And I? After the service of remembrance I slunk away to the beach, now shrouded in darkness. There I paced back and forth. Alone, my mind completely blank. Since no wind was blowing, the Baltic lapped the shore listlessly, bearing no message.
* * *
This business has been gnawing at the old boy. Actually, he says, his generation should have been the one. It should have found words for the hardships endured by the Germans fleeing East Prussia: the westward treks in the depths of winter, people dying in blinding snowstorms, expiring by the side of the road or in holes in the ice when the frozen bay known as the Frisches Haff began to break up under the weight of horse-drawn carts after being hit by bombs, and still, from the direction of Heiligenbeil, more and more people streaming across the endless snowy waste, terrified of Russian reprisal… fleeing… white death… Never, he said, should his generation have kept silent about such misery, merely because its own sense of guilt was so overwhelming, merely because for years the need to accept responsibility and show remorse took precedence, with the result that they abandoned the topic to the right wing. This failure, he says, was staggering…
But now the old man, who has worn himself out writing, thinks he has found in me someone who has no choice but to stand in for him and report on the incursion of the Soviet armies into the Reich, on Nemmersdorf, and the consequences. It's true: I'm searching for the right words. But he's not the one forcing me to do this, it's Mother. And it's only because of her that the old man is poking his nose in; she's forcing him to force me, as if all this could be written only under duress, as if nothing could get down on paper without Mother.
He claims that in the days when he knew her she was an inscrutable person, someone you could never pin down to any opinion. He wants my Tulla to have this same diffuse glow, and is disappointed now. Never, he says, would he have thought that the Tulla Pokriefke who survived the disaster would have developed in such a banal direction, turning into a Party functionary and an “activist” obediently fulfilling her quotas. He would have expected something anarchistic of her instead, an irrational act, such as setting off a bomb without a specific motive, or perhaps coming to some horrifying realization. After all, he says, it was the adolescent Tulla who, in the middle of wartime and surrounded by people deliberately turning a blind eye, saw a whitish heap to one side of the Kaiserhafen flak battery, recognized it as human remains, and announced loudly, “That's a pile o' bones!”
The old man doesn't really know Mother. And I? Do I know her any better? Probably only Aunt Jenny has any inkling of her being — or nothingness; at one point she told me, “Fundamentally my friend Tulla should be seen as a nun manque, with stigmata, of course…” This much is clear: Mother is impossible to read. Even as a Party cadre she could not be made to toe the line. When I wanted to go to the West, her only response was, “Well, go on over, for all I care,” and she didn't blow the whistle on me, with the result that considerable pressure was put on her in Schwerin; even the Stasi is supposed to have come knocking, but apparently without success…
In those days she placed all her hopes in me. But then I fizzled out, and she decided I was a waste of time, so as soon as the Wall was gone, she began to knead my son. Konny was only ten or eleven when he fell into his grandmothers clutches. And after the survivors' reunion in Damp, where I was a nonentity, lurking on the edges while he became the crown prince, she pumped him full of tales: tales of the flight, of atrocities, of rapes — tales about things she hadn't experienced in person but that were being told everywhere once Russian tanks rolled across the eastern border of the Reich in October 1944 and advanced into the districts of Goldab and Gumbinnen, tales that spread like wildfire, causing terror and panic.
That's how it must have — could have been. That's more or less the way it was. When units of the German 4th Army managed to retake the town of Nemmersdorf a few days after the advance of the Soviet nth Guards Army, one could smell, see, count, photograph, and film for the newsreels shown in all the cinemas in the Reich how many women had been raped by Russian soldiers, then killed and nailed to barn doors. T-34 tanks had pursued people as they fled and rolled over them. Children who had been shot were left lying in front gardens and in ditches. Even French prisoners of war, who had been forced to work on farms near Nemmersdorf, were liquidated — forty of them, so the story went.
