AH Vignette: The Night of the Albatross
It was one of those nights. I mean sure, it was a Thursday. I liked to think that the bar sat along a pretty busy corner just off Lafayette Street, and that the lights outside were very good for luring people in after dark. Not that day, though. It was already half past six and I was alone at the bar. Don't get me wrong, though, I didn't mind that much – as a bartender, I'd get paid no matter what. But I always rather liked the company and something to do, it makes it easier to pass the time. Everyone who's ever worked in a bar knows that there is a certain range of customers you'd rather have there, not too much, not too little, just enough to keep you occupied, to make everything go swimmingly.
So, there I was, arranging bottles and generally setting things up for the weekend. On Friday the bar would be packed, anyway, and I'd better put my ducks in a row for that, having some time on my hands.
”Bill”, I heard a voice to my right, ”pour me a beer would you? I'm getting thirsty out here.”
When I said I was alone, I forgot to mention that I actually wasn't. There, like most night those days, was John at the corner table. Thin as a rake, he looked at me from behind his square glasses, the usual ironic smile on his mustache-garnished lips. Perhaps ten years my senior, in his mid-30s, but looking older with that worn face of his.
”Make it an European lager, would you Bill? I'm in mind of having one.”
”Johnny, please, you know we don't carry that stuff. You'll have to do with a domestic brew again”, I told him, reaching for the tap.
The man some of the regulars called Johnny Papers shrugged and spread his hands.
”I know, I know... Just thought I'd try my luck”, he said and turned back to his notes.
What John did was write. He had a couple of notepads, a couple of newspapers and a pen. He was definitely an immigrant. He had a funny accent I could not place, but without it, everything about him said ”Northern Europe”. The couple of years I had known him, he was getting all the more Americanized, though, and even his accent was fading fast. In a couple of years more, it would probably be indistinguishable. What I mean is that the man had a head for language. People skilled with words adjust quickly, and I knew John wrote his notes in English – I'd peeked at them a few times, out of curiosity.
” What are you writing there, anyway?”, I asked the man, to pass my time. I knew he wouldn't mind.
”It's a song. A song about... about getting older and looking back at your decisions in life. If I know anything, Bill, it's not the things that you do that come back to haunt you. It's the things you could have done but never did. All the lost chances. That job across the country you never took. All those pretty girls you never even tried to hit on. Well, you know."
That was John all over. He wrote these nostalgic, sometimes quietly funny songs. Some of them he managed to sell, and some of them even got played on the radio. He never really got a real hit under his belt, but he made a modest living out of it. You could tell when he had sold another of his products, then he would buy rounds at the bar. The regulars loved him for it, and so they also gave him his privacy when he wanted it, in that corner table of his.
A couple of younger guys came in then, bought whisky shots and beer chasers, and then took a table and started talking about baseball. I remember they were quite animated about it. The Mets had been on fire that season, and they would go on to win World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was the legendary first season Yogi Berra was manager, making the Mets the first expansion team to go all the way.
Good times – if you were a baseball fan, that is. It was a summer of civil rights strife as well, there were riots in the city, too, and it was not uncommon to see the National Guard out on the streets. What with the news coming out of the still-chaotic Europe, and the renewed fighting in the Far East, the world was not looking very good. Immigrants were flocking out Europe now that the borders of Europe were open again, the Atlantic Wall having crumbled down. And still – it was yet two years before the Taiwan War. The thing is, though, no matter how bleak the international situation looked like, generally things seemed to be going towards, well, if not good things, actually, then gradual improvement at least.
Most of that feeling came from what happened in continental Europe. The German Civil War was finally over, and while the situation was still volatile, and nobody knew where the borders of the new nations would actually stand in the end, at least the worst of the nightmare was over. Oh – there still were Nazis around, like I guess there still are in this day and age, but at least they no longer held sway over the whole continent. The horrors of the Nazi crimes had been coming out the last few years, horrors that were hard to understand, horrors the Reich leadership had tried to hide from the world as well as it could.
The true scale of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Slavs had been revealed.
