Someone — maybe that damned destiny, for all I care — didn't want that for me. I had no escape route. Was not permitted to survive as a nameless found object. When the lifeboat was in the right position, Fräulein Ursula Pokriefke, as she was listed in the boat's log, in an advanced state of pregnancy, was transferred to the Löwe. Even the time was noted: 2205 hours. While deaths harvest continued to reap rich gains in the churned-up sea and inside the Gustloff, nothing more stood in the way of Mother s delivery.
This much must be conceded: my birth was not unique. The aria “Snatch life from the jaws of death” had several verses. Children came into the world before me and after me that day. On torpedo boat T-36, as well as on the Göttingen, a six-thousand-ton steamer of the North German Lloyd Line, which arrived somewhat later, having taken on board in the East Prussia harbor of Pillau two and a half thousand wounded and more than a thousand refugees, among them almost a hundred infants. During the voyage, five more children were born, the last shortly before the ship, traveling in a convoy, reached the sea of corpses, hardly enlivened anymore by cries for help. But at the actual moment when the Gustlojf went down, sixty-two minutes after the torpedoes struck, I was the only one to crawl out of my hole.
“At the exact minute when the Yustloff went under,” Mother asserts or, as I would describe it: when the Wilhelm Gustloff, bow first and listing sharply, at the same time sank and capsized to the port side, which meant that all the people slithering down the upper decks, also the stacks of rafts, indeed everything that wasn't nailed down, hurtled into the foaming sea; at the moment when, as if on orders from the back of beyond, the ship's lighting, extinguished since the torpedoes hit, suddenly came on inside and even on the decks, and — as in peacetime and the KDF years — offered all who had eyes to see one last spectacle of festive illumination; at the moment when everything came to an end, I was born, so they tell me, quite normally, in the engineers narrow bunk bed: headfirst and without complications, or, as Mother said, “It went without a hitch. You just popped out…”
She missed everything taking place outside that bunk bed. She saw neither the festive illumination of the capsizing ship as it went under nor the tangled bunches of people plummeting from the stern, the last part to remain above water. But as Mother claims to remember, my first cry drowned out that other cry, blended from thousands of voices and carrying far and wide over the water, that final cry that came from everywhere: from the interior of the collapsing ship, from the bursting promenade deck, from the flooded sundeck, from the rapidly vanishing stern, and rising from the turbulent surface of the water, where thousands swirled, dead or alive, in their life jackets. From half-filled or overcrowded boats, from densely packed rafts, which were swept aloft on the crests of the waves, then disappeared into the troughs, from everywhere the cry rose into the air, escalating to a gruesome duet with the ship's siren, which suddenly began to wail, and just as suddenly was choked off. A collective death cry such as had never before been heard, of which Mother said, and will continue to say, “A cry like that — you won't ever get it out of your ear…”
The ensuing silence was disturbed only by my whimpering, or so I hear. Once the umbilical cord was cut, I too fell silent. When the captain, as witness to the sinking, had noted the exact time in his ship's log, the crew of the torpedo boat went back to fishing survivors out of the sea.
But that's not how it was. Mother is lying. I'm certain that it wasn't on the Löwe that I… The time was actually… Because when the second torpedo… And at the first contractions, Dr. Richter… not an injection but actually delivered… Went smoothly. Born on a slanting, sliding cot. Everything was slanting when I… Only a pity that Dr. Richter didn't have time to fill out the form, by hand: born on… on board the… at… No, no, not on a torpedo boat but on board that damned ship, named after the martyr, launched in Hamburg, once gleaming white, much loved, promoting strength through joy, classless, thrice-cursed, overcrowded, battleship-gray, torpedoed, everlastingly sinking: that's where I was born, headfirst and on a slant. Once the umbilical cord was cut, and I was diapered and swaddled in one of the ship's wool blankets, Mother and I were helped into the life-saving boat by Dr. Richter and Head Nurse Helga.
