Our liquefied brains were no longer able to grasp what was happening to us, or what was asked of us. However, although we were not in a condition to function under fire, this did not mean that we were exempted from service. The staggering flood of refugees which had poured into Pillau did not allow anyone who still had two arms and two legs to remain idle.
Along with others whose wounds were more serious than ours, we were absorbed by the first-aid organization which was trying to help the civilians waiting to leave, in the face of almost insuperable difficulties. All of these people had lived through a hideous exodus, and the horror of what they had seen was still impressed on their emaciated faces. There was also a swarm of wounded men, soldiers from Königsberg and Cranz, lying about wherever they could. This was often outdoors, in the intense January cold, which sometimes cut short their sufferings. Boats were still putting into Pillau, and leaving filled with people; three-quarters of each load was civilian, the rest, wounded soldiers.
This groaning crowd of men, clinging to a last hope of evacuation, was divided into two categories. The most severely wounded — those whose chances of survival were doubtful, who would at best be hideously mutilated — were not embarked. For them, everything was over. The rest, who might still have some hope of a decent life, were eligible for the boats, which, with any luck, would carry them to the West, to that region we still imagined as a zone of relative quiet.
For every thousand persons embarked, some three thousand more arrived from the East, swelling the ranks of the mob which had turned to us for help.
If the fighting should reach us here, it would be the hell of Memel all over again, only worse. There were many more people here, and the numbers were continuously growing. People were coming in from the south, having crossed the Frisches Haff on anything that would float. They came from Heiligensbeil, Pomehrendorf, Elbing, and even from Preussisch Holland. They had been told that at Pillau they might be able to get on a boat.
We spoke to several of these wretched people. Almost everyone had lost one or two relatives on the way, and described in trembling voices scenes like the ones we had witnessed at Memel. We learned from them that the flight toward Danzig had been cut in two, and that the Russians had reached the Haff at several points. It sounded as if the horror of Memel was duplicated in almost every Prussian coastal town.
Swaying on our unsteady legs, we stared at the vast flood of human misery slowly washing toward the safety which had been promised. In spite of the most prodigious efforts it was clear that these people could not receive even a tenth of what they were expecting. If their prayers had been heard, heaven would have opened to succor their misery. But nothing happened, and misery subsided only for moments at a time, as on the tear-streaked face of a child who has collapsed into a passing sleep.
As winter closed in, the thermometer sank toward five degrees below zero, only aggravating the plight of the refugees and accelerating the death rate.
A crowd stretched as far as the eye could see, in front of a large building crammed with people. From the building a faint smell of the gruel cooking in large caldrons washed over the tightly compressed mass of people, who stood stamping their feet to keep from freezing. The thudding of their feet against the pavement sounded like a dull roll of muffled drums. The children were the most heart-wringing. Many were lost. When they tired of calling for their mothers, they collapsed into floods of tears which nothing and no one could console. These were the smallest ones, too young to grasp any explanations. Their faces, dabbed with tears which instantly froze, remain one of the most pathetic images of that time. We tried to gather them inside, near the caldrons, where they might feel some of the heat. We questioned them, hoping for some identifying information we could broadcast over loudspeakers, but they could only reply with tears and sobs.
Further on, a large metal cross, which stood on a slight elevation, glittered with frost. It looked like a huge sword, thrust into the breast of catastrophe. Another part of the crowd had collected here to listen to the prayers and encouragement of a priest.
The cold grew so intense that the Frisches Haff froze, creating new difficulties for the boats still coming into Pillau. The Frisches Haff froze, and despite the desperate consequences of such cold the fact was put to use. Hundreds of thousands, on forced marches across the ice, were able to reach the narrow strip of land at Nehrung, and Kahlberg, and finally, Danzig. People also left from the pocket at Heiligenbeil. They experienced every sort of hardship, including attacks from Soviet fighter-bombers, which tried to break the ice with strings of bombs, and often succeeded. Private cars and other vehicles of every kind frequently disappeared into crevasses covered over by thin films of ice.
However, nothing could hold back the flood of refugees, who were prepared to endure the most severe hardships. As the Russians grew increasingly active throughout the sector, large numbers of people left Pillau by this providential route. Russian planes were flying over Pillau every day, and it appeared that the defense of Königsberg had given way.
As the work at Pillau had become less intense, we planned to evacuate everyone who wasn’t strictly essential. It was barely twelve miles from Königsberg to Pillau. The front at Cranz had also been shortened, and before long we too would probably be directly involved in the fighting. We were part of an inadequate reserve composed principally of fragments of broken or annihilated units, from which a certain standard of performance was still expected. No one knew any longer where the rest of the Gross Deutschland might be, but we still wore our divisional flashes on our worn and discolored tunics, and there were still a few familiar names near me — principally, Lieutenant Wollers, with a dirty dressing on his right hand, which had lost two fingers; Pferham, our disillusioned pastor; Schlesser; Lindberg, who had survived his fear; and our cook, Grandsk, who had long ago exchanged his caldrons for an F.M.
There were also my friend Hals, whom I will never be able to forget, and I, who have consecrated the rest of my life to bearing witness. Then there were seven or eight others, whose names I never knew, who, with us, made up what was left of the Gross Deutschland Division in that area. Had our division been scratched off the list? Not yet, it seemed. An officer hailed us and ordered us to attention. Our eyes, which had already seen so much, studied this gray-faced hauptmann, who still clung to his sense of disciplinary strength.
This discipline, which had so often annoyed us in the past, touched us now like a soothing balm. Its demands were those made of living beings, of creatures still worthy of life. We analyzed no further than that; for us, accustomed as we were to thinking only of the moment, this realization was a kind of dividend. The captain spoke to us, and through his firm, official voice we caught the intense emotion of the crushing load which weighed on all of us: officers and troops, men, women, and children. The time of boasting and gratuitous bullying was so far behind us that no attitude incompatible with the gravity of the circumstances was possible. A man was speaking to us as men; no one could evade the situation.
However, this man still wore the vestiges of a military uniform, and was still trying to impose some semblance of order in a situation of cataclysm which had swept an entire nation into a devastating retreat. This man, who knew that everything was lost, was still trying to save the moment. He told us that we would have to withdraw; that we too would have to cross the ice of the Frisches Haff, and get to Danzig, where several sizable fragments of our division still remained. He tried to tell us, in a tone which was not peremptory, that there was still work for us to do as part of a particular organization which could be found where he had indicated. He was not trying to spare us a worse disaster when he gave us those orders; the worst was everywhere, and there was no escape. The hauptmann was already walking toward another group of men, saluting as he withdrew.