by Sam Pivnik
The answer came soon enough. A knot of Red Cross officials and SS officers had been deep in conversation near the buses. An SS man broke away from them and started marching around us. ‘Prisoners from the West!’ he shouted. ‘Any prisoners from the West. Move to the buses now.’
Left. Left. Right. Left. It was another selection, just as surely as if Dr Mengele was standing in front of me, flicking his grey gloves to right and to left. But almost always to the left. Now it wasn’t a matter of whether you were eighteen, fit and able, or old and crippled or with a family. Now it was a matter of where you were born. The accents all around me were unfamiliar. Away from the Yiddish and Polish of the Maurerschule I could hear snatches of French, Walloon and a completely alien tongue somebody told me was Danish. These men were on their feet, forming into the lines which were bred into them by now, shuffling forward. I heard my mother’s voice – ‘Szlamek, save yourself’ – and felt her hand, loving but firm in the small of my back. I remembered the line of able-bodied men on the Appellplatz in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the men who were going to Fürstengrube, to life. And I knew that my time had come again. As a group trudged past me, I scrambled upright and joined the column. I daren’t look back, at the faces turned to me. I knew no one would call out, give me away, and I suspected many of them had the same idea I did.
It felt like kilometres to those buses, standing there with their doors open and the safety of their leather seats. I could smell the gasoline; almost feel the lurch of a bus I hadn’t ridden in for nearly six years. I was at the door now. And bureaucracy stood in my way. A brown-overcoated civilian stood there, with a clipboard and a pen. Next to him stood a Hauptsturmführer of the SS, still immaculate beneath the death’s head, still in charge for all that the war was supposed to be over.
He asked me, in a German accent I’d never heard before, where I was from and I told him I was French. He narrowed his eyes and spoke again. This time the language was incomprehensible. It must have been French and he was trying to catch me out. If so, he succeeded. For a split second I thought of my old school in Bedzin and wished I’d been less keen on gardening and keener on languages. I pretended to be deaf, but that didn’t work either. Reverting to German, the SS officer told the Red Cross official that I wasn’t French. The official looked me up and down, still a kid in my stripes with my hair growing back and tears in my eyes. He leaned towards me.
‘Where are you actually from, lad?’ he asked.
I hadn’t heard that soft a voice from an official of any kind for years and I confessed at once. ‘Poland,’ I told him.
He smiled. He said he was sorry but they could only take prisoners from the West at the moment. There was only so much room on the buses. Then he straightened and said, louder than he need have done, I thought, ‘The war will be over in a few days. You’ll be safe then.’
I turned back to the Fürstengrube people and noticed others being turned away too. I wasn’t ready for my welcome, but I suppose I should have been. I felt a stinging slap around my head and Oberkapo Hermann Josef was looming over me, calling me a stupid bastard between clenched teeth and asking if I wanted to be shot.
‘Any more nonsense from you, Szlamek and I’ll beat the shit out of you. Sit down!’
I did and watched the lucky ones, those born by the accident of fate in a Western part of Europe, climb aboard the buses and rattle away through the sea mist, disappearing into freedom as if it was a distant, unattainable land I wasn’t going to be allowed to see.
How long we waited there I don’t know. Perhaps they intended to keep us there, sitting curled up on the quayside until the war ended. Perhaps they were going to throw us into the sea. I’d never seen the sea before. Bedzin, Wodzislaw, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fürstengrube: all the places I’d called a kind of home all my life had been far from the coast. And it was made all the more mysterious to me because I couldn’t really see it, just a lapping greyness that merged with the rolling mist.
And out of that mist came a fishing boat, engine chugging and with nets and weights hanging from its hull. It manoeuvred into position and the SS piled fifty or so prisoners on board. As it moved away into the grey distance, a second one came in; then a third. The fourth boat had my name on it and we Fürstengrubers, with an armed Rottenführer leading us, clambered aboard. I didn’t like the wobble and sway as we rocked at the quayside. There was nowhere to sit and anyway there were too many of us on board to make sitting possible. The engines roared and we too were swallowed up by the mist.
