“Why do you think that?”
“Luther learned an important lesson. Initially, he tried following your naïve and sentimental approach, Kersten. He believed that the path of kindness toward the Jews was the right one. Of course, he only wanted to impress them with Christianity and then convert them.”
“That’s to be expected of a former monk, isn’t it?”
“But alas, Kersten. His attitude of tolerance didn’t last. He was totally frustrated by the Jews’ stubbornness. I could have told him that. They refused to see the superiority of Christianity. That’s when he sat down and wrote the famous treatise. He damned them to hell and called them ‘the devil incarnate.’ The Führer got a lot of mileage out of Luther’s words.”
Kersten felt he couldn’t pursue this line of conversation much further since he hadn’t read the treatise, nor had he ever even heard it mentioned in his Lutheran circles.
“What most people don’t know, Doctor, especially the Jews,” Himmler continued, “is that in the Führer’s inner circle, I am the best friend the Jews have.”
Kersten thought this highly unlikely. One rumor had it that it was by Himmler’s command that the violent revenge was exacted on the Jews on Kristallnacht.
“How so, Herr Reichsführer?”
“Ach Kersten. I never wanted to destroy the Jews. I hate them, to be sure. Just name any problem in Germany: inflation and the banks; unemployment before the Führer’s rise to power, the outlandish reparations Germany had to pay after the Great War, the loosening of sexual mores in our cities, the mixing of the races, the monopoly and corruption of the banks. I could go on and on. Each and every one I attribute to the sinister, cancerous influence of the Jews. Nevertheless, I had quite different ideas than others as to how to handle the matter. It’s Heydrich and Göbbels who will have to have it all on their conscience.”
Kersten stopped his massaging and looked at Himmler with genuine astonishment.
“You’ll have to tell me what you mean.”
“The history books will probably say that I ordered the chaos of November 9 and 10, 1938. But it was Heydrich and Göbbels who gave the order for retribution, Heydrich behind my back and without clearing it with me, his superior. I would have demoted the disobedient bastard if the Führer had not intervened on Heydrich’s behalf, a decision that I fear the Führer will live to regret.”
Kersten maintained a strategic silence, sensing that Himmler was in the mood to divulge more about the inner workings of the Nazi cult.
“Some years ago, the Führer gave me orders to get rid of the Jews. I don’t remember if it was in ’33 or ’34. My plan for the Jewish question was to eliminate them from Germany by emigration. They would be encouraged to leave the country and even take their fortunes and property with them...Did you know, Doctor, that in 1938, even President Roosevelt became aware of our intentions for the Jews?”
Kersten said nothing, but raised his eyebrows.
“Yes. And we requested American support for executing our plan. If things had progressed differently, I think Roosevelt might have agreed.”
“But...”
“But then vom Rath was murdered by that impetuous young French Jew Grünspan. The Führer was incensed. Then, in an effort to kiss the Führer’s ass, Heydrich and Göbbels took advantage of the Führer’s absence in München and gave the fatal order. Göbbels never misses an opportunity to curry favor with the Führer and stick it to me. Neither does Heydrich. Soon after that, Jews were no longer permitted to leave Germany.”
Kersten was trying to assimilate Himmler’s information with what he had suspected and garnered by way of rumor before.
“I am sure Göbbels and Heydrich persuaded the Führer that the Jewish question could be solved only by means of their extermination. Heydrich and Göbbels couldn’t stop talking about an Endlösung, a final solution to the problem. I knew exactly what they meant.”
“But you were hoping for a different solution?”
“Yes. If we lose the war—unlikely, judging by how things have been going so far—history will judge Germany harshly for killing off the Jews. After all, all the papers and publishing houses in Britain and America are in the hands of Jews. I proposed to the Führer that he reconsider the ban on Jewish emigration, and instead give them a large piece of territory and let them set up their own independent state. There they could cheat one another instead of the rest of us. We made inquiries in a number of different quarters, but no one—including Roosevelt—wanted the Jews.”
