The Latvians were gracious to Niska. When Niska was exiled from both Sweden and Finland because of his vodka runs in the previous decades, he had taken refuge briefly in Riga. There he taught himself a few practical phrases in Latvian, which he used to his advantage now with the nurses and doctors. The government granted him an exit visa to travel to Estonia, not his desired destination, but one nation closer to Finland.
As the train chugged toward Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, Niska thought about the people he had smuggled out of Germany. Eleven had begun new lives somewhere other than Germany, Austria, or Czechoslovakia. A few, like Jiri Hudak, had remained in Finland, while others had taken advantage of the relative freedom and peacetime conditions in Finland to travel to more far-off destinations, probably figuring that the farther away from Germany, the safer and happier they would be.
Niska brought to mind the face of Jiri Hudak.
How is the young wine merchant faring? Does he feel safe now? Are the Finns receiving him warmly and helpfully? Are the Finnish people free enough of their innate suspicion of outsiders to recognize what an asset a young, ambitious entrepreneur like Hudak is to their country?
He recalled Hannah Hirtschel as well, of course, the forlorn Jewish street urchin he had discovered in the attic of his hotel. He relived the profound regret he felt about his inability to help her. It was a feeling of utter helplessness that he had had many times since. He had a hard time accepting that it was impossible to save them all, especially Hannah. This dark cloud of failure hovered over him and haunted him, not just whenever his memory resurrected the sweet face of Hannah, but whenever he had walked the streets of Charlottenburg and saw what seemed to him like a million Jews, each looking more fearful and desperate with each passing day.
~~~
Once on Estonian soil, Niska was depressed by how the beautiful, medieval town of Tallinn in which he had taken refuge from time to time was deteriorating into chaos. The country had enjoyed twenty years of independence from Russia. But now a dark, foreboding cloud moved over the skies of Estonia. The threat of invasion by the numerically superior Soviet forces loomed over the tiny nation like a heavy lead-colored thunderbolt that was poised to strike any day. In June, it did.
When Niska made his way to the Tallinn harbor, he was not totally surprised, therefore, to find fourteen Soviet naval vessels just off shore. They had been busy all night rounding up Estonians who were abandoning their homes and fleeing the dismal prospect of a brutal occupation by their former masters in any vessel that could float.
He had made it thus far against the odds; so close was he now, a mere eighty maritime kilometers to Finland from which he was exiled. But the imposing, seemingly impenetrable wall of Soviet naval vessels formed the barrier that potentially caused his connection to his homeland to be severed.
Seeing a tall wooden figurehead in the shape of the head and shoulders of a bear affixed to the bowsprit on the prow of one of the moored Estonian fishing boat made him think of the beautiful, almost erotic, figure of Vellamo, the goddess of the lakes and seas of traditional Finnish and apparently, Estonian folklore. Her carved image adorned many a Finnish fisherman’s skiff as its figurehead. They prayed to her to calm the waves and tame the winds. The typical Vellamo figurehead depicted her with long blond hair that flowed suggestively down to her chest to barely cover her enticing breasts. Vellamo was the balm of men out at sea for weeks or months without the comfort and warmth of their wives or girlfriends.
Instead of merely inspiring in him erotic thoughts and instincts, Niska had always thought of her as an angel. Most days he wasn’t sure if he believed that there really were such sublime messengers from the Divine. But whenever the cold winds of the autumn started to blow across the water and the waves swelled, in his solitude he had looked to Vellamo to shed her favor on his rickety boat and his worried soul. Each time, though tossed about and buffeted, the boat had weathered the storm, and his soul had rejoiced.
Though he and she hadn’t been out in open waters, it occurred him that Angelika Singer had been a juvenile Vellamo for him at the hospital in Charlottenburg.