But at least it was over. That was the main thing. The dawn of a new day for the Old Continent, like Robert Kennedy said in 1971, inaugurating the Kennedy Plan. The time for America to return to the European mainland and start taking numbers.
This is not an aside, either, it's very relevant to my story. So let me get back to it.
So, there's me, there's John in the corner, and there's these two guys talking baseball. It's seven-ish on a Thursday night in a bar in the Bowery.
I had the feeling that business would pick up and I wasn't disappointed. Soon a couple came in, the man in a spiffy suit and the girl looking like a secretary. He had a ring, she didn't. They ordered drinks and retired to a booth in the opposite corner from John. They appeared very much in love with each other.
I looked at John and saw he had noticed the couple, too. I could swear he winked at me, and then turned back to his papers.
It might have been the red Budweiser light at the bar, reflected off his glasses as well, come to think of it. But a wink would have been very much in character.
After a while, after the Mets fans had bought new drinks, three guys in suits walked in the door and cast measuring glances around the bar. They looked like small-time businessmen, bureucrats or some sort, or maybe cops. One looked more affluent, his suit was actually nice, the other two were on the scruffy side. Or, rather, worn. Not unkempt, but definitely looking less than affluent.
Two of the guys opted for a rum and coke, the man in the nice suit took a whisky on the rocks. When they opened their mouths, I realized the two worn-looking guys were foreign as well. European.
As the three guys started settling down, I noticed one of them casting a glance at John and then doing a double-take. He then stared at him for a while, shook his head and turned back to his friends.
In a minute, he would again take a long look at the man in the corner.
This time, he stood up. He was bald, with a beard and a mustache, a man in his forties. Hesitantly, at first, and then with more determination, he walked to John's table and said a single word to the man scribbling in his notebook.
I was watching this all unfold, having nothing particular to do.
Slowly, John raised his head and looked at the man. After a brief pause, I saw a smile spreading on his worn face.
”Pasanen perkele.”
It soon became apparent the two men knew each other. They shook each others' hands, both smiling, and came that close to hugging each other. John called the new arrivals over to his table and bought a round of drinks for them.
”Bill”, he told me, ”there's someone here you need to meet as well. Come over, sit down, I'll buy you a drink as well.”
I told him I really shouldn't, I was working and all, but he waved a hand.
”Bill, come on, live a little!”
Hesitantly, I joined the four men, trying to keep my eyes on the other customers and the bar. The three men introduced themselves. It turned out two of them were Finns and the third one their American... let us say associate. It was by pure happenstance they had walked in to the bar, for one of them to find an old friend there.
John.
Only now I realized that it was a Finnish accent that could still be faintly heard in John's voice.
”Bill, let me tell you a story, John said, looking at the bald, bearded guy opposite, ”Pasanen here can correct me if I get anything wrong”.
I thought that I don't have time for a story, but nodded anyway. I' m glad I did, though, in retrospect.
It was 1957– over 16 years ago now. I was a boy of 19. I had just been called for military duty by the Finnish Defence Forces. They put me in front of a panel of officers and asked me different things, to determine what I was suitable for. I told them how I liked writing, music and singing, and how I was from the coast and was fond of the sea. They knew I had a heart condition, but that I also had excelled in sports at school.
At the end of it, there was the verdict. I was assigned to a Navy Signals unit. Up in Petsamo. It came as a shock to me, it was the most remote place from my home on the southern coast I could be sent to. I think some of the officers had considered me politically unreliable – that was quite often why people were sent up north. Later, I came to think that it was due to a humourous essay I had written in the gymnasium, one about the German military and the Nazis. All lighthearted fun, but those are the kinds of small decisions that change our lives.
So, I was sent towards the Arctic Sea on a military train. It was a very long journey, and the train was packed, picking up more conscripts at stations along the way.