But she doesn't want a delivery on the Gustloff. Cooks up two sailors who cut my umbilical cord in the chief engineer's cabin. In another version it is the doctor, who, however, was not yet on the torpedo boat at that time. Even Mother, otherwise always absolutely sure of herself, wavers in her account, and sometimes, in addition to “them two seamen” and “the nice doctor who gave me a shot while I was still on the Yustloff” places another person at the scene of the delivery: the captain of the Löwe, Paul Prüfe, is supposed to have cut my umbilical cord.
Since I have no way to corroborate my version of the birth, which admittedly is more like a vision, I shall stick to the facts as reported by Heinz Schön; according to him, Dr. Richter was taken aboard the Löwe sometime after midnight. Only then did he preside over the birth of some other child. Beyond a doubt, it was the Gustloff's doctor who later filled out my birth certificate, giving the date of 30 January 1945, although without an exact time. It was Lieutenant Commander Prüfe, however, who was responsible for my given name. Mother is said to have insisted that I be called Paul, “just like the captain of the Löwe,” and there was no choice as to my last name, Pokriefke. Later the boys in school and in the Free German Youth, but also fellow journalists, called me “Peepee,” and I sign my articles P dot P dot.
By the way, the boy born on the torpedo boat two hours after me, which means on 31 January, was called Leo, at his mothers request and in honor of the ship that had rescued her.
There were no arguments on the Internet about any of this — my birth and the people who supposedly played a role in it, on one ship or the other; my son's Web site made no mention of a Paul Pokriefke, not even in abbreviated form. Absolute silence about anything having to do with me. My son simply left me out. I didn't exist online. But another ship, which, accompanied by the torpedo boat T-36, arrived at the site of the catastrophe at the moment of the sinking or a few minutes later, the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, unleashed a quarrel between Konrad and his nemesis David, a quarrel that would later unravel across the globe.
Fact is, the Hipper, likewise overloaded with refugees and wounded, paused only briefly, but then turned away to continue on course to Kiel. While Konny, portraying himself as an expert on maritime questions, assessed the warning about submarines in the area as sufficient grounds for the heavy cruisers turning away, David objected that the Hipper should have at least lowered some of its motor launches and made them available for further rescue operations. Furthermore, when the warship, with its ten thousand tons of displacement, executed its turning maneuver at full power in the immediate vicinity of the disaster site, a large number of people floating in the water were sucked into the boat's wake; not a few were shredded by the propellers.
My son, however, claimed to know for a fact that the Hipper % escort vessel had not only picked up U-boat presence on its locater, T-36 had actually managed to evade two torpedoes aimed at it. In response, David described, as if he had been there underwater, how the successful Soviet U-boat had kept motionless, not raising its periscope and not firing a single torpedo, while the detonation of the depth charges dropped by T-36 blew to bits many people drifting in life jackets and calling for help. As an epilogue to the tragedy, he claimed, a massacre had occurred.
Now there ensued the kind of no-holds-barred total communication possible on the Internet. Voices from home and abroad joined in. One contribution even came from Alaska. You could see how current the sinking of the long-forgotten ship had become. With the exclamation, seemingly emanating from the present, “The Gust-loff is sinking!” my son's home page opened a window to the entire world, launching what even David conceded online was “a much overdue discourse.” Yes, of course! Now everyone could know and judge for himself what had happened on 30 January 1945 off the Stol
pe Bank; the Webmaster had scanned in a map of the Baltic and marked with didactic precision all the sea-lanes leading to the site of the tragedy.
