“I Can’t Breathe!”—A German Woman Prisoner Watches Americans Jump Into the Atlantic as Torpedoes Hit, and Learns What Mercy Costs in War

The first time Anneliese “Leni” Krüger heard an American laugh, she thought it sounded like a door left open in winter—careless, loud, impossible to ignore.

That laugh lived somewhere above her head on the transport ship, in the world of boots and shouted English and cigarette smoke, while she lived below it in the converted cargo hold where they kept the prisoners. The hold smelled of damp wool, cold iron, and the sour edge of fear people tried to hide behind jokes.

She had been a German naval auxiliary, a radio clerk pushed into uniform by a country that had run out of boys and then started running out of excuses. Captured on the French coast in the chaos of a retreat that didn’t feel like marching anymore, just falling backward, she’d been processed, searched, stripped of anything sharp, and loaded onto a ship with men who looked at her like she was a rumor.

A woman among prisoners was an irregularity that made everyone uneasy—Americans included.

They called her “the girl” in English, as if giving her a name made the war too personal. She never corrected them. It was safer to be a category than a person.

The ship was an old cargo transport refitted for war work, gray as a bruise, plowing through the Atlantic in a convoy line that stretched beyond sight. The ocean in early spring didn’t roll; it heaved, as if something huge beneath it was shifting in its sleep. Every few minutes the hull would groan, and the metal would answer with a low, complaining moan that sank into Leni’s bones.

She had learned the rhythms of captivity: the clatter of mess tins, the short visits to the latrine under armed watch, the way men spoke in two voices—one for guards, one for each other. She learned the American guards’ habits, too: which ones were cruel because it made them feel strong, which ones were indifferent because it made them feel safe, and which ones were… complicated.

One guard in particular was complicated.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a Boston accent that bent English into something sharper. His name tag said CALLAHAN, but the other soldiers called him Red, even though his hair was dark. He carried himself like a dockworker who had been temporarily handed a rifle and told the ocean was now his problem.

He wasn’t friendly. He wasn’t gentle. But he wasn’t careless with power either.

Once, when an older German prisoner had collapsed from dizziness, Red had crouched beside him, pressed two fingers to his neck, and barked for a medic as if the man were one of his own. When another guard sneered, Red had turned with a look that said, Try me, and the sneer had vanished.

Leni watched him the way people watched weather—quietly, with respect, and with the suspicion that any calm might be borrowed.

The day everything broke open started like most days at sea: gray light through a vent, stale bread, the shuffle of bodies. Someone near the back of the hold was humming a German lullaby so softly it barely existed. Leni sat with her back to a bulkhead, knees drawn up, hands in her armpits for warmth, listening to the ship breathe.

Then the ship stopped breathing right.

At first it was just a change in vibration—the engines faltering, the hum turning uneven. Men looked up as if the ceiling might explain itself. Somewhere above, a bell clanged once, then again, urgent in its repetition.

Leni’s stomach tightened. She knew ships. She knew the language of metal.

Something was wrong.

A voice on the other side of the hatch shouted in English—too fast for her to catch all of it—but she heard one word clearly:

“Sub!”

A few prisoners stood instinctively, bodies stiff with old terror. Some of them had been sailors. Some had been on ships that never came back. The Atlantic was a cemetery that didn’t bother to mark graves.

The hold felt smaller as fear expanded.

And then the world punched sideways.

A deafening BOOM struck through the hull like a fist through a door. Leni slammed shoulder-first into the bulkhead. The floor lurched beneath her, tossing bodies as if they were loose cargo. Lights blinked out, replaced by a red emergency glow that made every face look like it was bleeding.

For one second, there was only stunned silence—then came the sound that always followed shock: noise.

Men shouting. Someone vomiting. Someone praying. Someone screaming a name like it could pull the person back from wherever the explosion had sent them.

The air changed too—filled with the bitter bite of smoke, with something hot and chemical. Leni coughed, covering her mouth with her sleeve.

