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 Rügen, in Kolberg and Swinemünde. 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 Löwe docked in the harbor of Kolberg. Along with Mother and her babe in arms named Paul, Heinz Köhler 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.
By now all the cities along the Pomeranian coast were either occupied by the enemy or under siege; Stettin was encircled, but Swinemünde was still holding out. Farther to the east, Danzig, Zoppot, Gotenhafen had fallen. Toward the coast, units of the 2nd Soviet Army had cordoned off the Hela Peninsula near Putzig, and farther to the west, at the Oder River, Küstrin was already the scene of fierce fighting. The Greater German Reich was shrinking on all sides. At the confluence of the Rhine and the Mosel, Koblenz was in American hands. But the bridge at Remagen had finally collapsed.
Along the eastern front, Heeresgruppe Mitte reported further withdrawals in Silesia and the increasingly critical situation of the fortress city of Breslau. To make things worse, the attacks by squadrons of American and British bombers on the large and medium-sized cities continued unabated. While to the delight of Britain's Marshal Harris of the RAF, the ruins of the city of Dresden were still smoking, bombs fell on Berlin, Regensburg, Bochum, Wuppertal… Repeated targets were reservoir dams. And refugees streamed in all directions, but with a general thrust from east to west. They did not know where it was safe to stop.
Mother, too, had no particular destination in mind when she managed to get out of Kolberg with me, her most important piece of baggage, constantly whimpering because of the lack of mothers milk. Mother got caught between the front lines, managed to make some headway at night, hitching rides for short stretches in freight cars or in the Wehrmacht s bucket cars, but also often on foot among others toiling along with less and less baggage. She kept going, frequently having to throw herself to the ground as dive-bombers swooped down, trying to get as far as possible from the coast, and — always on the lookout for mothers with surplus milk — made her way to Schwerin. She described her escape route to me sometimes one way, sometimes another. Actually she intended to continue on, crossing the Elbe into the West, but we got hung up in the undestroyed capital of the Reichgau of Mecklenburg. That was at the end of April, when the Führer did away with himself.
Later, as a journeyman carpenter and surrounded by men, Mother would say, when asked about her escape route, “I could write a novel. The worst was the bombers, when they came in real low over us and pow-pow-pow… But I was always lucky. I'm telling you, it would take a lot more than that to do me in!”
That would bring her back to her main topic, the everlastingly sinking ship. Nothing else mattered. Even the cramped conditions in our next temporary housing — another school — weren't worth complaining about, since by now she knew that she and her Paulie had found refuge in the birthplace of the man after whom the ill-fated ship had been named in times of apparent peace. His name was everywhere. Even the secondary school to which we had been assigned was named after him. When we came to Schwerin, his presence could not be missed. On the southern bank of the lake, that grove of honor with the glacial boulders was still standing, and in it the large block of granite placed there in '37 to honor the martyr. I am sure that was why Mother stayed in Schwerin with me.
It's still striking that in those realms of the Internet where I usually roamed nothing stirred for a while once the ship's sinking had been celebrated retroactively, yet as if it were a current event, and all the dead had been counted up, accounted for, made to count, depending on the accounting principles used, then compared with the number of survivors, and finally contrasted with the much smaller number of those who died on the Titanic. I was starting to think the server had crashed, had run out of juice, that my son had had enough, that Mothers prompting had nothing to add now that the ship had gone down. But the silence was deceptive. Suddenly he was back, presenting the familiar material on a redesigned home page.
This time pictures dominated the site. In fairly grainy reproduction but captioned in bold letters, the towering block of granite presented itself for the whole world to admire, with the name of the martyr chiseled into the rock beneath the jagged S-shaped rune for victory. The martyr's importance was illustrated by means of a chronology, a list of his organizational accomplishments, testimonials embellished with exclamation points, all incorporated into the ongoing project, leading up to the day and hour of his murder in the famous health resort for tuberculosis sufferers, Davos.
