Death in the Baltic

by Cathryn J Prince

  At this point Zahn saved himself. He knew the crew had stored much of the safety equipment aft and so he went there. He climbed into a lifeboat and waited for rescue.7

  Clad in a too-large life vest, Horst Woit was asleep when the first torpedo punched through the bow. The boy heard nothing. It was 9:10 P.M.; the ship was 25 nautical miles off shore. The second and third hits thundered through the vessel. The ship shuddered and Horst awoke to see his mother’s face fixed in terror. Horst and his mother stumbled inside the dark cabin to open the door. Outside, mother and son saw a crush of people, as the hallway had been filled with passengers once the cabins and the larger halls had run out of space. The two rushed for the stairs. Again the ship quaked. Fire extinguishers exploded, coating the stairs with a toxic mousse. Meta slipped.

  “Mama get up! Mama get up!” Horst screamed from the top of the stairs, his cries mixing with the howls and shrieks from other passengers. Hurt, Meta hoisted herself up and slowly, but deliberately, she climbed the stairs to her young son. As they edged toward the lifeboats across the slick deck, Horst saw flares shoot into the onyx sky.

  The evacuation quickly devolved into an exercise in panic. Passengers groped the walls along dark passageways that started tilting upward. Some found luggage and were able to dig out coats, hats, and boots if they weren’t already wearing them.

  The second torpedo struck the swimming pool where the 373 members of the Women’s Naval Auxiliary were billeted. Most of the young women died instantly.

  Irene Tschinkur East, now 78, remembers being slammed against a wall in ballroom when the first torpedo hit. The force jolted the grand piano from its position in the room. It rolled like a boulder toward Irene and her younger sister, Ellen. Their cousin Evi and mother Serafima were also in its path. Torrents of water rushed into the room. Hysteria washed over many of the women, children, and men inside the room.

  “We all just hung onto each other,” Irene said. “The lights were flickering. All of us quickly ran upstairs; people were coming from all directions.”

  “However, our journey was brief. We were torpedoed three times at 10 P.M. and hell was upon us. How I was able to find my three children in the dark and was able to get out I do not know. The ship was halfway in the water and we kept climbing higher and higher,” Serafima wrote after the war.

  Milda Bendrich scooped up her 2-year-old daughter, Inge, and made for the stairs, desperate to find a way off the ship. She hadn’t had time to dress her baby girl. A heap of bodies, crushed under the stampeding feet of escaping passengers, blocked her way like corks in a bottle. Somehow Milda reached an open deck.

  “We would not have been asleep more than half an hour when I was suddenly flung from my berth,” Milda wrote to her daughter Inge after the war. “You were asleep against the wall and stayed there quietly but that first hit had sent me flying. The second and third hit came in quick succession. In the meantime I had picked you [Inge] up quickly and headed toward the door to turn on the light. Nothing happened. Soon a pale red light glowed in the corridor, scantily lighting the path.”8

  “Suddenly there was a ‘bam.’ And then two more: ‘Bam. Bam,’” recalled Rose Rezas. “People were yelling and screaming.”9

  Seconds after the blow from the first torpedo, Rose and her sister, Ursula, locked hands so as not to lose each other in the mad rush. Running, they jumped over bodies and found they had to sidestep trampled children if they wanted to get out.

  Then an announcement from the ship’s loudspeakers cut through the racket: “Everyone quiet. We will save the ship!” Rose remembers another very different announcement barely one minute later: “The ship is sinking. Women with children go now to the lifeboats.” Hundreds of passengers wouldn’t survive the frenzied stampede to the uppermost of seven decks. Captain Wilhelm Petersen ordered sailors to secure the lifeboats and guard the exits from the sundeck and promenade deck. They could not effectively carry out orders.

  One of the captains spoke over the ship’s public address system. He pleaded with passengers to remain calm and keep order. The voice was ignored, lost in a roar of panic and the ship’s bleating alarm sirens. The traditional “Women and children first” order was overtly ignored as terrified people pushed their way to the decks and lifeboats. People slid, rolled, and skidded; piles of people were crushed when they careened against a wall. Many refugees got stuck in the hallway and stairwells. Some of them simply sat down, succumbing to their fate. Others were lifted to the upper decks on a wave of people desperate to survive.

