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  3. It was the worst tragedy in maritime (航海的) history, six times more deadly than the Titanic. When the German cruise ship Wilhelm

It was the worst tragedy in maritime (航海的) history, six times more deadly than the Titanic. When the German cruise ship Wilhelm

admin2010-07-06  51
问题      It was the worst tragedy in maritime (航海的) history, six times more deadly than the Titanic. When the German cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff was hit by torpedoes (鱼雷) 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 1,400 survivors. She recalls watching the ship, brightly lit, slipping into its dark grave and into seeming nothingness, rarely mentioned for more than halt 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 wrested 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."
     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, Ger- mans have managed to win acceptance abroad, marginalize (使……不得势) the NcoNazis 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’re now earned the right to discuss the full historical re- cord. Not to equate German suffering with that of its victims, but simply to acknowledge a terrible tragedy.
The Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy was little talked about for more than half a century because Germans______.
选项 A、were eager to win international acceptance.
B、felt guilty for their crimes in World War II.
C、had been pressured to keep silent about it.
D、were afraid of offending their neighbors.
答案B
解析 本题是一道细节题。参看文章第三段“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 equate German suffering with that of its victims，but simply to acknowledge a terrible tragedy”说明有意淡忘Wilhelm Gustloff 事件是德国人为自己在二站中的罪行不得不负出的代价。
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