And then Mother said, “Not till the third boom” had Dr. Richter turned up to check on the women in the maternity ward. “By that time all hell'd broke loose!” she exclaimed every time her neverending story reached number 3.
The last torpedo hit the engine room amidships, knocking out not only the engines but also the interior lighting on all decks, as well as the ship's other systems. After that everything took place in darkness. Only the emergency lighting that came on a few minutes later provided some sense of orientation amid the chaos, as panic broke out everywhere on the two-hundred-meter-long and ten-story-high ship, which could no longer send out an SOS; the equipment in the radio room had also gone dead. Only from the torpedo boat Löwe did the repeated call go out into the ether: “Gustloff sinking after three torpedo strikes!” In between, the location of the sinking ship was transmitted over and over, for hours: “Position Stolpmünde, 55.07 degrees north, 17.42 degrees east. Request assistance…”
On S-13, the successful hits and the soon unmistakable sinking of the target gave rise to quiet rejoicing. Captain Marinesko issued an order for the partially pre-flooded submarine to submerge, because he knew that this close to the coast, and especially over the Stolpen Bank, there was little protection from depth charges. First the torpedo stuck in tube 2 had to be disarmed; if it remained sitting there, ready for ignition, with the firing motor running, the slightest vibration could cause it to explode. Fortunately no depth charges were dropped. The torpedo boat Löwe, its engines cut, was sweeping the mortally wounded ship with its searchlights.
On our global playground, the vaunted ultimate venue for communication, the Soviet U-boat S-13 was labeled categorically “the murder vessel,” this on the Web site to which I had a familial connection. The crew of this naval unit belonging to the Baltic Red Banner Fleet were condemned as “murderers of women and children.” On the Internet my son set himself up as the judge. When his bosom enemy raised objections — all he could think of was cranking up his antifascist prayer wheel and calling attention to the high-ranking Nazis and military personnel on board, and the 3-cm antiaircraft guns mounted on the sundeck — they were no match for the comments that now flooded in from all continents. Most of the chatters chimed in in German, with scraps of English. The usual hate stuff, but also pious invocations of the apocalypse, filled my screen. Exclamation points following the balance of terror. Here and there casualty figures from other maritime disasters for purposes of comparison.
The frequently filmed drama of the Titanic was trying to maintain its lead. Close behind came the Lusitania, sunk during the First World War by a German U-boat, which supposedly led to the USA's entry into the war, or at least hastened it. A lone voice also piped up with the sinking of the Cap Arcona, loaded with concentration-camp inmates, by English bombers in the Bay of Neustadt in Holstein; this mistake occurred only a few days before the end of the war, and for now topped the charts on the Internet, with seven thousand dead. Then the Goya climbed to the same level. But in the end the Gustloff won out in this competitive numerical chatter. With the zeal fueled by his passion for thoroughness, my son had succeeded in using his Web site to draw the right-wing circles' muddled attention to the forgotten ship and its human cargo, rendering the vessel visible in the form of a schematic drawing, with jagged-edged circles marking the spots where the torpedoes had hit, so that from then on the ship's name came to carry global significance as the epitome of disaster.
But the statistics fighting it out in cyberspace had little to do with what actually took place on the Wilhelm Gustloff, starting at 2116 hours on 30 January 1945. In spite of the overly drawn-out prologue, Frank Wisbar did a better job of capturing, in his black-and-white film Night Fell over Gotenhafen, something of the panic that erupted on all decks when the three hits caused the ship to heel to port, with the bow already under water from the first hit.
Past omissions came home to roost. Why hadn't the lifeboats, of which there were too few in any case, been swung out in anticipation of being needed? Why hadn't the davits and block and tackle been deiced at regular intervals? In addition, there was the absence of the crew members trapped in the forward part of the ship when the watertight doors were closed — and perhaps even still alive. The naval recruits from the training division had no experience with lifeboats. The mass of people crowding from the upper decks onto the slick, ice-coated sundeck, which was also the boat deck, slipped and slid as the boat listed. Already the first ones went flying overboard, because there was nothing to hang on to. Not all of those who fell wore life jackets. Now many jumped into the water out of sheer panic. Because of the heat inside the ship, most of those making their way onto the sundeck were too lightly dressed to withstand the shock of an air temperature of — 18 °Celsius and correspondingly low water temperature — was it two or three degrees warmer? Even so they jumped.