Now, looking anxiously at the Soviet armada, he wondered, was this how it was going to end. There were some close brushes with death before, such as the hell-raising twenty-meter waves on the Baltic in ’28 that he was certain were going to engulf and capsize his boat. Or the time the Swedish coastal police surrounded his boat in ’31 and took shots at his boat as he was about to leave Swedish territorial waters with a cargo of vodka. A bullet had grazed his left arm. Had the projectile struck him just a few centimeters to the right, it would have gone through his heart. Vellamo had preserved him to sail yet another voyage.
Isn’t that precisely what makes the life of adventure so thrilling, the ecstasy of the chase so exhilarating, the satisfaction of the success so rewarding? The inescapable reality that we die, that sometimes we can outsmart death or outrun it, but that in the end, no one, not even the most artful adventurer and ingenious escape artist, can evade it? Even Vellamo must concede defeat to its inevitable power eventually.
For that matter, isn’t life itself so precious because we know it doesn’t last forever? Isn’t that why the immortal Greek gods envied humans, namely, that humans weren’t imperishable? Is this now my time to encounter death, my moment of truth?
Even now, Niska’s lifelong habit of suppressing anxiety or depression with action, however, was too deeply ingrained for it to disappear. He scoured the harbor region for anyone who might accept the few Estonian kroona he had in his pocket for a boat at least moderately seaworthy. He got his hands on one, though to call it seaworthy would be an exaggeration; it was in its middle stages of decay, leaky, with a poor excuse for a sail, only a pair of oars and one steering oar. The man, a retired fisherman who sold it to him, agreed to keep it in his shed by the water until Niska had need of it.
Every morning, he went down to the harbor to check conditions, but he had been disheartened by the sight of a mid-size Soviet ship unloading its cargo of dozens of Estonians who had tried to escape. Niska knew that despite the discouraging scene of refugees being forced to return to the mainland, he’d wait until his gut told him it’s the opportune time and then make a break for it somehow.
One morning, Niska woke up in his room in a dilapidated old rooming house and was pleased by the thick fog over the lower part of the city. When he found his way—more by memory than actually navigating the fog-draped streets—he deemed the impenetrable conditions over the Gulf of Finland to be ideal for his purposes.
He retrieved his wobbly boat from the fisherman’s shed. He decided the safest route was the ten-meter gap between the vessel farthest to the right and the sea wall. That way, he figured, he would be seen from only one of the ships. He rowed the skiff slowly and as quietly as he could toward the gap.
When the small rowboat emerged out of the fog, Niska was beyond the last vessel and on the open sea before him. His entire body was trembling. He hadn’t had much realistic hope of succeeding, but hope in what is seen isn’t really hope at all. Vellamo had pulled him through yet another crisis.
The fog remained behind in Tallinn. When night came, Niska was able to utilize his skills as an old seaman in navigating by the stars. The wind blew from the southwest, ideal, Niska thought, to convey him to Helsinki. Niska had no choice but to go where the wind was taking him and hope that it was to somewhere near Helsinki directly across the Gulf of Finland from Tallinn, rather than, God forbid, the eastern end of the gulf at Leningrad.
Now Niska was on an open sea somewhere between where he’d departed and where he hoped to arrive. These in-between times were the ones on his alcohol smuggling runs that were the most challenging. He recalled some of them now when all he could do for himself was put himself at the mercy of the wind and the waves. Strangely enough, he had often experienced fear more acutely at junctures like this than on any other point in his run. When he had been pursued by Swedish border police in their motorbo
ats at the onset of an escape, he had to drive his boat faster and keep his body low to the floor to avoid bullets from the police pistols or rifles. Cortisol and norepinephrine rushed through his body and made his heart beat faster and his brain think more clearly and quickly and sharply.
Once he was in international waters, the flood of stress hormones subsided and his heart relaxed. His brain was no longer focused solely on survival as he bobbed in the waves between Sweden and Finland. That is not at all to say that his mind had switched to an “off” setting. Rather, it was as though other intangible and less easy to evade fears rushed into the vacuum. Gratitude that he’d made it out of danger this time, yes, but fear, too, that sooner or later his luck would run out. Fear of Finnish border police up ahead and their scrupulous protection of Finnish waters and their firm determination to protect them with violence if necessary. More unnamed, indistinct existential fears, too, the fiercest kind: fear at age fifty that this way of making a living is not sustainable over the long haul; fear and a measure of shame that what he was doing was merely providing for the indulgent gratification of those who could afford to purchase his illegal booty; most of all, fear that if this was all there is, then when all was said and done, his life would not have made much of a difference in the world―a foretaste of death.
