On its final voyage as a ship full of vacationing passengers, the Wilhelm Gustloff was redirected back to its home port unexpectedly. Four days later, World War II began, effectively ending the Strength through Joy operation. Lazy chats around the sundeck and pleasant interactions among a “classless society” were erased as the ship was repurposed as a hospital ship. Five hundred beds, medics, and red crosses quickly transformed the ship’s appearance.

A tall and spindly teenager, the narrator’s son, Konny, attempted to integrate himself into a group of local young Nazis known as the Wilhelm Gustloff Comrades. Konny wrote a speech and delivered it to approximately fifty members, analyzing every detail of Gustloff’s murder and urging them to place a commemorative stone where the mighty granite boulder honoring him once stood. His speech was uncharacteristically placid for this group, devoid of abusive terms like “filthy Jew.” When young Konny urged the group to submit a petition to their local legislature in order to secure the desired memorial, the group exploded into “derisive guffaws.” As he tried to finish his historically detailed speech, the audience grew so bored that they began shouting for him to “knock it off” and to “cut the crap.” Sixteen-year-old Konny realized that he didn’t fit in with these “baldies.”

The Wilhelm Gustloff was completely gutted in November 1940 because of insufficient demand for its services as a hospital ship. Hospital beds were removed, nurses disappeared, and operating rooms were closed. The ship was repurposed as “floating barracks” where soldiers lived while they trained for combat. From 1940 to 1942, nothing particularly extraordinary happened aboard the ship. Tulla Pokriefke was summoned for war service as a streetcar conductor; pregnant for the first time, she lost the infant when she intentionally jumped off the car during a trip. David Frankfurter was transferred from a prison in Chur to one better suited for his protection, and Aleksandr Marinesko was promoted to lieutenant commander and put in charge of a new boat. He successfully managed to sink a tugboat, but only by resorting to artillery fire after missing his mark with three different torpedoes.

The narrator “crabwalks” through time to explain that when Konny first went astray, it initially looked like “innocuous childish stuff that he was scattering as he roved through cyberspace.” As Paul monitored his son’s online chats, he was somewhat amused to hear Tulla’s voice reflected in the comments. Konny, disguised with his online persona, bickered with “David” about the possibility of achieving a Volk community which could be both nationalist and socialist. Konny championed the worth of the Strength through Joy project and praised efforts to bring similar socialist vacations to fruition once more. 

Recalling his mother’s conversations during his childhood, the narrator believes that Tulla was “Stalin’s last faithful follower.” Tulla’s activism won her several awards, and Paul recalls that she was “both loved and feared.” She encouraged other women to become more active and increased the number of female carpenter apprentices to over twenty percent. 

At exactly 10:18 p.m. on January 30, 1990, Tulla traveled to the southern bank of Lake Schwerin. Completely alone, she navigated her way through the dark to place a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses where the granite boulder had once stood. Tulla insisted that she had not placed the flowers there to honor Gustloff; after all, he was “just one Nazi of many that got shot down.” Instead, her actions honored the children who had died in the icy waters that night.

Tulla forced Paul to attend an event commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the Wilhelm...