Tag #115407 - Interview #83163 (Anatoli Kraemer )

Then Germans came up to me and said, ‘This Bolshevik [17] is dead.’ They took my watch, my uncle’s present, and left me in the bushes. When they left, I started crawling to our people. There was a sanitary battalion with our wounded in the nearby forest. Then buses came from Tallinn and took the wounded to the hospital in Tallinn, which was set up in a former school. Later my daughters went to that school. They cleaned my wound, applied a bandage and left me in the ward. I stayed there before the Germans arrived in Tallinn at night. Nurses in the hospital calmed down the wounded and said that the Germans would do no harm since it was provided by the international convention that wounded people could not be hurt. I did not believe in that. Besides, I understood that I, a Jew, would be murdered by Germans at once, whether I was wounded or not. My Jewish friend and I started thinking of how to escape the Germans.

The next morning all of us were taken to the harbor. There were several ships and people were getting on them very quickly. We boarded a large Latvian ship, which was in Tallinn port. I saw that Tallinn was on fire. The wounded were put in the hold and the ship headed towards Leningrad. The harbor was mined. When the ship was in the sea, it was shot at from both coasts – the Estonian and the Finnish one. Besides, the Germans bombed from planes. Several ships were sunk; the bomb hit our ship as well. The hold with the wounded was flooded. It was impossible to go up as there was a fire. People understood that it was the end. Some people even hung themselves on the ties, straps etc. to wait for the torturing death.