The train got us only as far as Nellimö in Lapland. The Petsamo railway was still being constructed, it's completion would still be several months off. As we disembarked the train for military trucks, feeling cold even with our warm winter clothes, I was shocked to see the scores and scores of Russian labourers working on the railway. Thin as wraiths, wearing inadequate clothes, sometimes basically just rags. There were Estonian workers there as well, not detainees but free men, looking almost like Finns, better fed and clothed than the Russians. They were a gloomy and depressed bunch none the less.
The work was overseen by Finnish engineering officers and infantry guards, and there was a knot of German liaison staff there too, in their Wehrmacht winter coats. The railway was partly funded by the Germans, I understood, to provide a link from the Arctic to the Bay of Bothnia the Reich could use as well. Even with my short while there, I understood that while the Russians were afraid of the Finnish guards, they were in absolute terror of those German uniforms. Maybe they thought the officers were there to take them to the German area of occupation? I don't know, but it made me think about the fact that no matter how bad things look like, they could almost always also be worse.
The military service up north was – not nice. The early morning wake up calls, all the drills, the skiing practices, the constant cold wind, even in the summer... Only when basic training was over and we started practicing things like the Morse code, signalling, communication systems, and so on, it got a tiny bit better. I missed home and my folks, but there was no real chance to get a leave to go south to Kotka. So, I spent what free time I had in Liinahamari, which was a reasonable-sized town due to all the activity that had sprouted here after the war. There was the fish industry to process the fruits of the Atlantic fishing fleet, there were the military installations, there was the work with the railway. After it opened in early 1958, the port also started growing as a trade centre. Russian workers walked the streets, sorry-looking columns accompanied by sullen Finnish guards. I envied neither group and was quite happy of my station in life, all things considered. The only thing I missed, apart from my family and friends, were girls. Petsamo was full of men, and young women were a rare sight.
German soldiers were often seen in town, both SS and the Wehrmacht. They visited the bars and paid with Reichsmarks at a poor exchange rate which boosted the bars' profits. There was Kriegsmarine ships in the harbour at times, to pick up provisions and to allow men shore leave, but generally the German ships used Dietlhafen – like the Germans named Murmansk after its conqueror. That was the main German port on the Arctic, the hub of all of their activities on the Kola Peninsula as well. I never got to see it, though. It was restricted to the use of the German military and Nazi authorities.
The things with the Germans were becoming more wrought at the time, too. Once I got to witness a fist fight between Kriegsmarine men and some Waffen-SS troopers. There was a lot of animosity between the Nazi and non-Nazi parts of the German soldiery, like I understood it. It went against all that we were told about the unity of the Reich under the Führer in school and the military. Now, of course, I know that the Reich was much more ramshackle and disunited than the propaganda would have had us believe. Heydrich – Heydrich thought Hitler's death and Himmler's fatal car accident were both due to a conspiracy against the Third Reich and the Nazi Party. He caused a lot of resentment among otherwise loyal cadres by trying to root out that probably inexistent plot among the Nazi state machinery. And of course, after his own assassination attempt he barely survived during the war, Heydrich himself was both mentally unstable and physically feeble. He lost a lot of work due to his treatments by Doctor Morell, the trusted physician of all the three Führers of the Third Reich.
So, while Heydrich was lost in his delusions and trying to keep up appearances, the Wehrmacht generals and the moderate Nazis, ”Speerists” like you Americans call them, found each other. Even Göring, the Fat Man, was won over by the new faction due to his feeling sidelined by the SS elite. Slowly, then, the situation was building towards what is now called the German Civil War. Like I said, at the time I knew nothing about that all. Germany was our ally, and we were told they were staunch supporters of Finland. More unofficially, though, we were made to understand that German decisions were not always in the Finnish interest, and that German solutions were not necessarily ones that could or should be implemented in Finland.
It was not talked about publicly, but everyone knew that terrible things happened in the Russian areas under German control. I personally once heard a Finnish soldier who had been sent to Russia for ”police action” tell about what he had seen and done, after far too many drinks. He was a wreck, just like many of the German soldiers who frequented the bars of Liinahamari. Most non-SS soldiers radiated dissatisfaction, exhaustion and even anger. They tried to contain it, were ordered to contain it, but I guess there is just so much people can take. Remember, though, that the north was where people were sent as a punishment. Overseeing the work camps and mines on the Kola Peninsula was then probably one of the most demeaning jobs a German soldier could do. Some of Germans seen in Petsamo were members of actual penal formations – you could tell it by their filthy uniforms and the SS guards overseeing them.
