The first torpedo struck just after nine o’clock. I was woken by a deafening clatter, as though a big dresser full of china cups and plates had been tipped from the second floor of a building out onto the sidewalk. Then another, and then a third. People were screaming, crying for help. Almost immediately, the Gustloff began listing to the port side. Where do your thoughts turn at times like that? I grabbed the children. I could only find Heinrich and Hannelore. Hans must have gone looking for his mother while I slept. I had the presence of mind to grab the life jackets. We had to get up on deck. And quickly. You know, you don’t really think of others in such circumstances. I walked over people’s heads. Over dead bodies, I think. Very quickly. I was very strong back when I was twenty-five. Heinrich on my shoulders and Hannelore under my arm. I was holding on to her so tight that I kept turning around, sure that I’d be carrying no more than an arm I’d ripped off. Without a word. Struggling our way up. You can’t imagine the screams. Over ten thousand women and children suddenly realizing their best bet has just become a fatal illusion. I can still feel their lifeless bodies giving way beneath my feet. Stumble and you wouldn’t get back up.

Despite the panic, I managed to find the gangway leading to Clara’s cabin, but a group of men was coming in the opposite direction, blocking my path. One of them recognized me. “Your friend’s already out on deck!” I followed them, along with Hannelore and Heinrich. No sign of Hans. The boat was beginning to lurch terribly; people were toppling over.

And the cries, Kapriel. The cries.

(She got up and, for the first time since I’ve known her, she had to sort of mime her history, as though words had suddenly failed her. But without looking at me, her head turned away, as though she could no longer bear my gaze.)

We eventually made it to the Sonnendeck, the sun deck outside. The lifeboats were already full of Wehrmacht officers, along with women and children. Scenes from the end of the world. When they saw that the lifeboats were full, the Wehrmacht soldiers began shooting women and children to save them dying from hypothermia. People clung on to whatever they could. And the cold, Kapriel. It was as cold as the Germans found God’s heart that night. The whole deck was inch-deep in ice. Rafts that should have been put to water were blocked by the ice. I remember one man going at the ice with an ax as he tried to free them… And I saw her. She was being carried off by people, soldiers, to a life vessel. I shouted her name. She didn’t hear me. Running as fast as I could across the icy, lurching deck, I caught up with her.

“We need to get into the lifeboats, Magda. The boat’s sinking!”

She didn’t seem frightened at all. In fact she was calm and still as a summer night. Her fever seemed to have dropped. The lifeboats were already full. Just ahead of us a man was trying to climb into one. But they were for women and children only. He got in all the same. The officer in the lifeboat shot him dead. Right in front of us.

The auxiliary who had taken such good care of the children had managed to follow us. I don’t know why. She was holding onto Heinrich.

“Do you know how to swim?”

Clara and I almost had a heart attack. Of course we knew how to swim, but in that water, death was no more than ten minutes away.

“If we don’t jump now, we’ll be dragged down with the ship. Fasten your life jackets and follow me. We need to go down into the water.”

That girl who was just a little bit younger than me, that girl whose name I didn’t even know, she saved my life. Her plan was absolute madness. The boat was beginning to pitch dangerously to the left. We were to climb up the highest side, she said. Then step over the guardrail and slide down the side of the ship and into the water.

“It’s our only hope. Once you’re in the water, swim toward a raft or one of the lifeboats out there. Whatever happens, stay clear of everyone else. Whatever you do, don’t cling to me or I’ll punch you! Those who hang on to each other will be dragged down. You need to swim!”

“But will anyone come to our rescue?” I asked

“I’m not holding out hope,” she said, climbing across the listing deck toward the guardrail.

Clara said the Führer wouldn’t let us sink to the bottom of the Baltic; he wouldn’t let an SS man’s wife and children die. She wanted to know about Hans. It would have taken a good, hard slap to get her to shut up about her Führer. As if that was the time!

Others who’d had the same idea were sliding down the side of the boat. There was a mass of bodies at the bottom. Thousands of people had already jumped and were in the water shouting and screaming. On our way down into the water, we slid past the windows of the Promenadendeck, an outdoor deck closed off by unbreakable glass. It was where people went for a stroll on cold days. Thousands of people were now trapped inside. They were beating on the glass; you could heard their muffled shouts. And gunfire, everywhere. The auxiliary, twenty yards before we reached the mass of bodies, pointed to where we should jump. I wanted to live. And so did she. We jumped. She with Heinrich, me with Hannelore. I think Clara must have jumped thirty seconds after us. The water was ice cold.

“Get away from everyone! Now! Quickly! Don’t let them grab you!”

