weighed down with a load of sadness and feeling of inadequacy.
On the platform on which the train to Dresden was about to depart, Niska took some bank notes from his wallet and gave them to her so that she could purchase a meal or two. She stepped onto the train without a suitcase. As Niska waved his hand in farewell to her, he could see that she wiped a tear from her eye with a new, clean handkerchief he had given her back at his flat. Niska was overtaken by a feeling of grief. From his pants’ pocket, he pulled out his own, less clean handkerchief and blew his nose.
As he walked home, more slowly than usual, oblivious to his surroundings, Niska tried to sort through his muddled emotions and thoughts.
I feel so helpless to help her. I feel like an abject failure. What will become of her? Will she find her great aunt? Will she be received warmly? Will the great aunt even be there to begin with? Can she evade the SS or Gestapo that in time, I’m sure, will catch up to her, maybe eventually almost all Jews in Germany?
What was it that I was feeling as she was telling me her sad story? I’ve always loved smuggling, because it was a way of helping people get what someone else in authority has used his power to say that they can’t have. But alas, I couldn’t smuggle her.
Algot Niska, former whiskey runner during the years of Finnish prohibition, was now growing moderately comfortable as a smuggler out of Germany of the property of wealthy Jews. He was a thoroughly pragmatic and opportunistic man, who until that very moment was preoccupied with his own illicit business and livelihood. But that evening, this usually stoical offender of the law on the lam from the Finnish authorities felt an unfamiliar and overpowering tug somewhere within him, or from without, some unseen benevolent power pulling him compellingly outward toward those, like Hannah, who were being victimized and beaten, yanking him irresistibly toward some new version of himself.
CHAPTER SIX
Berlin: December 13, 1938
A superb, shiny, black-as-coal civilian automobile pulled up in front of a house on Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Except for its height, this house looked much like the others on that side of the street, old and heavy and gray. Yet, whenever people passed by this house, walking their dog perhaps, or striding to their own place of employment, they hastened their steps, lowered their heads, and strictly averted their eyes from it. They knew this was the general headquarters, the Chancellery of the Reichsführer SS, the chief of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, the secret police and security force―Heinrich Himmler.
The passenger in the car, Felix Kersten, had been dreading this day. Several nights prior, he had been in his flat in The Hague, fully enjoying in his blossoming romantic relationship with his fiancée Irmgaard. His benefactor Queen Wilhelmina was so pleased with his artful therapy that she requested that he treat her husband, Prince Hendrik, as well. Other requests followed. Kersten’s personal and professional life was where he wanted it to be. In The Hague, he had been in his desired home and natural habitat.
The slightly rotund Kersten stepped out of the vehicle and crossed the street. He approached the large, imposing red and black wooden door at the entrance to the repurposed mansion. Whatever anxiety he was feeling was concealed by an exterior of professional poise. Two SS guards, their faces identically impassioned, holding rifles, their heads squeezed into helmets that came down to their eyebrows, stood as a forbidding barrier in front of the entrance. Kersten handed one of the guards a letter of reference addressed to Heinrich Himmler from Auguste Diehn, which indicated the purpose of his visit.
“To the Reichsführer, bitte,” Kersten announced as if he expected his words to be received and obeyed as an order.
The guard took the letter and, without saying a word, rotated his erect body 180 degrees on his heels and opened the door for Kersten, showed him into the foyer, and told him politely to wait there.
Kersten wasn’t sure what he was feeling. A little anxiety, certainly, upon entering a realm as foreign to him as if he were getting off an airplane in Papua-New Guinea; a sense of curiosity about this unique, exclusive setting, an inner sanctum of the Nazi apparatus; a hint of defiance, too, a steely determination not to allow the excessive, orgiastic symbols of Nazi power and dominance, staring at him from every surface and corner in the building, intimidate him.
He beheld the enormous black and red Nazi Swastika flag hanging down over the foyer from the ceiling above. Every detail was calculated to inspire praise and glory to the National Socialist party, its leader and his philosophy, just as Notre Dame in Paris, with its supreme interior height, the majestic stained-glass windows and the remote high altar were designed to point to the grandeur of the Christian God.
So this is the den of the beast? This is the home of the notorious outfit that is the most universally feared orga
nization in Germany? I feel as if I am entering a sinister domain of darkness. Such a malevolent, morally rotten presence I sense in the air here. This is the fount from which springs a terrifying new world that has been evolving in the past five years, a world of mistrust, deceit and treachery. It must be impossible for any honest, scrupulous men, if there are any here, to breathe the putrid air.
