Nine

THE LITTLE RED SWEATER

The Wilhelm Gustloff sank about 12 nautical miles off Stolpe Bank, an underwater shoal near present-day Poland. Any ship within 10 nautical miles of the Wilhelm Gustloff when the S-13 fired its torpedoes that night would have heard the explosions, Captain Paul Vollrath said.¹ The news of the sinking reached the German signals staff in Gotenhafen via the SOS relay that had gone out a few minutes after the attack. In turn, the headquarters relayed the message.

Refugees aboard other transport ships heard the news. For example, aboard the Togo, Dr. Peter Siegel from Homburg-Saar remembered, “During the trip it was noticed that the crew, who was initially in good spirits and talkative, all of a sudden turned stern. I heard that they had just received the news of the sinking of the Gustloff.”² All available ships from the Hela peninsula, Pillau, and Gotenhafen left their courses to find survivors.

Helga Reuter estimated that perhaps four and a half hours had passed since the Wilhelm Gustloff sank before she spied searchlights on the horizon from inside the lifeboat. Her feet were swollen stiff from the cold and she could no longer feel them in her leather boots. Her face was numb and the saliva in her mouth felt like a thin layer of ice. Her blonde hair lay plastered to her scalp.

Then lights came closer. They belonged to the T-36, a torpedo boat. Upon hearing the distress call, Captain Robert Hering headed straight for the scene of the attack. The T-36 belonged to the Elbing class of small, fast torpedo boats, and throughout the war she had served in the Baltic Sea.

Captain Robert Hering had heard the transmission from the Gustloff around 10 P.M., just about an hour after Marinesko attacked. The boat neared the site at the same time as a barge. The large swells pushed the barge and it kept colliding with the T-36. The Gustloff had not yet gone under, and some passengers on the cruise liner’s upper decks took a chance and jumped into the water. Some made it onto the bucking barge; others were crushed between the barge and the T-36.

Hering couldn’t steer close enough to the Wilhelm Gustloff without risking his boat and crew. He resigned himself to picking up survivors. Each time the torpedo boat found a lifeboat, the crew threw over the side rope ladders, lines, or hawser netting. The stronger survivors climbed aboard. The weaker ones were pushed and sometimes pulled up in a sling. It quickly became apparent which lifeboats and rafts had able-bodied, experienced seamen inside. Those craft had little trouble maneuvering alongside the T-36, making for an easier rescue. The other boats drifted about. Captain Hering worried that the submarine that had attacked and sank the Wilhelm Gustloff still prowled the waters. He and his crew pushed that thought aside and worked diligently for hours.

The German navy didn’t coordinate the rescue effort; rather those ships that heard the distress call headed toward the scene.

“We yelled and waved our arms,” Helga Reuter said of trying to flag down the T-36. “Finally they came near us and called with a bullhorn. They had to turn around to get us from the right angle to the raft.”³

Reuter’s two exhausted companions mustered enough energy to align their little raft with the rescue boat. The rescuers shouted through the bullhorn to them. Their voices barely carried over the cold air. The rescuers told the three survivors in the raft to get ready to catch a rope. They needed to secure their life raft to the rescue boat, otherwise, it wouldn’t be steady enough for the T-36 crew to pull the three survivors up and over the gunwale, one at a time. The rope flew through the air, but the hands of Helga’s two companions were frozen. Time and again they tried to catch it, and time and again their fingers couldn’t close around the rope. Helga, however, had kept her hands tucked underneath her armpits, beneath her giant fur coat. Every so often she remembered to wiggle her fingers and rotate her wrists. She was able to catch and fasten the rope.

“I was the first to be lifted on this torpedo search boat. I could not stand up,” Helga said, pointing to her feet, which today plague her, nearly 70 years later, with arthritis and cold sensitivity. “They had to carry me inside where all the refugees and rescued sat on the floor or were standing. They got a stool from somewhere for me.”

By now it was nearly 2:30 in the morning on January 31. With nearly 500 survivors aboard, the T-36 quickly ran out of room. Inside the engine room, two sailors helped Helga shed her iceencrusted clothing and don warm, dry apparel, all of it donated from the crew’s own clothing. A third sailor wrapped her in a woolen blanket. A fourth sailor handed her a double vodka. She looked down and realized she had only one shoe. It was missing a heel. Slowly the icebox chill left her body and the heat, painful at first, flooded her body. Helga opened and closed her fingers to encourage blood flow. Then, the awful truth about Inge and Ruth came as her body warmed.

