Crabwalk

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 Lowe 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 Stolpmunde, 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 Lowe, 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 were 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.