“On the roads of the Reich were not only troops hurrying toward new positions but hundreds of thousands of refugees— fleeing the frontier areas as the invaders approached, fleeing the cities as the bombers came over,” she said, recounting her story decades after the event for a newspaper interview. “We thought we were so lucky to get on the Wilhelm. We were getting away.”11
Eighteen-year-old Eva Dorn Rothschild regarded the Wilhelm Gustloff with trepidation.
“It was big. It was easy to hit. I didn’t feel safe, and I had a very bad feeling,” she said nearly 70 years later, sitting on her plant-filled balcony in Ascona, Switzerland. In the distance, the Alps rise protectively around Lake Maggiore.12 Art and artifacts fill her apartment, and music from the 1930s wafts softly from inside, a reminder of her childhood when she used to go often to the theater.
Eva was a conscript in the German Navy Women’s Auxiliary, and in January 1945 she had already been stationed in seaside Gotenhafen for more than a year. She served in various capacities, including in a spotlight battery and as a lookout for enemy aircraft. Wearing her dark blue uniform and cap, Eva boarded the Gustloff almost a full week before the other refugees. She carried a small suitcase aboard and little else. Reflecting on those years, she said she doesn’t remember being scared of the Russians in the way the civilians were; her duties didn’t leave much time to think.
Born in 1926, Eva grew up in Haale (Saale), Germany, about 24 miles from Leipzig, one of Europe’s principal centers for music and art. She once dreamed of singing opera, not a far-fetched dream since her parents were musically gifted. Her mother, Paulina Aliza Dorn, was a classically trained opera singer; her father, Matius Brantmeyer, played the viola in a chamber ensemble. The pair, though never married, had four children—three boys and a girl. Eva was 11 years younger than her youngest brother. Hers was not an easy childhood. Her parents parted ways when she was quite young, leaving her to live with a mother more interested in shopping and luxuries than attending to Eva. Her mother had lost her job in the theater during the Depression and her father had remarried. Yet, though they were cash-strapped, Eva’s mother still bought clothes and cosmetics on credit.
“She was always beautiful and always beautifully dressed. But she was also tempestuous,” Eva said of her mother. During the early 1930s, Eva’s mother rented out rooms in their flat to help pay off her debts and also sold their big iron stove. It wasn’t enough. Paulina and her daughter had little to eat. Eva remembers carrying her tin pail to a soup kitchen to get food. Ironically, the soup kitchen volunteers cooked on the old stove that her mother had sold, so the workers usually gave Eva an extra serving or two.
“I was forced to be a grown-up very early in life,” Eva said, sitting tall in her chair, gracefully holding a cup of hot coffee. Her ability to fend for herself shows itself in her elegant carriage. At 86, Eva is steel under grace.
Milda Bendrich boarded the Wilhelm Gustloff with her two-year-old daughter, Inge. Still tethered to the pier, the sides of the former hospital ship and U-boat training vessel rose like a sheer cliff out of the water.
Decades later, in a long, handwritten letter to Inge, Milda Bendrich explained how it was they left their home in Gotenhafen in the middle of winter and joined the mass pilgrimage to the docks. Bendrich made the trip with her daughter, her parents, Rosalie and Karl Felsch, as well as two elderly neighbors. “It was the last week in January 1945 and the coldest winter in two decades. The Soviet armies were about to engulf Gotenhafen and at long last, after weeks of being forbidden, the women, children, and the aged were given permission to leave their homes. Suddenly the Germans—old German nationals like us, Reich Germans who were posted to the front for war duties, Baltic Germans who were invited to come back to the Reich at Hitler’s invitation . . . as well as refugees from areas now occupied by the Russians—realized that everyone had to flee as best they could,” wrote Bendrich. “Previously leaving meant death; a bullet in the brain. Now permission was granted even to relatives of [those in the] German armed forces. People were also allowed to freely discuss the events at hand.”13
Milda’s friend knew a purser who was serving on the Wilhelm Gustloff. Milda hoped this contact would be enough for her to secure much-coveted passes for the ship. As one of the officers in charge of boarding papers and financial matters, the purser handed Bendrich two tickets. Emboldened, Bendrich asked if she might have four additional boarding passes. She wanted two for her parents and two for her elderly neighbors who had moved to Gotenhafen from Warsaw before the war started.
