Crabwalk

Gauleiter Kaufmann of Hamburg and Gauleiter Hildebrandt of Schwerin-Mecklenburg also had permission to be there. The navy was represented by Admiral Raeder. And the local Gruppenleiter of the NSDAP in Davos, Bohme, had not hesitated to undertake the long journey.

Speeches were delivered. This time he held back. After Kaufmann, the manager of the Blohm and Voss shipyard spoke: “To you, my Fuhrer, I report in the name of the shipyard: This cruise ship, production number 511, is ready for launching!”

Everything else deleted. But perhaps I should pick a few plums out of Robert Ley's christening address. The fancy-free salutation was “My fellow Germans!” And then he ventured far afield to celebrate Strength through Joy, his plan for the well-being of the Volk, finally revealing its originator: “The Fuhrer gave me this order: 'See to it that the German worker gets his holidays, that his nerves may remain sound, for do what I might, it would all be for naught if the German people did not have its nerves in order. What matters is that the German masses, the German worker, be strong enough to grasp my ideas.'“

When the widow performed the christening a bit later with the words “I christen you with the name Wilhelm Gustloff,” the cheering of the strong-nerved masses drowned out the sound of the champagne bottle being smashed against the bow of the ship. Both the Horst Wessel and the Deutschland songs were sung as the new vessel glided down the slipway… But whenever I, the survivor of the Gustloff, attend a launching as a reporter or see one on television, an image steals into the picture: that ship, christened and launched in the most beautiful May weather, sinking in the icy Baltic.

At about this time, when David Frankfurter was already locked up in Churs Sennhof Prison, and in Hamburg the champagne bottle was smashed on the bow, Aleksandr Marinesko was in either Leningrad or Kronstadt, participating in a training course for naval commanders. At any rate, he had been ordered transferred from the Black Sea to the eastern end of the Baltic. That summer, while the purge trials set in motion by Stalin were not sparing the admiralty of the Baltic fleet, he became commander of a submarine.

M-96 belonged to an older class of boats, suitable for reconnoitering and combat in coastal waters. In the information available to me, I read that M-96, with 250 tons of displacement and a length of forty-five meters, was on the small side, carrying a crew of eighteen. For a long time Marinesko remained the commander of this naval unit equipped with only two torpedo tubes, whose range extended as far as the Gulf of Finland. I assume that along the coast he repeatedly practiced surface attacks followed by rapid submerging.

While the interior, from the lowest deck, the E deck, to the sundeck was being done, the funnel, the bridge, and the communications station were being added, and along the Baltic coast diving practice was taking place, in Chur eleven months of incarceration passed. Only then could the ship leave the fitting-out quay and sail down the Elbe for its trial run in the North Sea. So I will pause until enough seconds have elapsed in the present to allow my narrative to start rolling again. Or should I in the meantime risk a quarrel with someone whose grumbling can't be ignored?

He is calling for distinct memories. He wants to know how Mother looked, smelled, felt to me when I was about three. He says, “First impressions determine the course of a persons life.” I say, “What's there to remember? When I was three, she'd just finished her apprenticeship in carpentry. Well, all right, shavings and blocks that she brought home from the shop — I can see them before me in curls and tumbling stacks. I played with shavings and blocks. And what else? Mother smelled of carpenters glue. Wherever she stood, sat, lay — Lord, yes, her bed! — that smell clung. But because they didn't have child-care centers yet, she left me with a neighbor at first, then in a nursery school. That's what all working mothers did in the Workers' and Peasants' State, not only in Schwerin. I can remember women, fat and skinny, who ordered us around, and semolina pudding so thick your spoon would stand up in it.”

But memory scraps like these don't satisfy the old man. He refuses to let me off the hook: “When she was ten, Tulla Pokriefke had a face with two periods for eyes, a comma for a nose, and a dash for a mouth; but what did she look like as a young woman and journeyman carpenter, around 1950, lets say, when she was twenty- three? Did she wear makeup? Did she put a kerchief over her head, or wear one of those matronly flowerpot hats? Was her hair straight, or did she get it permed? Did she ever run around in curlers on the weekend?”

