Accidental Saviors

by Jack A Saarela

  “Sir, that is the female bathroom,” the head nurse announced to them from down the corridor. “A patient must be taking a bath.”

  Water was still gushing from the faucet into the tub. Angelika left it on deliberately. The door to the bathroom opened. Angelika turned toward the male intruder, pretending to be caught totally by surprise. She dropped the towel to the floor, revealing her naked body.

  “Ach! Bitte um Verzeihung. I beg your pardon, Fraulein!” the male intruder uttered. “I didn’t mean to violate your privacy.”

  He stepped back out into the corridor in a panic of embarrassment, his face as white as a ghost’s, and slammed the door behind him. His partner laughed.

  Niska, still crouching on his haunches on the toilet seat, was curious about what was transpiring. When the man had exited the bathroom, Angelika told him it was safe to come out of the toilet stall. She was still wrapping the towel around her wet body. Niska was able to put two and two together. In his relief, he marveled at the cleverness and quick thinking of such a young girl.

  “We have to inspect the rooms of the female patients,” the man with the deep voice said to the nurse. “He may be hiding in there.”

  The steps were fading away. Soon they sounded far down at the end of the corridor.

  Angelika dressed herself in a hurry. She and Niska opened the door cautiously and peeked out. They glimpsed the backs of the nurse and two men walking through the door leading to the female ward.

  He turned to Angelika. “Wait. We had to leave my hospital room in such a hurry that I forgot to grab my passport. I don’t believe I could be so thoughtless. I have to go back. Wait here in the bathroom until I get back.”

  Angelika shook her head. “No, don’t go back. You mustn’t try. What if the men come out from the ladies’ ward and see you?”

  “No, I have to fetch the passport. In today’s Berlin, if you don’t have the proper papers or ID, you are as good as gone.”

  Angelika didn’t argue any further. She watched through a door cracked slightly open as Niska tiptoed quickly along the wall of the corridor, and then disappeared into his hospital room.

  Suddenly, one of the men came out through the door from the female ward. He headed directly in her direction. She was relieved as he passed by Niska’s hospital room without looking in. He continued toward her hiding place. Quietly, carefully, she pulled the bathroom door shut all the way, kicked off her shoes, and wrapped the towel over her fully clothed body. If the man entered the bathroom, he might think she was still drying off after the shower.

  She breathed more easily when she heard the man’s footsteps walk past the women’s room. Suddenly, they stopped. Or else she could no longer hear them. Was he standing outside the bathroom door? She held her breath and stood absolutely frozen.

  In a minute or so she heard what she imagined was the flushing of a toilet and the running of water in a sink from behind the bathroom wall. The man walked out into the corridor again, finished tightening the belt of his uniform trousers, and marched past the women’s bathroom. The footsteps gradually grew fainter and more distant.

  “Please, God, please let Herr Niska stay in his room until the man has passed and gone back into the ladies’ ward,” Angelika fervently prayed. She feared for him, and for herself, lest he be caught and she be left alone to cope.

  Finally, after what seemed to Angelika like an eternity, Niska stepped into the bathroom. From deep inside her, Angelika let out a long breath of relief.

  “Did you get the passport?” she asked.

  “Got it. And a few Reichsmarks, too, so that if we manage to escape the building, we can catch a taxi and take you home. Is the coast clear?”

  “I don’t see anybody in the hallway.”

  Niska took Angelika into his arms to carry her into the corridor. He took long strides toward the door to the stairs to the emergency exit. By some miracle—or the carelessness and forgetfulness of a clinic employee—the door was unlocked.

  They exited the building into the backyard. Niska looked back to make sure that no one was following them. Suddenly, Niska remembered that from his room, he had looked out over the backyard. Then, the windows in the female ward must look out over the street at the front of the building.

  “I can’t go out to the front to hail a taxi. I must not be seen from the window. They are looking for a man, not a little girl.”

  Niska had barely completed the sentence when Angelika was headed out the backyard toward the front of the building.

