Salt to the Sea (24 page)

The few remaining boats were filling fast. My pack swung from my shoulder on the single strap, causing me to slip and lose balance.

I saw the pink hat through the crowd. And then I saw Joana. The Polish girl was crawling behind with the baby. I moved through the throngs of people toward them. The sailor, Alfred, crept slowly in my direction.

“Joana, Emilia, hurry! Women and children first,” I yelled.

Joana turned, saw the Polish girl, and grabbed her.

“Hurry!” I repeated to Joana. “Get in the boat. I'll help her in with the baby.”

“Take the little one,” shouted Poet, frantically pushing the wandering boy through the crowd. “Please, take him,” he pleaded.

“
Opi!
” the boy screamed, fighting to get back to the shoemaker.

A sailor helped Joana down a rope ladder into the lifeboat. She reached up for the baby.

The Polish girl refused. She motioned for me to get into the swaying boat.

People pushed past. The boat began to fill.

“
Go!
Get into the boat!” I yelled.

“She only trusts you,” shouted Joana. “She wants you to bring the baby down.”

“Damn it.” I handed Alfred my pack. “Hold this.”

The shoe poet tossed a life vest over my head. I took the baby from the Polish girl and climbed down into the boat.

“There's too many people,” someone screamed. “We're going to capsize.”

“Only one more,” a sailor said.

“Wait!
No!
” I yelled. “We have more people.”

“One more,” the sailor repeated.

“Emilia, hurry!” screamed Joana.

Emilia stared at us from above, then quickly pushed the wandering boy into the boat on top of us. The ropes snapped and our boat dropped down into the water.

Emilia was still on deck.

I was holding her baby.

Alfred was still on deck.

He was holding my pack.

Our boat dropped down into the black water.

I screamed for Emilia.

Florian screamed for his pack.

Huge waves battered and tossed us. A woman vomited in her lap. A deep rumbling sounded from the ship as it slid farther beneath the water. The wandering boy stood up in our lifeboat, his tiny arms stretched up toward the ship. “
Opi,
” he wailed. “
Opi!
”

A tuft of white hair appeared. “I'm coming, Klaus!” echoed from above. The shoe poet leapt feetfirst off the ship, plummeting toward the sea.

“Poet!” I screamed.

He plunged into the water nearby. Florian handed me the baby and jumped up to dive in after him. A wave threw our boat and Florian stumbled, slamming onto the pin holding the oar. The wandering boy grabbed his coat. The boat pitched and hurled.

“Row away,” someone yelled. “When the ship goes under it will suck us down with it.”

“Wait,” said the wandering boy, frantically searching the water. “Wait for my Opi.”

“Heinz!” Florian called into the darkness, his voice breaking with emotion. “Heinz, are you there?”

But the shoe poet did not reappear.

Florian grabbed my arm. “The sack of coins. The old man tied the bag to his belt. He gave me his life vest.”

“
Opi!
” sobbed the wandering boy. “No, please,
Opi
.”

Poet.

Our blessed shoe poet. Our Opi.

Our one light in the darkness.

He was gone.

The lifeboat was in the water. I was not in it.

No operable boats remained.

Some people had jumped down after the lifeboats. I was not a good jumper.

I was afraid to jump.

Shouting. Crying. Gunshots.

The ship slid deeper into the sea.

And then someone was pulling, yanking at me.

The young Latvian woman who gave birth was screaming in my face and dragging me. The ship's list increased and so did my terror. I stumbled behind the girl, my back feeling so heavy. And then we passed two rafts, stuck together with ice. She began kicking at them frantically, to dislodge them from the deck. One of the rafts came loose. The girl pulled me down onto it.

And then we began to slide.

The raft was sheet steel with large buoyancy floats on each end. Planks of wood stretched across the tanks with netting in between. The ship tilted and our raft began to skid. Like a winter sled racing down an icy hill, we skated across the deck.

Metal scraping. People screaming.

I grasped tightly to the netting. Our raft launched out into the sea.

Items tumbled into the water behind us with a splash. Luggage. Empty rafts. Empty bodies.