I don't know whether the information I can offer will shut him up; my image of Mother when she was young is both sharp and blurry. I never saw her with anything but white hair. She had white hair from the beginning. Not silvery white, just white. Anyone who asked Mother about it would receive the following explanation: “It happened when my son was born. That was on the torpedo boat that rescued us…” And anyone willing to hear more would learn that from that moment on she had snow-white hair, also in Kolberg, when the survivors, mother and infant, went ashore from the torpedo boat Lowe. In those days she wore her hair chin- length.

But earlier, before she turned white “as if on command from way up there,” her hair had been naturally almost blond, with a reddish tinge, falling to her shoulders.

In response to further questions — he won't let go — I assure my employer that we have very few photos of my mother from the fifties. One of them shows her wearing her white hair cropped short, matchstick length. It crackled when I ran my hand over it, which she sometimes allowed me do. And as an old woman she still wears it that way. She had just turned seventeen when she turned white from one moment to the next. “Of course not! Mother never dyed her hair, or had it dyed. None of her comrades ever saw her with raven locks or Titian-red ones.”

“And what else? What other memories are there? Men, for example: were there any?” He means men who spent the night. As a teenager, Mother was boy crazy. Swimming at Brosens public bathing area or serving as a streetcar conductor on the Danzig-Langfuhr-Oliva line, she always had boys swarming around her, but also grown men — for instance, soldiers on furlough. “Did she get over men later, when she was white-haired and a mature woman?”

What does the old man think? Maybe he really pictures Mother living like a nun, simply because the shock had bleached her hair. No, there were more than enough men. But they didn't stick around very long. One of them was a foreman bricklayer and very nice. He brought us things that were hard to come by, even if you had ration stamps: liverwurst, for example. I was already ten when he would sit in the kitchen of our rear-courtyard shack at 7 Lehmstrasse and snap his suspenders. His name was Jochen, and he insisted that I ride on his knees. Mother called him “Jochen Two,” because in her teens she had known an upper-schooler whose name was Joachim but who went by Jochen. “But that one wasn't interested in me. Wouldn't even touch me…”

At some point Mother must have sent Jochen Two packing, why, I don't know. And when I was about thirteen, a guy from the Peoples Police would come by after his shift, and sometimes on Sundays too. He was a second lieutenant from Saxony — Pirna, I think. He brought Western toothpaste — Colgate — and other confiscated goods. His name was also Jochen, by the way, for which reason Mother would say, “Number three s coming by tomorrow. Try to be nice to him when he comes…” Jochen Three was sent packing, too, because, as Mother said, he was “bound and determined to marry” her.

She didn't care for marriage. “You're enough of a handful for me,” she said, when at fifteen I was fed up with everything. Not with school. There I did fine, except in Russian. But I was fed up with the Free German Youth puppet theater, the harvest deployments, the special operations weeks, the everlasting songs about building socialism, and with Mother too. Just couldn't take it anymore when, usually at Sunday dinner, she would dish up her stories of the Gustloff along with the dumplings and mashed potatoes: “Everything started to slither. A thing like that you never forget. It never leaves you. It's not just in my dreams, that cry that spread over the water at the end there. And all them little children among the ice floes…”

Sometimes when Mother sat at the kitchen table after Sunday dinner with her mug of coffee, she would say only, “That sure was one beautiful ship,” and then not another word. But her I'm-not-home look spoke volumes.

She was probably right. Once the Wilhelm Gustloff was built, and set off on its maiden voyage, gleaming white from stem to stern, by all accounts it was a floating sensation. This opinion was expressed even by people who after the war made much of their having been fervent antifascists from the beginning. And the story went that those privileged to sail on the boat seemed transfigured when they stepped back onto dry land.

For the two-day test run, which happened to take place in stormy weather, they filled the ship with workers and salaried employees from Blohm and Voss, as well as with salesgirls from the Hamburg grocery cooperative.