A few minutes later another guard marched ceremoniously into the foyer, accompanied by a gray-haired officer.
“Heil Hitler!” said the officer as a greeting, extending his right arm in the standard Nazi salute.
The tall, stout visitor with the ruddy cheeks stood up, lifted his hat politely, and answered, “Good day, Leutnant.”
The officer looked irritated by the calculated civilian greeting in the exceedingly militaristic environment and culture of the building. “Follow me,” he said curtly to Kersten.
The officer led Kersten up a flight of stairs and down a very high-ceilinged and long corridor. There was a great deal of activity and movement to and fro through the hallway. Officers of all ranks emerged into the hallway carrying file folders and sheets of paper from offices and disappeared into other ones, exchanging salutes. Whatever their rank, all men wore gray uniforms, spotless and precise, their black boots polished and shiny, with an insignia depicting two ancient runes on the sleeve cleverly designed to form a stylized spelling of the .
Kersten, however, kept his hands in the pockets of his warm woolen overcoat and left his hat on his head almost cheekily. Before they reached the end of the corridor, near the middle, the officer stopped him for a fleeting instant, but long enough for the fluoroscope, hidden in a recess in the wall, to verify that the civilian visitor was unarmed.
Kersten followed the officer up yet another broad staircase, this one an enormous, ornate one made of marble. The ensuing corridor ended before a massive wooden door, again painted in the Nazi red and black. Kersten could sense the officer’s demeanor turning graver the closer they got to the door. The officer raised his right hand, prepared to knock on the door. Before he had a chance to do so, however, the door flew open from the inside. A man in the distinctive black uniform of a general of the SS stood in the doorway. He was slight, with narrow shoulders. His black hair was thinning at the crown and above his hairline. Steel-rimmed glasses framed slightly slanted eyes of deep gray. He had prominent Mongoloid cheekbones.
It was Himmler.
His face had deep hollows in the cheeks and temples, and was the color of beeswax. With a clammy and bony hand, he seized Kersten’s strong and plump hand, and drew the doctor inside the office. The officer saluted Himmler respectfully and left.
So this is the notorious Heinrich Himmler? This slight, almost puny man? This mouse-like, pitiful creature who has the appearance of an ordinary village schoolteacher, which is logical, I suppose, because, of course, that’s what he had been. As a boy, he must have been the last one selected for the pick-up soccer game in the schoolyard.
And yet, how utterly reverential the Leutnant who escorted me here was when he saluted Himmler, how compliantly he stood before this little man, how downright intimidated he appeared before the director of the infamous machinery of terror. Kersten was baffled by the apparent incongruity.
Kersten was barely a meter’s distance inside the office when Himmler burst out, all the while continuing to pump Kersten’s hand, “Thank you for coming, Doctor. I have heard a great deal about you.” The high pitch of Himmler’s voice surprised Kersten.
Himmler finally released Kersten’s hand. Kersten thought that Himmler’s wolfish, unattractive face became even more pale in the yellowish light in the office. Kersten couldn’t help but notice the huge, larger-than-life portrait of Adolf Hitler displayed prominently on the wall behind Himmler’s desk as though he had his eye on every movement in the office. Even in a still portrait, the Führer looked absolutely animated at a podium somewhere giving one of his rousing speeches.
“Perhaps, Doctor, you are the one to be able to relieve me of these unbearable stomach pains that permit me neither to walk nor sit well, not to mention sleep a wink. Sometimes the pain lasts four or five days at a time. I am completely wasted for days afterward. To my disappointment, not a single doctor in Germany, not even our best, has succeeded. But Herr Diehn has assured me that where others fail, you obtain results.”
Kersten was flattered initially, but silently began to curse his longtime patient and friend for giving Himmler such an excellent review of his work.
“Doctor, do you think you can help me?”
Kersten was struck by how thin Himmler’s lips were, like those of a lizard.
Yet, in the doleful features of Himmler’s face, in the depth of his dull gray eyes, Kersten recognized the familiar appeal of a suffering human being. Suddenly, Himmler, the thought of whom had repulsed Kersten, was now merely another sick person in need of treatment, just like any other patient.
“Please remove your tunic and shirt, and unbutton the top of your trousers, if you would, Herr Reichsführer.”
