It's the worst event in human being's nautical 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 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 sliding 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 claw 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 nothingness , rarely mentioned for more than half a century . Now Germany's Nobel Prize-winning author Gtinter Grass has revived 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 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 . " The long silence about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff was probably unavoidable - and necessary . By unreservedly owning up to their country's monstrous crimes in the Second World War , Germans have managed to win acceptance abroad , _ the neo-Nazis at home and make peace with their neighbors . Today's unified Germany is more prosperous and stable than at any time in its long , troubled history . For that , a half century of willful forgetting about painful memories like the German Titanic was perhaps a reasonable price to pay . But even the most politically correct Germans believe that they've now earned the right to discuss the full historical record . Not to equate German suffering with that of its victims , but simply to acknowledge a terrible tragedy . Why does the author say the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff was the worst event in nautical history ?
It was attacked by Russian torpedoes . Most of its passengers were frozen to death . Its victims were mostly women and children . It caused the largest number of casualties .