Death in the Baltic

by Cathryn J Prince

  It was another story for Irene’s and Ellen’s uncle, Heiner, and cousin Bill, Evi’s father and brother. In the last months of the war, the German military had conscripted Heiner and Bill into the Volkssturm. After the Germans surrendered, the Soviets arrested the father and son and put them on a cattle car bound for a Siberian prison camp. The two survived three years of forced labor in a Siberian gulag. Once released from the gulag, Heiner moved to Bavaria to live with his second wife, a woman he’d known previously. Irene and Ellen’s dad, Herbert Christoph Tschinkur, had saved enough money to sponsor Bill to emigrate to Canada. The two pounded the streets of Windsor, Ontario, looking for work.

  Irene and Ellen recently discovered a letter from their mother containing new information. In November 1948, Serafima had written to family friends, Otti and Felix von Lieven, to inform them of the tragedies that engulfed the family the year before. The von Lievens lived in West Germany after the war and later settled in Toronto. The sisters didn’t get a hold of the letter until just a few years ago. It had turned up in an old suitcase in Paris. Irene said it was a mystery how it got there, because as far as she knows the von Lievens never lived in Paris. She believes after the von Lievens died the valise containing the letter was sent on to relatives.

  My dear Otti and Felix. How happy we were to receive your letter! We have thought about you often. Thank god you’re in good health and together. That is the most important thing. Finally we have lost everything. . . . We are happy to hear that you are doing well. The 4 of us are together but we have lived through a lot. First, dear Otti a sad news for you personally: Reny died in July in the Harz and Evchen died during a “ship catastrophe.” We have no news of Heiner, but we have news from Billy (not directly from him, but through a POW) that he is a POW in Russia (in the Urals). Whether he will return soon or not at all, no one knows. Poor kid, he has no idea that his mother and Evchen are no longer alive. Fate was too bitter for all of the family Krachmauer. One asks often: why? You know, Otti, that Evchen was with us in Gotenhafen.

  This letter was Serafima’s only allusion to the sinking. She never spoke directly about it after the war, Irene said.

  In Ontario, life regained a rhythm of normalcy. Irene and Ellen went to school, their mother sewed them new dolls to help replace their massive collection left behind in Latvia. The girls fondly recall one in particular that had a bright red skirt. The girls learned English, and slowly life resumed. The death of Evi left a great hole in their hearts. The family never talked about the Wilhelm Gustloff outside their home. Yet once, about 15 years ago, Ellen had a brief moment where she considered sharing her story with her coworkers. She started to tell them about what happened to her family. One of her colleagues interrupted her. “‘Oh the war. That was hard, we had to use margarine,’” Ellen remembered the woman saying. Ellen’s mouth clamped shut, never to speak of it again with her colleagues.

  Ellen’s story helps explain why survivors of the Gustloff remained reluctant to talk with outsiders for so many years. Instead, they reached out to each other. In the past few years they’ve formed a community of sorts where they can and do talk amongst themselves. They call each other on January 30; they call each other on birthdays and anniversaries. Today Helga Reuter Knickerbocker, 82, who lives in Las Vegas, counts among her friends Rose Rezas Petrus, 86, in Littleton, Colorado. Though the two have never met face-to-face, circumstance threw them together—with Horst Woit, Eva Dorn Rothchild, and other survivors. In their lifeboat of shared memory, they became a small community with a shared history, able to talk freely without worrying about the judgment of others.

  “You think about it all the time. Fortunately or unfortunately,” Horst Woit said. “You dream about it. It’s not easy, particularly that lifeboat. I will never, ever forget the face of my mother when I pulled that knife out of my ski pants. It’s even hard to describe. It’s very emotional.”

  After Alexander Ivanovich Marinesko torpedoed the Gustloff and the following month torpedoed the Steuben, he returned to the Russian naval base Turku near Finland. He was certain he would receive his nation’s respect. What he got was food: Marinesko’s comrades feted him by arranging a feast at which the banquet table held two enormous glistening roasted pigs symbolizing the Wilhelm Gustloff and the Steuben.4

  However, other than that sumptuous meal, recognition eluded Captain Alexander Marinesko. He received the Combat Order of the Red Banner at the end of World War Two, and his crew received the Order of the Red Star.

