Crabwalk

Of all this — the continuing arguments on the bridge, the absence of an adequate number of escort vessels, and the increased icing over of everything on the upper deck — the antiaircraft guns had become inoperable — Mother remained oblivious. She recalled that after the “Fuhrers speech” she received from Nurse Helga five pieces of zwieback and a bowl of rice pudding with sugar and cinnamon. From the nearby Bower the groaning of the critically wounded could be heard. Fortunately the radio was playing dance music, “cheerful tunes.” She fell asleep to the sound. No contractions yet. After all, Mother thought she was in her eighth month.

The Gustloff was not alone as it steamed along at a distance of twelve nautical miles from the Pomeranian coast. The Soviet submarine S-13 was following the same course. The submarine had waited in vain in the waters near the embattled port city of Memel, along with two other units of the Baltic Red Banner Fleet, for ships departing or bringing reinforcements to the remnants of the German 4th Army. For days nothing came into view. While he waited, the captain of 5-/J may have been brooding over the impending court-martial and the interrogation he would have to undergo at the hands oft the NKVD.

When Aleksandr Marinesko received word over the radio in the early morning hours of 30 January that the Red Army had captured Memel's port, he issued an order for a new course without informing his central command. While the Gustloff was still docked at the Oxhoft quay, taking on a few more batches of refugees — now the Pokriefkes came on board — S-13, with forty-seven men and ten torpedoes, made for the Pomeranian coast.

While in my report two boats are coming closer and closer but nothing decisive has happened yet, an opportunity offers itself for taking note of routine conditions in a Graubunden penal institution. On that Tuesday, as on every workday, the prisoners were sitting at their looms. By this time the murderer of the former Nazi Landesgruppenleiter Wilhelm Gustloff had served nine years of his eighteen-year sentence. With the war situation now radically altered — since the Greater German Reich no longer represented a threat, he had been transferred back to Sennhof Prison in Chur — he thought the moment had come for submitting a request for clemency; but it was rejected by the Swiss Supreme Court around the time of the ships' maneuvering in the Baltic. It was not only David Frankfurter but also the ship named after his victim that found no mercy.

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He says my report would make a good novella. A literary assessment with which I can't concern myself. I merely report the following: on the day that Providence, or some other calendar maker, had selected as the ship's last, the downfall of the Greater German Reich had already been rung in. Divisions of the British and American armies had entered the area around Aachen. Our remaining U-boats sent word that they had sunk three freighters in the Irish Sea, but along the Rhine front, pressure on Colmar was growing. In the Balkans, the partisans around Sarajevo were becoming more aggressive. The 2nd Mountain Troop Division was withdrawn from Jylland in Denmark to reinforce sections of the eastern front. In Budapest, where supply problems were worsening from day to day, the front ran directly below the castle. Everywhere dead bodies were left behind, on both sides. Identification tags were collected, decorations handed out.

What else happened, aside from the fact that promised miracle weapons failed to appear? In Silesia, attacks near Glogau were repulsed, but around Posen the fighting intensified. And near Kulm, Soviet units crossed the Vistula. In East Prussia the enemy advanced to Bartenstein and Bischofswerder. Up to this day, which was nothing special in itself, the authorities had managed to get sixty-five thousand people, civilian and military, onto boats in Pillau. Everywhere monument-worthy heroic deeds were performed; others were in the offing. As the Wilhelm Gustloff on its westward course was approaching the Stolpe Bank, and the submarine S-13 was still prowling for prey, eleven hundred four-engine enemy bombers conducted a night raid on the area around Hamm, Bielefeld, and Kassel, and the American president had already left the United States; Roosevelt was on his way to Yalta, the conference site on the Crimean peninsula, where the ailing man would meet with Churchill and Stalin to pave the way for peace by drawing new borders.