It felt strange and uncomfortable for Kersten to be using the Nazi form of address, making him feel awkwardly that he was collaborating somehow and compromising his own values. But he knew he had to tread carefully inside the headquarters of the feared SS.
“Jawohl, at once, Doctor, at once.”
Himmler stripped unselfconsciously to his waist. He had rickety round shoulders, narrower than his torso, flimsy skin, slight biceps and chest muscles, and a prominent kettle of a stomach.
One of the “Master Race,” this scrawny specimen?
“Please stretch out flat on your back, Herr Reichsführer.”
Himmler reclined as directed on the divan in front of the Spartan desk that contained only two black and white photos. One, of Himmler looking at Hitler with absolutely rapt admiration, like a little boy meeting his hero for the first time, on a balcony overlooking the mountains, probably at Hitler’s retreat in the Austrian Alps. The other was of Himmler and his family, he sporting Bavarian civilian clothes and an Alpine felt hat with a feather, a fishing rod held over his right shoulder, his left arm around the least attractive-looking woman Kersten had seen in a long time, presumably Himmler’s wife, with their two young pig-tailed daughters and their stern-looking younger brother in front of them.
Kersten drew up a chair next to the divan and eased himself into it. He placed his hands on the outstretched body.
Kersten’s hands were large, thick and fleshy. Each finger had, under its short, close-cut nail, a sort of benign swelling which was much more highly developed, much fleshier, than what one would see on most male hands.
Kersten’s hands began to move rhythmically. His fingers glided like a figure skater over Himmler’s delicate, white skin. Their tips skimmed in turn over Himmler’s throat, chest, heart and stomach. At first their touch was light, barely perceptible. Then the fingers began to stop at certain spots, to seek, to listen. To listen...with those extraordinary small bulges at the tips of his fingers that served as a kind of antennae endowed with unusual sensitivity. They had a kind of second sight into a human body unknown to ordinary men and women, even other chiropractors and neurologists.
Kersten applied all his powers of concentration as he manipulated Himmler’s tissue. He switched off his sense of hearing, smell, even sight. The only sense operating was in his hands, in those inexplicable nodules on his fingers.
Kersten’s face was transformed by the tide of energy he had released within himself. His eyelids were shut as though in prayer, even though Kersten was agnostic. This was when he felt most fully alive.
Himmler writhed in the pain which tormented him ceaselessly, yet his gaze never left Kersten’s absorbed, intensely focused face. Suddenly, he gave a cry. Kersten’s fingers, up to then light and velvety as they glided over the surface of Himmler’s abdomen, had just pressed forcefully on a spot on his stomach. The pain burst in Himmler’s gut like a wave of fire.
“Good...very goo
d...please hold still,” Kersten urged softly. Himmler noted that those were the first words Kersten had spoken since the treatment began.
Kersten continued exploring the flesh near the sensitive spot. Himmler groaned and bit his lip. His brow was wet with perspiration.
“That is very painful, isn’t it?” Kersten asked each time.
“Terribly,” answered Himmler through clenched teeth.
At last, Kersten withdrew his hands and placed them on his knees and opened his eyes.
“I see,” said Kersten. “It’s the stomach, obviously; but more interestingly, it’s the sympathetic nervous system. It’s not anything in your diet, even though I am sure you’ve been advised many times to change it. No, rather the nerves in your stomach are overstressed.”
“I have a nervous system that is sympathetic?” Himmler asked with a chuckle. “Don’t broadcast that too widely, Doctor. A lot of people would deny that adamantly.”
Kersten smiled at Himmler’s clever use of the pun. A good sign, perhaps.
“Can you help me, Doctor?” Himmler asked in a pleading tone.
Himmler’s wan and lusterless face expressed humble supplication, and the dull eyes were begging for relief.
“We shall find that out right now, Herr Reichsführer.”
Kersten reached his hands over Himmler’s supine body once again. He saw Himmler’s body flinch and his muscles tighten.
“Just try to relax as much as you can.”
This time Kersten did not need to grope. He knew exactly where to apply his effort. He thrust his fingers deep into Himmler’s stomach at the affected spot, seized firmly and accurately the roll of flesh thus formed, and squeezed it, twisted it, kneaded it like a loaf of dough.
With every movement of Kersten’s, Himmler flinched with a stifled cry.
“I’m trying to reach and waken the affected nerves through your skin, fat and muscle,” Kersten explained. “I apologize for the discomfort.”
Accidental Saviors Page 4