In the Soviet era, Wolf Messing performed on the stage as an illusionist artist, supposedly reading the public's thoughts. In Perestroika, they began to write about him as almost the greatest psychic of the twentieth century. Today we know a lot about him and sometimes shocking information, but no one can figure out where the truth is and where the fiction is.
The ability to suggestion manifested itself in Messing as a child
Biographical sources tell the following about Wolf Messing. He was born on September 10, 1899 in the Jewish town of Gora-Kalevaria near Warsaw (the territory of the former Russian Empire). After graduating from a local school (cheder), he was sent to an educational institution that trained clergymen - yeshibot. But the boy quickly fled from there - he had no desire to devote himself to God. He took some pennies from the donation mug and went to Berlin. And during the train journey, the first miracle happened in his life. When the controller demanded a ticket from him, which Messing, of course, did not have, he handed the controller some piece of paper found on the floor and looked him straight in the eyes - he really wanted the piece to be mistaken for a ticket. And it worked! The inspector has validated the ticket!
Messing managed to escape from prison using hypnosis
Messing assured that he had prophesied defeat to Hitler and therefore turned into persona non grata. Besides, he was a Jew. The artist tried to hide, but one day he was arrested anyway and put in a prison cell. He understood that he had no way of getting out alive in the usual way. Then Messing decided to use his abilities. By force of suggestion, he forced all the police station where he was being held to gather in his cell, and he himself rushed out into the corridor and locked the door from the outside. When the "haze" disappeared and the police came to their senses, the fugitive was already far away.
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Stalin gave Messing a check
According to Messing's recollections, he came to the Soviet Union in 1939, after his entire family died in Majdanek. He was taken out of Warsaw on a cart under the hay and helped to reach the border with the USSR. There he got a job in a brigade of Brest actors, with whom he traveled throughout Belarus. Once in Gomel, two strangers took him to a hotel room, where he met … with Stalin. He asked him about Poland, about Jozef Pilsudski, and then gave him the task: to get 100,000 rubles from the bank on a clean piece of paper. I had to convince the cashier that he sees a check for 100 thousand. True, when the cashier came to his senses and saw a blank sheet of paper in front of him instead of a check, he had a heart attack. Another task given to him by Stalin was to get into L. Beria's office without a pass, bypassing the guards. Messing easily coped with this.
Messing's abilities - a myth?
There is a version that Messing's memoirs, published under the title "I am a telepath," were in fact written by the famous journalist Mikhail Khvastunov, who was in charge of the science department of Komsomolskaya Pravda. The fact that many of the facts presented in the book are fictional was confirmed by people from the entourage of Messing and Khvastunov. It was just necessary to come up with a beautiful legend for the illusionist. And whether Messing actually possessed some unusual abilities or could only show tricks on stage is unknown.
Many facts from Messing's memoirs proved impossible to verify
In 1965, the journal Science and Religion published Messing's memoirs. In them, Messing claimed that in 1915 in Vienna he met with Albert Einstein at the physicist's apartment. However, it turned out that Einstein never had an apartment in Vienna, and from 1913 to 1925, the scientist never visited this city.
Another of Messing's most famous claims was that he, performing in one of the theaters in occupied Warsaw, predicted Hitler's collapse if he turned to the East. After that, the occupation authorities assigned 200,000 marks for his head. However, there is no evidence for this story. In the sources of the times of the fascist occupation of Poland, there is not a single word about the artist Messing.
Messing did not read minds, he "read muscles"
In his lifetime interviews, Messing said that in his youth he performed in traveling circuses, participating in the numbers of illusionists. Then he mastered the so-called "pop telepathy". “This is not mind reading, but, if I may put it that way, 'muscle reading,'” he said. - When a person intensely thinks about something, brain cells transmit impulses to all muscles of the body. Their movements, invisible to the simple eye, are easily perceived by me … I often perform mental tasks without direct contact with the inductor. Here I can use the inductor's respiration rate, the beating of its pulse, the timbre of the voice, the nature of the gait, etc.
During the war, Messing gave money to build a fighter plane. And that may very well be true. In 1942, the artist was summoned by a party official from the State Concert and asked how much he was willing to donate to the needs of the front. “Thirty thousand,” answered Wolf Grigorievich. “Wolf Grigorievich,” the official chuckled, “yes, our collective farmers donate tanks and planes to the front, and you with your income …” In the end, Messing signed up for fifty thousand rubles and said goodbye. The next day, he was arrested on charges of spying for the Germans. The NKVD officers processed the artist for several days, promising to drop the charges against him if he … gives a million rubles for the plane.
Some time later, articles appeared in the newspapers that the famous pop artist presented a fighter jet to the Soviet front, on which the Hero of the Soviet Union pilot Konstantin Kovalev now flies.