  In the moments after the attack, Rose Rezas became disoriented; the ship sloped like a crazy fun-house mirror. But somehow she and Ursula clawed their way to the glassed-in promenade deck. Behind the glass, it looked as if humans were trapped like fish in an aquarium. Together with other passengers, they tried to smash an opening in the glass. Rose and her sister pushed through a stairwell jammed with people to escape the rushing water that was sure to reach them. If they were to fall, they would die.

  “Then all the lights went out and we couldn’t see a thing,” Rose said. “My sister and I were holding hands so we wouldn’t lose each other. I can’t describe the screaming that was going on. A woman next to us said, ‘Kids, now it is time to die.’”10

  The third torpedo struck the Wilhelm Gustloff amidships, near the engine room where sailors stood at their posts. Freezing water rushed into the lower decks. It’s quite possible Walter Salk, the young sailor from Essen, was here below decks when the impact came. This blast disabled the engines and cut the ship’s power. It also extinguished the lights and silenced the ship’s communications system. With the radio dead, the ship would not be able to send out a mayday. The radio room operator used an emergency transmitter to hammer out an SOS in the scant hope of a rescue ship.11 Unfortunately, the transmitter only had a range of 2,000 meters, so the torpedo boat Löwe was the only vessel to receive the distress call. Under the command of Lieutenant Commander Paul Prüfe, the Löwe saw the red flares fanning out in the night sky. He headed the Löwe toward the damaged ship, all the while retransmitting the Gustloff’s SOS, hoping other boats would hear it and respond to the scene.

  From the bridge Captain Friedrich Petersen ordered any able-bodied crew members below decks to shut the watertight doors. This effectively sealed off the forward part of the ship, trapping many of the off-duty crew in their quarters. While a few sailors escaped to the sundeck by climbing emergency ladders located in the ventilation ducts, most were trapped in the engine room that soon became their coffin. They clawed and scratched at the locked steel doors. Petersen’s decision robbed the ship of many of the sailors who were schooled in emergency procedures. There were few sailors left who knew how to lower the lifeboats.

  The ship listed to the port side. This made escape from lower decks impossible. Staircases tilted at crazy angles and stairs were hard to climb, especially for those with young children and babies. Indeed, between 1,000 and 2,000 people died in the first few minutes after the attack. Suddenly the emergency lights blinked to life. It seemed an unknown crewmember had started the emergency diesel engines.12

  At 9 P.M., Captain Heinz Weller stood in the chart room. In his memoir, Weller recalled how, just when the Wilhelm Gustloff passed the mouth of Gotenhafen’s harbor, off to port side the lighthouse at Stilo seemed to blaze a little more brightly. During war, lighthouses on the German coast shone only at certain preset times that each sailor knew. The navigation officer noted the ship’s bearing and recorded it on chart. Weller returned to the bridge. As he passed through the doorframe of the chart room, a shockwave blasted through ship. The force threw Weller in the air and he smashed his head on the top beam of the doorframe.13 At first he thought the ship was in the middle of a minefield. After the second and third explosion he realized the ship had been torpedoed.

  At the same time, bulkheads began to collapse and burst. Steel braces throughout the ship tore apart as rivets popped, and the Wilhelm Gustloff listed to port side. Weller lost his b
alance. He felt the bow dip deeper into the water and the ship tremble. The boat started rolling toward one side.

  Weller skidded to the port-side bridge deck, pulled up, and climbed to the bearing deck. He ordered the signalmen to fire off every flare they could. Red blooms rose upward into the night.

  Initially, Zahn, Petersen, and a few other officers remained on the bridge trying to maintain order. They felt the stern rising higher and higher as the bow tipped further beneath the sea. They knew the ship was lost. Although many of the crew died instantly or were sealed off from the rest of the ship and were thereby prevented from aiding the civilian refugees, many stories of crew members behaving badly surfaced years later.