Unfortunately Konny s adversary did not refrain, toward the end of the globally expanding chatter, from bringing up the further significance of that fatal date and reminding everyone of the man for whom the sunken ship was named, portraying the murder of the party functionary Wilhelm Gustloff by the medical student David Frankfurter as “on the one hand regrettable for the widow, on the other hand — in consideration of the Jewish people's suffering — a necessary and far-sighted act.” He even began to celebrate the sinking of the huge ship by a small U-boat as a continuation of the “eternal struggle of David against Goliath.” His pathos escalated; he tossed expressions like “hereditary guilt” and “obligation to atone” into the networked ether. He praised the commandant of S-13 for his sure aim, calling him a worthy successor to the sure-aimed medical student: “Marinesko's courage and Frankfurters heroic act should never be forgotten!”
The chat room promptly filled with hate. “Jewish scum” and “Auschwitz liar” were the mildest insults. As the sinking of the ship was dredged up for a new generation, the long-submerged hate slogan “Death to all Jews” bubbled to the digital surface of contemporary reality foaming hate, a maelstrom of hate. Good God! It has been dammed up all this time, is growing day by day, building pressure for action.
My son, however, showed restraint. His tone was quite polite when he inquired, “So tell me, David, is it possible that you're of Jewish descent?” The response was ambiguous: “My dear Wilhelm, if it will give you pleasure or help you in some other way, you can send me to the gas chamber the next time an occasion arises.”
* * *
The devil only knows who knocked mother up. Sometimes it's supposed to have been her cousin, in the dark woodshed on Eisenstrasse in Langfuhr; sometimes it was a Luftwaffe auxiliary from the antiaircraft battery near the Kaiserhafen — ”in sight of the pile o' bones” — then a sergeant who allegedly gnashed his teeth as he ejaculated. It doesn't matter; whoever it was who fucked her, to me her random finger-pointing meant only this: born and raised without a father, doomed to become a father myself someday.
Still, a certain someone, who is about Mothers age and claims to have known her only casually, as Tulla, patronizingly gives me permission to explain my screwed-up existence in a few words. He is of the opinion that my failure with my son speaks for itself, but if I absolutely insist, the trauma of my birth can be cited as a possible extenuating factor for my ineptitude as a father. Still, all private conjectures aside, the actual events will have to remain in the foreground.
Thanks a lot! I can manage without explanations. I've always found absolute judgments repellent. Only this much: your humble servants existence is purely a matter of chance, for as I was born in Captain Prüfe's cabin and mingled my cry with the cry that for Mother refused to end, three frozen infants were lying under a sheet in the next bunk. Later others were added, they say: ice-blue.
After the heavy cruiser Hipper, with its ten thousand tons of displacement, had shredded dead bodies, and some that were still alive, as it executed its turning maneuver, and then sucked them under, the search was resumed. Little by little other boats arrived to aid the two torpedo boats. In addition to the steamers, that included several minesweepers and a torpedo interceptor, and finally VP-1J03, which rescued the foundling.
After that, there were no more signs of life. Only corpses were fished out of the water. The children, their legs poking into the air. At last the sea above the mass grave was calm.
The numbers I am about to mention are not accurate. Everything will always be approximate. Besides, numbers don't say much. The ones with lots of zeros can't be grasped. It's in their nature to contradict each other. Not only did the total number of people on board the Gustloff remain uncertain for many decades — it was somewhere between 6,600 and 10,600 — but the number of survivors also had to be corrected repeatedly: starting with 900 and finally set at 1,230. This raises the question, to which no answer can be hoped for: What does one life more or less count?
We do know that the majority of those who died were women and children; men were rescued in embarrassingly large numbers, among them all four captains of the ship. Petersen, who died shortly after the end of the war, looked to save himself first. Zahn, who became a businessman in peacetime, lost only his German shepherd Hassan. Measured against the roughly five thousand children who drowned, froze to death, or were trampled in the corridors, the births reported after the disaster, including mine, hardly register; I don't count.
Most of the survivors were unloaded in Sassnitz, on the island of Rügen, in Kolberg and Swinemünde. Not a few died on board. Some of the living and the dead had to return to Gotenhafen, where the living had to wait to be transported by other refugee ships. From the end of February on, Danzig was the site of fierce fighting; the city burned, releasing floods of refugees, who up to the end crowded the piers where steamers, barges, and fishing cutters were tied up.