As if on command or under some other compulsion, David spoke up. Initially his topic was not the monument but the martyr's murderer. David announced triumphantly that in March 1945 things took a positive turn for David Frankfurter, incarcerated for over nine years by then. After a futile attempt to have his case reopened, the Berne attorneys Brunschwig and Raas submitted a petition for clemency, addressed to the Graubünden parliament. My son's adversary had to concede that the request for reducing the eighteen-year sentence to time served was not granted until 1 June 1945, in other words, after the war was over. He explained that the decision had to wait until Switzerland's grandiose neighbor was brought to its knees. Because David Frankfurter was expelled from Switzerland after his release, he decided to go straight from the looms of Sennhof Prison to Palestine, hoping for a future Israel.
On this topic the sniping between the two grim online opponents remained fairly moderate. Konny conceded generously, “Israel is okay. It was the perfect place for that murdering Jew. He could make himself useful, on a kibbutz or something.” All in all, he had nothing against Israel. He even admired the toughness of its army. And he completely supported the Israelis' determination to take a hard line. They had no other choice. When dealing with Palestinians and such Muslims, you couldn't give an inch. Sure, if all the Jews would just pack up and move to the Promised Land, like that murdering Jew Frankfurter, he would be all for it: “Then the rest of the world would be Jew-free!”
David accepted this horrendous notion; he agreed with my son in theory. Apparently he was worried: as far as the safety of the Jewish citizens of Germany was concerned — and he included himself among them — he feared the worst; anti-Semitism was increasing by leaps and bounds. Once again one had to think about leaving the country. “I, too, will be packing my bags soon…” Whereupon Konny wished him “Bon voyage” but then hinted that it would give him pleasure if the occasion arose for him to meet his bosom enemy before the latter s departure — not just online: “We should get together, check each other out, preferably sooner rather than later…”
He even proposed a meeting place, but left the date for the desired rendezvous open. At the spot where the block of granite had towered above the others in the memorial grove, and where today hardly anything preserved the memory of the martyr, because desecrators had cleared away the rock and the hall of honor — in that very place where, in the not-too-distant future, a stone monument would have to be erected once more, in that historically meaningful place they should meet.
The sniping promptly resumed. David favored a meeting anywhere but in that accursed location. “I absolutely reject your historical revisionism…” My son added his own fuel to the fire: “He who forgets his peoples past is not worthy of it!” David agreed with that. What followed was sheer silliness. They even allowed themselves to make jokes. To one of them — ”What's the difference between e-mail and Emil?” — I unfortunately did not get the punch line. I logged out too soon.
I've been there numerous times. Most recently a few weeks back, as if I were the perpetrator, as if I had to keep returning to the scene of the crime, as if the father were running after the son.
From Mölln, where neither Gabi nor I could find much to say to each other, to Ratzeburg. From there I drove east, passing through Mustin, a tiny village just beyond which the border had been located, complete with death strip, cutting off the highway. One still sees a three-hundred-meter gap in the chestnuts planted long ago on either side of the road: not a tree to right or left. The place gives one a feel for the multitiered efforts the Workers' and Peasants' State undertook to secure its people.
Once I left that scar in the landscape behind me, Mecklenburg's sweeping farmland extended all the way to the horizon on both sides of the once more tree-lined highway. Hardly any undulations, few larger stands of trees. On the outskirts of Gadebusch I took the new bypass. A strip of home improvement stores, shopping centers, flat-roofed auto dealerships, trying with strings of drooping pennants to revive business. The Wild East! Not until close to Schwerin, where the road was now lined with smaller varieties of trees, did the area become hilly. I drove past larger wooded stretches, the radio tuned to channel 3: the classical request program.
I then turned right onto Route 106, toward Ludwigslust, and was soon approaching the Grosser Dreesch housing complex, thrown up in several stages and once home to fifty thousand citizens of the GDR, and parked my Mazda by unit 3, right next to the Lenin monument in the curve at the end of Gagarinstrasse. The weather held; it didn't rain. Now renovated and made presentable with pastel colors, the apartment buildings lined up in a row.