Another impact shuddered through the ship, less violent but still terrifying—a secondary blast, or perhaps something tearing loose, metal giving up.

A German prisoner near the hatch hammered on it with his fist. “Aufmachen! Open!” he shouted, switching languages like panic made no distinction.

Leni stood unsteadily, heart racing. She tried to breathe slowly, but the air felt wrong, as if it had been diluted.

Someone near her began to wheeze.

It was a sound Leni knew intimately. As a child she’d had asthma so severe her mother slept sitting up, listening for the telltale rasp. She’d outgrown most of it, but panic had a way of bringing old weaknesses back like ghosts.

The wheeze wasn’t hers—yet.

The hatch above clanked. Boots pounded on the deck overhead. The metal handle rattled.

Then the hatch opened, and a blade of colder air poured in.

Two armed Americans stood there, faces tight, eyes scanning the prisoners as if expecting a riot. Behind them, the corridor was chaos: smoke drifting, men running, a distant alarm like a siren in a nightmare.

Red Callahan pushed in between the guards, shouting, “Back up! Give me room—Jesus, there’s smoke in here!”

His eyes found Leni—only because she was closest to the light. For a heartbeat, he looked surprised, like he’d forgotten she existed outside of routine.

A prisoner shouted in German, “They will lock us in! They will let us drown!”

That fear moved through the hold like a contagious disease. Men surged forward. The guards tightened their grips on rifles.

Red barked, “Nobody’s getting locked in, you hear me?” Then, slower, as if trying to be understood: “Stay. Calm.”

A third American appeared with a ring of keys, hands trembling. Red grabbed them and shoved the keys back. “Don’t stand there—start moving them up!”

A guard snapped, “Orders say—”

“Orders say keep ‘em alive,” Red cut in. “Unless you want to explain to God why you didn’t.”

That word—God—coming from an American soldier with smoke on his face, hit Leni strangely. It sounded less like religion and more like a threat against cowardice.

The ship lurched again, this time with a sickening tilt. Somewhere far off, metal screamed—a long, tortured wail that made Leni’s teeth ache.

“Move!” Red shouted.

The prisoners started up the ladder in a stuttering line. The guards formed a funnel, trying to keep things from turning into a stampede. Leni waited until a gap opened, then climbed, hands slipping on cold rungs.

Halfway up, the smoke thickened. It wasn’t black, not yet, but it had enough bite to scrape her throat raw. She coughed, hard. The taste of fear became literal.

When she reached the corridor, she had to press against the wall as men rushed past—Americans carrying hoses, sailors dragging crates, someone stumbling with a bandaged head. The corridor was lit by emergency bulbs that flickered like nervous eyes.

Red grabbed her elbow—not roughly, but firmly, the way you grabbed someone near a ledge.

“This way,” he said, and then, realizing she might not understand, he jerked his chin toward the stairs leading up.

Leni started to move, but her chest tightened suddenly. The corridor felt narrow. The air felt thinner. Her breath came shorter, quicker, less useful.

Not smoke alone—panic, blooming like a bruise.

She tried to inhale deeply and couldn’t. Her lungs refused to open all the way. She heard herself make a small, humiliating sound.

Red looked at her sharply. “Hey—hey, you with me?”

Leni shook her head, the world narrowing to a tunnel. She pressed a hand to her chest like that could force her ribs apart.

Words came out in English because fear didn’t care about pride. “I—I can’t—”

Another lurch. The ship tilted more. Men grabbed railings. A crate slid and slammed into the bulkhead with a crash.

Leni’s breath snagged again, and then the phrase tore out of her like a confession:

“I can’t breathe!”

Red’s face changed. Not softness—something more practical. Recognition. He’d seen this before, maybe in a kid with croup, maybe in a man choking on mustard gas stories from older wars.

He stepped closer, blocking the corridor traffic with his body like a human wall. “Look at me,” he said, slow and hard. “Look at me.”

Leni’s eyes locked onto his because she had nothing else.

“In through your nose,” he said, demonstrating. “Slow. Not fast. Slow.”