Those men did not drink in bars. Their camps, the Stalags, were on the German side of the Arctic border. You could only see them in Petsamo when they were in transit. Often, I think, it was one way only.
During the war, the Finnish government had told the Nazi leadership that Finland did not have a Jewish Problem. Even after the USSR had been beaten, our leaders tried to protect the Finnish citizens from being sent to the Reich, whether or not they were leftists, rumoured symphatizers of the ”decadent West” or Jews. Increasingly, though, it was becoming harder in the 50s. The pro-Nazi factions in Finland grew stronger, and ”not rocking the boat” was the order of the day. Finlandisierung, like some call it. The nation was slowly drifting towards the kinds of modes of thought that were prevalent in the Reich itself.
So – under President Kekkonen and supported especially by the barely-tolerated Finnish Workers' Party, set up as a front for the Social Democrats to continue their political work, a underground organization was set up to spirit as many Jews out of the nation as possible. Through neutral Sweden, more often than not, but through Petsamo as well, in different civilian ships. I understand that one popular way to do it was signing up men and women into the ships of the Finnish Atlantic fishing fleet under false names, and take then to American, British or Irish ships on the Atlantic. These people were called, predictably, ”export herrings”. It was risky, but everything had to be tried. Hundreds of Jewish people left Finland as export herrings.
Since 1955, Heydrich's government stepped up the demands for Finland to give up last of the Finnish Jews for ”resettlement in the East”. Helsinki knew what this meant, and while some even in the government thought of agreeing with the demand, plans were made to save the Finnish Jews from this fate. By then, there were less than 800 Jews still left in Finland – often just men who had served in the Finnish military during the war and their families. These men saw serving Finland as their duty and were reluctant to leave, even with everything that was happening in Europe.
So, while I learned telegraphing and radio technology up in Liinahamari and suffered from the cold Arctic Sea wind, the Finnish government planned for the final solution for the Jewish Problem in Finland. In 1957, the Finnish state's shipping company had bought an old German Kraft durch Freude cruiseship, called Der Deutsche, ostensibly to be scrapped and the steel to be used for new Finnish submarines. Instead, the ship was taken to Sweden where it got a new name. Flying the neutral Swedish flag, it was sent through the Danish straits and into the Atlantic, manned by a crew of Swedish and Finnish sailors approved by the underground and rather left-wing Finnish Seamen's Union.
In early January 1958, I had spent a year in Petsamo. The second year of my conscription was upon me.
That month, things started getting weird.
For one thing, the Germans were acting all screwy. They would not hold on to their meticulous timetables anymore. They were becoming unpredictable and increasingly hostile. Troops and units were being moved to and fro, apparently at cross purposes. It made things... interesting in the north as well.
And then one day, a ship arrived into the port of Petsamo. It was a passenger liner. ”Albatross, Stockholm” was painted on its stern and it flew the Swedish flag. I had never seen a passenger ship that big in the harbour. For two days, it just sat there.
And then the trains with closed windows appeared in the dead of night. As they stopped at the harbour, I learned that they were full of people. 754 people, to be exact. They had come up to Petsamo to board a ship. It was a huge confusion in the darkness as the people, men and women, boys and girls, kids, adults and the elderly scrambled to get from the trains to the passenger ship. Among a small know of soldiers, I watched the confusion. We had no orders about what to do, so we just stood and observed.
After several hours of confusion, everyone was aboard the ship. Some bags and various random things had been left behind on the docks. A lone labrador retriever stood guard next to an abandoned trolley, staring forlornly towards the ship where his master probably was trying to find a place for the journey.