These particulars and others as well I found on the Internet under the address with which I was by now familiar. There was also a translation of an appeal penned by the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, calling on all Russian soldiers to murder, rape, and take revenge for the havoc wreaked by the fascist beasts on the fatherland, revenge for Mother Russia. Under the URL www.blutzeuge.de my son, recognizable only to me, bewailed this state of affairs in the language used during the period in question for official proclamations: “These horrors were visited by subhuman Russians on defenseless German women…” and “Thus the Russian soldateska raged…” and “This terror still menaces all of Europe if no dam is erected against the Asiatic tide…” As an added attraction he had scanned and included a poster used by the German Christian Democrats in the fifties, showing a devouring monster with Asiatic features.
Spread by way of the Internet and downloaded by who knows how many users, these sentences and the captions to the accompanying illustrations could be read as if they applied to current events, even though the crumbling of Russia or the atrocities in the Balkans and in Ruanda were not mentioned. To illustrate his latest campaign, my son needed no more than the corpse-strewn battlefields of the past; no matter who had sown them, they bore a rich harvest.
The only thing left for me to add is that during those few days when Nemmersdorf became the epitome of horror, the contempt for everything Russian that had previously been instilled in Germans abruptly turned into abject fear of the Russians themselves. The newspaper reports, radio commentaries, and newsreel images from the reconquered town triggered a mass exodus from East Prussia, which escalated into panic when the Soviets launched their major offensive in mid-January. As people fled by land, they began to die like flies by the side of the road. I can't describe it. No one can describe it. Just this: some of the refugees reached the ports of Pillau, Danzig, and Gotenhafen. Hundreds of thousands tried to escape by ship from the horror closing in on them. Hundreds of thousands — the statistics tell us over two million made it safely to the West — crowded onto warships, passenger liners, and freighters. So, too, people crowded onto the Wilhelm Gustloff, which had been lying at Gotenhafen's Oxhöft Pier for years.
I wish I could make things as easy for myself as my son, who proclaimed on his Web site, “In a calm and orderly fashion the ship took on the girls and women, mothers and children fleeing before the Russian beast…” Why did he suppress any reference to the thousand U-boat sailors and the 370 members of the naval women's auxiliary, likewise the crews of the hastily dismantled flak batteries? He did mention in passing that at the beginning and toward the end some wounded were brought on board — ”Among them were fighters from the Kurland front, which was still holding against the onslaught of the red tide…” — but in his account of the conversion of the barracks ship into a seaworthy transport vessel, he noted with pedantic precision how many tons of flour and powdered milk, how many slaughtered swine came on board, but said not a word about the Croatian volunteer soldiers pressed into duty, without sufficient training, to supplement the ship's crew. Not a word about the ship's inadequate radio system. Not a word about the emergency drill — ”Close watertight doors!” It is understandable that he emphasized the foresight that went into setting up a delivery room, but what kept him from even hinting that his grandmother was in the advanced stages of pregnancy? And not a word about the ten missing lifeboats, which had been commandeered for spreading a smoke screen in the harbor during air raids, and replaced by smaller-capacity rowboats and hastily stacked and roped-together life rafts, filled with compacted kapok. The Gustloff was to be presented to Internet users as a refug
ee ship only.
Why did Konny lie? Why did the boy deceive himself and others? Why, when he was otherwise such a stickler for detail, and knew every inch of the ship, from the shaft tunnel to the most remote corner of the onboard laundry, did he refuse to admit that it was neither a Red Cross transport nor a cargo ship that lay tied up at the dock, loaded exclusively with refugees, but an armed passenger liner under the command of the navy, into which the most varied freight had been packed? Why did he deny facts available in print for years, facts that even the eternal has-beens hardly contested anymore? Did he want to fabricate a war crime and impress the skinheads in Germany and elsewhere with a prettied-up version of what had actually happened? Was his emotional need for clear-cut victims so compelling that his Web site could not accommodate even an appearance by the civilian Captain Petersen's military nemesis, Lieutenant Commander Zahn, accompanied by his German shepherd?