From the bridge came orders to steer all those pushing toward the boat deck into the glass-enclosed lower promenade deck, to shut the doors and post armed guards, in the hope that rescue ships would arrive. The order was strictly enforced. This glass case measuring 165 meters and stretching from port to starboard imprisoned a thousand people or more. Not until the very end, when it was too late, did some sections of the promenade deck's plate glass shatter from the pressure.
But what took place inside the ship cannot be captured in words. Mothers phrase for anything indescribable — ”There's no notes in the scale for it…” — expresses what I dimly mean. So I won't even try to imagine those terrible sights and to force the gruesome scene into painstakingly depicted images, no matter how my employer is pressuring me to present a series of individual fates, to convey the entire situation with sweeping narrative equanimity and the utmost empathy and thus, with words of horror, do justice to the full extent of the catastrophe.
Such an attempt was undertaken by that black-and-white film, with images shot in a studio. You see masses of people pushing, clogged corridors, the struggle for every step up the staircase; you see costumed extras imprisoned in the closed promenade deck, feel the ship listing, see the water rising, see people swimming inside the ship, see people drowning. And you see children in the film. Children separated from their mothers. Children holding dangling dolls. Children wandering lost along corridors that have already been vacated. Close-ups of the eyes of individual children. But the more than four thousand infants, children, and youths for whom no survival was possible were not filmed, simply for reasons of expense; they remained, and will remain, an abstract number, like all the other numbers in the thousands, hundred thousands, millions, that then as now could only be estimated. One zero more or less — what does it matter? In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.
I can only report what has been quoted elsewhere from the testimony of survivors. On broad staircases and narrow companionways old people and children were trampled to death. It was every man for himself. The more considerate among them tried to steal a march on death. Thus one training officer is said to have gathered his family in the cabin assigned to them, where he shot first his three children, then his wife, and finally himself with his service revolver. Similar stories are told of prominent Party members and their families, who put an end to their lives in those very luxury staterooms built for Hitler and his vassal Ley and now providing the setting for self-activated liquidation. It may be assumed that Hassan, the lieutenant commander's dog, was likewise shot, by his master. On the ice-coated sundeck, weapons also had to be used, because the order “Only women and children to the boats” was not being observed, with the end result that primarily men survived, as the statistics proved, those statistics that wrap up life soberly and without commentary.
A boat that could have accommodated fifty was lowered into the water prematurely, with only about a dozen sailors in it. Another boat, having been let down too hastily and still attached by the cable in front, tipped all its passengers into the choppy sea and then, when the cable snapped, fell on top of those who we
re floundering in the water. Reportedly only lifeboat 4, half occupied by women and children, was lowered correctly. Since the critically wounded soldiers in the emergency ward set up in the Bower were doomed in any case, medics tried to get some of the less seriously wounded into the boats: in vain.
Even those in charge thought only of themselves. There is a report of a high-ranking officer who fetched his wife from their cabin on the upper deck and began to deice the mountings of a motor launch that had been used in KDF times as an excursion boat during trips to Norway. When he finally succeeded in swinging the motor boat out, wonder of wonders, the electric windlass was working. As the launch was being lowered from the boat deck, the women and children imprisoned in the enclosed promenade deck saw it through the plate-glass panels, only half occupied; and the occupants of the launch caught sight for a moment of the mass of humanity crammed in behind the glass. The two groups could have waved to each other. The rest of what happened inside the ship remained unseen, never to be put into words.