  Some of the survivors recall naval personnel firing their weapons in the air to quell the creeping hysteria. Yet, it seemed panic seized some of the crew, not all of whom went down with the ship. Some sailors didn’t wait—they put on life vests and jumped. Some of them were squished and smashed by other lifeboats. Each lifeboat could hold 50, yet one lowered lifeboat held a captain and 12 sailors. There weren’t enough lifeboats, and even for those who reached them, there was no guarantee of salvation. Water from swells splashed over the sides of the vessels, soaking everyone inside. Some of the lifeboats capsized; others were adrift on the water.

  Horst Woit and his mother had been fortunate enough to acquire a cabin on the top deck, so they were spared the lower decks’ pandemonium with children slipping from their mothers’ arms and people being crushed under panicking feet. After climbing over bodies and pushing through the crowd, the Woits reached the ship’s railing. Shouting people beseeched the sailors to help them, to save them. Two crew members pointed to the Woits and assigned them to a lifeboat fairly quickly. As he, his mother, and family friends climbed aboard one of the few lifeboats filled to near capacity, Horst recalls seeing flares burst over his head.

  The Woits’ boat cranked lower and lower, the inky sea tantalizingly close. It was slow going because, as with the other lifeboats, ice seemed to have turned the lines on this vessel into steel. The small boat began to swing slowly at first and then more violently with every turn of the crank. Horst pushed his face against his mother. He doesn’t remember if they spoke or if she tried to calm him. Instead, he remembers how one man howled against the wind for something with which to cut the line. Suddenly, Woit remembered his uncle’s jackknife. He passed the black knife to his mother. Each passenger carefully passed it forward, each afraid it would slip from between cold fingers. The man opened the blade and sawed through the thick, ice-covered rope, a difficult job since the lifeboat rocked with force. Finally, the boat broke free. The knife saved 70 lives.

  “Otherwise we would have been pulled under,” Horst Woit said. Even now, nearly 70 years after that night, when Horst tells the story, it’s as if he is telling it for the first time, as if he is surprised the knife wasn’t lost, that it worked. It’s as if he’s unsure the knife will still save him, save his mother, and all those people.

  The boat landed on the water. All the while the din of human voices dying filled the air. As more lifeboats hit the sea, crammed lifeboats ignored outstretched hands lest they sink from the weight of one more body. Children’s faces were plastered in terror, their parents’ faces etched in agony at their helplessness of the situation. The atmosphere in many a lifeboat had turned feral.

  “People tried to pull themselves onto the boat, and people hit them on the heads and hands saying ‘Get ’em off, they’re going to top us over!’” said Woit.

  In the water around their lifeboat, Horst noticed legs stuck straight up into the air. Later Woit realized that they were the legs of children whose too-large life vests had pulled them underwater headfirst. Blood-red flares fired by desperate sailors danced across the sky.

  Nellie Minkevics had just shut the door to the putrid bathroom when, boom! She flew out of the lavatory, trying to stay balanced on the ship that now rolled and pitched terribly. She looked around for her father and her friend. She felt strangely alone in the mob. Then Nellie saw her father go one way, running away from her. He didn’t see her. She couldn’t reach him. The last glimpse she had of her father was his back disappearing into the rush. A tap on her shoulder summoned her from a trance. Her friend had returned to fetch her mother’s suitcase. That single irrational act saved the pair because they had headed off in one direction searching for the suitcase while everyone else ran the other way. Eventually Nellie and her friend reached the deck with the lifeboats and sailors helped them into one.14

  Rather than endure death in the frozen sea, one father shot his family before turning his pistol on himself, remembered Vollrath. Pistols weren’t used exclusively for suicide. Many armed officers used them to try and control the panicked passengers. Sometimes an officer shot into the air to get people’s attention.15 However, suicide in the face of near certain drowning was a rational choice for some. Some stripped off their clothes before jumping into the sea, knowing the cold would grant them a faster death. Some survivors told stories about passengers who slit their wrists. At that time of year the Baltic Sea hovers around 4 degrees Celsius (39 degrees Fahrenheit). A body doesn’t have long in that frigid water.

  Carrying baby Inge, Milda Bendrich stood in the midst of a mountain of people blocking the stairs from C-deck to B-deck. They had to trample over the dead to save themselves.