I can only suspect what induced Konny to cheat: the desire for an unambiguous enemy. But the story about the dog I have straight from Mother as actual fact; even as a child she was fixated on German shepherds. Zahn had had his Hassan on board for years. Whether on deck or in the mess, the officer always appeared with his dog in tow. Mother said, “From down on the dock — where we had to wait before they let us on — we could see clearly a captain or some such standing up there at the railing with that pooch of his and looking down at us refugees. The dog was almost exactly like our Harras…”
She could also describe the situation on the dock: “You wouldn't believe the pushing and shoving, total confusion. In the beginning they were keeping a neat list — everyone who came up the gangway — but then the paper ran out…” So the numbers will forever remain uncertain. But what do numbers tell us? Numbers are never accurate. In the end you always have to guess.
Among the 6,600 persons recorded were a good 5,000 refugees. But from 28 January on, additional hordes of people, who were no longer being counted, stormed up the gangplank. Was it two or three thousand, destined to remain numberless and nameless? Approximately that number of extra meal cards was printed on board and distributed by the girls of the naval auxiliary, who had been pressed into service. It didn't matter, and still doesn't, if there were a few hundred more or less. No one has precise figures. It is not known either how many baby carriages were stowed in the hold; and it can only be estimated that in the end the ship held close to four and a half thousand infants, children, and youths.
Finally, when no more was possible, a few last wounded and a final squad of women's auxiliaries were squeezed in, the young girls being billeted in the emptied swimming pool on E deck, below the ship's water-line, because no more cabins were available, and all the lounges were already filled with mattresses.
This specific location must be repeated and emphasized, because my son breathed not a word about anything connected with the naval auxiliaries and the swimming pool as a death trap. Only when he waxed indignant on his Web site about rapes, did he speak, almost rhapsodically, of the “young maidens whose innocence was supposed to be protected by the ship from the depredations of the Russian beast…”
When I came upon this nonsense, I again took action, but without identifying myself as his father. When his chat room opened, I lobbed in my objections: “Your maidens in distress were wearing uniforms, attractive ones, even. Knee-length grayish-blue skirts and close-fitting jackets. Their caps, with the imperial eagle gripping the swastika in front, perched rakishly atop their hairdos. All of them, whether innocent or not, had undergone military training and had sworn the loyalty oath to their Führer…”
But my son didn't care to communicate with me. Only with his invented adversary, whom he lectured in the tone of a classic racist: “As a Jew you will never be able to grasp how much the violation of German girls and women by Kalmucks, Tatars, and other Mongol types still hurts. But what would you Jews know about purity of the blood!”
That couldn't be something Mother had drummed into him. Or could it? Not so long ago, when I had visited her in Grosser Dreesch and had laid on her coffee table my fairly objective article on the controversy over the proposed Holocaust memorial in Berlin, she told me about someone who once turned up at her uncles carpentry shop, “a fat kid with freckles” who drew a fairly good likeness of the dog lying chained up there: “He was a Yid, and he had some weird notions. But he was only half Jewish, so my papa said. And he said it out loud, too, before he kicked that Yid — Amsel was his name — out of our courtyard…”
On the morning of the thirtieth, Mother finally managed to get on board, with her parents. “We was just in the nick of time…” They lost some of their luggage in the process. At noon the order arrived for the Gustloff raise anchor and cast off. Hundreds were left behind on the pier.
