What They Carried. Survivors' Stories at Heart of 'Death in the Baltic'

A recent photo essay depicted Syrian refugees holding the “one thing” they carried from home as they fled the violence. Some held a wedding photo, some a key to their house. Some took a stack of documents and some a cooking pan.

When my husband’s grandfather left Poland, because as a Jew it was too dangerous to stay,  he took his tallit and his teffilan. Together those two objects were his “one thing.” Not all of the family escaped when the Nazis stormed through. Eighteen years ago my husband and I married under the hand woven woolen prayer shawl.  It was our way of saying: “We are here. We live.”

In my newly released book Death In the Baltic: the WWII Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff the “one thing” was different things for different people. The East Prussians fleeing the Red Army took for sentimental reasons as well as for survival. On May 16 as part of the Eight Bells Lecture Series I will have the privilege of speaking at the Naval War College. It is the stories of the survivors, and the things they carried, that makes up the heart of my book.

For Irene Tschinkur East and Ellen Tschinkur Maybee it was a set of silver spoons hidden in coat pockets. The Soviets deported the Tschinkurs from Latvia as part of the 1939 Non Aggression Pact. The family was told to take only what they could fit into a small suitcase. Their mother Serafima Tschinkur decided to take the spoons, hoping to use them as cash in East Prussia. The spoons remained with the Tschinkur sisters’ father while they, their mother and cousin Evi boarded the Gustloff. Stirring tea or coffee with these spoons is Irene’s way of saying “We are here. We live.”

For Helga Reuter Knickerbocker the “one thing” was a stack of photographs tucked into her father’s woolen trousers that she wore aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff. Her older sister Inge had the identity cards. Helga wanted something from home. Miraculously the photographs survived her near drowning in the Baltic Sea after the Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed.

Horst Woit’s “one thing” was his uncle’s jackknife. When he and his mother fled Elbing, East Prussia, Woit swiped his uncle’s knife. This pure act of impulsive innocence saved him, his mother and a lifeboat filled with people.

Horst Woit no longer has the knife that saved him, but in many ways he holds it still; present as it is in his every waking thought. Sometimes you don’t need to have the object to hold it. Objects have power, even when we no longer posses them. They are a way to say: “We are here. We live.”