You know, Kapriel, the Germans are very fond of swimming. It’s one of the things we do well. I followed the auxiliary, who was holding little Heinrich in her arms, but water, Kapriel, water undoes even the best laid plans. Hannelore was lost. All I saw of her were her little feet sticking up out of the water. The life jacket was too big for her; it trapped her upside down, her head underwater. Drowned. The temperature outside was eighteen below. The water was barely above freezing. I kicked away two boys who were grasping at me, having lost their mother.

“It’s too late for her. Don’t look back!”

The auxiliary swam like a fish in spite of her wool coat. Clara followed behind, gasping for breath. How long did it take us to swim out to the lifeboat? People lifted us out of the water, took Heinrich in their arms. We were freezing and soaked to the skin, but alive. Not long after that, other swimmers clambered into the boat, and others after them, until someone shouted, “That’s enough! Another one and we’ll sink!” And the men began beating at the frozen fingers that were clinging to the boat. Those still in the water looked at us in disbelief. That man’s face, Kapriel. He looked me in the eye as if to say, “What are you doing?” Just before he got an oar to the knuckles and disappeared. I can still see him… Every evening.

And suddenly the shouts intensified, if you can imagine! The Gustloff lit up like there was a huge party on board. All the lights came on at the same time and the sirens began to wail. Seconds later, the ship slipped into the Baltic. All that remained were thousands of people floating on the surface. Their shouts could be heard for a few minutes longer, then they died of cold, one by one.

There were twenty-five or twenty-six of us in that lifeboat that kept threatening to capsize beneath our weight. We had to wait hours in the freezing cold. The moon was full in the sky above. The wind froze our faces. A first boat came by, a German Navy ship. It turned back when it saw us, for fear of being torpedoed too. We had no notion of time. Very quickly it was too late for Heinrich. Hypothermia takes the children first, you see. We threw his frigid body overboard to lighten the load. People shouted and cried for hours. Every five minutes, a voice would fall silent, taken by the cold. And just like that, little by little, one by one, death came for nearly every person in the lifeboat. We threw their bodies into the water once we realized. The auxiliary, Clara, and I huddled together.

“I think we’ve lost the war, Magda,” Clara said. “The Führer can’t do a thing for us now. He’s left us here to die.”

And then: “Suddenly everything seems so clear… I can see things so clearly now. It’s like before… before the fevers…”

And a few minutes after that, the cold silenced her forever. All I could hear was the wind and the three voices the heavens had spared, the auxiliary’s body stiff against my back.

Five hours it took for them to rescue us. When they hoisted me up onto the boat, I regained consciousness for a moment or two, then they dragged me over to the furnace with the others. Miraculously the auxiliary was there, too, shivering. They poured cognac into our mouths and we passed out.

They dropped us at Swinemünde; 1,239 survivors out of over 10,000 passengers. The rest are at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. I spent two weeks in a school that had been converted into a hospital. Then I went on alone to Berlin via Stettin. Some people took me by cart as far as Stettin. After that I walked, from farm to farm, from village to village, until I got to Charlottenburg, or what was left of it.

There was no trace of Papa. He must have died in an air raid. Or at least that’s what I thought until the Red Cross got in touch to let me know he’d died in Uruguay in 1979. He’d taken refuge over there in the last days of the war. He’d lived under an assumed name, had even married another woman and had two children with her. It was his son who’d insisted the Red Cross contact me. He’d even included a photo. I wasn’t hard to find. Everyone was on file in East Berlin. I didn’t go around shouting it from the rooftops, naturally. I just thought how history repeats itself. Papa had told me one of our ancestors had left one day, never to return again. How had he known? As part of the hiring process with KdF, he’d had to produce what was known as an ancestor passport, a document that traced his family tree back to 1800. Every civil servant in Germany had to have an approved researcher look into their ancestry. You see, the Nazis wanted to be sure there were no Jews or Slavs or gypsies among their ranks. Do I still have it? Of course not! It was destroyed in an air raid. But Papa showed it to me once. The family tree went all the way back to the late eighteenth century, back to a certain Johann Berg, the son of Christian Berg, a carpenter who left to work as a mercenary in America. After that, we lost all trace of the Berg family. It’s strange: that man left to fight in a war, leaving his son behind in East Prussia, while my father was fleeing the war. In both cases, the result was the same: they both abandoned their children. At any rate, knowing he’d felt compelled to flee Germany in 1945 set me straight about a few things.

I took refuge at a convent in Dahlem. And there I waited until the war was over. There you have it, Kapriel.

(She sat back down on the sofa and finished off what was left of the wine.)

After that, I was done with courtly love. I was having none of it. I chose to live in the East because, for me, if you took the “national” out of “national socialism,” you ended up with something viable, more or less. Wrong again. I mustn’t know what’s good for me. Now you know everything. No, wait… In 1948, I contracted tuberculosis, but I recovered. Imagine that!

I’ve lived in this building since it was built in 1972. Are you crying, Kapriel?