“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.
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.