  Unfortunately for Marinesko, his commanders failed to consider his actions brilliant. In fact, they doubted the magnitude of the hit. The NKVD gave credit for the Gustloff’s sinking to a Soviet air force attack. Still irate over the disorderly conduct Marinesko had displayed in January 1945, the NKVD ultimately pulled strings to get him ousted from the navy. Before that could happen, Marinesko’s superiors demoted him two grades and wanted to station him on a minesweeper. His insubordination had irritated too many of his superiors. Marinesko declined the offer and found he no longer had a place in Russia’s navy.

  After the war, a blood transfusion institute hired the former submarine commander as a deputy manager.5 Ever the concerned commander for his crew, Marinesko now worried about his employees. He got in trouble for letting employees take home peat bricks to heat their homes. The peat was considered state property and so Marinesko received a three-year sentence in a prison camp near Vladivostok.6 After serving, he was released and lived in relative obscurity. He married and had a daughter, Tatania, who lives in Krondstadt, traditionally the home port of the Russian Baltic Fleet on a small island near St. Petersburg, Russia.7

  Ultimately Alexander Marinesko received the redemption he craved. In 1990s, just before the Soviet Union collapsed, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev posthumously awarded the submariner the nation’s highest military honor: Hero of the Soviet Union. Marinesko had died in October 1963 at the age of 50. Grim-faced Soviet naval officers attended Marinesko’s funeral, bearing his casket that had his captain’s hat atop it. Russians consider Marinesko a hero and often visit his tomb in St. Petersburg, a dark granite stone etched in gold letters and topped with his likeness. A large statue of the submarine captain stands in Kalingrad, Russia.

  Today, the question nags. Did the Wilhelm Gustloff present a legitimate target since it was transporting military personnel across the Baltic with the intention of using them to boost troop strength? Or did the fact of the overwhelming number of civilians negate the fact that there were service members aboard? Was the sinking merely one man’s attempt to win a medal and national recognition, or was it a necessary step to stop the war? For every person who argues that Captain Alexander Marinesko sank an innocent refugee ship, there are those who point out the thousands of soldiers and sailors on board, many of whom were destined to replenish German troops.

  Some see Marinesko’s decision to fire on the Wilhelm Gustloff as a brilliant military operation. It showed Soviet submarine commanders possessed a prowess that enabled them to seize the initiative and utterly and completely dominate the Baltic Sea battleground. “Acting as they did, the submarine ‘S-13’ crew advanced the end of the war. It can be rightly considered the huge strategic success of the Soviet Navy while for Germany it was the most disastrous sea catastrophe. The greatness of Marinesko’s deed lies in the fact that he destroyed the symbol of Nazism itself, which seemed unsinkable, the dream-ship emphasizing and promoting the might of the Third Reich. The civilians, who happened to be on the ship, became the hostages of the German war-machine. That is why it is Hitler’s Germany, not Marinesko, that must be blamed for the ‘Gustloff’s tragic death.”8

  All of Horst and Meta Woit’s belongings sank to the sea floor with the ship. Every photo Horst has today came from generous relatives and friends. After the Woits arrived at Sassnitz on the Isle of Ruegen, the Red Cross sent them on to Kolberg, Pomerania, where the German authorities issued the family new identification cards affirming they had been on the Wilhelm Gustloff.9 The Wo
its were one of the few survivors to have such cards. From Kolberg, Horst and Meta Woit traveled to Schwerin, East Germany, then in the Soviet occupation zone. Ironically, the two now resided in the town where the Wilhelm Gustloff’s namesake had been born and buried, and they would spend a year behind the iron curtain, living under the very forces they had just fled.