A crowded lifeboat floated nearby. Drowning people in the water clung to the edges of the boat, desperately trying to pull themselves in.

“Please,” begged a teenage boy. “I'm so cold. Please let me in.” He gripped the side of the lifeboat, struggling to pull himself up.

“It's too crowded. It will capsize,” argued the people in the boat.

“Could you please warm my hands then?
Please, help me?
”

They did not warm his hands. They beat at the teenager's fingers until he released his grip and slipped beneath the surface with a few small bubbles.

“Come!” I yelled to the people in the water. “We have room
on the raft.” And then an enormous wave lifted the raft and pulled us away from the sinking ship.

How foolish to believe we are more powerful than the sea or the sky. I watched from the raft as the beautiful deep began to swallow the massive boat of steel.

In one large gulp.

The baby. The wandering boy. What was I to do?

The Polish girl. My pack. Where were they?

The knight. He had the baby. I knew he'd be a savior.

Bodies were strewn like human confetti. Would I still get my medal?

The tail of the ship was all that remained sticking out of the water. People dangled from the railings, their legs swinging wildly. The glass-enclosed sundeck at the back of the ship was packed with hundreds of trapped passengers. They banged their desperate fists against the glass. The water inside rose higher and higher. A brave sailor, balancing on the stern, hacked at the glass with an ax, trying to free the trapped people. The glass would not break. He swung harder, then lost his balance and fell into the sea. We watched in horror as the people behind the glass began to drown.

A lifeboat floated near the back of the
Gustloff
. In it sat a captain and several sailors.

Thousands of lifeless bodies floated around us. I searched for Heinz and the sailor with my pack. A young girl kicked and shrieked in the water next to our lifeboat.

I removed my life vest and threw it to her. “Grab my hand,” I told her.

“No!” yelled a woman in our boat. “She'll turn us over!”

I stood and leaned over the side. Our lifeboat tipped toward the water. Everyone screamed. I reached down and grabbed the girl by her hair. She gripped my arm and I pulled
her into the boat. She fell, soaked and exhausted at our feet.

A woman in a fur coat yelled at me. “You had no right! You're endangering everyone!”

“Shut up!” I roared. My body shook with anger. “Do you hear me? Shut up!” Everyone fell quiet. The wandering boy hid his crying face in the crook of his arm. Joana reached up to me.

I slumped down beside her and dropped my head into my hands.

Fate is a hunter.

Its barrel pressed against my forehead.

The dark air was full of screams. Snow and sleet blew horizontally, battering our faces. A lifeboat near ours was sandwiched full of crying women and children. Florian saw them and stood up.

“They need someone to row their boat.”

My free hand grabbed at his back. “Stay,” I begged him. “Please, Florian. Stay with me.”

“I'll go.” The husband of the woman in the fur coat stood up. The woman yelled and berated her husband as he bravely jumped from our boat into the other.

Floating in the sea of black, we were forced to witness the massive and grotesque deaths of thousands of people. I clutched the baby tight and closed my eyes. But the scenes continued to play in my mind: The severely angled deck. A woman throwing her baby down to a sailor. He reached. He missed. The child hit the steel raft and then rolled off into the sea. Thousands of desperate people jumping, kicking, gulping. Seawater filling mouths and nostrils, collapsing lungs. High waves, angry sea, snow, and wind.

The injured soldier who had begged for a kiss now floated dead near our lifeboat, his head strangled in the netting of a raft. So many people needed my help. And now I could do
nothing. The frigid temperature of the water would induce immediate and lethal stress on their hearts. They would die of hypothermia. Instead of helping, I was forced to watch the panorama of catastrophe unroll before my eyes.

Guilt is a hunter.

I was its hostage.

A whitecap tossed us beyond a cluster of rafts, most of them empty. Less than an hour had passed since the ship was torpedoed. Thousands of dead bodies, eyes wide, floated frozen in life vests. In the darkness, closer to the sinking ship, I thought I could make out the silhouette of lifeboats. We were much farther from the ship than the others. The sailor was sick into the water. I pulled the pack from his arm. He thanked me and leaned farther over the edge of the raft.