“As for my sister and aunt,” Helga said. “I never heard from them again.”

Since the T-36 had escorted the Wilhelm Gustloff out of Gotenhafen, it was the first rescue vessel to arrive on the scene. It had been working the area some time before it found Helga and her companions in their life raft.

The young captain and his T-36 crew also rescued Captains Wilhelm Zahn, Friedrich Petersen, and Heinz Weller, in addition to pulling several hundred people out of the Baltic Sea. Not all of them were alive and some were dying. Rescuers kept coming upon an all too familiar sight; aimlessly drifting lifeboats filled with the frozen dead. Some of the people had died from exposure, others from the sheer exhaustion of trying to balance on rickety life rafts. People were sucked under the propellers of rescue ships. From inside the rafts and lifeboats, a maddening chorus of screaming women, children, and men filled the air. Dead bodies floated past.

Most rescue boats took hours to locate survivors from the Wilhelm Gustloff, searching for bodies to match the pleading voices calling over the black waters. Many lifeboats and bodies had drifted far from the site of the attack. When rescue boats did arrive, their captains and crews found a floating debris field filled with dangerous pieces of metal, splintered wood, rucksacks and bodies.⁴

“On January 31, 1945, at about 1 A.M., we passed the sinking spot of the Gustloff. Despite submarine alerts we were able to save a woman and a petty officer amongst the drifting bodies,” wrote one officer who had been on a rescue vessel.⁵

Two decades after the sinking, Maj. Erich Schirmack wrote to Dönitz’s subordinate Vice Admiral Conrad Englehardt about the rescue effort. While returning from a mission with five other boats, Schirmack heard the Gustloff’s distress call. His boat was heading back to Pillau to pick up refugees. Schirmack’s vessel arrived on the scene an hour after hearing about the sinking. It sailed as fast as possible, but “could only recover corpses.”⁶

The Admiral Hipper, a heavy cruiser that T-36 had escorted from Gotenhafen, arrived on the scene soon after hearing the distress signal. It had left Gotenhafen with 1,377 refugees and 152 crewmembers already on board. The Hipper had seen quite a lot of combat during the war, from operating against Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic to participating in operations against Allied convoys trying to supply the Soviet Union. The ship and its crew had been drafted into doing construction work in Gotenhafen. The boat was actually on its way to Kiel for refitting when it heard the distress call. The Hipper’s crew tried to pluck survivors from the black waters of the Baltic Sea. Her captain, fearing another submarine attack, didn’t stay long. The ship sailed away.

His fear was understandable, but Alexander Marinesko never saw the Hipper. In fact, he’d dived far beneath the midnight-dark sea to escape the punishing shock waves of depth charges.⁷ Three more minesweepers eventually arrived and saved nearly 200 more people from drowning or exposure.

Dramatic scenes played out throughout the night, aboard the rescue ships and in lifeboats such as Captain Paul Vollrath’s. The lifeboats were built to safely hold between 60 and 70 people. After a quick head count Vollrath realized close to 90 people sat on board. The boat was heavy, the bodies and sodden clothing pushed the gunwales nearly flush with the water.

For the rest of his life, Vollrath’s decision to refuse more people remained one of the hardest and yet the most necessary choices he ever had to make. Inside the boat meant life, or at least a chance at life. Outside the boat death was certain. “Even today I often ask myself, ‘Why did you not at least attempt to get some more into the boat?’ But still my answer is that should I have done so, the boat would have capsized, there were too many people swimming in the water,” said Vollrath.⁸

Finally the wind no longer whipped about, the sea calmed, and the swells came less frequently. Just after 10 P.M., an hour after the three torpedoes hit, Vollrath decided to stop rowing away from the ship so he could conserve his energy. He also didn’t want to take the craft too far from the site of the attack. About 50 yards separated his boat from the Wilhelm Gustloff. Vollrath saw the emergency lights glimmering against the ship’s upper decks; they cast a spectral glow. He thought he saw a person standing on the side of the ship, which now rested at sea level. He wondered if his mind was simply playing tricks on him. When he looked again, there was nobody there and quite suddenly the Wilhelm Gustloff was gone, pulled into the watery abyss.