She tried. It didn’t work at first. Her lungs fluttered uselessly like paper in wind.

Red cursed once, then grabbed the front of her coat—not to shake her, but to hold her steady against the ship’s motion. “You’re not dying,” he said with fierce certainty, as if declaring it could make it true. “You’re scared. That’s all. Breathe.”

Another American ran past, yelling, “They hit us forward! We’re taking water!”

Red didn’t look away from Leni. “Slow,” he repeated.

Leni forced air in, a thin thread. Then another. The tightness eased by a fraction.

Red nodded, as if she’d passed a test. “Good. Now move.”

He shepherded her toward the stairwell. Other prisoners and guards streamed upward. The ship’s tilt made the stairs feel steeper.

When they broke onto the open deck, the Atlantic slapped her in the face with cold wind so sharp it felt like needles. She gasped—and this time the breath came easier, clean and brutal.

The sky was low and slate-colored, the sea a churning field of dark glass. The convoy had exploded into motion: destroyers streaking through the water, smoke trailing, men pointing and shouting. Far off, something burned—an ugly smear on the horizon.

Leni’s first thought, absurdly, was: So much water. Too much.

The second thought was worse: The ship is dying.

She could feel it now, the way the deck angled beneath her boots. The transport had a list, slow but growing, as if the ocean were leaning in to claim it.

A sailor shouted, “Abandon ship! Prepare to abandon ship!”

Leni’s heart jumped into her throat. Prisoners clustered together, eyes wide, some of them pale with terror, some grimly calm in the way people became calm when they’d already decided they were dead.

The guards looked uncertain. In training, prisoners were an administrative problem. In a sinking ship, they were human weight.

Red grabbed a megaphone from someone and yelled, “Life jackets! Get life jackets on ‘em—now!”

Another guard snapped, “We can’t just let ‘em—”

Red turned on him. “You want to watch ‘em drown? You want that on your soul? Move!”

The guard hesitated, then ran.

Leni watched Americans shove life jackets into German hands. Watched an American sailor help a German prisoner tie the straps, fingers clumsy from cold. Watched an old German man clutch the jacket like it was a holy relic.

The sea roared below the rail, hungry and impatient.

Then something happened that made Leni’s mind stall.

An American soldier—young, barely more than a boy—ran to the rail and jumped.

Not because he was ordered. Not because he was fleeing.

He jumped because a German prisoner had slipped on the tilted deck and gone over the side, disappearing into the black water with a splash that vanished immediately under waves.

The soldier didn’t hesitate. He just went.

Another American jumped after him.

Then another.

Three bodies hit the Atlantic like thrown stones, swallowed by foam.

Leni stared, stunned. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. In her world, enemies didn’t leap into freezing water to save you. Enemies let you die and called it strategy.

A German prisoner beside her whispered, disbelieving, “Warum…?”

Why.

Leni could only shake her head. She had no answer. The wind stole her breath again, and her fear threatened to close her chest, but the shock of what she was seeing held panic at bay like a hand over a flame.

Red moved along the rail, shouting instructions. “Throw the line! Get the ring—now! Keep eyes on ‘em!”

He turned and saw Leni watching the water, frozen.

“Don’t just stand there,” he barked—and then, because he realized she wasn’t a soldier to him, he changed tone without losing urgency. “You speak German. Tell ‘em to stay together. Tell ‘em one at a time. No stampede.”

Leni blinked. A task. Something to do besides be afraid.

She swallowed and raised her voice in German, rough with cold. “Ruhig! Slowly! One at a time! Stay together!”

Men listened—not because she had authority, but because fear made any clear voice sound like leadership.

A rope was thrown. A life ring splashed. The Americans in the water fought like they were wrestling a monster—waves slamming them, ice-cold shock stealing strength. One of them latched onto the German prisoner and began hauling him toward the line.

The transport groaned again, listing harder now.

A sailor screamed, “We’re going down!”

The words turned order into panic in an instant. Prisoners surged. Guards shouted. The deck became a slanted, crowded puzzle of bodies and fear.