  Refugees from the Wilhelm Gustloff and those transported during Operation Hannibal were sent to one of the four occupation zones. The large German populations in territories returned to Poland and the Soviet Union meant large population transfers. In the Russian zone, refugees like Horst and Meta were supposed to view the Russians as their saviors and ignore the atrocities they had seen or heard about. “I cannot recall being asked to keep quiet about the sinking on the Wilhelm Gustloff, but perhaps my mother was,” said Woit. She never spoke about the sinking outside their home because keeping quiet became necessary for their survival. They now depended on the good will of the Soviet occupiers. To talk about the sinking to anyone outside the home was dangerous. Going to school each day frightened Horst to the core. Yet, he also used to follow the Russian soldiers to try and get something to eat from them and he still remembers some Russian phrases.

  Horst can’t forget the grim faces and menacing body language of Russian officers in the area. Their fears were realized when one afternoon a Soviet soldier grabbed Meta. What happened next was never clear to Horst, yet this memory chills him to this day.

  During the postwar period, the Russian population had been portrayed as a lewd, rapacious horde. No one knows how many rapes went unreported or how many rape victims never received medical attention, but rape was a very real threat for the wandering refugee population as well as for those living in temporary shelters.10 The situation was grave enough to warrant a telegraph from the American ambassador in France, Jefferson Caffery, to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: “We may however expect some vigorous complaint from the Russians and possibly other Allies over present treatment of their displaced nationals. Incidentally, Russians are by far the most difficult to handle in view of their greater tendencies towards looting of and violence towards Germans. For this and other practical administrative reasons I believe our military authorities have taken the only course in, wherever possible, concentrating and temporarily virtually confining displaced persons.”11

  Horst and his mother stayed in East Germany until 1946 when they moved to Frankfurt, West Germany. Horst’s father rejoined the family in West Germany about 20 months after the sinking of the Gustloff.12 Horst’s uncle, from whose possessions he had lifted that important knife, arrived in Frankfurt in 1948, a fortunate survivor of three years in a Siberian gulag. By the war’s end, the Soviet Union had taken nearly 2.4 million German soldiers and slightly more than 1 million combatants from other European nations as prisoners. More than a million of the German POWs died.13

  Although life in Frankfurt improved each day, the Woits yearned to cross the Atlantic Ocean to start anew, far from Germany where they had seen so much violence and destruction. They wanted to immigrate to either Canada or the United States. The quota in the United States for European refugees was filled, and in the summer of 1948 they received their visas to Canada. A few years later, Horst found a job with the Canadian railroad. He lived in Toronto and commuted to Montreal.14

  Today, Horst’s home in Kimberly, Ontario stands as a shrine to the Wilhelm Gustloff. Paintings, models, books, and magazine articles about the Gustloff line the shelves of his study and adorn many of the home’s walls. Horst married and has two children; his mother, Meta, died several years ago. He has helped keep the band of survivors together through emails and by phone, calling many on their birthdays and always on January 30.

  Horst remembered many things about his young boyhood before boarding the Gustloff, and occasionally he felt a twinge of homesickness for Elbing, but he and his mother realized quickly they would never return. “Once we found out after the war that East Prussia would become part of Russia, we knew we would never make it back. I went back to Elbing in 2000 by myself for the first time. I flew to Berlin and drove to Elbing. It was hard on the nerves, but I found the house.”

  “We’re alive.”

  Those words played often in Irene and Ellen Tschinkur’s heads in the days, weeks, and decades following the sinking.

  Because they lived in the British zone of occupation, they were not officially silenced. But nothing was said about the sinking and rescue; the family had more pressing matters to consider such as where and how to get food, or whether to enroll the girls in school. Above all, they were preoccupied with securing visas for the West. “I didn’t talk about it with mom or my sister,” Irene said. “We had a life to live. Then we were busy with school, fitting in, learning the language, work.”15

  All that Herbert Christoph Tschinkur carried when he left Gotenhafen were the clothes on his back, his baker’s cookbook, and some money. The sisters cherish the book, with its cracked binding and lovingly handled pages. When the Tschinkurs lived in Nienberg, Germany, all in one room under a mansard roof, they often paged through the book, looking at the luscious photographs of cakes, creams, and cookies. An evening spent fantasizing about the sugar delights helped sate their appetites. “Food was rationed, but [our parents] were good to us. Just nothing left, no food, no coffee,” Irene said.