“Where did you envision this independent Jewish state to be? In Palestine?”
“No, in Madagascar, in fact. We’d dispatch an expeditionary force of the SS to Africa to take over the country. Those black Untermenschen wouldn’t know what hit them.”
Kersten was stunned. He didn’t know if Himmler was kidding and he should laugh at such an outlandish idea. But no, Himmler looked perfectly serious.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jyvaskyla: March 10-14, 1940
The Russians began lustily anticipating a final victory when word reached them that “the White Death” had been stricken down, possibly fatally. Haula had been much more than a minor uncomfortable thorn in the Russians’ flesh. Singlehandedly, he had felled almost seven hundred of them. Now the surviving troops at Kollaa were eager to strike a final and decisive blow to the Finns and go home. Almost 89,000 of their comrades had been killed or were still missing in action in the four months since November. The Finns, for their part, estimated that their losses were only one-quarter of those of the enemy. The sheer overwhelming numerical superiority of the Russian forces, however, and their unrelenting pace of adding replacements, finally inundated the Finns. The Finns were in retreat on skis and boots toward the Finland-Karelia border.
Niska and Haula were oblivious to events after they’d been hit by a Russia sniper. As severe as it was, Haula’s facial wound was not life-threatening once the bleeding was staunched and the wound stuffed with cotton by the medics. He was transported to the closest field hospital at the recently converted sanitorium at Tiuru.
Niska’s situation was more dire. The effusive bleeding from the wound in his chest raised his medical status to critical. The hospital at Tiuru was not equipped with the specialized facilities required for surgery and treatment of his life-threatening condition. He would have to be transported to a full-fledged military hospital farther inland.
Two medics stabilized him in the closest tent at Kollaa all the while troops preparing to evacuate were taking down the other tents. The medics staunched the bleeding and sprinkled sulfa powder as an antiseptic over the chest wound. They applied dressings the best they could in the hellish cold. They resurrected the dying embers in the campfire outside the tent, commanded the orderlies to dig beneath the snow for stones and small rocks and heat them over the revived flames. They inserted the heated rocks into several water canteens and placed them under the blankets on the sledge to protect Niska as much as possible from the threat of hypothermia. To fortify his body further for the sledge transport, they injected morphine to alleviate pain.
On the morning of March 13, Niska sat visibly dazed on a bed in a post-operative ward in a military hospital. His chest was wrapped tightly with strips of gauze bandage. He glanced down at his chest but saw no evidence of bleeding. His eyes grew wide with disgust as he noticed that a plastic tube connected his penis to a bag beneath his bed. He was sufficiently conscious and aware to feel embarrassment when a volunteer Lotta nurse poked her head around the privacy screen encircling his bed.
“Dr. Berg will be down to see you soon, Corporal Niska.”
A few minutes later, a short, roundish man in the white coat of a doctor came around the screen and saluted. “Corporal, I am Captain Berg, surgeon, Fifth Medical Corps.”
Niska answered with a feeble salute. “Where am I, Captain?”
“Why, you’re at Kinkomaa Military Hospital. Just beyond the pine and birch outside your window is the city of Jyväskylä.”
“Jesus. Jyväskylä? The last place I remember being was a frozen river bank in Karelia someplace.”
“Yes, you were at Kollaa. Several of you who served there have been patients here. You were transported by some exceptionally competent medics on a Lapp sledge to a train full of soldiers evacuating Karelia and then brought here from the Jyväskylä station by military ambulance.”
“I don’t remember a blessed thing about that.”
“That’s perfectly normal at this juncture. I performed emergency repair of your heart just two days ago. We dug a Russian Mosin-Nagant bullet out of the right ventricle of your heart. You’re lucky to still be alive. Your body has been through a lot of trauma, and you are still feeling the after-effects of the anesthetic. I assure you, Corporal, your memory will improve in time.”
“I guess I’ll just need to take your word for it.”
“I’ll leave you now so that you can try to get some sleep. Are you feeling any pain in your chest?”
“No, not really, Doctor.”