  “I’ll get us a taxi,” she said breathlessly with her back to Niska.

  “Angelika, no! Come here! It’s too dangerous out there for you. The SS may have an agent waiting in a parked car for the other two.”

  But Angelika was already beyond earshot.

  Niska waited in the darkness of the backyard. Every few seconds, he looked over at the emergency exit, expecting one or both of the SS agents to emerge. Minutes passed that felt like hours, but no sign of Angelika. It was an unusually warm evening, given that it wasn’t even the end of March. But the tension of waiting for Angelika to return safely was making him tremble from the cold. Would Angelika be able to get a taxi without being apprehended as an accomplice of a smuggler of Jews? Or as a Jew herself?

  A moment later, Niska felt his heart relax. Angelika returned to the backyard.

  “Herr Niska, I have a taxi waiting out front.” She took Niska by the hand and led him the front of the building.

  “Run for the car, hurry!” she instructed Niska.

  Niska did as he was commanded. Angelika followed him into the taxi.

  Angelika had been taught some English by her father. “Someday, you may get to England or America where it is safe for Jews. They speak English there,” he had said by way of explanation. So she and Niska spoke only English so that the taxi driver would not understand their conversation.

  “No, we must not go to your father’s home. I am sure that the nurses’ log lists me as a patient of your father’s. The SS might go there when they cannot find me in the clinic.”

  “Oh, then I’ll give the driver my aunt’s address on Friedrichstrasse,” Angelika said. “We can be safe there.”

  The aunt graciously invited both of them to spend the night. She figured out that it was not safe for Niska to return to his flat at his hotel either, since the nurses’ log would list his address.

  “Here, Herr Niska,” the aunt said as she handed him a bundle of clothes. “These are my late husband’s. I haven’t had the heart to throw them out or give them away until now. You can’t go back out into the streets in that hospital gown.”

  “Thank you...Frau...”

  “Schwartz. Hilde Schwartz. But it’s you we should be thanking...for what you have been doing for our people.”

  He borrowed Frau Schwartz’s telephone to report on the evening’s events to Dr. Singer. He could not praise highly enough the ability and initiative of the doctor’s daughter. Niska didn’t spell out all the details for the time being. But he emphasized that Angelika most probably saved his life.

  “You and your late wife gave her a truly appropriate name.”