Red climbed onto a crate to be seen. “Stop pushing!” he roared. “You push, you die—everybody dies!”

His voice cut through the chaos like a whip.

For a moment, it worked.

Then a wave hit the hull, and spray whipped across the deck. Someone screamed as cold water drenched their face. The ship shuddered as if it had been punched again from below.

Leni’s lungs tightened. The old fear returned, climbing her throat.

“I can’t breathe,” she whispered, and then louder, “I can’t—”

Red dropped off the crate and was suddenly in front of her again, as if he’d been tethered to her panic. “You’re breathing,” he said. “You’re doing it right now.”

Leni’s eyes flicked toward the rail where Americans were still fighting to pull people from the water. “Why are they—” she began in English, voice cracking. “Why are they jumping?”

Red’s face hardened. “Because they’re in the water.”

“That’s not an answer,” Leni said, and surprised herself by sounding angry.

Red stared at her, jaw working as if choosing words that wouldn’t lie. “Lady,” he said, “I don’t know what you were told about us. I don’t know what you were told about any of this. But I’m not gonna stand on a deck and watch people drown if I can do a damn thing about it.”

He pointed toward the lifeboats being lowered—clumsy, swinging in wind. “You. In that boat. Now.”

A guard grabbed Leni’s arm and steered her toward a lifeboat. She stepped carefully, the deck slanting more, her boots slipping. Her mind was still stuck on the sight of Americans going into the sea for enemy bodies.

She reached the lifeboat and looked back, searching without knowing why.

Red was at the rail now, helping throw another line. His sleeves were rolled up despite the cold, hands red from rope burn. A German prisoner stumbled near the edge, and Red caught him by the collar with the speed of a father snatching a child from traffic.

The prisoner clung to him, sobbing in German.

Red didn’t understand the words, but he understood the sound. He shoved the man toward the boat with a grunt. “Go,” he said simply.

The lifeboat dropped with a stomach-lurching jolt. Leni grabbed the side, knuckles white, as the sea rose to meet them. The boat splashed down hard, water slapping over the edge, shocking everyone into coughing and swearing.

Men began rowing—Americans and Germans side by side, hands on the same oars because physics didn’t recognize uniforms.

The transport loomed above them, listing sharply now. Smoke trailed from a vent. Men still clung to the rails, waiting for a turn, waiting for luck.

Then Leni saw Red climb the rail.

For a second she thought he was abandoning ship.

But he didn’t jump away from danger.

He jumped into it—into the Atlantic, into the chaos, toward a cluster of heads bobbing in black water where someone was slipping under.

His body hit the sea, and the cold swallowed him like it wanted to keep him.

Leni stood in the lifeboat, unable to sit, unable to move, staring at the spot where he’d gone in. Her breath came fast again.

A prisoner beside her said, voice shaking, “They will die. The water will kill them.”

Leni couldn’t look away. “Maybe,” she said softly. “But they jumped anyway.”

The transport gave one long groan like an animal. Then it began to slide beneath the surface, stern rising, bow disappearing, the Atlantic taking it with slow authority.

Men screamed. Some jumped. Some prayed. Some vanished without sound.

Leni felt her chest lock again as the scale of it hit her—the cold, the drowning, the helplessness.

“I can’t breathe,” she whispered, but this time the words weren’t only panic. They were grief, awe, and horror braided together.

The lifeboat rocked as a wave rolled under it. Oars fought. Hands reached out, pulling survivors aboard—Americans hauling Germans, Germans hauling Americans, everyone reduced to shivering bodies with the same terrified eyes.

Then Red surfaced near the boat, gasping like a man reborn. He had one arm hooked around a sailor who looked half-conscious, lips blue. Red kicked hard, dragging him closer.

“Grab him!” Red shouted.

Leni lunged forward without thinking. She grabbed the sailor’s sleeve. Another German prisoner grabbed his belt. Together they hauled him over the side, collapsing him into the bottom of the boat like a sack of wet cloth.

