Guenter Grass - Crabwalk

Erna and August Pokriefke must have found it hard to recognize the ship's interior, for all the reception areas and dining rooms, the library, the Folk Costume Lounge, and the Music Room had been emptied, stripped of all pictures on the walls, and reduced to mattress encampments. Even the glassed-in promenade deck and the corridors were crammed with people. Since thousands of children, both counted and uncounted, constituted part of the ship's human freight, their crying mixed with the blare of the loudspeakers, which were constantly announcing the names of lost boys and girls.

When the Pokriefkes came on board, without being recorded, Mother was separated from her parents. A nurse made the decision. We will never know whether the couple was jammed by the naval auxiliaries on duty into an already occupied cabin or whether they found a spot in a mass dormitory, along with what remained of their luggage. Tulla Pokriefke would never see the photo album and her parents again. I use this order deliberately, because I am fairly certain that the loss of the photo album was especially painful for Mother, for with it were lost all the pictures, shot with the family Kodak box camera, of her with her curly-haired brother Konrad on the boardwalk in Zoppot, with her girlfriend Jenny and Jenny s adoptive father, Dr. Brunies, in front of the Gutenberg monument in the Jäschkental Forest, as well as several with Harras, the pure-blooded German shepherd and famous breeding dog.

When Mother came to the part in her neverending story about going aboard the ship, she always talked about being in her eighth month. Probably it was the eighth. No matter which month, she was assigned to the maternity ward. It was located next to the so-called Bower, where the critically wounded soldiers were groaning, packed in like sardines. During KDF times, the Bower had been popular with the cruise participants as a sort of winter garden. It was located under the bridge. The ship's physician, Dr. Richter, chief medical officer of the Second Submarine Training Division, oversaw the Bower as well as the maternity ward. Every time Mother told me about getting on board, she said, “It was so nice and warm there. And I got hot milk right away, too, with a nice dollop of honey in it…”

It must have been business as usual in the maternity ward. Since the beginning of the embarkation process,four babies had been born, “all little shavers,” as I was told.

Some say that the Wilhelm Gustloff had the misfortune of having too many captains. That may be true. But the Titanic had only one, and even so things went wrong on its maiden voyage. Mother says that shortly before the ship pulled away from the dock, she wanted to stretch her legs, and somehow wandered onto the bridge, without being stopped by the guards — ”It was only one flight up.” There she saw “this old sea dog having a real knockdown-drag-out with another fellow with a goatee…”

The sea dog was Captain Friedrich Petersen, a civilian who in peacetime had held the command on several passenger liners, including the Gustloff for a short period, and after the outbreak of war had been captured by the British as a blockade runner. But then the British decided that because of his age he couldn't possibly be fit for military service, and once he had sworn in writing that he would never again take to the seas as a captain, he was deported to Germany. That was why this man in his mid-sixties had been assigned as a “stationary captain” to the “floating barracks” at the Oxhöft Quay.

The one with the goatee must have been Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Zahn, who always had his German shepherd Hassan at his heel. The former U-boat commander, whose career had been only moderately successful, was supposed to serve as the military transportation officer for the ship loaded with refugees. In addition, to support the elderly captain, whose seagoing instincts were rusty by now, two more captains, young but experienced in sailing the Baltic, also occupied the bridge; their names were Köhler and Weiler. Both had been brought over from the merchant marine, and were therefore treated with considerable disdain by the naval officers, chief among them Zahn; the two groups ate in different officers' messes and talked to each other only when absolutely necessary.

Thus the bridge harbored tensions, but also shared responsibility for the ship's hard-to-define freight: on the one hand the ship was a troop transport, on the other a refugee and hospital ship. With its coat of gray paint, the Gustloff offered an ambiguous target. For the moment it was still safe in the harbor, except from possible air attacks. For the moment the inevitable friction among the too many captains had not yet produced a conflagration. For the moment yet another captain was completely unaware of this ship carrying children and soldiers, mothers and naval women's auxiliaries, and equipped with antiaircraft guns.

Until the end of December, S-13 lay in the dock of the Red Banner Fleets floating Smolny base. Once the ship had been serviced, refueled, provisioned, and loaded with torpedoes, it was ready to set out on a mission, but the commander was missing.

Alcohol and women prevented Aleksandr Marinesko from breaking off his shore leave and being on board in time for the major offensive slated to roll over the Baltic and East Prussia. As the story goes, pontikfa, Finnish potato schnapps, had knocked him off an even keel and wiped out all memory of his obligations. He was searched for in brothels and other dives known to the military police, but in vain; the boat's captain had gone missing.

Not until 3 January did Marinesko, by now sober again, report back to Turku. The NKVD immediately interrogated him, holding him under suspicion of espionage. Since he had no recollection of any of the stages of his extended shore leave, he had nothing but memory gaps to present in his own defense. Eventually his superior, Captain First Class Orjel, managed to postpone the convening of a court-martial by citing Comrade Stalin's recent order for an all-out effort. Captain Orjel had only a few experienced commanders at his disposal and did not want to diminish the fighting power of his unit. When even die crew of S-13 intervened in the proceedings against their captain with a petition for clemency, and the NKVD began to see mutiny as a possibility, Orjel ordered this U-boat commander, who was unreliable only on shore leave, to set course at once for Hangö, whose harbor S-13 left a week later. Icebreakers had opened the navigation channel. The boat was supposed to head for the Baltic coast, passing the Swedish island of Gotland.

There is a film in black and white made at the end of the fifties. It is called Night Fell over Gotenhafen, and its cast includes stars like Brigitte Horney and Sonja Ziemann. The director, a German American by the name of Frank Wisbar, who had earlier made a film about Stalingrad, hired the Gustlojf expert Heinz Schön as an adviser. Banned in the East, the film achieved only modest success in the West, and is now forgotten, like the unfortunate ship itself, submerged in the depths of archives.

While I was living with Mothers friend Jenny Brunies in West Berlin and attending secondary school, I went to see it, at her insistence — ”Tulla conveyed to me that she would very much like us to see the film together” — and was quite disappointed. The plot was utterly predictable. Just as in all the Titanic films, a love story had to be brought in as filler, taking on heroic dimensions at the end, as if the sinking of an overcrowded ship weren't exciting, the thousands of deaths not tragic enough.

A wartime romance. In Night Fell over Gotenhafen, after a much too long prelude in Berlin, East Prussia, and elsewhere, the love triangle is revealed: the cuckolded husband, a soldier at the eastern front, who is later brought onto the ship, critically wounded; the unfaithful wife, a temptress torn between two men, who manages to get on board with her infant; and a playboy naval officer who figures as adulterer, father, and rescuer of the infant. Although Aunt Jenny managed to cry at certain passages in the film, when she invited me afterward to join her at the Paris Bar, where I had my first Pernod, she remarked, “Your mother would not have found much to like about the film, because they show not a single birth, either before or after the sinking of the ship…” And then she added, “In point of fact there's no way you can film something so terrible.”