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  • katjabanik
    • Jun 19, 2022
    • 1 min read

The Thrill of Amber - Germany's Historical East - a Plea for Humanity


The Weeping Soldier and the Baby – On board the freighter Göttingen, January 1945


My maternal relatives – my grandma with her three children – fled on an icebreaker from Königsberg on the evening of January 28, 1945 and arrived in Pillau the next morning. Carrying some 3,000 refugees and 2,500 slightly wounded people, the freighter Göttingen left Pillau the same day about 7 pm.

My Mama, her mother and her sisters slept on the floor in the radio cabin. Suddenly the radio operator was shaking all over and called out that the Gustloff had been hit. That night, 28 survivors were rescued from the freezing water. My Mama saw how two soldiers took a dead woman out of the Baltic Sea who was still holding her baby in her arms, which was crying terribly. When the soldiers were both on board, one took the baby from the dead mother’s grasp and also started crying bitterly. Mama said she would never forget that image: the crying soldier with the baby in his arms.



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