The morning dawned, a little less dark, Arctic grey-blue semi-morning, and the ship just stood there. I was in duty at the Navy's communications facility in the harbour that morning, and there I learned why, from my Sergeant, Pasanen, who had seen the events unfold right there. Apparently, things in Europe were going to hell in a handbasket real fast. The German military was in full alert everywhere, the Kriegsmarine had sortied out from their base in Hanko, there were a lot of Luftwaffe aircraft in the air all around the place. The Finnish government and military were in alert as well. Nobody who was anybody had got any sleep that night in the capital. The president, the cabinet, the highest military leadership – all were prepared for the worst.
Now, later, we know that this was the day the first shots of the German Civil War were fired. Heydrich moved to start his purges of the ”conspiracy” and, as a response, the military and moderate Nazis kicked off their very own Fall Wintersturm, the plan to sideline Heydrich and among him the highest party and SS leadership loyal to the third Führer of the Third Reich.
In Liinahamari, the man who controlled the all the Finnish Navy assets there as well as the harbour itself was Commodore Voionmaa. A handsome, tall old officer, he had at some point of his career been called anti-German by his opponents and sent up north for his perceived sins. He was a liked commander among the Navy people in Petsamo, and I often saw him make his rounds in the town. Political opinions aside, Voionmaa was a stickler for orders. I think that since his posting to Petsamo, he had decided that from thereon he would not give Helsinki any reason to call him unreliable. He followed orders from the capital to the point of silliness, and if something was not directly ordered, he would not do it.
The problem with the Albatross now was that all ships in the ports were on lockdown due to the German unpleasantness, and withouth direct orders from the Navy, Voionmaa would not allow the passenger ship filled with Jewish refugees to leave port.
As the 754 men, women and children waited on the ship, and as its Swedish captain constantly implored the harbour leadership to release the vessel, just after noon the port of Liinahamari was startled by a massive roar up ahead. It was a flight of heavy German jet bombers, apparently en route from an airbase in Finnmark to Dietlhafen. It was followed by another flight in half an hour. The meaning of these flights never became clear to me, but they caused considerable confusion in the town.
In the afternoon it was four of us in the communications room. Sergeant Pasanen, the squad leader, an older guy in his late 20s who was as non-military as someone in a uniform could be, a well-liked joker. He used to amuse us with parodies of news reports and spot-on imitations of well-known people. There were three conscripts, Virtanen, Lastumäki and me. This was one of the three sections at duty at any given time. We were all overseen by a young lieutenant, but he was tied up with some briefing at the local HQ. There were reports coming in from all over about anomalous German actions which we then passed up along the chain of command. So, as we try to keep up with all the information that comes our way, suddenly a flustered young guard bumps into the radio room and tells us that there's someone wanting to talk to us, and he would not take no for an answer. Some civilian, the young man told me with almost contempt in his voice.
Pasanen sent me to talk to him. As I went to the foyer, I came face to face with a balding man in his 50s. Dressed in a warm winter coat, he looked at me with piercing, intelligent eyes and frowned.
” - Seaman”, he said, looking at my rank tabs, ”My name is Skurnik. I need the Navy to release the passenger ship from port immediately. This is the main communications centre, right? Get me the commander of the harbour right now!”
I must have stared at the man looking dumbstruck, because he suddenly smiled, maybe realizing he wasn't a soldier anymore.
” - If you could be so kind”, he added, a bit sheepishly now.
I thought I recognized the man when I entered the room, but now understood that I did know him. This was Leo Skurnik, the most decorated Finnish military doctor of the war. He had earned the Iron Cross from the Germans after treating countless badly wounded Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS soldiers at the front in 1941, right under the Soviet guns. He had been given the Mannerheim Cross after he saved the life of the Marshal of Finland himself when the old soldier was badly wounded in a Soviet bombing of Viipuri in 1942.
Leo Skurnik was a war hero and he was a Jew. He had refused to accept the Iron Cross, reputedly saying that it was the kind of decoration he would ”wipe his ass with”, but had carried the highest Finnish decoration prominently on his tunic as long as he wore the Finnish uniform even after the war.
