Crabwalk

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 Lowe 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 Lowe, then we'd be in the cellar, with the Lowe 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 Lowe, 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 Gottingen, 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 climbed 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 Swinemunde. 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,