One of the most enigmatic personalities of the past century, Wolf Messing was born into a Jewish family and was wanted by Josef Stalin and hated by Adolf Hitler. The phenomenal ability of this legendary man is still shrouded in mystery…
Wolf Messing was born on September 10, 1899, in a village not far from Warsaw. His father and brothers perished in the Maidanek death camp during World War Two. His mother did not live to see that though… Many Polish Jews were then going to Germany driven by scathing poverty and unemployment. The little Wolf was also on his way there. Having no money to buy a train ticket, he hid under the seat and fell asleep… A short while later his slumber was cut short by a ticket checker loudly requesting his ticket. The boy was scared to death and with pretty good reason too because in Hitler’s Germany any transgression, even a free ride could easily cost one his life. His eyes glued to the controller’s, the shaken boy proffered a trembling hand clutching a scrap of newspaper mentally beseeching the man to take it for a ticket. The controller gave him a strange glance: “Why are you hiding then, you little fool? C’mon, get up, we are arriving in Berlin shortly!” he said punching the piece of paper Wolf had offered him.
The boy took some time to realize his suggestive powers though. He explained his luck with the ticket checker as the man being too tired to take a better look or, maybe simply feeling pity for him. It took another incident for Wolf to finally appreciate his supernatural powers…
In Berlin, sweeps were fast becoming a routine affair and many Jews never showed up at home after work being instead whisked away to concentration camps or being summarily executed. Being a Jew, Wolf Messing finally got caught by that deadly dragnet... Having neither an ID card not a job certificate and almost starving, he was thrown behind bars. Another close call… He thought how great it would be if the wardens left his cell unattended and retired into a faraway room. Well, this crazy idea miraculously came true! Shortly after, the guards left. Then they came back only to see that their young captive was gone! Wolf Messing then landed the job of a messenger. Once, hauling a hefty parcel, the starving young man blacked out. Thinking the boy was dead, the doctors sent the body to the mortuary where, much to Wolf’s luck, a young intern managed to feel his heartbeat. Waking up, Messing was told he had been in a coma for a whole three days. Interested, Doctor Abel started teaching the teen the art of telepathy, which was very much in vogue back in those days. Doctor Abel also found him a job with a wax museum where Messing wowed the public five days a week lying inside a crystal casket pretending he was dead.
His first concerts, box office grabbers all, were in Vienna in 1915. It was then and there that Wolf Messing made the acquaintance of Albert Einstein. The great psychoanalyst Zigmund Freud, who was then staying with the great physicist, wanted to check out the young man’s extraordinary mind-reading abilities. Acting on Freud’s mental orders, the shy and self-effacing Wolf went up to the table and picking up a pincer, plucked out three hairs from the host’s famous moustache. A puzzled Einstein winced in pain and Freud gave out a satisfied chuckle. Messing had read out Freud’s mind and stood the test just perfectly! Buoyed by that initial success, Wolf started touring the world as a psychic entertainer. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 Messing fled the country to escape the wrath of Adolf Hitler whose death in 1945 he had publicly prophesied. Messing was wanted by the Fuhrer after declaring his prophesy about Germany’s defeat during its attempted invasion of the east and offered a sum of 200,000 marks for his head. Arrested before he could leave the country, Messing was thrown behind bars. Unfazed by his predicament, he mentally ordered his prison guards to assemble in his cell and, locking them up there, he managed to get away to Moscow. Knowing very little Russian and having no definite profession, Messing took a mere six months to gain a superstar status in the Soviet Union where magicians and mesmerists were never much liked by the country’s Communist authorities. Who knows, maybe he owed his officially backed popularity to a prediction that red-starred tanks would some day be rumbling up and down the Berlin streets?
Word about the great Wolf Messing finally reached the Kremlin and Josef Stalin wanted to see him. Overawed, Messing started showing off his supernatural psychic powers. Puffing on his pipe, Stalin said, “Well, you could rob a bank this way, right?” “Yes, I could…” Messing replied. Shortly after, Wolf Messing, with a bevy of security agents in tow, walked into the Central Bank headquarters in Moscow with an order to take away 100,000 rubles. Walking up to the teller’s window, Messing handed him a blank sheet of paper and opened his briefcase. Receiving a mental order, the no-nonsense teller carefully examined the paper and readily produced the required sum. Messing left the building and immediately returned giving the money back to the teller. The man stared at the empty sheet of paper for one brief moment and… went down unconscious!
On at least one occasion, Messing was able to predict a man’s fate by looking at his photograph. He was able to foretell the future (when he was forced to by circumstances) with accuracy. Messing wrote that foresight or clairvoyance does exist. We cannot explain such phenomena because we have yet to clearly understand the essence of time, its connection to space, and the interconnectedness between past, present, and future.
Wolf Messing lived 76 years. Even a magician of his stature is powerless in the face of Death. Wolf Messing took the secret of his amazing psychic powers with him…