All I know is how Mother was rescued. “Right after that last boom, the labor pains started…” As a child, when I heard her begin that way, I thought I was in for a thrilling adventure story, but she soon punctured the expectation: “And then the nice doctor quickly gave me a shot…” She had been scared of the “prick,” “but that stopped the pains…”
It must have been Dr. Richter who saw to it that two new mothers with their infants and Mother were helped across the slippery sundeck by the head nurse and seated in a boat that had already been swung out of its berth and was suspended in its davits. With another pregnant woman and one who had suffered a miscarriage, the doctor reportedly soon afterward found a spot in one of the last boats — apparently without Nurse Helga.
Mother told me that as the ship listed more sharply, one of the 3-cm antiaircraft guns on the afterdeck broke free from its mounting, plummeted overboard, and smashed a fully occupied lifeboat that had just been lowered. “That boat was right next to us. Just goes to show how lucky we were…”
So I left the sinking ship in Mother's womb. Our boat cast off, and, surrounded by drifting bodies, some still alive, others already dead, put some distance between itself and the listing port side of the ship, from which I would like to extract another story or two before it's too late. For instance, the one about the popular ship's hairdresser, who for years had been collecting the increasingly rare silver five-mark pieces. Now he leaped into the sea with a bulging pouch on his belt, and the weight of the silver promptly… But I'm not allowed to tell any more stories.
I am advised to cut it short, no, my employer insists. Since I'm not managing in any case, he says, to capture the thousandfold dying in the belly of the boat and in the icy water, to perform a German requiem or a maritime danse macabre, I should leave well enough alone, get to the point. He means my birth.
But the moment has not yet come. In the boat in which Mother was seated, without parents or luggage, but with postponed contractions, all the occupants had a clear view from an increasing distance, and whenever a wave lifted them, of the Wilhelm Gustloff, sinking at a catastrophically steep angle. As the searchlight of the escort vessel, which was holding its position to one side in heavy seas, kept raking the bridge superstructure, the glassed-in promenade deck, and the sundeck, tilted sharply up to starboard, those who had managed to escape into the boat witnessed individuals and clumps of people hurtling overboard. And close by, Mother, and all those who wanted to see, saw people drifting in their life jackets, some still alive and calling out loudly or feebly for help, pleading to be taken into the lifeboats, and others, already dead, who looked as if they were asleep. But even worse, Mother said, was the fate of the children: “They all skidded off the ship the wrong way round, headfirst. So there they was, floating in them bulky life jackets, their little legs poking up in the air…”
Later, when Mother was asked by the journeymen in her carpenters' brigade or by the man with whom she was sleeping at the moment, how she had come to have white hair at such a young age, she would say, “It happened when I saw all them little children, head down in the water…”
It's possible that this really was when the shock first took effect. When I was a child and mother was in her mid-twenties, she displayed her cropped white hair like a trophy. Whenever someone asked, it brought up a subject that was not allowed in the Workers' and Peasants' State: the Gustloff and its sinking. But sometimes, with cautious casualness, she would also talk about the Soviet U-boat and the three torpedoes; she always employed stilted High German when she referred to the commander of S-13 and his men as “the heroes of the Soviet Union allied to us workers in friendship.”
Around the time when, according to Mothers testimony, her hair suddenly turned white — probably a good half hour after the torpedoes struck their target — the crew of the submerged submarine were keeping still, expecting depth charges, which, however, did not come. No sound of an approaching ship's propeller. None of the drama one associates with scenes in U-boat films. But Petty Officer Shnapzev, whose assignment was to pick up external noises in his earphones, heard the sounds from the body of the sinking ship: rumbling, caused when engine blocks broke free from their mountings, a loud popping when, after a brief creaking, the watertight doors snapped under the water pressure, and other indefinable noises. All this he reported to his commander in an undertone.
Since in the meantime the torpedo stuck in tube 2 and dedicated to Stalin had been disarmed, and the order for absolute silence in the boat was still in force, the petty officer with the earphones could pick up, in addition to the sounds that made the dying and still anonymous ship audible to him, the distant noise of the escort vessel, moving slowly. No danger emanated from there. Human voices he did not hear.