Every time I visit Mother, I am amazed that this bronze statue, which grew so large under the hands of its Estonian creator, is still standing. Although Lenin is gazing westward, he was denied any gesture that might indicate a destination. With both hands in his coat pockets, he stands there like a man out for a stroll who is allowing himself to take a breather, his feet resting on the low granite platform that forms a pedestal. The left corner of its lowest step is clad in bronze. The inscription molded into the metal in capital letters recalls a revolutionary resolution: the land reform decree. Only on the front does Lenin's overcoat reveal traces of color from some meaningless spray-can graffiti. Pigeon droppings on the shoulders. His wrinkled trousers have remained clean.
I did not linger on Gagarinstrasse. Mother lives on the eleventh floor, with a balcony and a view of the nearby broadcast tower. She insisted on serving me coffee, which she always makes too strong. After the renovation of the concrete-slab buildings, the rents were raised — to manageable levels, Mother thinks. We talked about that, only that. Otherwise there was not much to say. She did not ask what had brought me to the city of many lakes, besides my brief visit to her: “Certainly not the Führers birthday!” The date of my arrival must have given my destination away; she exclaimed as I entered her apartment — and after I had denied myself a glance into Konnys room: “What's there for you? Nothing to be done about it now.”
Taking Hamburger Allee, formerly Lenin-Allee, I drove in the direction of the zoo, then along Am Hexenberg, and parked by the youth hostel, having found my way to the spot as if in a trance. Around the back of the gray stuccoed structure from the early fifties, the wooded bank on the southern end of Lake Schwerin falls off steeply. Down below, almost at the waters edge, you see Franzosenweg, a favorite path for walkers and bicycle riders.
A sunny day by now. Actually not typical April weather. When the sun came out, it had real warmth. At a slight distance from the entrance to the youth hostel, the moss-covered blocks of granite still lay motionless, as though nothing had happened, remnants of the memorial grove that had been cleared away, not very thoroughly, decades earlier. Among the trees once planted to form the grove, scanty underbrush. The square foundation of the hall of honor was easy to make out, because only a little dirt had been dumped over it, but the youth hostel faced the site, obstructing any sense of the original layout. To the left of the hostel's entrance, above which one could read in raised lettering the name of the hostel, “Kurt Bürger,” a Ping-Pong table on sawhorses was waiting for players. A sign on the door hung slightly crooked: CLOSED FROM 9 AM TO 4 PM.
I stood for a long time amid the mossy blocks of granite, one of which even displayed fragments of an inscription and a chiseled rune. Lost property — from what century?
Back in the day when Mother and I found refuge in Schwerin, everything was still standing: boulder next to boulder, the Nazi hall of honor, and the massive piece of granite with the martyrs name. When Mother first saw the memorial, it was already neglected, but still under the care of the Party, which was crumbling from the outside in. She told me that she came upon the oaks and beeches, still small at the time, while she was out looking for firewood: “Where they assigned us to, there wasn't a blessed thing to burn in the stove…” Many other women and children were also out looking. By the time the American tanks reached Schwerin from their bridgehead on the Elbe southwest of Boizenburg, followed by the British — ”They had genuine Scotch soldiers…” — we had been moved from the cellar of the school to Lehmstrasse, in the part of town known as the Schelfstadt; it must have been fairly run-down by the end of the war. We were assigned to a brick outbuilding with a tar-paper roof, located, of course, to the rear of the building that fronted on the street. It's still standing, that shack. We had two tiny rooms and a kitchen. You had to go out to the courtyard to use the toilet. They even put in a cylinder stove for us. The stovepipe went through the kitchen window. And to feed the stove — Mother cooked on the cover plate — she had to hunt all over for firewood.
That's how she happened upon the memorial grove. When the British pulled out in June and the Red Army came in, and stayed for good, the boulders with various names and runes chiseled on them remained standing for a long time; the Russians didn't care.
Since the Potsdam conference, where the victors divided up Germany, we were in the Soviet occupation zone, Mother even of her own free will, ever since she discovered, on the largest of the remaining stones, set close to the lakeshore, a name that was not unfamiliar: “That stone had the same name as our Yustloff...”