“Mama and Papa were ashamed of me, of course, with my big belly. Every time one of the other refugees asked about me, Mama would say, 'Her fiances fighting at the front.' Or: 'There was supposed to be a long-distance wedding with her fiance, who's fighting on the western front. If only he hasn't been killed.' But to me all they talked about was the shame. It was good they separated us right away on the ship. Mama and Papa had to go way down into the belly of the ship, where there was still a bit of room left. I was sent up to the maternity ward…”
But we haven't reached that point yet. Again I have to do a little crab walk in order to move forward: the previous day, and then all through a long night, the Pokriefkes sat on their too many suitcases and bundles, in the midst of a crowd of refugees, most of them exhausted from the long trek. They came from the Kurische Nehrung, from the Samland Peninsula, from Masuria. A last batch had fled from nearby Elbing; Russian tanks had rolled through, but the fighting for control seemed to continue. Also more and more women and children from Danzig, Zoppot, and Gotenhafen crowded in among the horse-drawn carts, farm wagons, baby carriages, and many sleighs. Mother told me about abandoned dogs who weren't allowed on board and because they were hungry made the piers unsafe. The East Prussian farm horses had been unharnessed and either turned over to the Wehrmacht units in the city or sent to the slaughterhouse. Mother didn't know exactly. But it was only the dogs she felt compassion for: “They bayed all night long like wolves…”
When the Pokriefkes left Eisenstrasse, their relatives the Liebenaus refused to pack up and follow the helper's family. The master carpenter was too attached to his workbenches, his circular and band saws, the finishing machine, the stacks of lumber in the shed, and apartment house 19, which belonged to him. His son Harry, whom Mother implicated temporarily as my possible father, had already received his call-up notice the previous fall. Somewhere, along one of the many retreating fronts, he must have been a radio operator or a member of the armored infantry.
After the war I learned that the Poles had expelled my possible grandfather and his wife, like all Germans who had remained in the region. We heard that both of them died not long afterward in the West, one right after the other, most likely in Lüneburg — he probably out of sorrow for his lost shop and all the window and door hardware stored in the apartment house's cellar. The watchdog, in whose kennel Mother is supposed to have spent a week as a child, was dead long since; before the war someone — she says, “A pal of the Yid's” — poisoned him.
It can be assumed that the Pokriefkes came aboard with one of the last lots, allowed on because their daughter was visibly pregnant. With August Pokriefke might there have been trouble; the MPs patrolling the pier could have pulled him out as fit for the Volkssturm. But since he, as Mother said, was only “a half-pint,” he managed to bluff his way through. At the end, supervision became porous in any case. Conditions were chaotic. Children ended up on board without their mothers. And mothers lost hold of their children's hands in the shoving on the gangway and couldn't save them from being pushed over the edge and disappearing into the water between ship's hull and the wall of the pier. It did no good to scream.
The Pokriefkes might have found room on the steamers Oceania and An
tonio Delfino instead, although they too were overloaded with refugees. These two ships were also tied up at the Gotenhafen-Oxhöft pier, known as the Quay of Good Hope; and the two medium-sized transports did reach their destinations, Kiel and Copenhagen, safely. But Erna Pokriefke was “determined” to get onto the Gustloff, “come hell or high water,” because she had such happy memories of her KDF cruise to the Norwegian fjords on what was in those days a gleaming white ship. She had stuffed into her luggage the photo album with snapshots from that trip.
Erna and August Pokriefke must have found it hard to recognize the ship's interior, for all the reception areas and dining rooms, the library, the Folk Costume Lounge, and the Music Room had been emptied, stripped of all pictures on the walls, and reduced to mattress encampments. Even the glassed-in promenade deck and the corridors were crammed with people. Since thousands of children, both counted and uncounted, constituted part of the ship's human freight, their crying mixed with the blare of the loudspeakers, which were constantly announcing the names of lost boys and girls.
When the Pokriefkes came on board, without being recorded, Mother was separated from her parents. A nurse made the decision. We will never know whether the couple was jammed by the naval auxiliaries on duty into an already occupied cabin or whether they found a spot in a mass dormitory, along with what remained of their luggage. Tulla Pokriefke would never see the photo album and her parents again. I use this order deliberately, because I am fairly certain that the loss of the photo album was especially painful for Mother, for with it were lost all the pictures, shot with the family Kodak box camera, of her with her curly-haired brother Konrad on the boardwalk in Zoppot, with her girlfriend Jenny and Jenny s adoptive father, Dr. Brunies, in front of the Gutenberg monument in the Jäschkental Forest, as well as several with Harras, the pure-blooded German shepherd and famous breeding dog.
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