Mother had forced me to come. She hit me over the head with an irrefutable argument: “Seeing as how it's your fiftieth, too…” She had invited our son Konrad, and when Gabi raised no objections, she carried him off in triumph. She drove up in her sand-colored Trabant, quite a sight in Damp among the gleaming Mercedes and Opels. She had ignored the request I voiced earlier that she be satisfied with me and spare Konny this wallowing in the past. As a father and in other respects, too, I simply didn't count; on this assessment of me, my mother and my ex, who otherwise had little to say to each other, agreed: to Mother, I was “a wet noodle,” and Gabi never missed a chance to tell me what a failure I was.
Thus it was not surprising that the two and a half days in Damp proved quite awkward for me. I stood around at a loss, smoking like a chimney. As a reporter, of course, I could have put together a feature article on the event, or at least a news brief. Probably the organization's directors expected something of the sort from me, because Mother introduced me at first as “a reporter from them Springer papers.” I didn't correct her, but the only sentence I got down on paper was, “The weather is the way it is.” In whose voice could I have written a report? That of a “child of the Gustloff”? Or that of an objective professional?
Mother had an answer for everything. Since she recognized several other survivors among the crowd and was spontaneously approached by former crew members from the torpedo boat Löwe, she seized every opportunity to introduce me, if not as a Springer reporter, then as “the little boy who was born smack in the middle of the disaster.” And she had to add that the thirtieth would provide an occasion to celebrate my fiftieth birthday, even though the schedule called for an hour of silent remembrance on this day.
Several births are supposed to have occurred before the ship sank, as well as on the following day, but with the exception of one person born on the twenty-ninth, no one else of my age was there in Damp. The majority of the guests were old people, because hardly any children had been saved. Among the younger survivors was a ten-year-old from Elbing, who now lives in Canada. He had been asked by the directors to describe for the audience the particulars of his rescue.
Altogether, and for obvious reasons, there are fewer and fewer witnesses to the disaster. If over five hundred survivors and rescuers had turned up for the reunion in '85, this time only two hundred had come, which caused Mother to whisper to me during the hour of remembrance, “Soon none of us will be alive anymore, only you. But you just don't want to write down all the stuff I've told you.”
Yet I was the one who managed to smuggle Heinz Schöns book to her, long before the Wall came down, though admittedly to silence her gnawing reproaches. And shortly before the reunion in Damp she received from me an Ullstein paperback, written by three Englishmen. But even this documentation of the catastrophe, which I must admit was written factually but too emotionlessly, did not please her: “It's all too impersonal; nothing comes from the heart!” And then she said, when I stopped in to see her in Grosser Dreesch, “Well, maybe my Konradchen will write something about it someday…”
That explains why she took him along to Damp. She arrived, or rather made her entrance, in a black velvet ankle-length dress, buttoned up to the neck, that set off her cropped white hair. Wherever she stood, or sat over coffee and pastries, she was the center of attention. She especially drew men. As we know, she had always had that effect. Her schoolmate Jenny had told me about all the boys who stuck to her like flies during her youth; from childhood on, she is supposed to have smelled of carpenters glue, and I could swear there was a hint of that odor about her in Damp.
But now it was old men, most of them in dark-blue suits, standing around this tough old bird in black. The stout graybeards included a former lieutenant commander who had been in charge of the torpedo boat T-36 — its crew had rescued several hundred of the victims — and an officer who had survived the sinking of the Gustloff. But it was especially the crew members from the Löwe whose memories of Mother had remained vivid. I had the distinct impression that the men had been waiting for her. They thronged around Mother, whose demeanor took on something girlish, and could not tear themselves away. I heard her giggle, saw her cross her arms and assume a pose. But it was no longer about me and my dramatic birth at the moment of the ship's sinking; now it was all about Konny. Mother introduced my son to the older gentlemen as if he were her own; and I kept my distance, not wanting to be questioned or, worse still, celebrated by the Löwe veterans.
Watching from the sidelines, I noticed that Konny, who had always seemed rather shy, handled himself confidently in the role Mother had assigned him, giving brief but clear answers, asking questions, listening intently, venturing a youthful laugh now and then, even standing still to have his picture taken. At almost fifteen — his birthday would come in March — he showed not a trace of childishness, instead appeared ripe for Mothers plan of initiating him into the complete story of the disaster and, as would become apparent, having him promulgate the legend.
From then on, everything revolved around him. Although one survivor in attendance had been born on the Gustloffthe day before the boat sank, and he, like me, was given his own copy ofSchöns book by the author — the mothers were honored on stage with bouquets — it seemed to me as though all this was done merely to impress Konny s obligation upon him. People were placing their hopes in him. Great things were expected of our Konny. He would not let the survivors down.
Mother had stuck him in a dark-blue suit, which called for a collegiate tie. With his glasses and curly hair, he looked like a cross between an archangel and a boy at First Communion. He presented himself as if he had a mission, as if he were about to proclaim something sacred, as if he had been vouchsafed a revelation.
The service of remembrance took place at the hour when the torpedoes struck the ship. I don't know who suggested that Konrad sound the ship's bell, hung next to the altar; in the late seventies Polish divers had salvaged it from the aft of the wrecks upper deck. Now, on the occasion of this survivors' reunion, the crew of the salvage vessel Szkwał had presented their found object to signal Polish-German rapprochement. But in the end it was Herr Schön after all who was allowed to strike the bell three times with a hammer to mark the end of the service.
The pursers assistant on the Gustloff was eighteen when the ship went down. I do not want to conceal the fact that in Damp little gratitude was expressed to this man who after the disaster had collected and researched almost everything he could track down. At the beginning of the reunion he spoke on the topic “The Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on 30 January 1945 from the Russians' Perspective.” In the course of his speech, it became evident that he had visited the Soviet Union often to do his research, had made the acquaintance of a petty officer from the U-boat S-13, and, what is more, had remained in friendly contact with this Vladimir Kourotchkin, who, on his commanders orders, had sent the three torpedoes speeding on their way, and had even been photographed shaking hands with the old man. With these revelations, he had, as Schön later reticently put it, “lost some friends.”
After the speech, they cut him dead. From then on, many in the audience labeled him a Russian-lover. For them the war had not ended. The Russian was still “Ivan,” the three torpedoes murder weapons. But from Vladimir Kourotchkin’s point of view, the nameless ship he sank had been stuffed to the gills with Nazis, responsible for launching a surprise attack on his homeland and leaving scorched earth when they retreated. Not until he met Schön did he learn that after the torpedoes hit their mark, more than four thousand children drowned, froze to death, or were sucked into the depths with the ship. The petty officer apparently dreamed of those children for a long time afterward, always the same dream.