  They were, of course, hungry all the time, but safe. Finally the lines of communication with America opened. They started hearing from two aunts who lived on Long Island. One day a package arrived from C.A.R.E., an organization that allowed Americans to send relief packages to friends and family in Europe. Aside from honey, sugar, beef broth, and other staples were packets of coffee. Real coffee.

  “The whiff of that coffee was just heaven,” Irene remembers.

  Helga Reuter Knickerbocker didn’t receive strict orders to remain silent, but she too never spoke of the incident until decades passed. “We had to get over it,” Helga said.16

  When Helga arrived in Berlin after the sinking, she stayed with her younger sister and brother-in-law. They took her in and fed her, in spite of the scarcity of food in the city. She soon learned that her parents were stuck in Königsberg; they could not get out from under the Soviet occupation. Her father, Kurt, who had fed prisoners and had defied orders to try and ensure his daughters’ survival, died of starvation 18 months after the war in a Soviet prison camp. The Soviets had also captured Helga’s mother, Marta, who spent three years in a forced labor camp. By the time she returned to Königsberg, it had been renamed Kaliningrad. Their home had been virtually destroyed, and her mother went to work as a street cleaner. The town was starving and life under the Russian occupation was difficult. “My mother was walking through the town one afternoon and a lady said to her, ‘Come, I have to show you something. Look in through the window, look into the basement.’ She looked in and saw a mother and child who had been eaten alive by rats.”

  In 1952 Helga Reuter left Berlin and made her way to Zurich, Switzerland. She found a job working as a seamstress in a high-fashion enterprise. After a year Helga decided she’d had enough of Europe and decided to emigrate to the United States. Congress had just passed the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act that maintained a quota system for various ethnic groups. Labor qualifications were a big factor. Helga got a visa to work as a nanny in Dayton, Ohio. After that, she found a job with an older couple who lived in California.

  Helga will never forget the moment she saw the Pacific Ocean. “When I saw the Pacific, that was it. I was a water girl set on dry land. I was a water rat. I had no trouble after that [the Gustloff sinking] with water,” she said.

  At first Helga had little love for the United States. She found it difficult, particularly because she spoke halting English, having studied it for only six years as a child in Königsberg. She remembers her teacher who came from Great Britain. She favored wearing black shoes in winter and showed a penchant for brown shoes in summer. Tired of living in a country where she c
ouldn’t converse, Helga said she finally just “opened my mouth and learned English.”

  In 1966 Helga met her husband, Roy Knickerbocker; they married in 1968. “My husband always wanted to know how I felt when they said the Titanic was the greatest shipwreck. He couldn’t stand hearing about that,” Helga said.

  Milda Bendrich remembered, too, the painful years after this traumatic event and how she came to shroud her story in silence.

  Milda recalled arriving with her daughter Inge in Sassnitz on the Isle of Ruegen on January 31, 1945. “Here I have a gap in my memory, which I simply cannot fill. When I left my cabin on the W.G., I could not possibly have put on my boots, as if I had done so, then I would still have had these boots when I arrived in Ochtersum. And I know exactly that I had no boots after the flight until, with the help of a few bartering items, I managed to have a pair of boots made by a bootmaker who was a friend of my in-laws. So I arrived on the TZ-36 (and so did you) without any shoes. After we berthed, we walked with other shipwrecked people to a camp on a path made of trampled snow. A part of this path I can still remember clearly, but I cannot judge if it was much more than a kilometer. Could someone from the TZ-36 have provided me with shoes?”

  Bendrich remembered the Red Cross camp had shelters with long rows of double-decker bunks. On two of these bunks lay two of the Marinehelferinnen, Women’s Naval Auxiliary, who were rescued from the water. Both were naked under their blankets. Their soaked uniforms had been cut from their bodies. One of the girls had a high fever and was somnambulant. Milda spoke with the other girl, trying to comfort her.