Initially the purser refused Milda’s request, repeating his orders that he could only issue tickets to families with young children. As Bendrich’s parents and elderly companions were retired and had no young children in their care, they didn’t quite meet the Third Reich’s requirements for receiving boarding passes. The purser explained that room had to be spared for wounded soldiers, U-boat crews, naval personnel, and the young women serving in the naval auxiliary. Next, women with young children were permitted, then families. Only after them would those traveling alone be considered for a place aboard the large ship. Bendrich pleaded. She simply couldn’t abandon her parents and neighbors to the Soviet Army, and, if he denied her appeal, she just might refuse to board. For some reason unbeknown to Milda, her emotional appeal together with a brazen display of self-sacrifice and bravado convinced the young man.
“In this way I blackmailed the purser into giving me the six tickets I needed, and thus the blame for the fate of my parents and these two elderly ladies rests with me,” Bendrich explained to Inge in her postwar letter.
Before the war Bendrich had lived in Warsaw, Poland. In the 1920s, she and her two brothers decided to move to East Prussia to look for work. Milda was an English-Polish-German translator and her brother worked in shipping. At the time Gotenhafen, a lively city, presented the perfect opportunity. Milda’s parents didn’t move to the city until 1944, after life in Warsaw became too dangerous.14
“My grandfather was a Baptist minister and a schoolteacher for Baptist children. I do not know if he was still working when the Nazis took power,” Inge Bendrich Roedecker said.
Like Bendrich, the thousands of East Prussians waiting to board the Wilhelm Gustloff had vacated homes, some of them in towns where they had lived for two, three, or more generations. The refugees hailed from deeply traditional villages in East Prussia on slightly quaint farmlands in typical one-story farmhouses set back from the street. They tended cherry, apple, and nut orchards. Other East Prussians hailed from bustling cities and towns such as Königsberg, Danzig, and Elbing. Germans had lived in East Prussia for at least 700 years. Over time the area became ethnically and culturally mixed. There were some ethnic Poles with German names and Germans with Polish names.15
There were people who led compartmentalized lives, never mingling with those of other faiths and ethnicities. Religious differences marked East Prussia. The Prussian Germans adhered to the Protestant faith, the Poles to Catholicism, and the Russians followed the Orthodox Church.
Although East Prussia was technically part of the Third Reich, Berlin and the war felt distant. For example, Königsberg lay about 327 miles from Berlin, which created both a physical and emotional distance. Not every East Prussian harbored a deep-seated desire to formally reunite with greater Germany. Indeed, they wanted the protection of the German government as the Soviet Red Army advanced, but the majority of them didn’t want to leave their homes.
Born in the seaside town of Schwarzort, East Prussia, Rose Rezas Petrus was a young woman of 19 when she laid eyes on the Wilhelm Gustloff. In 1939, with war clearly on the horizon, the Germans sent Rose, together with other ethnic Germans living on the coast, deeper into East Prussia to work.16 Before the Soviets closed in during the winter of 1944–1945, Rose worked on a German army telephone switchboard. In the war years, young women were also trained as radio operators, telegraphers, stenographers, and workers in munitions factories. When the Soviets moved clos
er to the front, many of these women were sent to work digging and building antitank obstacles and supporting antiaircraft artillery crews. When survival meant fleeing west, Rose and her sister, Ursula, made their way to Gotenhafen, where the Wilhelm Gustloff was anchored. Ursula had been visiting from Memel when the Russians advanced so far that she couldn’t return to home. (Memel was an East Prussian city which, like Schwarzort, has since been returned to Lithuania.)
