Crabwalk

But when the Gustloff put out to sea for three days on 24 March 1938, the passengers included a good thousand Austrians, carefully screened by the Party; for two weeks later the people of the Ostmark were supposed to vote in a plebiscite on something that the Wehrmacht had already made a fait accompli with a swift march into that country: the annexation of Austria. On the same voyage three hundred girls from Hamburg came aboard — selected members of the League of German Girls — and well over a hundred journalists.

Just for fun, and as a sort of test, I am now going to try to picture how your humble servant would have reacted as a journalist to the reception for members of the press, scheduled for the very beginning of the voyage and held in the reception-and-movie lounge. As Mother says, and as Gabi will be happy to tell you, I am anything but a hero, but perhaps I would have been rash enough to ask about the financing of the new vessel, and about the holdings of the German Labor Front, for like the other journaJists I would have been aware that Ley, the man of many promises, could never have taken on such ambitious projects without the funds he had skimmed from all the banned labor unions.

A belated test of courage! If I know myself, the most I would have come out with is a roundabout query about the remaining capital, to which the unflappable KDF tour leader would have promptly responded that the German Labor Front was swimming in money, as we could plainly see. In a few days the Howaldt Shipyard would be launching a huge electrically powered ship, which, as could already be guessed, would bear the name of Robert Ley.

After that, the horde of invited journalists had an opportunity to tour the ship. Further questions had to be swallowed. And as a backdated journalist, I, who in my entire career have never uncovered a scandal, never detected a skeleton in a closet or misappropriation of campaign funds or bribery of high officials, would have kept my mouth shut like all the rest. We were permitted only to express breathless admiration as we made our way from deck to deck. Except for the special staterooms for Hitler and Ley, which were not open for inspection, the ship was set up to be purely classless. Although I am acquainted with the details only from photographs and surviving documents, it feels as though I was actually there, impressed and at the same time sweating bullets out of sheer cowardice.

I saw the spacious sundeck, free of irritating superstructures, saw shower stalls and sanitary installations. I saw and assiduously took notes. Later we had a chance to admire the gleaming varnished walls on the lower promenade deck and the nutwood paneling in the lounges. Our mouths open with astonishment, we looked at the Ballroom, the Folk Costume Lounge, the German Hall, and the Music Salon. In all these spaces hung portraits of the Fuhrer, who gazed over our heads, his eyes fixed solemnly but resolutely on the future. In some rooms smaller pictures of Robert Ley were allowed to draw the eye. But the predominant wall decoration consisted of landscapes, oil paintings in old-master style. We inquired about the names of the contemporary artists and noted them on our pads.

In between we were invited to enjoy a draft beer, and I learned to avoid the decadent term “bar,” later writing in traditional German terms about the “seven inviting taprooms” on board the KDF ship.

Then they showered us with statistics. In the galley area on A deck, with the help of a supermodern dishwashing setup, 35,000 dirty dishes a day could be rendered spotless. We learned that for every voyage 3,400 metric tons of potable water were on hand, with a tank inside the one funnel serving as the waterworks. When we visited the E deck, where the German League girls from Hamburg had settled into the “swimming youth hostel” with its bunks, we saw on the same deck the indoor swimming pool, with a capacity of sixty metric tons of water. And further numbers, which I did not bother to take down. Some of us were relieved that they spared us the number of tiles and the number of individual chips in a colorful wall mosaic populated by virgins with fish tails and fabulous sea creatures.

