Terror on the Baltic as told by Agnes Pauls to Helen Rose Pauls

details about the Gustloff from Günter Grass, Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang), trans. Krishna Winston. Göttingen, Steidl Verlag, 2002 (English translation, Orlando, FL, Harcourt Inc., 2003).

What would have been a seven hour pleasure cruise in better times became a seven day nightmare. We had fled our home in Chortitza, Ukraine, in 1943, as the German army began its retreat. We were fortunate enough to get a train ticket to Danzig, Poland. We settled nearby in Zopot and life was beginning to show some signs of normalcy. My husband had a job. We had a roof over our heads. The two children had enough to eat. Suddenly TERROR stalked us once more as the Russians began to attack Poland with force. My husband sensed our hopeless situation and made hurried arrangements for myself and the children, my two sisters, his sister, and three other Mennonite mothers with small children to be transported to Germany. He and the other fathers had to remain behind to become soldiers in the Volksturm (German army deployed against the Allies as a last desperate measure.) A train took us to Gutenhafen (Gydinia) where we were to board a ship which would continue to Insel Rugen, Germany, a resort town on the Baltic Sea.

The roads and harbors of Poland were filled with thousands of refugees, mostly women and children, in horse carts and on foot, fleeing before the Russian army and the terror of rape, injury and death. The temperature was minus 18 degrees Centigrade on January 30, 1945. Ice covered the roads. Freezing winds howled.

When we got to the harbor, there were no facilities to handle the crowds of despairing refugees; no food or lodging. People slept on their bundles and ate what food they had been able to bring along. All had a common goal: to get onto ships for Germany. The Russians were not far behind.

Finally, a ship, the Gustloff, entered the harbor. Hope stirred anew through the crowd and they came as a wave to the gangplank. Refugees were forcibly held at bay while the registered passengers entered; some military personnel and their families, as well as the women and children of the upper class. Once the ship had taken on these passengers, pandemonium broke out as everyone clamored for ship space. The screaming of children and mothers who had lost each other in the press of the crowd, and the shoving for position made organization impossible. Those in charge simply took a rope and made a huge circle, and those inside were allowed up the gangplank. More families were separated in this process and the bedlam increased. Old and young fell to their death from overfull gangplanks; abandoned bedrolls and suitcases littered the harbor. We were left behind clutching our meager belongings. Every breath was a prayer and a cry for help.

The Gustloff was not a Red Cross transport or a cargo ship but a pleasure cruiser built in 1936 in Hamburg by the Blohm and Voss company, commissioned by the German Labor Front and its subsidiary 'Strength through Joy,' which took laborers and white-collar workers on excursions on the Baltic Sea. It was named after a Party comrade shot [martyred] by a Jew. The ship was christened in May of 1937 by Gustloff's widow as Hitler looked on. The ship had cost 25 million Reich marks, was 208 meters long, had 8 levels and a glassed in promenade deck against the bitter Baltic weather. Projected crew was 417 with 1,463 passengers. It was to have only one passenger class and set an example for the desired unity of the German people. For the duration of the war, it had lain in port, used first as a war hospital and then barracks for a military training facility supplying a constant stream of cannon fodder for the German army. Now it was pressed into service.

A second large ship, the Potsdam, came into view and had room for us. Flotillas of other ships, large and small, were taking their places to rescue the refugees like another Dunkirk. We struggled on board the Potsdam that had been built for 2,000 passengers. Now 10,000 persons clung to every ladder, rail and post. Fog was thick. The Baltic Sea was heavily mined and two mine sweepers accompanied us as we departed and the ship groped through the fog and the darkness. First a rumor and then the truth swirled throughout our ship. The Gustloff, which had left the harbor 15 minutes before us, was sinking. Those on outside decks could hear the shouts and cries of those going under. Our ship was in turmoil. Some cried and prayed their last prayers. Others screamed. I silently bowed my head. After all that I had been through and survived: losing my ancestral home in Russia when Stalin took power, escaping from the gulag death camps as a young women, fleeing to Danzig with my husband and two small children during the war--now I and my children, my sisters and my friends would die on this ship and sink into a watery grave. One of the mothers with us kept screaming and crying, "I will never see my Abraham again!"

The Gustloff registered 6,600 passengers the night of January 30, 1945, but the officers ceased counting as approximately 4,000 more pressed onto the decks. Of the over 10,000 people, 1,230 were rescued, among them an embarrassing number of men. Apparently some of the lifeboats were missing and others had mechanisms that were iced up. The crew was inexperienced and unfamiliar with the apparatus. The front part of the ship was locked off and these passengers along with a 1,000 more in the glassed-in promenade deck could not escape. Only one minesweeper escorted the ship and the U-boat locater was frozen. Life jackets were insufficient and all were adult size. Of those 8,000 and more who perished that night, 4,500 were children, many of them found the next morning floating upside-down in oversize life jackets, their little frozen feet poking up .

On the Potsdam, there followed seven days of terror and misery. Food for only a one day journey had been placed on the ship but few could reach the dining halls for the press of the crowd. We rationed what was in our rucksacks, and my sister would line up for water, which was rationed so guardedly that we suffered constant thirst. We slept in the aisles, pressed together in one big room, or standing up, sitting on stairs or our belongings. My listless children were able to double up on a cabin bunk. My every breath was a prayer for safety and a cry for help. I was sure that we would go down at any time!

But somehow, we survived the trip, and the ship entered the harbor at Insel Rugen amid as many shouts of joy as parched and aching throats could muster. What should have taken seven hours took seven days, but we walked off the ship, exhausted, starving but not hopeless. Many children and old people had succumbed during the voyage, their bodies pitched overboard. There was a makeshift refugee camp where we landed at Insel Rugen, with straw to sleep on; with food and water. But we had to move on. My sister-in-law had an address in Dudestadt of an officer she had worked for and we managed to find a train in that direction. By a string of amazing circumstances, I was reunited with my husband after the war and eventually came to Canada, settling on a farm in Chilliwack, British Columbia. Not a day goes by that we fail to be thankful for freedom and safety in this wonderful country; for warmth, for food, for shelter, for life itself.

Years later, Heinz Schön, survivor and assistant ship's purser on the Gustloff, painstakingly researched this disaster. Gunter Grass shed more light on this disaster in his novel Crabwalk. For many years there had been silence about the Gustloff. It was as if the worst marine disaster in history had never happened. After the wall came down in 1990, a reunion was planned for the survivors. Five hundred gathered to share their memories. None had forgotten the collective death cry when the ship sank, and some hear it still, every day.

Photos of Gustloff from Kappes, Irwin J. "Wilhelm Gustloff : The Greatest Marine Disaster in History. . . and why you probably never heard of it," retrieved 2007, February 14 from http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/articles/wilhelmgustloff.aspx. Used by permission.