On my last visit to Schwerin, when I stood amid the mossy granite blocks in front of a split boulder and could puzzle out what was left of the name Wilhelm Dahl in cuneiform script — of the first name, only the syllable “helm” was left, next to the split edge — I succumbed to the temptation to picture Mother out hunting for firewood, and coming, with her arms full of branches and twigs, upon the still intact grove and the open memorial hall. On the dozen or so glacial boulders lined up there, she would have deciphered the names of Party members unfamiliar to her but obviously deserving, among them the Kreisleiter of Wismar, Wilhelm Dahl. I see her, small in stature and emaciated, too, standing astonished before the four-meter-high rock, but I can't guess her thoughts, which may have become tangled once she read the inscription on the martyrs stone. But if I know Mother, she certainly didn't hesitate for a moment to step inside the memorial hall in the middle of the grove.
Formed of square granite blocks, it had been built directly on the ground. Into the smooth outside surfaces of the square columns that supported the hall on its open sides, a contemporary sculptor had chiseled SA standard-bearers in outline, larger than life. Affixed to the walls on the interior of the roofless structure were also ten bronze plaques with the names of the dead who were honored there. Eight of the names carried the notation “murdered” after the date of death. The floor of the hall was filthy. Mother told me, “It was full of dog shit…” The granite block for Wilhelm Gustloff, however, stood apart from the row of boulders, at a spot that could be seen from the open memorial hall as particularly significant. From there one had a wide-angle view of the lake. Mother no doubt looked in a different direction. And I was never there when she was out hunting for wood. During her search for anything burnable, a woman from the neighborhood was probably nursing me; her name was Frau Kurbjun. Mother, after all, hardly had a bosom, then or later, just two pointy little pouches.
That's how it goes with monuments. Some of them are put up too soon, and then, when the era of their particular notion of heroism is past, have to be cleared away. Others, like the Lenin statue by the Grosser Dreesch complex, at the corner of Hamburger Allee and Plater Strasse, remain standing. And the monument to the commander of submarine S-13 went up in St. Petersburg barely a decade ago, on 8 May 1990, forty-five years after the end of the war and twenty-seven years after Marinesko's death: a triangular granite column supports the larger-than-life bareheaded bronze bust of the man belatedly designated a “hero of the Soviet Union.”
Former naval officers, by then retired, had established committees in Odessa, Moscow, and elsewhere and persistently petitioned for recognition of the captain, who had died in '63. In Königsberg, as Kaliningrad was called until the end of the war, the bank of the Pregel River behind the Regional Museum was even named after him. That street still bears his name, while the Schlossgartenallee in Schwerin, which from '37 on was called Wilhelm-Gustloff-Allee, still leads to the vicinity of the former memorial grove, but under its old name; similarly, since the fall of the Wall, Lenin-Allee has become Hamburger Allee, and runs through the Grosser Dreesch concrete-slab complex, past the steadfast statue of Lenin. On the other hand, Mothers address, which celebrates the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, has remained true to itself.
There is a notable omission. Nothing has been named after the medical student David Frankfurter. No street, no school bears his name. Nowhere was a monument erected to the murderer of Wilhelm Gustloff. No Web site campaigned for a David-and-Goliath sculpture, perhaps in Davos, the scene of the crime. And if my son's bosom enemy had posted such a demand on the Net, the hate pages would certainly have called for the monument to be cleared away by a shaven-headed special operations commando.
That's how it's always been. Nothing lasts forever. Yet the district administration of the NSDAP in Schwerin and the city's mayor went to great trouble after Gustloff s murder to design a memorial grove that would be there for eternity. As early as December 1936, when the trial of Frankfurter was wrapped up in Chur and the verdict reached, the search was under way in the fields of Mecklenburg for glacial boulders to form an enclosure around the memorial grove. The instructions read, “For this purpose natural stones in every size are required, of the sort found near buildings and on native soil around Schwerin…” And a letter written by the Gaus coordinator of ideological training reveals that the regional capital felt obligated to support the Gau administration financially, to the tune of “a subsidy of 10,000 reichsmarks.”