  It occurred to Niska as he spoke to Dr. Singer that the doctor may not be as thrilled by his daughter’s actions that evening as Niska was.

  ~~~

  Niska’s contacts located another flat for him the very next morning in a different section of Berlin. Comprehending his situation, they even moved his meager belongings from one flat to the other. Niska’s close call at the clinic with Angelika reinforced that he needed to make sure that the new flat had a front and a rear entrance, and instructed his contacts to that effect. You never knew when a rear exit would be the difference between life and death.

  For the next several weeks Niska hibernated in the flat, leaving only for the briefest moments to buy cigarettes at the nearby kiosk. But the pain in his stomach raised its ugly head again. He called Dr. Singer’s number, but there was no answer.

  Needing m
edical care, he called for a taxi and gave the driver an address a couple of blocks from Dr. Singer’s. This was another precaution he had learned from prior events. The driver was Aryan, and made no effort to hide his reluctance to wander into Jewish Charlottenburg.

  “I’ll have to charge you extra for entering a Yid neighborhood, Sir.”

  When they were near Dr. Singer’s office, Niska jumped out of the taxi and paid the driver, adding a generous tip. He began walking toward the doctor’s residence which also housed his surgery. As he got closer to his destination, he noticed immediately that something was amiss. Dr. Singer had a tastefully enameled sign beside the entrance door to the house naming the practice and listing the hours of his practice.

  Niska stopped and stared at the sign. All over it was glued a sheet of paper on which was scrawled just one word in capital letters: “J-U-D-E.” Jew.

  Niska was totally disheartened. While Dr. Singer, like a significant percentage of Berlin’s physicians, was a Jew, and thus vulnerable, Niska couldn’t help but feel responsible somehow for this.

  Did the Gestapo do this to punish Dr. Singer because a patient of his, a wanted criminal in the eyes of the state, had eluded them? And what about little Angelika? What has happened to her?

  Upset and angry, Niska went up the three steps and rang Dr. Singer’s door bell. After an unusually long time, a middle-aged woman opened the door part way.

  “Yes, can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Dr. Singer.”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “The doctor is having some difficulty seeing visitors today.”

  “I am an old patient of Dr. Singer’s, really, an old friend. Please tell the doctor that Mr. Algot Niska is here to see him. He’ll know who I am. Please, it’s quite urgent.”

  “Just a moment,” the anxious woman relented.

  She came back five or so minutes later. She looked guardedly out onto the street before opening the door to allow Niska to enter. She led Niska to a room at the back of the house.

  Upon entering, Niska could tell that Dr. Singer was shaken. He looked pale and haggard, not his usual self.

  “Dr. Singer, what has happened? Are you all right?”

  “Oh, Herr Niska. I don’t want you to see your doctor like this. Nothing has happened to me that hasn’t happened to most Jewish doctors in Berlin. Perhaps all of Germany.”

  “But I am relieved that you appear safe. And physically unharmed.”

  “I am relieved, too. German patients are forbidden to come to me, now. I will see Jewish patients for as long as I can. But for now, I am grateful that I have not been beaten...or worse.”

  “Where is Angelika, Doctor?” Niska held his breath in anticipation of Singer’s answer.

  “I sent her to her late mother’s sister Hilde on Friedrichstrasse. You know all about her, Mr. Niska. Angelika can be safe there...for the time being.”

  “You have an amazing daughter. So intelligent, so courageous.”

  “I’m afraid she will need all of that and more to survive this insanity.”

  “The noose is tightening for many of us, now. I cannot move about freely either.”

  “I know of the good you have done for Jewish people, Herr Niska. But you must be careful.”

  “So far, the mouse is winning the cat-and-mouse game. Thanks largely to Angelika.”

  “I don’t want to boast, Herr Niska, but until now my reputation as a prominent specialist who has successfully treated even wives of Nazis, has been to my advantage. How long it can go on like this, I don’t know. The sticker on my sign downstairs is the first warning. But it will not be the only one, I am sure. They gave me this yellow Star of David to sew on the front of my coat. My name now must be ‘Israel Singer.’ Josef, the name given to me by my parents, is no longer acceptable to the powers that be.”

  Remaining there any longer constituted a potential danger for both Niska himself and Dr. Singer.

  “Herr Niska,” Singer said with a sad resolve. “You had better find a German doctor to consult from now on, for your safety, and mine, too.”

  Niska nodded in reluctant agreement. He thanked the doctor for all he had done for him as his physician and took his leave.

  As he walked back to the location where he had exited the taxi, Niska looked back at the vulgar placard covering Dr. Singer’s classy, attractive sign. He wondered if he would ever see Dr. Singer and his cherubic young daughter again. He came to the sad conclusion that probably not.

  The madness was well on its way to infecting all of Germany.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Berlin, August 16, 1939