Now 86 and a mother of three, Rose lives in Littleton, Colorado, in an assisted living facility. She remembers everything that happened to her before, during, and after the war. Today the Atlantic Ocean separates her from her childhood. Yet “she speaks about it every day,” said her son Peter.17 Although Rose tried desperately to wipe the experience from her mind, forgetting became a useless exercise.
As a seaman-mechanic in the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, Walter Salk had been assigned to several ships during the war. In January 1945 he served on the Wilhelm Gustloff. Salk would have spent much of his time below decks in the belly of the ship, doing repairs and regular maintenance to keep it running smoothly. Before coming to Gotenhafen, the young man from Essen, Germany, had served on the T.S. Mürwik, a torpedo boat. It was during that deployment that Salk, with his bold eyebrows and cheerful eyes, met a young canteen worker named Christa Hausen. Their friendship blossomed.
Walter came from a very close-knit family and throughout his navy service he frequently wrote his parents, Hedwig and Willi Salk. Walter’s older brother, Erwin, had died the year before when his U-boat sank in the North Atlantic.18 Knowing how much his parents worried about him, Walter shielded them from war’s realities. Instead, he preferred to ask them about home and how they were faring. The Krupp’s factory was located in Essen, which made it and the city a target for Allied bombs. He also, without fail, asked after his little sister, Inge.
In December 1944, the Salk family received Walter’s cheery but brief Christmas letter with welcome relief. They too knew the Americans and British were getting closer to Essen. More than 200 bombing sorties left the industrial city with more rubble than brick. The intensity of the bombing raids was one reason Hedwig and Willi agreed to send Walter’s sister, Inge, to Czechoslovakia as part of the Kinderlandverschickung (KLV), or “Save the Children in the Country.”
The program, which started in 1940, took children from urban areas and sent them to farms and other rural places. Ostensibly its aim was to protect children between the ages of four and the early teens, from the Allied bombing. The German leadership considered these children old enough to be separated from their parents. They sent them on trains to remote, rural villages for up to six months at a time. Families had virtually no choice but to participate in the KLV. Moreover, parents weren’t encouraged to visit their children and many children weren’t able to communicate with their parents. The children lived in Hitler Youth supervised facilities ranging from dilapidated inns to homey alpine resorts.19 These children worked on farms and, among other duties, were also supposed to help reeducate those Germans coming from the East. Without the guidance and care of their parents, these children were immersed in the Third Reich’s canon.
While in Czechoslovakia, Inge Salk faithfully kept a diary rather than risk sending letters home. The older youth in the program and the adult leaders frequently censored their charges’ mail. Inge drew lively little pictures next to her many entries. She poured her heart out between its ruled pages and light brown cover. On February 10, 1944, Inge wrote a piercing entry: “My dear brother has fallen for the Fatherland. . . . I got the letter January 30, 1944, on a Sunday before noon. The first pain was indescribable . . . but the war has made us hard . . . but you just have to find your way out of this, just because you just have to. . . . I look at a picture of him and it seems like a bad dream, but I have to endure. . . . My thoughts keep turning to the past but they just don’t find Erwin.”20
Meanwhile, Inge’s other brother, Walter, wrote home as often as he could, frequently recounting the mundane, from when he had duty to how many cigarettes he received. He always asked after Inge and his grandparents. He wrote shortly after the start of 1945, on January 3, to thank his family for the “Lovely greetings and the 50 DM [deutsche marks] of which I am grateful.” His last letter was dated January 14, 1945, sixteen days before the Wilhelm Gustloff set sail. Even with Russian Army’s swift advance and the uncertainty of his fate, Walter Salk’s letter was happy.
“My dear Parents! . . . everything is as always. Yesterday, some comrades and I went out. . . . I will be glad when I leave Gotenhafen . . . and get stationed somewhere else. I will let you know my new address. Now I must close, I have duty later. . . .
Your son, Walter.”21
In January 1945, Irene East and Ellen Maybee, née Tschinkur, stood before the Wilhelm Gustloff.