Now, Skurnik and his family were about to leave Finland on the Albatross.
I led the man to the communications room and explained it to Pasanen who just nodded. I then opened a phone line to Voionmaa's office and handed the earpiece to Skurnik. A discussion followed, and even if I only heard what the former military doctor said, I got the gist of it – Voionmaa hid behind his lack of orders and Skurnik could not change his mind, for all his strong words. In the end, dejected, Skurnik lowered the earpiece and looked at me mournfully.
”Thank you anyway”, he said, put his fur hat on and left without another word.
Just then, yet another flight of aircraft passed the port, making a deafening sound as it went.
I sat down and thought of the situation for a while. Then, I went to Pasanen and asked him to the other room for a while.
”Pete”, I said to him, using his nickname for effect, ”we need to do something. You know what they say about Jews in Germany. You know what happens in Russia. If there will be war again, you know that the Jews on that ship will be the first people the Nazis will attack. We can't just wait helplessly to see what happens to all those 754 people”
My argument went on further, I can't remember my exact words, but I thought they had an effect on Pasanen. After a while, he got this familiar, blank look on his face like he was really thinking about something.
”All right, Vainio”, he said finally. I have an idea I'd like to try. It'll get us in big trouble if it doesn't work out.”
A mischievous smile spread on his face.
”Besides, what can they do? Send us to Petsamo?”
Pasanen donned his overcoat, took his hat and told me to wait for a while. Then he left through the door.
Right then, I realized that while I had been listening to John's story, the baseball fans had finished their beers and were demanding more. I went to pour them more to drink and then returned to the table, happy that the couple in the corner had eyes only for them and wanted no more drinks and that no more people had yet arrived into the bar.
After half an hour, maybe more, Pasanen returned. He then asked Virtanen and Lastumäki to leave the room, sat down and looked at me seriously.
”All right, lets do this. Get me a phone line to Voionmaa. Tell him it's the Navy Headquarters calling.”
”But we have no call from the HQ”, I protested.
”I know. Just make the call.”
I did so. I heard the phone ringing, and then the commodore answering it.
”Voionmaa.”
”Com...Commodore”, I stammered, ”It is Seaman Vainio from Comms. I have an urgent call from the Navy HQ for you.”
I could almost hear him frowning at the other end of the line.
”All right seaman, put it through.”
After that, I handed the receiver to Pasanen who put a piece of cloth on the microphone, winked at me and started speaking.
”Is this Petsamo?”, he said in an older man's voice. I realized what he was doing. I had heard that voice in his Christmas party routine just weeks ago.
”This is Voionmaa, yes”, the commodore answered.
”Unto, it's Lennes. Do you have this ship... Albatross... in the port over there?”
From where I was sitting, Pasanen was doing a very good impression of the Navy commander. I would have bought it, definitely.
The question was, would Voionmaa? He knew the Admiral personally, after all.
”Admiral”, the commodore said, ”the Albatross arrived yesterday. The people from the trains are aboard, but we have had no further orders...”
Pasanen raised the volume of his voice for effect.
”The people's already on the ship, really? Dear God, Unto, let the ship go then! This is an order to give the Albatross the go-ahead to leave port!”, he boomed into the microphone.
There was a brief silence on the line before Voionmaa answered.
”Understood, admiral. I'll make sure it happens. Any other instructions?”
”Not right now, no. We're up to our bloody eyeballs with trouble down here. I'll get back to you when we know more. Keep your wits about you, commodore. Good bye now.”
”Good bye... Admiral”, Voionmaa answered, and after a brief paused killed the line.
Pasanen looked at me with some surprise on his face.
”That went surprisingly well”.
I could only agree with him.
After Virtanen and Lastumäki returned to the room, none the wiser about what we had done with Pasanen, I asked the sergeant if it was all right for me to go see what happened at the port. He agreed that it was a good idea.
After a brief walk, I saw the outlines of the Albatross in front of me, a looming mass in the darkening afternoon, the dark hull dotted with lights shining from the portholes. It was only ten or fifteen minutes after the call, but already there were men detaching stout ropes from the bollards where the ship was tied to the shore.