Now, bobbing up and down in a rowboat on a different gulf, his mind was downcast, his heart and soul strangely empty. The adrenaline high of the adventure, the thrill of the successful passage through the Russian naval blockade in Tallinn harbor, were over and done. He felt flat; his mouth tasted stale. He longed for his mind to be vacant. He didn’t want to squander mental energy trying to predict the unknown and unknowable future and think about what fate might be awaiting him if and when he arrived in Helsinki. He could only think about what he’d lost and left behind: the new vocation he’d arrived at accidentally, and the new purpose he’d been given in smuggling living human beings for their survival in this dark, dangerous time, instead of vodka or whiskey to help just a few forget and deny the darkness momentarily. He thought wistfully of people who had sparked his soul to new life: Altmann, Hudak, Hannah, and most longingly of all, Angelika to whom he owed his life.
He saw now that this voyage was not just from one country to another, from an adopted home to his homeland. It was a farewell voyage, really, from a life he was just learning to appreciate and cherish when it had to come to this abrupt end with two life-threatening inflammations in his gut. It was the unceremonious journey from the Algot Niska who had been to the Algot Niska who just beginning to be born.
After more than a day and two nights, Niska was exhausted in all corners of his body and mind. He could not hold off sleep any longer. If he was apprehended now, at least it was by his countrymen rather than the SS or the Soviets.
Niska could not tell if he had been asleep half the night and half the next day when he was awakened by the boat’s banging now and then against a cliff that rose up out of the water. Not until he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes did he realize how dangerous it would have been if the wind had increased while he slept and flung the boat against the cliff.
He had so frequently sailed the coastal waters of Finland that he could orient himself immediately: He was at the foot of the cliff adjacent to the lighthouse on the tiny island of Harmaja―a stone’s throw from Helsinki harbor.
Bless you, Vellamo.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Helsinki: September 23, 1939
Niska stood still as a lamppost in the square facing the central train terminal in Helsinki. He thought of catching a train to Turku where his daughter Eeva lived. But her husband was such a tight-ass who bore his wife’s resentment on her behalf that Algot had abandoned the family in order to flee to Germany. He’d likely report his father-in-law to ValPo, the state police, before Algot was prepared to face them.
He wondered if his sister, Aino, still lived in Helsinki’s Eteläinen district. He rummaged through his memory for a mental map of the district. It had been such a long time since he’d been there. Had she been relocated like some others to make room for the construction of the stadium for the 1940 Olympics, which were cancelled, as it turned out, due to the outbreak of war? He couldn’t remember his sister’s address, but figured that he’d remember the street by its appearance and her ancient stone apartment block once he saw it, if it was still there.
Indeed, he did. Once he decided which block was hers he stood on the sidewalk within range of the locked front door. A resident exited the building. Niska nodded his head slightly, pretending that he was another resident of the building and knew the man, grabbed the front door before it shut, and let himself into the lobby.
He recalled that she and her husband lived in an apartment on the second or third floor. He patrolled each floor and examined the metal nameplates on the door of each flat until he found his sister’s.
His brother-in-law Heikki answered the door and was opened-mouthed and mute when he recognized their visitor. Heikki called Aino to come to the door. Aino stopped in her tracks when she saw Algot standing at the threshold. Her eyes were larger than chestnuts. She raised a hand to her mouth and began to weep.
“Algot, is that you? My God, you’re alive! Since we hadn’t heard from you, we were sure that you’d breathed your last long ago.”