Early in the morning of 31 January the torpedo boat Löwe docked in the harbor of Kolberg. Along with Mother and her babe in arms named Paul, Heinz Köhler disembarked. He was one of the four battling captains of the lost ship and put an end to his life when the war was barely over.
The weak, the sick, and all those with frostbitten feet were taken away in ambulances. It was typical of Mother that she counted herself among those who could walk. Every time her neverending story came to the episode in which she went ashore, she would say, “All I had on my feet was stockings, but then a grandma who was a refugee too dug a pair of shoes out of a suitcase. She was sitting on top of a handcart at the side of the road and hadn't a clue where we'd come from or what all we'd been through…”
That may be true. In the Reich the sinking of the once beloved KDF ship was not reported. Such news might have weakened the will to stay the course. There were only rumors. The Soviet supreme command likewise found reasons not to publish in the Red Banner Fleet's daily bulletin the success achieved by U-boat S-13 and its commander.
Apparently Aleksandr Marinesko was disappointed when he returned to Turku Harbor and found that he was not welcomed as befitted a hero, even though he had resumed his mission and had sunk another ship, the former ocean liner General von Steuben, with two torpedoes fired from the stern on 10 February. The fifteen-thousand-ton ship, traveling from Pillau with over a thousand refugees and two thousand wounded — those numbers, again — sank, bow first, in seven minutes. About three hundred survivors were counted. Some of the critically wounded were lying cheek by jowl on the upper deck of the rapidly sinking ship. They slid overboard in their cots. Marinesko had staged this attack from fighting depth, using the periscope.
Still the high command of the Baltic Red Banner Fleet hesitated to name the doubly successful captain a “hero of the Soviet Union” when his boat returned to its base. The hesitation continued. While the captain and his crew waited in vain for the traditional banquet — roast suckling pig, copious amounts of vodka — the war continued on all fronts, nearing Kolberg on the Pomeranian front. For the time being, Mother and I were billeted in a school, of which she later remarked, “At least it was warm and cozy there. Your cradle was an old desk with a hinged top. I thought to myself, my Paulie’s starting his schooling mighty early…”
After the school was hit by artillery and became uninhabitable, we found shelter in a casemate. Kolberg had a reputation rooted in history as a city and fortress. In Napoleon s time, its walls and bastions had enabled it to resist his armies, for which reason the Propaganda Ministry had chosen it as the setting for a stay-the-course film, Kolberg, with Heinrich George playing the lead and other top Ufa stars. Throughout what remained of the Reich, this film, in color, was shown in all the cinemas that had not yet been bombed: heroic struggle against overwhelming odds.
Now, at the end of February, Kolbergs history was being repeated. Soon the city, harbor, and bea
ch area were encircled by units of the Red Army and a Polish division. Under artillery bombardment, the effort got under way to evacuate by sea the civilian population and the refugees with whom the city was packed. Again huge crowds swarming over all the docks. But Mother refused to get on a ship ever again. “They could've beaten me with truncheons and they still wouldn't have got me on one of them boats…,” she would tell anyone who asked how she escaped with a baby from the besieged and burning city. “Well, there's always a hole you can slip through,” she would reply. And in fact Mother never did set foot on a boat again, even during company outings on Lake Schwerin.
In mid-March she must have sneaked past the Russian positions, carrying only a rucksack and me; or perhaps the Russian patrols took pity on the young woman and her nursling and simply let us through. If I describe myself here, in a moment of renewed flight, as a nursling, that is only partially accurate: Mothers breasts had nothing to offer me. On the torpedo boat, an East Prussian woman who recently gave birth helped out: she had more than enough milk. After that it was a woman who had lost her baby along the way. And later, too — for the duration of our flight and beyond — I lay time and again at other women's breasts.
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