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 Löwe. 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 Brösens 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. But when the Gustloff put out to sea for three days on 24 March 1938, the passengers included a good thousand Austrians, carefully screened by the Party; for two weeks later the people of the Ostmark were supposed to vote in a plebiscite on something that the Wehrmacht had already made a fait accompli with a swift march into that country: the annexation of Austria. On the same voyage three hundred girls from Hamburg came aboard — selected members of the League of German Girls — and well over a hundred journalists.
Just for fun, and as a sort of test, I am now going to try to picture how your humble servant would have reacted as a journalist to the reception for members of the press, scheduled for the very beginning of the voyage and held in the reception-and-movie lounge. As Mother says, and as Gabi will be happy to tell you, I am anything but a hero, but perhaps I would have been rash enough to ask about the financing of the new vessel, and about the holdings of the German Labor Front, for like the other journaJists I would have been aware that Ley, the man of many promises, could never have taken on such ambitious projects without the funds he had skimmed from all the banned labor unions.
A belated test of courage! If I know myself, the most I would have come out with is a roundabout query about the remaining capital, to which the unflappable KDF tour leader would have promptly responded that the German Labor Front was swimming in money, as we could plainly see. In a few days the Howaldt Shipyard would be launching a huge electrically powered ship, which, as could already be guessed, would bear the name of Robert Ley.
After that, the horde of invited journalists had an opportunity to tour the ship. Further questions had to be swallowed. And as a backdated journalist, I, who in my entire career have never uncovered a scandal, never detected a skeleton in a closet or misappropriation of campaign funds or bribery of high officials, would have kept my mouth shut like all the rest. We were permitted only to express breathless admiration as we made our way from deck to deck. Except for the special staterooms for Hitler and Ley, which were not open for inspection, the ship was set up to be purely classless. Although I am acquainted with the details only from photographs and surviving documents, it feels as though I was actually there, impressed and at the same time sweating bullets out of sheer cowardice.