I don’t know how far out we’d gone into the Bay of Lübeck when I realised that the sea mist was thinning. Looking back there was no sign of the quay or the little town beyond. Looking ahead a large grey ship loomed out of the gloom. It had three funnels and was huge. I’d never seen a ship like it, not even in pictures. Its grey hull was streaked with rust rivulets and it had obviously seen better days. Halfway up the hull was an open door cut into the grey metal and a deadly-looking rope ladder trailed from it to just above the water level.
A ship’s officer appeared in this doorway in the uniform of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy. He shouted down to the Rottenführer that the ship was already crammed with prisoners. They couldn’t take any more.
‘I’ve got my orders,’ the Rottenführer shouted back. This phrase and others like it I had heard before and would hear again over the years from ex-Nazis anxious to excuse themselves from the madness they’d taken part in.
The naval officer told him to try another ship. We could all see the others, three of them moored nearby, but they were all smaller than this one. If this one was full, what chance would there be on the others? The boat’s pilot had let us drift along the giant hull during this shouted conversation. Now he swung the wheel over and we circled back to the ladder and the doorway. As he did so, I saw, under the grey camouflage paint of the Kriegsmarine, the original name of the ship.
It read SS Cap Arcona.
11
The Cap Arcona
The reports of the Royal Air Force bear out my memory of 3 May 1945. It was a Thursday and low cloud obscured the south-western coast of the Baltic Sea, especially along the coastal strip at Neustadt and the Bay of Lübeck. One by one we grabbed the swaying rope ladder and scrabbled up. There was hardly time to be terrified before I was stumbling in through the hole in the hull and facing, for a moment, impenetrable blackness.
It was the smell that hit me first. As my eyes acclimatised to the dim electric light I could see heads and shoulders as prisoners like me sat in every available space, crammed together like sardines in a tin. The smell told me that these men had been here, in this sea-borne concentration camp, for days and we were among the last to arrive. This was a floating Hell and there was nowhere to go in the congested space. The dead, we discovered, had already been thrown overboard, to float like human debris in the black waters of the Bay of Lübeck. Even our SS guards were rattled and they spoke to the crewmen, asking where they should take us.
The atmosphere crackled with tension. It was clear we’d come aboard against the wishes and the better judgement of the ship’s crew, who resented being ordered around by the SS. What we didn’t know – and the world would not know until much later – is that the Arcona’s captain, Heinrich Bertram, had held out for a whole day against the SS claiming, quite rightly, that his ship’s sanitary arrangements could only cope with about 700 prisoners. We had no way of counting heads but that morning in the Bay of Lübeck we were nearly 4,500. The SS had turned up with an order for the captain’s execution and he had reluctantly given up. He knew perfectly well that if he didn’t the SS would shoot him and load us all on the Arcona anyway.
We were ordered up top and followed our Rottenführer through the mass of stinking humanity. Most of these men, we learned later, were from KL Stutthoff and unlike us, they’d had no respite on the Schmidt Farm. I lost count of the stairs we climbed until we reached what had clearly once been a passenger lounge. There were people here too, of course, hundreds o
f them, sitting in their own filth and muttering among themselves. The scene was like something out of an old painting of Hell because the porthole windows had been painted over and only a grey dim light filtered through onto the huddled ‘passengers’. At least there was just about room to sit down, and I was climbing over people to find my own space when all Hell broke loose. The ship lurched violently with an almighty bang and I went sprawling, along with anybody else who had been on their feet.
I was on all fours now, heart pounding with fear, but with an overriding sense of confusion. What the hell was going on? There was a second lurch and crash and this time the windows blew in, showering us all with flying glass. We were under attack.
If you read the calm collected account of the sinking of the Cap Arcona written by military historians today, it all sounds so orderly, so everyday. There were three prison ships in Lübeck Bay – I’d seen the other two briefly before I got on board the Cap Arcona. The others were the Thielbek and the Athens and there was a fourth vessel too, the Deutschland. All four of them were believed by the Royal Air Force’s Intelligence Units to be carrying SS and probably Wehrmacht in an attempted breakout for Norway, perhaps to continue to fight the war from there. As such they were legitimate targets for Allied bombers and it was only the bad weather on the morning of 3 May that had held off an attack until midday.