“That’s another thing for which to take my word, Corporal. There will be pain, maybe as soon as tomorrow. The Lottas are trained to administer morphine in that case.”
The next morning, Dr. Berg stopped by Niska’s bed once more.
“The Lottas tell me that you have been obeying their orders to get out of bed, Corporal, and walk a little. That’s good.”
“That stout farmer’s wife…Kettunen’s the name, isn’t it?..she’s quite persuasive, if you know what I mean. I don’t dare disobey her. She’s as crusty as a couple of the worst sergeants at boot camp.” Niska laughed at his own remark, but immediately placed his hand on his bandaged chest and grimaced.
Berg joined in the laughter, which indicated to Niska that the surgeon wasn’t overly concerned about the pain in Niska’s chest just now, and therefore he didn’t need to be either.
“Corporal, you were hit by a sniper’s bullet,” Berg reported. “But it appears you dodged the sniper’s intent.”
“I have a vague memory of trying to stay low on the snow to evade a sniper up in the trees.”
“I’m told you rescued the famous Corporal Haula. He will live the rest of his days with half a face, but the important thing is that he will live. A whole nation owes you a huge debt of gratitude, Corporal Niska.”
“A soldier does what he has to do,” Niska managed to say. “Any one of us would have done the same for a wounded brother-in-arms.”
“In any case, you seem to be recovering swiftly. Continue following Lotta Kettunen’s orders,” Berg said, and winked at Niska as he left.
The affable Niska was beginning to feel isolated and cut off by the privacy screen. He asked one of the Lotta nurses to remove it for the daytime.
A voice came from the man sitting up two beds down from Niska’s.
“So soldier, I hear you’re Algot Niska. The Algot Niska?”
“As far as I know, there is only one of us in the world with that name, and it’s me.”
“Just wait till I get back home to Vimpeli and tell the guys I was in a hospital ward with the notorious whiskey smuggler, Algot Niska. I’ll be the big man in town. Most of us were just boys in ’12 when you almost led Finland to a football bronze medal in Stockholm.”
“But the thing is, we didn’t win the medal, unfortunately. Maybe your buddies would be more impressed if we had.”
“No, it was pretty impressive. Imagine. Tiny Finland knocking the mighty Czar’s team out in the first round. Then almost doing the same to the Brits in the bronze medal game. We were prouder than hell.”
Niska couldn’t think of a self-effacing comeback. They were silent for the time being. Finally, seeing that the young soldier looked eager to have more conversation, Niska asked, “Vimpeli, eh? You a farmer? I presume once this bloody war is over, that you’ll be going back to your farm in Vimpeli?”
“Well, it’s actually my father’s farm. He’s had a hard time of it working it alone with just the help of my mother and sister, even in the winter, while I’ve been here on the Karelian front. As soon as the surgeon gives me the okay, I’ll be on that train headed toward home.”
“They won’t send you back to the front? That’s where I figure they’ll send me.”
The young soldier fell into an awkward silence of consternation. He looked disbelievingly at Niska.
“You haven’t heard, then?”
“Heard? About what?”
“The peace treaty, of course. The one signed by Ryti and Molotov on the 12th. None of us is going back to the front anymore.”
Niska sat on his bed stunned. If what his young mate was saying was true, how swiftly the tide of the war had turned.
“We lost Karelia, then? All that bloody fighting…for what?”
“Viipuri is suddenly a Russian city.”
“Damn them! That’s my birthplace. No going back there now.”
Niska sat mum on his bed. He couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. He always knew in his mind, of course, that at some time the conflict would end. But things had started so propitiously the first two months that he naïvely believed just like others that things would continue that way.
Niska slept fitfully that night. Now what? Where to next? The medics and Dr. Berg had given him another chance at life, but what was he going to do with it? His estranged wife and children didn’t want him back in Finland. He had no desire to go back to Germany. In fact, since Hitler had by now annexed or occupied to much of it, he couldn’t go anywhere in Europe either. He woke up from his sleep while it was still dark and felt a yawning void within, a vague emptiness.