So fixated I was on the ship that I did not realize someone was standing in the shadow next to me.
”Did you have something to do with this?”, Leo Skurnik asked me.
”Maybe”, I said quietly, ”We gave it our best shot at least.”
The man nodded and held out his right hand. His handshake was warm and strong.
After Skurnik took off towards the gangway, I turned back towards the comms centre. And then I saw the same dog again. Loyally guarding the possessions his master had left behind, staring at the ship. It had started snowing in the gloom, making the scene even more miserable. Out of a sudden impulse, I went to the dog, stroked its head and then took a hold of its collar.
”All right boy, I bet someone's missing you right now. Come on, I'll take you to your master.”
As I started forward, the dog didn't even protest but happily followed me. I took him up the gangway and once aboard, tried to find someone to take custody of the animal. After a while, I left the dog with a friendly-looking woman.
When I returned to the gangway, a trio of the harbour's civilian stevedores was detaching it from the boat. One of them looked up to me.
”You coming ashore, seaman?”, one of them asked, ”it's your last chance.”
Right then, the Albatross sounded its fog horn.
The sound drifted across the harbour and towards the snow-filled sky.
”No”, I said to the man, my mind suddenly made.
”I'm staying aboard”.
John drained the last of his beer and smiled.
”And that is how I became a deserter and an immigrant. Like Sergeant Pasanen here can attest to”, he said, nodding towards the older man opposite.
”I haven't been to Finland since. They'd probably arrest me on sight.”
The man he called Pasanen smiled.
”I don't think it is all that bad these days”, he said in his accented English.
”People have been pardoned for worse transgressions. Hell, I was let off with a slap on the wrist for impersonating a full admiral”, he said.
”Happens Admiral Lennes called Voionmaa just five hours later, with essentially the same message. The commodore put two and two together – he was at the Christmas party as well, remember – and had me called to his office.
I know it was you, the old man said and gave me a serious talking-to. Placed me under arrest for a couple of weeks. Had the promotion I had already been promised cancelled. But that was it.”
The bald man looked at his former subordinate and went serious.
”There's one thing you probably don't know, Juha. About three hours after the Albatross embarked, a lone German destroyer arrived to Liinahamari, asking for emergency assistance. It was the Hanna Reitsch of the SS-Marine. Voionmaa told me that the ship had spotted the Albatross, and despite its neutral flag would have stopped and boarded it. It already had its guns trained on the ship if it would not stop and agree to an inspection.
But then the Hanna Reitsch came under attack by a flotilla of smaller Kriegsmarine vessels out of Dietlhafen. It was surprised in the cover of darkness. Shot right up. It was forced to withdraw, and the captain decided to seek help at Liinahamari.”
I looked at the expression change on John's face.
”So without our little antics...”, he started.
The man called Pasanen nodded.
”The Albatross would not have made it.”
”Ai saatana.”
So that is how I learned that the man who I had known as John Watt was a Finnish deserter who in his youth had saved over 750 Jewish people from the Nazis. I can thank Johnny Papers for several things, really – it was John who inspired me to pick up music again and stop just drifting and doing odd jobs. He had heard me play the piano at the bar. He convinced me that I had talent - the guy could really make a good case for it. When I got my second album published by Columbia Records in 1977, I seeked John out to write me a song. That's the story behind Old Sailor some people quote as one of their favorite songs – it is about the Finnish deserter who spent five years as a sailor before he landed in New York and to that bar in the Bowery.
John never made it big, but his music and stories always earned him a living. I heard that in his last years he finally returned to Finland. He was not punished for his desertion, but neither were John or his friend Pasanen commended for their actions in January 1958. It was the kind of thing most people never hear about – just a minor thing in the flow of history. And, to be fair, in comparison to the events of the Second World War, and even what happened during the German Civil War, it really is just a footnote at best.
For some people, though, a footnote like that can change the course of their entire lives.
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