Guenter Grass - Crabwalk

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 Swinemünde. 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, would have been called Peter, not Paul, would have studied shipbuilding and been hired by the Neptune Shipyards in Rostock, holding a secure job up to the fall of the Wall, and would have been present at the reunion of survivors in the Baltic sea resort of Damp, fifty years after my rescue, an early retiree, alone or with my now elderly adoptive parents, celebrated by all the participants, pointed out on the stage: he was that foundling.

Someone — maybe that damned destiny, for all I care — didn't want that for me. I had no escape route. Was not permitted to survive as a nameless found object. When the lifeboat was in the right position, Fräulein Ursula Pokriefke, as she was listed in the boat's log, in an advanced state of pregnancy, was transferred to the Löwe. Even the time was noted: 2205 hours. While deaths harvest continued to reap rich gains in the churned-up sea and inside the Gustloff, nothing more stood in the way of Mother s delivery.

This much must be conceded: my birth was not unique. The aria “Snatch life from the jaws of death” had several verses. Children came into the world before me and after me that day. On torpedo boat T-36, as well as on the Göttingen, a six-thousand-ton steamer of the North German Lloyd Line, which arrived somewhat later, having taken on board in the East Prussia harbor of Pillau two and a half thousand wounded and more than a thousand refugees, among them almost a hundred infants. During the voyage, five more children were born, the last shortly before the ship, traveling in a convoy, reached the sea of corpses, hardly enlivened anymore by cries for help. But at the actual moment when the Gustlojf went down, sixty-two minutes after the torpedoes struck, I was the only one to crawl out of my hole.

“At the exact minute when the Yustloff went under,” Mother asserts or, as I would describe it: when the Wilhelm Gustloff, bow first and listing sharply, at the same time sank and capsized to the port side, which meant that all the people slithering down the upper decks, also the stacks of rafts, indeed everything that wasn't nailed down, hurtled into the foaming sea; at the moment when, as if on orders from the back of beyond, the ship's lighting, extinguished since the torpedoes hit, suddenly came on inside and even on the decks, and — as in peacetime and the KDF years — offered all who had eyes to see one last spectacle of festive illumination; at the moment when everything came to an end, I was born, so they tell me, quite normally, in the engineers narrow bunk bed: headfirst and without complications, or, as Mother said, “It went without a hitch. You just popped out…”

She missed everything taking place outside that bunk bed. She saw neither the festive illumination of the capsizing ship as it went under nor the tangled bunches of people plummeting from the stern, the last part to remain above water. But as Mother claims to remember, my first cry drowned out that other cry, blended from thousands of voices and carrying far and wide over the water, that final cry that came from everywhere: from the interior of the collapsing ship, from the bursting promenade deck, from the flooded sundeck, from the rapidly vanishing stern, and rising from the turbulent surface of the water, where thousands swirled, dead or alive, in their life jackets. From half-filled or overcrowded boats, from densely packed rafts, which were swept aloft on the crests of the waves, then disappeared into the troughs, from everywhere the cry rose into the air, escalating to a gruesome duet with the ship's siren, which suddenly began to wail, and just as suddenly was choked off. A collective death cry such as had never before been heard, of which Mother said, and will continue to say, “A cry like that — you won't ever get it out of your ear…”

The ensuing silence was disturbed only by my whimpering, or so I hear. Once the umbilical cord was cut, I too fell silent. When the captain, as witness to the sinking, had noted the exact time in his ship's log, the crew of the torpedo boat went back to fishing survivors out of the sea.

But that's not how it was. Mother is lying. I'm certain that it wasn't on the Löwe that I… The time was actually… Because when the second torpedo… And at the first contractions, Dr. Richter… not an injection but actually delivered… Went smoothly. Born on a slanting, sliding cot. Everything was slanting when I… Only a pity that Dr. Richter didn't have time to fill out the form, by hand: born on… on board the… at… No, no, not on a torpedo boat but on board that damned ship, named after the martyr, launched in Hamburg, once gleaming white, much loved, promoting strength through joy, classless, thrice-cursed, overcrowded, battleship-gray, torpedoed, everlastingly sinking: that's where I was born, headfirst and on a slant. Once the umbilical cord was cut, and I was diapered and swaddled in one of the ship's wool blankets, Mother and I were helped into the life-saving boat by Dr. Richter and Head Nurse Helga.

But she doesn't want a delivery on the Gustloff. Cooks up two sailors who cut my umbilical cord in the chief engineer's cabin. In another version it is the doctor, who, however, was not yet on the torpedo boat at that time. Even Mother, otherwise always absolutely sure of herself, wavers in her account, and sometimes, in addition to “them two seamen” and “the nice doctor who gave me a shot while I was still on the Yustloff” places another person at the scene of the delivery: the captain of the Löwe, Paul Prüfe, is supposed to have cut my umbilical cord.

Since I have no way to corroborate my version of the birth, which admittedly is more like a vision, I shall stick to the facts as reported by Heinz Schön; according to him, Dr. Richter was taken aboard the Löwe sometime after midnight. Only then did he preside over the birth of some other child. Beyond a doubt, it was the Gustloff's doctor who later filled out my birth certificate, giving the date of 30 January 1945, although without an exact time. It was Lieutenant Commander Prüfe, however, who was responsible for my given name. Mother is said to have insisted that I be called Paul, “just like the captain of the Löwe, ” and there was no choice as to my last name, Pokriefke. Later the boys in school and in the Free German Youth, but also fellow journalists, called me “Peepee,” and I sign my articles P dot P dot.