On 10 September 1949, when the dismantling of the grove of honor and the relocation of the corpses and urns was as good as complete, the mayor wrote on his de-Nazified letterhead to the regional government, revealing that this operation had been less costly: “Expenditures of 6,096.75 marks are hereby reported to the regional government for purposes of reimbursement…”
One also discovers that the “residual ashes of Wilhelm Gustloff” could not be transferred to the municipal burial ground: “According to the statement of master mason Kröpelin, G. s urn is located in the foundation of the stone memorial. Removal of the urn is not possible at this time…”
The removal did not take place until the early fifties, shortly before the youth hostel was built and named in memory of the antifascist Kurt Bürger, recently deceased. Around this time, the U-boat hero Marinesko had already spent three years in Siberia. Right after S-/5 sailed into the Finnish harbor of Turku, and the crew went ashore, trouble began for the man who wanted to be celebrated as a hero. Although the NKVD file and the misconduct that had not yet been dealt with in court continued to hang over him, he did not cease, whether cold sober or disinhibited by vodka, to demand recognition for his deeds. Although S-13 was designated a Distinguished Red Banner Boat, and all the crew members received the Order of the War for the Fatherland to pin on their chests, as well another medal, that of the Red Flag, whose motif was the star, hammer, and sickle, Aleksandr Marinesko was not declared a Hero of the Soviet Union. Worse yet, the official bulletins of the Baltic Red Banner Fleet continued to make absolutely no mention of the sinking of the twenty-five-thousand-ton Wilhelm Gustloff, and not a word testified to the rapid sinking of the General von Steuben.
It was as if the tubes in the bow and stern of the submarine had fired phantom torpedoes at nonexistent targets. The twelve thousand or more dead registered to his account didn't count. Was the naval high command embarrassed because of the only roughly calculable number of drowned children, women, and severely wounded soldiers? Or had Marineskos successes got lost in the intoxication of victory that characterized the last months of the war, with their surfeit of heroic deeds? But now his loud insistence could not be ignored. Nothing could deter him from playing up his successes whenever the occasion presented itself. He became a nuisance.
In September 1945 he was relieved of the command of his submarine, and soon thereafter he was degraded to the rank of lieutenant. In October he was discharged from the Soviet navy. The justification given for this three-stage dishonorable discharge was “an indifferent and negligent attitude toward his duties.”
When his application to the merchant marine was rejected — on the pretext that he was nearsighted in one eye — Marinesko found employment as the administrator of a supply depot responsible for the distribution of building materials. Before long he saw fit to accuse the director of the collective — with insufficient evidence — of having taken bribes, paid kickbacks to Party functionaries, and trafficked in materials, whereupon Marinesko came under suspicion of violating the law himself by being too generous in giving away only slightly damaged building materials. A special court sentenced him to three years at hard labor. He was deported to Kolyma on the East Siberian Sea, a place that belonged to the Gulag Archipelago, whose daily routine has been written about. Not until two years after Stalin's death did he put Siberia behind him, in a topographical sense. He came back ill. But it wasn't until the early sixties that the damaged U-boat hero was rehabilitated. He was restored to the rank of captain third class, retired and entitled to a pension.
Now I must repeat myself by reverting to something already mentioned. That is why I write here: when Stalin's death was reported in the East and West, I saw Mother cry. She even lit candles. Eight years old at the time, I was standing at the kitchen table and didn't have to be in school, having just got over the measles or something else that itched, was peeling potatoes, which were supposed to go on the table with margarine and curd cheese, and saw Mother crying behind burning candles over Stalin's death. Potatoes, candles, and tears were scarce in those days. Throughout my childhood on Lehmstrasse, and as long as I was in secondary school in Schwerin, I never saw her cry again. When Mother had cried her eyes out, her face took on an absent expression, her I'm-not-home look, which Aunt Jenny remembered from their early years. At the carpentry shop on Langfuhr's Eisenstrasse they would comment, “Tulla's gone and bashed in the windows again.”
After she had cried long enough for the death of the great comrade Stalin, and then had no expression for a while, we ate the boiled potatoes she had fixed, with curd cheese and a pat of margarine.