Among the 90 people inside the lifeboat was a doctor, and for that Vollrath was thankful. He asked the physician to look after people as best he could. Meanwhile, Vollrath passed around his cigarettes and bottle, which, if nothing else, helped shore up morale. “There was not much else one could do,” Vollrath said. Every now and then one of the survivors saw what appeared to be the shadow of a ship moving on the water’s surface and then stopping to pick up survivors. The people in lifeboat No. 6 waited, and waited, for their turn.

Shortly before midnight, nearly two hours after the S-13 fired its torpedoes at the Gustloff, the Löwe moved alongside Vollrath’s lifeboat. Vollrath told the captain of the torpedo boat that he and his passengers were stable and in fair shape, and he suggested that the crew continue searching for those hapless souls still in the water or those people floating on the more exposed rafts. Before the Löwe left Vollrath’s location to do so, one of its crew announced through a megaphone that they were preparing to drop depth charges. The British had developed depth charges in World War One to use against German submarines. It was unlikely that Löwe’s action would sink the S-13 or any other submarine still prowling about. However, its shock waves could loosen the submarine’s joints or perhaps damage its instruments, which would force the sub to surface, allowing guns from the Löwe to finish it off.

Explosions rumbled beneath the water and Vollrath’s lifeboat creaked. The severe shockwaves threatened to split the lifeboat open. The depth charges, however, yielded no results: Captain Marinesko’s submarine was no longer in the vicinity.

At this point silence filled the lifeboat. Passengers sat alone with their thoughts. To Vollrath, it felt as if only a short time had ticked by since thousands of lives were literally swept away, frozen to death. When he rowed away from the Wilhelm Gustloff, Vollrath glimpsed a gigantic hole in the Gustloff’s foredeck, the size of which had nearly eviscerated the boat. The hole was just below where the drained swimming pool had sheltered the Women’s Naval Auxiliary. “In one hour this inferno had lasted and dragged love, hopes, and wishes down to the bottom of the sea. What is one hour, 60 minutes, 3,600 seconds? Sometimes it may appear to be [an] eternity and I am sure no one will ever forget this,” Vollrath wrote in his postwar memoir.

He remembered the ship’s siren screaming as the Gustloff went down. “Landlubbers always say that ships do not have a soul. Technically this behavior is easily explained by stress, but I thought that it so very much reminded me of the last outcry of a dying animal,” Vollrath said.⁹

In his memoir, Vollrath recounted how the Löwe worked for several hours more, picking up survivors here and there, until its captain realized nothing more could be done. It was time for the Löwe to return to lifeboat No. 6. The beacon from Vollrath’s flashlight helped guide the torpedo boat back into position.

That night the Löwe saved more than 400 people. Vollrath wondered how many others might have lived had their lifejackets been supplied with flashlights. The survivors in lifeboat No. 6 scrambled over the side of the lifeboat and onto the torpedo boat, which was fairly low in the water. Only then did Vollrath notice a crippled old man, unable to move, lying in the boat. Vollrath reached for him and helped carry him aboard the Löwe.

Once the survivors were safely on board the Löwe, the crew worked furiously to warm them. They cut away nearly frozen clothing from men and women and hosed their frigid bodies with warm water. Then they tucked the survivors into bunks in twos and threes. Hot drinks were served and blankets handed out. Members of the ship’s crew gave their clothes to the survivors.

After he had boarded the Löwe and changed into warm, dry clothing, a woman approached Vollrath. She told him that she and the others from the lifeboat had been angry that he had repeatedly turned away the Löwe to rescue others. Now she wanted Vollrath to know she understood his decision, and that he had been right after all.

The Löwe also plucked Horst Woit from his lifeboat. He doesn’t remember his mother pushing him up and over the side, or her telling him it would be okay, that they were now safe. He doesn’t remember any motherly words of consolation or assurances. One minute he sat next to her and 68 other people, and the next minute strong arms lifted him through the air. Being carried up from a lifeboat to a rescue boat didn’t guarantee safety. Some people slipped through rescuers’ arms into the sea and drowned; others died minutes after being pulled from the water. Horst Woit was lucky.