Red clung to the rim, coughing violently, seawater pouring off his hair. His eyes met Leni’s for a brief, strange moment.

She expected triumph, or hatred, or something dramatic.

What she saw instead was pure exhaustion and stubborn will.

He nodded once, as if to say, See? People. Just people.

Then he pulled himself into the boat and sat with his back against the side, shaking so hard his teeth clicked.

Leni sank down across from him, hugging herself. The wind tore at her coat. Everyone was soaked, freezing, alive.

The sailor Red had saved coughed and opened his eyes, confused. A German prisoner offered him a canteen with shaking hands. The sailor drank without asking who held it.

The ocean around them was littered with debris, with life jackets, with men calling out, some voices fading, some growing stronger as rescue craft arrived.

Leni stared at Red, words crowding her mouth. Her English wasn’t elegant, but it was real.

“You jumped,” she said, as if naming it could make it make sense.

Red barked a laugh that was mostly a cough. “Yeah,” he rasped. “I noticed.”

“You… jumped for us,” Leni said.

Red’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I jumped for a man in the water.”

“But he is German.”

Red shrugged, shivering. “Then he’s a German man in the water.”

The simplicity of it hit Leni harder than any propaganda had ever hit her. It left no room for grand theories, no room for slogans. Just a fact: drowning looked the same in any language.

Leni’s throat tightened. Tears came, hot against her frozen cheeks. She tried to swallow them down, but they fell anyway.

Red watched her for a moment, then looked away, uncomfortable with emotion that wasn’t his to manage. “You okay?” he asked, gruff.

Leni laughed once—small, cracked. “No,” she said. “But I… I can breathe.”

Red nodded, as if that was enough of a victory for one morning.

Hours later—though time in shock didn’t behave like normal time—they were hauled onto a rescue ship, wrapped in blankets that smelled like wool and diesel. Men were lined up, counted, reassigned to categories again: prisoner, guard, sailor, survivor.

Leni sat on the deck with a cup of something hot trembling in her hands. Red sat a few feet away, staring at the sea where the transport had disappeared, jaw clenched like he was holding back a thousand words.

For a long while, neither of them spoke.

Then Leni said quietly, “In Germany, they told us you were monsters.”

Red didn’t look at her. “In America,” he said, voice low, “they told us you were, too.”

Leni stared at the gray horizon. “What are we, then?”

Red finally turned his head, eyes tired but clear. “Cold,” he said. “Hungry. Scared. And stuck in a mess that’s bigger than us.”

A gust of wind swept across the deck. Leni pulled her blanket tighter. She thought of the men who hadn’t made it into boats, the ones swallowed by the Atlantic so quickly they barely had time to understand they were dying.

She thought of the phrase she’d screamed—I can’t breathe—and how different it sounded now. Not as a plea, but as a marker: the moment her world had broken, and something human had leaked through the cracks.

Red took a slow breath, as if reminding himself he could. Then he stood, stamping his feet to get feeling back.

As he walked away, Leni called after him, the words awkward but urgent.

“Callahan!”

He paused, glancing back.

Leni hesitated, then said the only thing that felt true enough to offer.

“Thank you.”

Red stared at her for a beat, then gave a small, almost embarrassed nod. “Don’t thank me,” he said. “Just… stay breathing.”

And then he was gone into the moving crowd of survivors, another man in a war trying not to drown—whether in water, or in what the war asked him to become.

Leni watched the ocean until her hands stopped shaking.

Somewhere beyond the horizon, the war continued like a machine that didn’t care who it crushed.

But in the Atlantic, on a morning that smelled like smoke and salt, she had seen Americans leap into freezing water for enemy bodies—seen mercy that didn’t ask permission from flags.

And for the first time since she’d been captured, she understood something simple and unbearable:

Sometimes the most shocking thing in war isn’t cruelty.

Sometimes it’s **the moment someone refuses to be cruel—**even when the ocean is trying to make all of you disappear.

Note: Some content was generated using AI tools (ChatGPT) and edited by the author for creativity and suitability for historical illustration purposes.