It was the torpedo boat, still holding its position with engines throttled, from whose railing ropes were lowered to fish the living and the dead out of the water. Since its only motorized dinghy was iced up, besides which the motor refused to start, it could not be used to help with the rescue effort. Ropes were the only devices available. About two hundred survivors came on board in this fashion.
When the first of the few lifeboats that could get free of the hesitantly capsizing ship headed for the Löwe and came alongside in the light cone of its searchlight, they had trouble docking in the choppy sea. Mother, who was in one of the boats, said, “First a wave would lift us high up, so we was looking down on the Löwe, then we'd be in the cellar, with the Löwe way above over us…”
Only when the lifeboat hovered at the level of the torpedo boat's railing — which meant for seconds at a time — did it prove possible to transfer individual survivors to safety. Anyone who missed the jump fell between the boats and was lost. But with luck Mother landed aboard a warship with only 768 tons of displacement, launched in '38 from a Norwegian wharf, christened the Gyller, placed in Norwegian service, and seized by the German navy when Norway was occupied in '40.
Two sailors from the escort ship with this prehistory hoisted Mother over the railing. She lost her shoes in the process, and they had hardly wrapped her in a blanket and taken her to the cabin of the engineer on duty when the contractions resumed.
Make a wish! It's not that I want to introduce a distraction, which a certain someone might impute to me; but instead of being born to Mother on the Löwe, I wish I could have been that foundling rescued by the patrol boat VP-1J03 seven hours after the ship went down. That happened after additional ships, chief among them the torpedo boat T-36, then the steamers Gotenland and Göttingen, had plucked the few survivors from the swell amid ice porridge, ice floes, and many lifeless bodies.
In Gotenhafen, the SOS calls broadcast repeatedly by the Lowe's radio operator were reported to the captain of the patrol boat. He immediately set out in his rust bucket, and came upon a sea of corpses. Nonetheless he repeatedly scanned the sea with the onboard searchlight, until the cone of light picked up a lifeboat that was drifting as if unmanned. Chief Botswain Fick climb
ed down into the boat and found, next to the stiffened corpses of a woman and a half-grown girl, a frozen bundle wrapped in a wool blanket, which, when brought aboard VP-1J03 and freed of the outer coating of ice, was unrolled, bringing to light that infant I would like to have been: a foundling without parents, the last survivor of the Wilhelm Gustloff.
The fleet doctor, who happened to be on duty on the patrol boat that night, felt the infants weak pulse, started resuscitation efforts, ventured to administer a camphor injection, and did not rest until the child, a boy, opened his eyes. The doctor estimated his age at eleven months, and set up a provisional document in which he recorded all the important details — the lack of a name, the unknown origin, the approximate age, the day and hour of the rescue, and the name and rank of the rescuer.
That would have suited me: to have been born not on that ill-starred 30 January but at the end of February or the beginning of March '44 in some East Prussian hamlet, on an unknown day, to Mother Unknown, begotten by Father Nowheretobefound, but adopted by my rescuer, Chief Botswain Werner Fick, who would have placed me in the care of his wife at the first opportunity — in Swinemünde. When the war ended, I would have moved with my adoptive, otherwise childless parents to the bombed-out city of Hamburg in the British zone. But a year later, in Fick s hometown of Rostock, located in the Soviet occupation zone and likewise bombed out, we would have found a place to live. From then on, I would have grown up parallel to my actual biography, in which I am tethered to Mother, would have participated in the same things — the Young Pioneers' flag waving, the Free German Youth parades — but cherished by the Ficks. That I would have enjoyed. Pampered by father and mother, as a foundling whose diaper revealed nothing about his origins, I would have grown up in a concrete-slab apartment complex, would have been called Peter, not Paul, would have studied shipbuilding and been hired by the Neptune Shipyards in Rostock, holding a secure job up to the fall of the Wall, and would have been present at the reunion of survivors in the Baltic sea resort of Damp, fifty years after my rescue, an early retiree, alone or with my now elderly adoptive parents, celebrated by all the participants, pointed out on the stage: he was that foundling.
Crabwalk Page 12