On board, an officer guided the young boy to the engine room. The room radiated heat. The officer helped Horst out of his frozen ski pants, jacket, and socks and into dry, if slightly large, clothes. He gave Horst something hot to drink. The officer asked Horst if he would like a marmalade sandwich.

“Yes, of course,” Horst remembered answering, “with butter too please.”¹⁰

Though alone, Horst said he didn’t feel frightened but he was anxious to find his mother. So much had happened so quickly, he hadn’t much time to think, but now he began to wonder where the crew had taken his mother. Meta Woit had been pulled aboard the Löwe a little after Horst; it took time to transfer all 70 people inside the lifeboat. When Meta boarded the Löwe, sailors offered her a change of clothing and something hot to eat and drink. Then she searched for Horst. It was a story she often told Horst in the years after the sinking.

“Have you seen my son?” she asked every crewmember, every passenger. No one answered the wild-eyed mother because no one knew the answer. There were so many people, so many families split apart in the confusion of the sinking and rescue operation. An officer pointed Meta toward a scratchy-looking woolen blanket piled at the bow. Meta forced herself to peer beneath the mound. Small bodies lay tucked together in lifeless slumber. Though her little yellow-haired boy was not among them, she nearly retched at the sight. At dawn, Meta found Horst asleep in a bunk, wedged between the wall and an elderly man.

Others weren’t so fortunate. Children, mothers, fathers were stacked like cordwood on the boat’s decks. There weren’t enough rough wool blankets to drape all the corpses.

Around 5:30 A.M. on January 31, a small patrol boat, the VP–1703, spotted a dark shape bobbing on the waves. At first the sailors couldn’t figure out whether it was debris or bodies. It was a lifeboat, but its passengers appeared dead, all of them twisted and frozen, floating inside the water-filled craft. Nonetheless, Petty Officer Werner Fick jumped in to inspect. To his astonishment he found an infant wrapped in a woolen blanket snug between frozen corpses. He was the last official survivor of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Fick and his wife adopted the baby.¹¹

Rose Rezas thinks she was rescued around 4 A.M., but since she had no watch she couldn’t be certain.¹² Inside her lifeboat, which was only half full, one little boy kept yelling over and over for everyone to stay strong, to not give up hope. Finally, after what seemed an interminably long time, a ship appeared. The crew threw over a rope and the refugees ascended to safety one at a time. Rose promptly passed out upon hitting the deck. She woke to find herself wearing men’s clothes. A sailor handed her a whiskey to drink. With each sip her anguish grew. Where was her sister Ursula? Feeling quite worried, Rose almost didn’t notice the officer standing before her.

“There’s a girl who looks like you in the next cabin,” the sober-looking officer said. Rose timidly got to her feet and followed him, cautiously hopeful. She passed through the door, her eyes searching. Leaning against a wall, Ursula sat eating.

Nearly 70 years later, Irene Tschinkur, who was 11 at the time, doesn’t remember the moment her body hit the sea. She doesn’t remember feeling a slap as the waves rushed to meet her. She does remember feeling afraid she would drown. While submerged beneath the icy surf, she felt her lungs might pop. She doesn’t remember seeing bodies or debris. But those memories pale in comparison to the moment she and her mother, Serafima, found each other in the dark water and swam together toward a lifeboat packed with people. They tried to hang on to the outside of the little vessel. Their exertion was in vain; the people inside boat smacked at their hands with oars. Irene and Serafima treaded water. When Irene remembers it today, it seems that they waited for hours in the water. Naturally, there was no way to tell how long they were in the water until the T-36 picked them up.

“The German navy men were so helpful, stripped our wet clothes from us, and put us in hammocks with warm blankets,” Irene said, remembering how she studied the beads of condensation on the ceiling as she lay in the hammock. Getting out of her wet, frozen clothes was relief and torture, the sudden warmth painful. After more than six decades, certain sights and sounds can still pull Irene back in time.

“We watched somebody operate on a woman’s leg which showed a big hole, and most of the night we kept throwing up seawater,” Irene said.