I had the knight's pack.

The knight had the baby.

The knight would want his pack.

I wanted my baby.

Pain ripped through my chest. I wanted her. I wanted my baby.

A deep popping came from the ship. Its bones were snapping, breaking from the contortion pressure. The rounded stern sloped vertically toward the sky. People dangled from the railings, screaming. Others plummeted backward to their death. An explosion detonated from within the boat under the water. Suddenly, the entire ship lit up. A blaze of glittering lights brightly illuminated the water and the grotesque scene. I stared at the massive twinkling ship. A groan, like a deep
yawn, sent echoes across the waves into my face. And then the lights vanished. The boat disappeared into the black. The huge steel city—and thousands trapped inside—was sinking to the bottom of the sea.

A momentary quiet followed, leaving nothing but the sound of the wind and waves. We bobbed up and back, up and back, waves lapping and curling, the sound of crying filtering through the dark.

Next to me in the water, a young woman floated silently in a life vest. Her skirt rose up in a perfect circle around her. She turned in slow pirouette, dead arms outstretched, snow dusting her dark hair like powdered sugar. A set of false teeth drifted by on a piece of wood and faded into the darkness.

The lifeboats were too far away to yell. I didn't have an oar. I scanned the water for something to row with. Bobbing all around us were tiny children. The weight of their heads, the heaviest part of their bodies, had flipped them over in their life vests. With each wave, small corpses knocked against my raft. I was surrounded by hundreds of drowned children, heads in the water, their little feet in the air.

All the little duckies, with their heads in the water

Heads in the water.

It was my punishment. Honor lost. Everything lost.

Shame is a hunter.

My shame was all around me now.

My angel, Hannelore,

The night is dark. I scarcely know where to begin. I am floating on a buoyed raft in the Baltic Sea. My ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff, she is gone. We left Gotenhafen at lunchtime on January 30. I thought it such a perfect departure date. After all, January 30 was the birthday of Wilhelm Gustloff, for whom the ship was named, and also the anniversary of Hitler's rise to power.

The voyage began this afternoon, with more than ten thousand passengers on board. Yes, ten thousand. I was gripped with seasickness from the start. It was crippling in a way that forced interruption of my duties.

Several hours into our journey to Kiel, at precisely 9:15 p.m. per my watch, the ship was struck by three torpedoes. It began to sink. Alarm bells hammered and we were mustered to boat stations. Passengers were seized with savage panic. It would be inappropriate for me to document the scene for you. You see, the dark corridors I ran through felt like a lumpy mattress, the kind I detest. But I soon realized that it was, in fact, a carpet of bodies that I was walking over. The three explosions tore not only through the ship, but also the passengers. I asked a young girl in the corridor to move. When she didn't respond, I nudged her. Her round
head, the shape of a summer peach, rolled and she was missing half of her face. I can't stop thinking of it. I'm grateful you weren't here to witness such haunting devastation.

The sinking took just under sixty minutes. The Gustloff's final dive will pull her deep, to the bottom of the Baltic Sea. I estimate the water temperature to be approximately four degrees Centigrade at this time of year. It is quite impossible for a body to survive in that cold for any length of time. As a result, the many thousands of people I now see in the water will surely perish, despite their life vests. I am fortunate to have station on a raft, joined by a young Latvian woman whose newborn baby was snatched into a lifeboat without her. The waves are enormous and I am plagued with illness, constantly spilling my stomach over the side of the raft. My uniform is soiled. I seem to be missing a shoe.

Floating amidst this darkness and death, I have time not only for reflection but for honesty. I am now faced with the unbearable truth. How, Lore, could I truly love you? I could not, I should not—not after what you said, what you so rudely announced to everyone in the street. Yet the infatuation preserves and satiates me in an indescribable way. Perhaps it fences the fear.

So I cling to it.

You see, fear is a hunter. It encircles us when we are unarmed and least expect it. And then we are forced to make decisions.

I made the right decision. I tried to help.

You tried to pull your shade, to keep me out. Your decision, Hannelore, was the wrong one.