“One day they came and got you and said you have to go on this ship,” Ellen Tschinkur Maybee said.22 The two girls went to the port and waited outside in the freezing harbor to board with their mother, Serafima, and their older cousin, Evelyn Krachmanow. She had come with them since her mother was sick with tuberculosis and too ill to travel. The Tschinkurs and Evelyn carried little. The only thing Serafima brought with her was a briefcase containing important papers, some jewelry, and money.23
In 1939, soon after the Germans and Russians signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Kurt and Serafima Tschinkur and their daughters, Irene and Ellen, had been forced to leave Riga, Latvia. The family was just one of millions forcibly uprooted from their homes because they were Baltic Germans. Their mother, Serafima Ivanova Karsubova, had been born in Moscow. Their father, Herbert Christoph, had been born in Riga. However, somewhere on Herbert’s side, a few generations back, there was German blood. Therefore, they were “returned” to the Third Reich from the Soviet Union.
Irene and Ellen connected with many cultures as they grew up. They spoke Russian and Latvian and attended a kindergarten where they learned German and English. Their relatives lived in the same elegant building where their grandparents ran a bakery. Above the door hung the guild sign—a pretzel. Today, Irene wears a miniature gold version of the pretzel sign her father once wore on his watch fob.
The Tschinkurs had not been given much notice when they were resettled: They were allowed to take only one suitcase each. So brown-haired Irene and blonde-haired Ellen left behind their 39 dolls, each one dressed in clothes their mother had sewn. Knowing they would need some sort of currency, Serafima handed Irene several sterling silver teaspoons to hide under her clothes.
“‘Don’t show them; don’t tell them you have them in your sweater,’” Irene said, remembering her mother’s warning as they waited on the dock for the boat that was coming to take them away. “The German policeman bent down. I looked up. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you I have silver spoons in my pocket,’” she blurted.
For some reason the policeman didn’t punish the mother or her daughters, he simply nodded and let them pass with the silver. The family also took silver soupspoons. There is only one left; Serafima and Herbert Christoph traded the rest on the black market for food during the war.
“Everything was left behind in Riga. It’s what you could carry. We thought we could go back,” Irene said. “We had a dog, Lobo, who only ate from father’s hand. We had to put him down because he would starve otherwise.”
Although the Tschinkurs were not shipped to the ice-covered taiga of a Siberian labor camp, they were removed from their home. The trauma of their expulsion would forever cling to their family, long after the war ended and long after the family settled in Canada. That they would ultimately find freedom and safety in the West was not clear on the day Irene, Ellen, and their parents stood waiting to be sent to newly reabsorbed German territory in Eastern Prussia.24
Like many of their fellow shipwreck survivors, Irene and her sister Ellen didn’t speak of their experience for decades. Today, while sitting in her dining room—where a breakfront displays New Year’s and Christmas card wishe
s for peace, and flickering advent candles and chocolates similar to those she enjoyed as a child—Irene says she and Ellen feel they were simply ordinary people who suffered during extraordinary times; others suffered far worse.25 At the same time, Irene says, their story has been lost beneath the stories of the great battles and the nearly mythical figures of Adolf Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, Georgy Zhukov, and Erwin Rommel. With the passage of years, it became important for Ellen and Irene to speak out about the events that took place.
Helga Reuter and her sister, Inge, hadn’t slept in at least 36 hours when they finally glimpsed the ocean liner now painted gray.26 When Helga left her home in Königsberg, she wore a fur coat, ankle-high boots with rubber overshoes, and thick woolen socks. Inge wore riding boots, too snug to allow for heavy socks. Helga also wore a pair of her father’s trousers. Her mother had nipped the pants in at the waist and hemmed the cuffs. Before she left, Helga slid several family photographs in her back pocket, secured with a single button. The photographs were the only family mementos she carried. Inge had money and their identification papers sewn to the inside of her skirt. Helga had asked for money but her father told her she didn’t need any; she was traveling with her sister.
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