“It is indeed your long-lost brother, Algot, alive and in the flesh. Shame on you for thinking that I’d died. I couldn’t write or call on the telephone because I was sure that if ValPo wasn’t opening my mail and tapping my telephone, then the SS was. True, I’ve more than a few close calls. But more than one person says that I’m like a cat. I have nine lives.”
“Yes,” said Heikki, “but how many of the nine have you used up? For God’s sake, come on in.”
“Now that you mention that, I’ve got to get to a doctor soon. I’ve got two nasty ulcers in my stomach that burn like hell.”
The next day, Heikki called their family doctor and made an appointment for Algot. The doctor prescribed an antacid and emphasized the need for rest, counsel that after his eventful sea journey to Finland Niska was quite ready to accept. As the older sister and a professed teetotaler at that, through their younger years, Aino had often expressed her displeasure at Algot’s outlaw activities in the past. Nevertheless, she was gracious now when he had nowhere else to go and nursed him for many days in her flat.
When she left him alone, Niska was busy preparing a lengthy “sea declaration” of all that he had been doing in Germany since 1932, particularly his activities on behalf of German Jews in the past year. He didn’t withhold any of his own hardships or obstacles he had faced. He worded his declaration truthfully but strategically with the intent of provoking leniency from whatever judge he would have to face in a trial for his smuggling of liquor and other contraband a decade and more earlier.
He and Heikki lingered after breakfast in their underwear over several cups of Aino’s coffee. Finland wasn’t rationing coffee yet, unlike Germany, which had begun doing so the moment the Wehrmacht had rolled its tanks into Austria. Niska hadn’t enjoyed the taste of real coffee since.
“How are your ulcers today?” Heikki asked.
“Thanks to the rest, better each day. I’ll get out of your way soon, though, and give you your flat back to yourselves.”
“The shenanigans in Moscow are giving me more than ulcers,” Heikki said cheerlessly. “You’ve heard, haven’t you?”
“Well, it depends on which shenanigans you mean. My little Estonian rowboat didn’t come equipped with a short-wave radio, remember.”
“Paasikivi has been recalled from the embassy in Stockholm to head a Finnish delegation to Moscow.”
“Not to see the Bolshoi or tour St. Basil’s Cathedral, I presume?”
“That’s for sure,” Heikki said, adding a sarcastic snort. “The President is sending him there on a futile mission of trying to convince Molotov and Stalin that Finland isn’t going to allow them to adopt us forcefully as a Russian
satellite as the Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians were obliged to do.”
“No, no, we don’t want that. I’ve just had a little unplanned holiday in both Latvia and Estonia. Riga and Tallinn aren’t the grand cities they were the last time I was there. The Russian occupiers have made sure of that.”
“Molotov and Stalin were ridiculous with their demands,” Heikki complained, shaking his head indignantly. “They want us to redraw the map of our borders with Russia so that Viipuri becomes a Russian city and most of Karelia becomes a Russian timber plantation.”
The antacids were easing the pains in his stomach. Consequently, each successive day added to his restlessness. One Friday morning in mid-November, he told his hosts that he was going down to ValPo headquarters and turn himself in.
“Are you sure you ought to do that, little brother?” Aino asked.
“I don’t think ValPo would take to you kindly for harboring a wanted whiskey smuggler in your flat,” Niska explained. “It’s time I said ‘Thank you’ and left your flat and faced the consequences of my past actions.”
“I can’t let you go to see the police in those old clothes you’re wearing.” Looking at her husband, she said, “Heikki, look through your closet for one of your suits that would fit Algot.”
Algot came out of his bedroom looking almost comical in an ill-fitting suit. But he virtually luxuriated in its cleanliness and freshness after having ditching his sea swept and tattered sweater and pants that he had been wearing since he left Latvia. When he was ready to leave, he and Heikki gave each other a self-conscious handshake at the door. Aino was tearful as she put her arms around her brother.
“You just got here after years away, and now you’ll be holed up in jail somewhere.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Berlin: March 1, 1940
Accidental Saviors Page 14