Irene and her mother still had no inkling if little Ellen had survived. The thought that she too had died twisted the mother’s gut since she was fairly certain that Evi, or Evchen as she was also called, had drowned. So mother and daughter thawed and sipped hot liquids, and if they talked, Irene doesn’t remember what they said.¹³ They simply waited in limbo together with the hundreds of other refugees aboard the boat. So many were waiting for news of loved ones.

The pair spent the night on the T-36, and the next morning the ship arrived at Sassnitz, a seaside port on the Isle of Ruegen, just off the coast of present day Stralsund, Germany. The Red Cross had set up a makeshift camp with the German authorities to help sort out the survivors. The sailors had given them their clothes but had no shoes to provide. They tramped barefoot through the snow to the camp.

Hitler had envisioned using the 30-mile-long island of Ruegen with its deep bays and narrow straits to build a British-style beach resort. He wanted the Baltic Sea island to be the largest resort ever to have existed, with room for up to 20,000 people at a time in a 2.5-mile-long complex. The hotel Prora, situated between Sassnitz and Binz, was built between 1936 and 1939. Like the KdF cruise liners with which the Wilhelm Gustloff had once sailed, the hotel too would offer affordable vacations for the average German worker. It was called a “Seaside Resort for the Common Man.” Each room boasted two beds, a wardrobe, and sink; guests would have used communal toilets, showers, and ballrooms located on each floor. In spite of Hitler’s ambitious plans, no guests ever checked into the hotel, for when Germany invaded Poland, the idea and the buildings were abandoned. Today the island is a popular tourist destination and can be reached by ferry or car over a causeway.

German authorities processed the refugees, recording their names and where they wanted to go. Like many survivors, Serafima and Irene Tschinkur were assigned to a Red Cross ship. Once on board they found a place to sit. They still didn’t know Ellen’s fate. No one on the island remembered seeing the child, but then again many children and parents had become separated. The mother was heartsick. If her little daughter hadn’t made it into a lifeboat, she was dead. She told Irene to wait while she looked for their clothes, which supposedly had been transferred from the T-36 to this Red Cross ship. Suddenly, a cry of joy pealed through the boat. Serafima had found Ellen’s little red wool cable-knit sweater in the survivors’ clothing pile. After survivors had been pulled from the sea and given dry garments, rescuers had gathered up the sodden clothes. The Red Cross had taken the clothing, hoping to match the garments with their owners. Surely, she thought, this little hand-knit sweater was proof of life. She scooped it into her arms and tore through the ship, going from room to room until she came upon a room full of crying children who had lost their mothers. There sat Ellen, quiet and bewildered. She did not speak one word.

A lifeboat had rescued the six-year-old. When the T-36 came on the scene and began transferring people from the lifeboat, it was clear the blond-haired girl was too small to climb the rope ladder on her own. Instead, she was transferred aboard in a sling seat. Just before Ellen’s turn came to ride the sling, she watched a lady in a rescue chair. The lady was pulled up, but her frozen hands were unable to firmly grasp the ropes. She slipped and fell, hitting her head on the lifeboat. She sank.

The terror of falling into the water and being submerged remains with Ellen Tschinkur to this day. She has trouble talking about her rescue. She still cannot wash her hair under the shower since standing under the faucet reminds her too much of being submerged under the sea. So few children Ellen’s age were rescued. Her white fur coat helped save her life; it shone like a beacon in the dark.

Milda Bendrich couldn’t believe her 2-year-old Inge made nary a peep the entire time, from the moment the first torpedo slammed into the Wilhelm Gustloff until they were rescued aboard the T-36. Like survivors in the other lifeboats, Milda too climbed a ladder from her lifeboat to the safety of the T-36 deck. Her hands were frozen but she maintained her white-knuckled grip on her baby girl. Once on board, Milda tried to warm Inge. “A woman with a fur coat put me inside and kept me warm,” Inge Bendrich Roedecker said.¹⁴ Together, the lady and Milda made sure Inge was warm, safe, and unscathed. Medical personnel took Inge in another cabin for further examination. Only then did Milda tend to her own basic needs. She changed into dry clothing before sitting down on a hard chair.