Because I have known, ever since the childhood my mother imposed on me, that the second torpedo struck the swimming pool and transformed its tiles and pieces of mosaic into deadly missiles, I might have thought to ask, as I viewed the pool where an energetic swarm of German girls was frolicking, how far below the water-line the pool lay. And on the top deck the twenty-two lifeboats might have struck me as insufficient. But I did not probe, did not invoke the possibility of a catastrophe, did not foresee what would happen seven years later on a bitter-cold night, when the ship was packed — not with a mere fifteen hundred souls, free of their daily cares, as in peacetime, but with close to ten thousand, who sensed their possible doom, and then experienced it in numbers that can only be estimated. Instead I struck up, in shrill or coolly modulated tones, whether as a reporter for the Volkischer Beobachter or a correspondent for the solid Frankfurter Zeitung, a hymn to the ship's charming lifeboats, as if they were a generous gift from the Strength through Joy organization.

But not long afterward one of the boats had to be lowered into the water. And after that another. And this was no test.

On its second cruise, which took it to the Straits of Dover, the Gustloff ran into a nor'wester, and as it was steaming along, full speed ahead, through heavy seas, it picked up an SOS from the English coal boat Pegaway, whose cargo hatch had been smashed and its rudder broken. Captain Lubbe, who would die of a heart attack at the beginning of the next Strength through Joy cruise, destination Madeira, immediately set course for the ship in distress. Two hours later, the Gustloff searchlights picked the Pegaway out of the darkness. It was already low in the water. Not until early morning did they manage to lower one of the twenty-two lifeboats, in the face of the worsening storm. But a riptide hurled the lifeboat against the side of the ship, and it drifted off, heavily damaged. Captain Lubbe at once had a motor launch lowered, which after several attempts managed to take aboard nineteen seamen and bring them to safety as the storm subsided. Finally the lifeboat that had drifted off was sighted, and its crew could be rescued.

This incident has been written up. Domestic and foreign papers lauded the heroic rescue. But the only person to provide a thorough account, and at a temporal distance, was Heinz Schon. As I am doing now, he combed through a welter of contemporary news reports. Like mine, his course in life remained tethered to that ill-starred ship. Barely a year before the end of the war, he came on board the Gustloff'as assistant to the purser. Having risen through the ranks of the Naval Hitler Youth, Schon was hoping to join the navy, but because of poor eyesight was forced to sign on with the merchant marine. After he survived the sinking of the onetime Strength through Joy ship, later hospital ship, still later floating barracks, and eventually refugee transport, he began, when the war was over, to collect and write about everything connected with the Gustloff, in good times and bad. This was his sole topic, or the only topic that gripped him.

No doubt Mother would have been very pleased with Heinz Schon's work. But although his books found a publisher in the West, in the GDR they were not welcome. Those who had read his accounts kept mum. On both sides of the German border, in fact, Schon's information was not in demand. Even when a film was made at the end of the fifties — Night Fell over Gotenhafen — for which Schon served as an adviser, it achieved only a modest echo. Not long ago a documentary was shown on television, but it still seems as though nothing can top the Titanic, as if the Wilhelm Gustloff had never existed, as if there were no room for another maritime disaster, as if only the victims of the Titanic could be remembered, not those of the Gustloff.

But I, too, kept mum, held back, left myself out of the picture, had to be pressured into action. And if I, a fellow survivor, now feel a certain kinship with Heinz Schon, it is only because I can benefit from his obsession. He made lists of everything: the number of cabins, the vast stores of food, the size of the sundeck in square meters, the number of lifeboats, those fully equipped and those missing at the end, and finally, growing from edition to edition, the tally of the dead and the survivors. For a long time his avid collecting took place in obscurity, but now Schon, who is a year older than Mother and whom I could picture as the father of my dreams, which would let me off the hook, is quoted more and more often on the Internet.

Recently the Internet was abuzz with a tearjerker of colossal proportions, the sinking of the Titanic freshly filmed in Hollywood and soon to be marketed as the greatest maritime catastrophe of all times. The numbers Schon had soberly cited refuted this nonsense. And this time there was an echo, for since the Gustloff was launched into cyberspace, making virtual waves, the right-wing scene has been vocal online. Jew bashing is in season again. As if the murder in Davos had taken place just yesterday, radicals are demanding on their Web site “Revenge for