  She couldn’t understand why so many people didn’t make any effort to mount the stairs, especially when they could clearly see the sea of passengers from the cabins trying to climb them, Milda wrote to Inge. “Anyone hesitating to climb across the people below them or losing their strength would end up under stampeding feet. The panic had started. At this stage we did not even know why we were fleeing. Nobody had experienced a torpedo hit before. We were women and children, not experienced seamen. It was much later that we understood why the people sitting on the stairs could do nothing to escape from the stampeding masses. I just hope that they were beyond feeling anything.”

  Milda stared at the two flights between C-deck and B-deck, and started her ascent, pausing for breath on a small square landing.

  “I climbed [them] countless times in my mind in the coming years. You in my arms, fighting against the wave behind me and the women in front of me who, like me, lacked the strength to fight on,” Milda Bendrich wrote.

  Those who surrendered to the mob simply became one more obstacle for Milda to cross. She, too, almost succumbed to the calamity when she reached the second half of the stairs. But then a woman behind her pushed her up one step, and then another step, saying, “For God’s sake, don’t fall.” Suddenly a wider passageway opened ahead of them. Milda wanted to rest, just for a moment. Looking down at the deck floor, she thought that she was too tired to go on and was tempted to stop trying. Then she saw the tiniest clump of snow. She guessed someone had tracked it in on their shoes. She picked up the snow and put it in her mouth.

  “I could not have cared less about hygiene as I devoured this snow,” Bendrich wrote. “Now I was able to continue. I did not have to fight for every centimeter now. There were no bodies barricading my way. The torpedo hit had its harvest further below, not here.”

  Revived, Milda Bendrich searched for her parents. She found the mattresses they had rested on, but they were empty. Indeed, the entire hall was empty except for a few old people who told her the others had left a long time ago. It seemed as if quite some time had elapsed since the first torpedo. For a while she searched aimlessly for her parents, a task doomed to fail because of the sparse emergency lighting and increasingly impassable corridors. Later, Milda would learn that her parents, Rosalie and Karl Felsch, never escaped the glassed-in promenade deck.16

  The ship now tilted at an angle of 30 degrees. In the search for her parents, Milda hardly realized she was actually walking uphill. Then, clutching her baby girl, she stepped out onto a mirror-smooth sheet of ice, which turned out to be the boat deck.

  “I stood, pressed against the wall of
the ship, but again, as if by instinct, I worked my way across to the railing, as I could see men working on a boat by the light of the moon. Now, imagine me climbing this icy hill, without being able to gain a foothold and carrying a small child. I kept on ending back against the wall where I started,” Bendrich wrote. As the ship leaned, people slid over the side rails straight into the water. She was standing at the rail when she saw a lifeboat filled with people fall and dump everyone inside into the water.17

  About a meter away from Milda stood a marine officer. He made no attempt to get to the railing. He appeared to be listening to noises, which sounded like whipping. Later she realized it might have been some officers shooting their families and children rather than gamble on making it into a lifeboat. Something seemed to pull the officer out of his trance, and he barked at a soldier to help Milda and Inge into a lifeboat. The soldier held onto the parapet with one hand. He took Milda’s hand in his while the other officer pushed the mother up as far as he could. “So by pushing and pulling, we arrived at the railing and were lifted into the lifeboat. While our boat was being freed, another which was already being lowered into the water capsized and lost everybody.”

  While Milda Bendrich struggled to survive, the Rezas girls, Rose and Ursula, remained riveted to a railing to stop themselves from tumbling into the glacial waters. They saw bodies flailing in the water below, and they heard the howling of those desperately cleaving to life. They tried to smash open a porthole. They failed. A German officer shot the glass. It shattered. Ursula and Rose crawled through the hole and were swept into the sea. The cold salt water stung their bloodied hands; it felt as if it was cutting through their skin and bones.

  Fortunately Rose could swim. But so many didn’t know how to stay afloat, so many drowned. “An old man came floating toward me and grabbed me. I began to go down and kicked him away from me,” Rose recalled. “I can’t forget his face.”18