“I spent this night sitting on a chair. Around me were women, each one engrossed with her own fate. As if in a fog, I heard a woman in another room screaming hysterically. Somebody explained that this woman had to leave her three children on the W.G.,” Bendrich wrote in her letter. “I must have suffered from shock as from the first moment I had felt no fear and instinctively knew that I would not give up.”

Milda and Inge were reunited the next morning. A doctor assured the young mother that he had examined the baby girl and that she was well. The baby slept peacefully through the night.

Wilhelmina Reitsch, who supervised the evacuation of the Women’s Naval Auxiliary, had remained in Gotenhafen until the end of March when the port was under fire and she left on a fishing boat.¹⁵ She had decided to put the auxiliary women on the ships because the few trains available were deemed unsafe and there were no other options. Even when she heard about the Gustloff’s fate, she continued putting her officers and sailors on board ships. However, just about a day after the sinking, she faced a grim task. The recovered dead auxiliaries found in lifeboats or floating in the waters around the Gustloff were taken to Gotenhafen. There she and other auxiliary leaders identified them whenever possible. Reitsch received the Iron Cross in recognition of her service. Because the catastrophe happened on January 30 in very cold temperatures and because they knew them, Reitsch and her staff were able to identify the young women on sight. Most casualties of the army, Luftwaffe, and other refugees were not identified. Unidentified bodies were buried in the seaside city of Gotenhafen. Irene and Ellen Tschinkur believe their cousin Evi was buried in a mass grave with the other dead.

Once Helga Reuter reached Sassnitz, she tried to find Inge. “I went to the Red Cross to look for my sister. Maybe find information from the camp. The last I saw of her she was in the water,” Helga said. Although Helga asked and searched, she held out little hope that Inge lived. The water had been too cold, the wait for help too long. Besides, she couldn’t deny that last vision of Inge floating away like a frozen lily pad.

Helga realized it was time to plan. She wouldn’t return to Königsberg. That left her with only one option, to continue her journey to Berlin. The Soviets were still coming on one side, the Americans and British on the other. Other survivors in similar situations joined together. Helga decided it would be safer to travel with someone else. So Helga paired off with a lady who had sat and rested next to her on the rescue boat. The lady hoped to reach Dresden. Helga can’t remember the woman’s name, but her face lights up when she speaks of her these many years later.

“She had lost her oldest son in Königsberg and her youngest slipped out of her arms on the Gustloff. Now she had to write to her husband who was in army and tell him. She asked me to come with her. I said ‘I have no shoes.’ The lady said ‘I have no coat.’ We left together after a nurse scrounged up a coat for the lady and shoes for me,” Helga said.

Together the mother without a child and the sister without a sibling walked to an airfield. It took them nearly two hours. Helga’s legs felt numb. Finally, they arrived in Dresden. Almost two weeks later, Helga decided to continue on the road to Berlin. She was so appreciative of the woman’s graciousness but now it was time to leave.

What should have been a two- or three-hour trip took eight hours. At one point the train stopped in its track in the middle of the forest. Helga peered out the window. She saw a phantasmagoric outline of trees and little else. The train shook up, down, and from side to side. The Allies were firebombing the baroque city of Dresden, best known for its delicate porcelain dolls. In four raids in mid-February 1945, British and American planes participated in the firebombing of Dresden in support of the Red Army’s drive on that city.¹⁶

Eva Dorn isn’t sure how long she floated in the lifeboat before the T-36 under the command of Captain Hering came alongside. Sailors from the torpedo boat started pulling Gustloff survivors up from the lifeboat. Eva was the last one in the lifeboat when the T-36 crew received a warning that enemy submarines were in the area. It was going to leave, even though Eva remained. “Throw me something,” Eva yelled. Down came a seaman’s chair. Shaped like a triangle, it’s what sailors sat on while cleaning or painting the side of a ship. She had to jump over the water to catch the chair and she worried she’d miss. A dead woman floated in the water. With every wave her head banged against the side of the T-36, her hair undulated like seaweed. Eva held her breath and jumped. She caught the chair and was pulled up. Eva Dorn became the last of the 564 survivors pulled aboard the T-36.

The sailors ushered her down iron steps to the engine room, the warmest part on the ship. She undressed and put her clothes on a machine to dry. The room was crowded with survivors and smelled of wet clothes.