The next day, Dr. Berg made another bedside visit. “Good morning, Corporal.”
“I guess I should see the morning as a good one. I’m still breathing. So many of my army colleagues are not.”
Berg took the stethoscope from around his neck and placed it on Niska’s chest. The Lottas had unrolled and removed the tight bandages and replaced them with lighter ones. Before they had applied the new dressings, Niska saw that his chest was crisscrossed by red lines sown together with bloodied stitches as though he were several pieces of fabric.
“Your ticker sounds good considering the shape it was in when they brought you here. I frankly wasn’t altogether sure that we could patch the punctures.”
“You undoubtedly got your first training for this job when repairing your bicycle tires as a boy,” Niska joked.
Berg smiled politely but not with much conviction. “Despite your humor this morning, Corporal, you seem less animated than usual. Did you get some sleep?”
“A little yes, until the farmer’s wife Lotta came in the middle of the night to pull that damn tube out of my baby-maker. Afterward, it hurt like hell to pee.”
“That’s quite normal after the catheter is removed. You’ll just have to grin and bear it for a few more days…You can also expect to experience a touch of depression, strangely enough, as you get closer to a full recovery.”
“I admit I feel a little lost. It’s going to be hard to find a direction, given what I hear has happened. Strange. This is the moment we had all been waiting for. Yet now I feel life is a little futile.”
“From what I’ve heard about you and your venturesome life, you always seem to find your way out of the fog to a safe harbor,” Berg assured him.
Niska pondered the doctor’s remark. The angelic Vellamo with me again?
Niska had been watching the dancing motion of Berg’s unusually dark, bushy eyebrows, so characteristically non-Nordic, whenever he spoke.
His next question seemed even to him a non sequitur. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about your name, Doctor. One of the Swedish Bergs?”
“No, not Swedish. Jewish, from Russia originally. The former family name was Rosenberg.”
“I figured as much.” Then, suddenly fearing that this casual remark would be offensive to Berg, he added, “Not that it changes anything as far as I’m concerned, you understand?”
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br /> “My grandfather did his twenty-five years of service in the Czar’s army mandated for Jews. He married a Finnish woman when he had been stationed at Turku. After his tour of service, he chose to stay and resume civilian life in Finland. I shortened the name to just ‘Berg’ to make it easier for me to gain entrance into medical school.”
“That sounds a lot like the story of the few other Jews I knew growing up or have met since.”
“There aren’t many of us in Finland, that’s for sure. I’ve learned from my rabbi at the Helsinki synagogue that thanks to your heroic assistance, there are a few more of my people in the country now.”
Niska felt his customary bashfulness whenever this topic was raised in conversation.
“I’ve heard of what you’d done for so many Jews trapped in Germany. You may like to know that a few of them joined the synagogue after they arrived with your help in Finland. You might say that my preserving your life through surgery was the least I could do on behalf of my fellow Jews you saved from the ghettoes and camps.”
“I merely did what the situation called for, Doctor. The opportunity found me, not the other way around. That’s where I find my joy: doing what needs to be done. Believe me, I’m no hero.”
“But you’ve led a life well-lived, Corporal. The venerable old rabbis used to say, ‘If you happen to come along and see what in the world needs repairing, and you know how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that God has left for you to complete.’ Being a hero doesn’t always mean doing extraordinary things, does it, though I hear you’ve done your share of those? I think it means sometimes doing the ordinary thing that needs to be done, but doing it courageously and faithfully. Yes, by God, Corporal Niska, that’s a life well-lived.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Berlin: December 1, 1941
Kersten was going about the treatment with Himmler in an unusually perfunctory, mechanical manner. This was no longer the exception to the rule; it was the rule. It had been a year and a half since Himmler had laid down the condition that Kersten not treat Jewish patients any longer. Kersten felt his professional independence had been violated. He was still resentful. He wasn’t conscious of his resentment every day by any means. Many days, however, he was going about his treatments of Himmler in a less committed and conscientious way.
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