'The German Titanic'.(Gunter Grass's new book Crab Walk)(Brief Article)

It was the worst tragedy in maritime history, six times more deadly than the Titanic. When the German cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff was hit by torpedoes fired from a Soviet submarine in the final winter of World War II, more than 10,000 people--mostly women, children and old people fleeing the final Red Army push into Nazi Germany--were packed aboard. An ice storm had turned the decks into frozen sheets that sent hundreds of families skidding into the frigid Baltic Sea as the ship listed and began to go down. Others desperately tried to dislodge lifeboats that were frozen tight to their davits. Some who succeeded fought off those in the water who had the strength to try to claw their way aboard. Most people froze immediately. "I'll never forget the screams," says Christa Nutzmann, 87, one of the 1,200 survivors. She recalls watching the ship, brightly lit, slipping into its dark grave--and into seeming oblivion, rarely mentioned for more than half a century.

Now Germany's Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass has resurrected the memory of the 9,000 dead, including more than 4,000 children--with his latest novel "Crab Walk," published last month. The book, which will be out in English next year, doesn't dwell on the sinking; its heroine is a pregnant young woman who survives the catastrophe only to say later: "Nobody wanted to hear about it, not here in the West [of Germany] and not at all in the East." The reason was obvious. As Grass put it in a recent interview with the weekly Die Woche: "Because the crimes we Germans are responsible for were and are so dominant, we didn't have the energy left to tell of our own sufferings."

Since most Germans feared they would be accused of equating their losses with the horrors they inflicted on others, only the nationalist right spoke freely about what happened to the 13 million Germans brutally driven out of their homelands at the end of the war. As the Soviet Army advanced into what is now Poland and the Czech Republic, revenge killings, starvation and exhaustion claimed the lives of an estimated 2 million civilians. Even now, many of Germany's neighbors react angrily to any talk of the refugees' plight, fearing ...