  Niska was confined to his flat like a restless prisoner on house arrest. One afternoon he listened with a great deal of both fascination and visceral repugnance on his radio as Adolf Hitler gave a rousing speech to the filled Sportplatz where he had hosted the Olympic Games in 1936. Hitler sounded no less enraged than usual. He railed against recent incidents of violent resistance against German officials and soldiers. He claimed that the perpetrators of the murders were Jews.

  “I have decreed, that commencing at 5:20 am this morning and onward, one hundred shots will be returned for every shot fired against a soldier of the Reich.”

  Niska’s physical condition was rapidly declining day by day. He visited a physician—a gentile this time, at Dr. Singer’s urging. The new diagnosis was two serious ulcers instead of just one.

  “You are in need of care,” the elderly physician told him. “I’m afraid I cannot treat you, however. Not because I do not want to. No, it’s rather that every available doctor in Germany is being called up, either to report in person near the Polish border, where our troops are mobilizing, or be transferred to a military hospital in Germany, Austria, or Czechoslovakia.”

  Niska wondered how the land of Beethoven, Göthe, and Kant could be so intent now on mobilizing for yet another war so soon after their ignominious defeat in the previous one, so recent, earlier in the century.

  “The best thing is for you to leave Germany and get care elsewhere,” the doctor continued. “In a matter of weeks, days even, almost every hospital in Germany will have been converted into a military hospital where you do not qualify for care. Try to get to your own country. I am sure that in Sweden everything is still in full functioning order.”

  Initially, Niska was taken aback by the doctor’s reference to Sweden as his “own country.” Then he realized that this doctor knew him as Sven Ovesen, the name on his own forged Swedish passport.

  Niska’s situation was becoming more desperate each day. It was clear that his only remaining hope was to return to his actual home country, Finland. He faced legal problems there, probably imprisonment, that lingered from his smuggling years. But even in a Finnish prison he could receive much better care than as a foreigner in a German one.

  Ambassador Mäki at the Finnish legation in Berlin was aware of Niska’s outlaw past, of course. He was also cognizant of the rumors circulating among some of Berlin’s Finns that Niska had a new calling now: smuggling Jews out of the clutches of the SS. Mäki might have to face consequences eventually for overlooking Niska’s past crimes against the government of Finland. But consequences be damned. He had had it up to his neck with the presumptuousness and self-importance of his German hosts. He was not going to allow this Finnish savior of Jews to end up in Dachau, or worse. He secretly arranged for Niska to board a German merchant ship in Danzig bound for Helsinki.

  On the first part of the voyage, Niska writhed in pain in a supine position on a hard bench down below. It became almost unbearable as the steamer was near the mouth of the Gulf of Riga in the Baltic. The steamer’s doctor discovered that Niska had begun hemorrhaging.

  The captain ordered the ship to be diverted to the port of Riga in Latvia. Even if it was a detour and would delay the arrival of his cargo in Helsinki, he was not going to allow his fellow seafarer, a captain in his own right, bleed to death on his vessel.

  It would not be a day
in Niska’s life, it seems, if, in addition to such serendipitous moments of grace, there weren’t further obstacles as well. At the behest of the occupying Soviets, the Latvians had just imposed a new ordinance that no Latvian was allowed to leave the country, and no foreigner was permitted to enter, whether they had a valid visa or not. Niska had jumped from the German frying pan into the Russian fire.

  The German captain himself carried Niska into the customs building and laid him on a counter where Niska lay almost unconscious from the severe pain.

  “You’re familiar by now of the prohibition of foreigners entering our country,” a young Latvian customs clerk informed the captain.

  “I don’t give a damn about your prohibition. I don’t appreciate your mouthing the bloody Bosheviks’ prohibitions. This man will bleed to death right here on your counter, if he does not receive some medical attention,” the German captain barked at the clerk. He angrily handed him Niska’s passport.

  The clerk looked intimidated by the angry German. He regarded the passport.

  “This man, Mr. Ovesen, is a Swede.”

  “I don’t really give a rat’s ass if he’s a Hottentot. He needs immediate attention!”

  The clerk responded, “We don’t have a Hottentot hospital in Latvia, but we do have a Swedish one. They might take him.”

  “Well do you want to take responsibility for the bleeding death of a citizen of a neutral country like Sweden?”

  Immediately, the clerk called over to a colleague, even younger than himself, “Get this man over to the Swedish Hospital. Not in the morning! Now!”

  The Swedish hospital had been spared the worst of the damage of the Soviet reoccupation of the city. Niska lay on his bed seriously underweight, his usual angular facial features rendered even more bony. He had been given intravenous fluids and been fortified for surgery. Surgeons were shocked at the condition of his stomach and how close to death he had been.

  It wasn’t until September morphed into October that he was strong enough to be discharged. Since Sven Ovesen had a Swedish passport, he was informed that the government of Sweden had paid the substantial tab for his medical care and stay in the hospital.