填空题
It was the worst tragedy in
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history, six times more deadly than the Titanic.
When the German cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff was hit by torpedoes fired from a Russian submarine in the final winter of World War II, more than 10,000 people—mostly women, children and old people
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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
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into the sea as the ship tilted and began to go down. Others desperately tried to put lifeboats down. Some, who succeeded, fought off those in the water who had the strength to try to
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their way aboard. Most people froze immediately. "I"ll never forget the screams," says Christa Ntitzmann, 87, one of the 1,200 survivors. She recalls watching the ship, brightly lit, slipping into its dark grave and into seeming
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, rarely mentioned for more than half a century.
Now Germany"s Nobel Prize-winning author Gtinter Grass has
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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 come
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in English next year, doesn"t
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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
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. 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
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, we didn"t have the energy left to tell of our own sufferings."
A. dominant B. maritime C. obvious D. nothingness
E. marine F. out G. sliding H. claw
I. emptiness J. by K. revived L. dwell
M. relived N. slipping O. fleeing