Guenter Grass - Crabwalk

By the way, the boy born on the torpedo boat two hours after me, which means on 31 January, was called Leo, at his mothers request and in honor of the ship that had rescued her.

There were no arguments on the Internet about any of this — my birth and the people who supposedly played a role in it, on one ship or the other; my son's Web site made no mention of a Paul Pokriefke, not even in abbreviated form. Absolute silence about anything having to do with me. My son simply left me out. I didn't exist online. But another ship, which, accompanied by the torpedo boat T-36, arrived at the site of the catastrophe at the moment of the sinking or a few minutes later, the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, unleashed a quarrel between Konrad and his nemesis David, a quarrel that would later unravel across the globe.

Fact is, the Hipper, likewise overloaded with refugees and wounded, paused only briefly, but then turned away to continue on course to Kiel. While Konny, portraying himself as an expert on maritime questions, assessed the warning about submarines in the area as sufficient grounds for the heavy cruisers turning away, David objected that the Hipper should have at least lowered some of its motor launches and made them available for further rescue operations. Furthermore, when the warship, with its ten thousand tons of displacement, executed its turning maneuver at full power in the immediate vicinity of the disaster site, a large number of people floating in the water were sucked into the boat's wake; not a few were shredded by the propellers.

My son, however, claimed to know for a fact that the Hipper % escort vessel had not only picked up U-boat presence on its locater, T-36 had actually managed to evade two torpedoes aimed at it. In response, David described, as if he had been there underwater, how the successful Soviet U-boat had kept motionless, not raising its periscope and not firing a single torpedo, while the detonation of the depth charges dropped by T-36 blew to bits many people drifting in life jackets and calling for help. As an epilogue to the tragedy, he claimed, a massacre had occurred.

Now there ensued the kind of no-holds-barred total communication possible on the Internet. Voices from home and abroad joined in. One contribution even came from Alaska. You could see how current the sinking of the long-forgotten ship had become. With the exclamation, seemingly emanating from the present, “The Gust-loff is sinking!” my son's home page opened a window to the entire world, launching what even David conceded online was “a much overdue discourse.” Yes, of course! Now everyone could know and judge for himself what had happened on 30 January 1945 off the Stolpe Bank; the Webmaster had scanned in a map of the Baltic and marked with didactic precision all the sea-lanes leading to the site of the tragedy.

Unfortunately Konny s adversary did not refrain, toward the end of the globally expanding chatter, from bringing up the further significance of that fatal date and reminding everyone of the man for whom the sunken ship was named, portraying the murder of the party functionary Wilhelm Gustloff by the medical student David 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 Prüfe'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 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.