Hours later the T-36 reached Sassnitz where the Red Cross was busy helping sort out the survivors; because Eva was a member of the Women’s Naval Auxiliary, she was directed to a military barracks on the island. She spent the night there in a room with 14 other young women. In the morning Eva went to the laundry and washed her seawater and vomit-encrusted uniform. She received a four-week leave of absence and decided to go home to Halle (Saale). Her mother, Aliza, opened the door. She thought Eva had returned because she’d received the cable about her sister-in-law dying in childbirth. No, Eva told her mother, she hadn’t heard. Rather, she was on leave. She sat next to her mother on the sofa. She told her the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff. “My mother looked at me and said, ‘How terrible, but couldn’t you have saved at least one suitcase?’ She just didn’t get it,” Eva said.¹⁷

Finally, Serafima Tschinkur understood that her niece, 13-year-old Evi, had not survived the torpedo attack and had drowned in the icy sea. Neither Ellen nor Irene remembers talking about their despair at the time. After a day or so at the Sassnitz camp, the three Tschinkurs were taken to the mainland where they received train passes from the German authorities. They were lodged in a home for a couple of days and were given clothes to wear. “For many years we kept a handmade lavender-and-white triangle shawl until it fell apart in Canada. That’s all we had to remember from the Isle of Ruegen,” Irene said.

Serafima decided to travel to Poznan, a risk since the Russians were headed there; however, she needed to find Evi’s mother, her sister. Their train passes allowed them to sit in a compartment normally reserved for officers. So the three sat, not talking very much, when two officers entered the cabin. Ellen still remembers the high sheen of their boots and just how clean they looked. The pair sat facing the Tschinkurs. Ever so meticulously the two peeled opened wax paper bags. Inside were neatly cut sandwiches.

“We just looked at those sandwiches. We couldn’t turn our eyes away from them,” Ellen said.

Before taking their first bites, the officers motioned for the conductor. Clearly agitated, the two demanded to know, “What are these persons doing in our car?” The conductor explained the family had just survived a torpedo attack. That quieted the officers but didn’t make them generous. They ate slowly, methodically chewing every morsel.

Once in Poznan the three Tschinkurs went directly to their Aunt Irene’s house.

“The worst part of all of this was not the shipwreck. It was when they got to my Aunt Irene’s house,” Irene said. “When she opened the door, she held my face in her hands. ‘Evi?’ My mother gently pushed me aside. She had to tell her Evi died.” Their Aunt Irene quaked with grief.

Nearly seven decades later, Irene and Ellen sit together in Irene’s home. An advent candle, much like the one they lit when they were children, sits on the table covered with a cream-colored hand-crocheted cloth. Irene tells how she publishes Evi’s picture in the local newspaper every five years. It’s just a reminder, she said, a simple, but important way to memorialize her.

Irene pushes back her chair and takes a framed picture off the wall. Under the glass is the two-page letter their mother wrote to a friend after the war. The yellow lined paper is an unexpected gift; they only recently discovered its existence. Irene and her sister Ellen now know how their mother remembered those first moments after they literally fell off the Wilhelm Gustloff.

“After a long search I found Ellen two days after the catastrophe in Sassnitz, nobody could give me any news about Evchen. We were not allowed to stay in Sassnitz and had to move on. Without clothes (even the clothes we wore disappeared while “drying”), in torn clothes, without food, no food stamps and without . . . bread I went with my 2 children to Harz where Oma and Reny [Aunt Irene] were. That is how I got to Gandersheim. Now, dear Otti, you can imagine my situation, how could I tell Reny that I did not know where Evchen was. At this moment I wondered, why Evchen? It would have been better if one of my children had gone missing,” Serafima wrote.

Ellen speaks. She looks around, her eyes settling on one of the many black and white photographs covering the table. She looks at the photo of Evi, in which her light hair is pulled back in a braid, her face tilted away—a happy, serene look on Evi’s face.

“How do you tell parents you lost their child? I just felt so guilty,” Ellen said, adding that their Aunt Irene died of tuberculosis soon afterward. “Truthfully? We never talked about it. We never talked about. Why did the three of us survive? It’s not fair. But then I ask, how could three members of a family survive it at all? It boggles my mind.”