On the subject of this conference and the subsequent one in Potsdam, which took place when Roosevelt was dead and Truman president, I found hate pages on the Internet and a sort of throwaway comment on my know- it-all son's Web site: “This is how they dismembered our Germany,” along with a map of the Greater German Reich, with all the lost territories marked. He then speculated on the miracles that might have occurred if the young sailors, almost finished with their training, had safely reached their destination of Kiel on the Gustloff and been successfully deployed, manning twelve or more U-boats of the new, fabulously fast and almost silent XXIII Class. His wish list bristled with heroic deeds and special victory announcements. Konny didn't go quite so far as to invoke the final victory retroactively, but he was sure that these young U-boatmen would have experienced a better death, even if these miracle vessels had been destroyed by depth charges, than proved their lot when they drowned wretchedly opposite the Stolpe Bank. His opponent David agreed with the comparative weight assigned to these ways of death, but then tossed some reservations into the Net: “Those young fellows really had no choice. No matter what, they had no chance of surviving to adulthood…”

Photos are available, collected over decades by the pursers assistant after he survived the disaster: many small passport-sized ones and a group photo showing all the sailors who would normally have undergone four months of training with the 2nd Submarine Training Division. They are lined up on the sundeck, having saluted Lieutenant Commander Zahn and now, after the command “At ease!” standing there in a more relaxed posture. On this wide-angle photograph, showing over nine hundred sailor hats, which get smaller and smaller toward the stern, individual faces can be made out only as far back as the seventh row. Behind that an orderly mass. But from the passport-sized photos, one uniformed man after another gazes out at me. These youthful faces, although they may all be different, have the same unfinished quality. They must be about eighteen. Some boys, photographed in uniform during the final months of the war, are even younger. My son, seventeen by now, could be one of them, although, because of his glasses, Konny would hardly have qualified for submarine duty.

They are all wearing their admittedly becoming sailor caps, with the band that reads german navy at a cocky angle, usually tilted toward the right. I see round, narrow, angular, and chubby-cheeked faces on these death candidates. Their uniform is their pride and joy. They gaze out at me, their solemnity prophetically appropriate for this last photograph.

The few photos available to me of the 375 girls of the naval auxiliary make a more civilian impression, in spite of their little two-pointed service caps, also worn at an angle, with the imperial eagle bent around the point at the front. The young girls' neat hairdos — many no doubt achieved by means of permanent or water waves — fall in the curls fashionable at the time. Quite a few of the girls may have been engaged, only a few married. Two or three, who make a coolly sensuous impression on me with their straight hair, remind me of my ex-wife. That is how Gabi looked back in the day when she was a fairly dedicated education student in Berlin and made my heart drop to my knees the moment I saw her. At first glance almost all the naval auxiliaries are pretty, even cute; some of them show early signs of a double chin. They have a less solemn expression than the boys. Each one gazing out at me smiles unsuspectingly.

Because not even a hundred survived of the far more than four thousand infants, children, and youths aboard the doomed ship, only a few photos turned up; the refugees' baggage, with family photo albums from East and West Prussia, Danzig, and Gotenhafen, went down with the ship. I see the children's faces from those years. Girls with braids and bows, the boys with hair slicked down, parted on the left or right. There are hardly any pictures of infants, who in any case have a timeless appearance. The photographs of mothers who found their grave in the Baltic and of the few who remained alive, mostly without their children, were “snapped” (as Mother would say) either long before the disaster or many years later on family occasions; of Mother there is not a single photo from that era — or of me as a baby.

By the same token, no likeness remains of those old men and women — Masurian peasants, retired civil servants, merry widows, and tradesmen — the thousands of elderly people, distraught from the horrors of their flight, who were allowed on board. All men in their middle years were turned back on the Oxhoft dock because they were eligible for the last Landsturm call-ups. Among those saved from going down with the ship, thus, were hardly any men or women of advanced years. And no picture preserves the memory of the wounded soldiers from the Kurland who lay packed onto cots in the Bower.

The few older people who were rescued included the ship's captain, Petersen, a man in his mid-sixties. At nine o'clock in the evening all four captains were standing on the bridge, arguing over whether it had been right to