The first attack came at 1200 hours when four Typhoon IBs, fighter bombers of the RAF’s 184 Squadron, hit what their reports described as ‘a two-funnel cargo liner of 10,000 tons with steam up in Lübeck Bay’. This was the Deutschland, which had only days before become a hospital ship. Only its funnels were painted white, rather than the whole ship because of a shortage of white paint, and the red cross was only painted on one funnel, facing away from the raiders. The Typhoons fired a total of thirty-two rockets, four of which hit the ship and set it alight.
I knew nothing of this attack at the time and have only read about it since so the Deutschland must have been too far away, in the hazy mist, for us to be aware of it. What I was aware of, though, was the second attack because it was the one that had knocked me off my feet. This was the one delivered by 198 Squadron under Group Captain ‘Johnny’ Johnson, one of Britain’s most celebrated air aces, that tore into the Arcona a little after 1500 hours. Nine Typhoons snarled out over the Bay and sent forty rockets into the stricken ship. I heard and felt the first two of these. The reports state that the shells hit the Arcona amidships, between the funnels. These shells contained 60 pounds of high explosives and the subsequent hits reverberated together with an appalling noise.
What followed was the worst sound I’ve ever heard. It rumbled and boomed away from somewhere below us and it took me a while, kneeling and dazed, to realise what it was. It was the sound of thousands of men screaming in terror, echoing and re-echoing up stairways and through corridors. The Arcona shuddered and now I could smell burning. As if someone had blown a whistle, we were suddenly all on our feet at once and all shouting together in a mad scramble to get out and find the light. Somewhere above me a hatch was thrown open and I could see the grey of the sky. With whatever strength I had left – and it’s astonishing how much strength you still have when your life depends on it – I tried to reach that hatch. I couldn’t, my fingers clawing the smoke-filled air, but my Fürstengrube friend Peter Abramovitch was there, shouting instructions and getting me up on his shoulders. I grabbed the cold metal and hauled myself upwards, taking my weight on my arms and dragging my feet out onto the deck.
The whole ship was vibrating and shuddering under me but all I could see were the planes, painted in camouflage, green and grey, snarling overhead. Time and time again they wheeled and banked, flame bursting from their wing rims as they screamed past me. It was Bedzin all over again, that day when I was playing football and the war came to our world. I was thirteen that day. Now I was eighteen and I’d seen more horrors than most people do in a lifetime. Then the Luftwaffe had been aiming at factories. Now the RAF were aiming at me. And they were supposed to be on our side!
People were running in all directions over the deck and thick grey-black smoke was belching from the area below. Somebody shouted that we were sinking, and I spun round to scrabble in the open hatch and grab Peter’s hands. But they weren’t there.
‘Peter!’ I yelled into the blackness. ‘The ship is on fire! We must get off!’ There was no answer. Peter had gone, carried away in the headlong panic below decks as men desperately looked for a way out.
One of the many rumours today is that the SS had removed the lifeboats and deliberately turned the Arcona into a death ship. This doesn’t take into account the fact that the SS men on board, not to mention the ship’s crew, would all be committing suicide. It also ignores the fact that I saw the lifeboats myself and prisoners desperately trying to release them. The crew were there too, hauling at ropes already on fire and jumping in and out of billows of smoke. Us prisoners had no idea how to release the boats and some of the manila housings gave way, burnt through and more than one boat plummeted downwards to crash into the foaming sea, empty and useless. Others were still welded to the ship’s gantries and impossible to use.
I didn’t give a thought to the men still below decks even though Herzko was there and Peter, Joe and the other lads of the Maurerschule. Sailors on the Arcona who testified to the Allies later, said that the fire on the upper decks spread so fast that there was no time to get the fire-hoses into action and they couldn’t reach the pumps.
Over the side as I clung to the rails in an agony of confusion and indecision I could see the fishing boats that had brought us out to this inferno coming back. It became obvious as I watched what their instructions were. They were picking up anyone in uniform, the Kriegsmarine, the SS, but not us. Anyone in stripes who tried to jump into a trawler was shot at by the SS, either those still on deck or in the boats themselves. Including the people they fished out of the churning sea, the records show that sixteen of the eighty crew were rescued and perhaps 400 of the 500 SS guards. They didn’t collect a single prisoner.
