| The phone call
surprises her.
That was such a long time
ago, she says. She was a young woman then, just 23.
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Leonilla
"Nellie" Zobs, 84, was on a
German refugee ship that was torpedoed and sunk in
late January 1945. Her father died, but she and a
girlfriend [...] made it onto a lifeboat and lived.
photo:
Krista Niles |
Now she doesn't remember
things so well.
But, yes, she was on that
Wilhelm Gustloff.
A ship that Hitler built.
Named after a Nazi. It was filled with refugees that day, not
socialites like the Titanic.
Maybe that's why not very
many people know the story of how it sank on Jan. 30, 1945.
But Nellie Zobs knows.
She doesn't remember the date anymore, only that it was so
cold and she wore her winter boots and a heavy woolen coat
over her dress and she walked to the harbor with her father
and her girlfriend and her girlfriend's mother.
And she climbed aboard an
ocean liner overflowing with people escaping the advancing
Russian Army.
"We thought we were so
lucky to get on this Wilhelm," says Nellie. "We were
getting away."
Thousands and thousands of
desperate people were getting away with them - wounded
soldiers and Army nurses, but mostly refugee families and
mothers with babies.
"People were just
squeezing on. We had to stay on the top floor, the highest
floor."
She doesn't tell this story
very often.
Write it down, her children
tell her.
But she never has.
I don't write so good, she
tells them. I can't express myself very well.
The boat left from a place
called Gotenhafen, Nellie says on the phone.
"Come over and I will
show you on the map."
When you arrive at the modest
ranch house where Nellie and her husband, Peter, raised their
son and daughter, the atlas is open. A route is traced in
pencil on page 63.
A small woman, a widow with
tight brown curls, bends over the table.
See, here is Poland, Gdansk.
Back then it belonged to the Germans. And the Russians were
coming to push them back. The war was nearly over.
Her bent finger points to
Latvia, where she came from.
She had fled to Poland that
summer. Her father came a few months later. Her mother stayed
behind.
The Russians will be leaving
soon, her mother told them. I will be safe here on the farm.
WAS SHE?
It was the Russians who sank
the ship. Three torpedoes with names written on their sides.
For the Motherland. For the
Soviet People. For Leningrad.
The pencil mark leaves the
port and pushes out into the Baltic Sea. Nellie's finger
follows it.
And then, it stops.
She remembers the first
torpedo. She was in the bathroom. She just sat down and then a
great big boom.
After that, she forgot about
going to the bathroom for the longest time, she says,
laughing. Even after she was safe on the rescue ship.
They say maybe 10,000 people
were on Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship built for 1,880.
They say nearly 9,000 people
died, the biggest maritime disaster in history.
They say only a few lucky
ones survived. Some books say 400, some say 1,000.
Whatever the number, Nellie
says, she was lucky.
When she came out of the
bathroom the ship was tilting. People were rushing everywhere.
She saw her father go one way, running.
He didn't see her. She
couldn't get to him.
"I lost him and I didn't
see him again."
She says it so
matter-of-factly. It was so long ago. It is hard to go back.
She found her friend, though.
The friend's mother wanted her suitcase.
That suitcase saved them,
Nellie says.
They went one way, looking
for the suitcase. Everyone else went the other way. Sailors
helped them into a lifeboat.
They went only a little way
in the sea when she heard that sound.
A big yawn.
Then the people screaming and
the Wilhelm Gustloff disappearing into the sea.
It wasn't too long before a
German boat came and pulled them aboard.
She sat in the engine room,
trying to get warm.
She didn't feel anything,
Nellie says. Only empty.
For years, she thought maybe
her father lived, had somehow been rescued from the icy water
and taken to Sweden or Norway.
She went to the Red Cross.
Did they know of a man called Voldemar Minkevics?
They did not. Her father was
really gone. And the Russians didn't leave Latvia, so she
couldn't go home to her mother.
And so a young woman called
Leonilla - her hair was blond then and she was taller and she
wanted to be a lawyer like her father - wound up in England
and then met a young man in Scotland and they fell in love and
came to Lincoln in 1958.
Peter was a baker. Nellie
worked at Bryan Hospital. She didn't become a lawyer after
all. In those years in Europe after the ship went down she
trained to become a nurse instead.
Her blond hair turned dark,
the children grew up, she retired.
She had Peter's parents here
in Lincoln, but she had not talked to her own mother in 40
years.
It wasn't safe to write home.
The government might open the letters and punish her mother
for having family in America.
They had already sent her
grandmother and uncle, her nieces and nephew to Siberia, but
that's another story, Nellie says.
In the early 1980s, things
started to change in Latvia. There was Gorbachev and
Perestroika.
She took a chance and wrote a
letter. Where could she start?
How could she start? With her
Peter? With the children, Andrew and Elisabeth?
With the good news? Or the
bad news?
She simply told her mother,
whom she would never see again, that Father had died.
And that she had survived the
sinking of a ship called the Wilhelm Gustloff, in the Baltic
sea, on a cold night in January 1945.
Special thanks to Cindy
Lange-Kubick at the Lincoln Journal Star.
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