Crabwalk

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 Prufe'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 Rugen, in Kolberg and Swinemunde. 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 Lowe docked in the harbor of Kolberg. Along with Mother and her babe in arms named Paul, Heinz Kohler 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 beach 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.