Panic was everywhere. The Cap Arcona was blazing from stern to bows and all I knew was I had to get off. I’d never been a great swimmer and this was a sterner challenge altogether than paddling in the Lesnica river back in the Garden of Eden. I looked over the side. I must have been twenty metres up, the height of a nine-storey building, and the sea far below was littered with debris that the Typhoon’s rockets had blown out of the ship and with the bobbing heads of those trying to swim for it.
I became one of those. I held my breath and jumped. The air rushed into my nose and mouth, billowing up my jacket and stinging my eyes. There wasn’t time for my life to pass before me before I hit the water. It felt like a wall. I didn’t hear the noise and the word ‘splash’ just doesn’t do it justice. The water was like ice and the impact knocked the breath out of me. I went down into the blackness, the daylight on the surface above flashing like searchlights in my head. How many feet I went down I don’t know but it seemed to last forever until I felt myself carried upwards again and broke the surface, taking a huge, agonising gulp of air and trying desperately to remember how to swim. I hadn’t done this since the water storage tank in Fürstengrube but you never forget how it’s done and I doggy-paddled towards a large piece of planking floating nearby.
As I reached it my frozen hands grabbed someone else’s and another half-dead prisoner got there just as I did. We probably both had the same idea, to forget all thoughts of humanity and kick the other bastard away. Other men in the water around us were doing just that, fighting and screaming at each other in a desperate quest for survival. In fact, with both of us clinging to the timber, it became more stable and we were each grateful for the presence of the other. We both hauled ourselves up onto our elbows with our legs dragging in the water.
I can’t describe the noise. The Arcona loomed above us, a blazing wreck, bangs reverberating from the ship’s metal, twisting and buckling in the intense heat. Th
e fishing boats were snarling all around us too, their engines revving and smoking as their crews worked desperately to haul SS men out of the water. Now and again there were bursts of pistol and machine-gun fire as those in the boats scattered prisoners trying to board them. At one point a German torpedo-boat, fast and deadly, roared out of the drifting smoke and its crew sprayed the sea around them with their machine-guns. I saw the spurts of water in neat rows where the bullets ripped the surface and terrified men writhing in the sea as they were hit, falling backwards and plunging below the surface.
I don’t know how long I’d been in the water when I saw the planes coming back. The pilots’ logs will tell you that it was 1600 hours when nine Typhoons of 263 Squadron hit the Deutschland. Minutes later a fourth attack hit the same ship, already on fire. 197 Squadron dropped eight 500-pounders onto the deck. I had once made wooden packing cases for bombs of this size in Herr Killov’s factory back home but of course I had no idea of the weapons carried by the planes snarling over the Cap Arcona again and one of them swooped low over us firing its cannon at us thrashing about in the sea.
Should any of this have happened? Today there is the suggestion that the RAF’s intelligence was faulty, that they should have known the ships they were destroying carried concentration camp prisoners. In that situation, travelling at high speed over a burning sea through dense black smoke, I expect one struggling swimmer looks much like another. I believe the man who pushed the cannon button in his cockpit thought he was killing Germans. That was his job. It was his duty. He flew low over the Bay of Lübeck and then headed west. It was probably his last mission.
Eventually the shooting stopped and the planes had gone. A third prisoner had joined us and together we made a sort of plan. We had no idea what happened when a ship sank, how the downpull can drag anything with it for hundreds of metres around. Almost the last thing that happened on the Cap Arcona was an enormous explosion. There is a theory today that the whole ship had been rigged as a floating bomb by the SS, the fuel tanks filled with gas and incendiary devices. If this was true then it was a fittingly fiendish way for the SS to carry out yet another elaborate form of execution on us. More likely the Arcona went up because of vaporisation of the fuel in the tanks. Whatever the cause, the ship rolled like a dying whale onto her port side to lie half submerged and still burning fiercely. The hull was too hot for anyone to stand on – I could see the metal bulging and buckling. Anybody still left on board must have been dead.
