Are completed this year eighty years from the end of World War IIa sad anniversary that invites us to reflect the tragic pages of European history. Starting from a poem, we focus on the fate of German refugees from east areas of Europe, through the works of Nobel Prize -winning Literature Guunder Grass.

The wreck of Wilhelm Gustlov: Memory and Tragedy

Returning to January 1945, the sinking of the cruise ship Wilhelm Gustlov From a Soviet submarine in the Baltic Sea, it remains one of the bloody naval tragedies. The ship, carrying up to 10,000 German refugees and soldiers in the final stages of the war, sank in a native, symbolizing the drama of uprooting and loss. Guunder Gras himself, the birth of Gdansk’s surroundings (Danchich), captured the event in his novel ‘Like the crab’ (2002), as well as in his other literary creations.

Refugee bureaucracy and Baltic in memory

In 1967, Gras writes the extensive poem ‘Tower of sand’where he narrates the fate of the people who have been forced to abandon their homes in a moving way. In *an iconic excerpt *, he stresses how uncomfortable the refugee feels when he is called upon to answer the bureaucratic question “Born When and Where?” His origin seems to be lost in his childhood memories, in Towers of Baltic Sand and the sounds of the sea: “How is the Baltic doing? – Blobe, PFF, PSS … ».

When refugees arrive in West Germany, they see their particular identities questioned, with the memory of their sea often treated with suspicion, almost as “ultimately betrayal” *.

Human memories, lost homelands

Grass’s poetry confronts the cruelty of uprooting and recording the personal memories and small supplies of childhood: acorns, amber, old toys, smells of houses that no longer exist. These are the treasures Refugees – fragments of a lost homeland that continue to accompany their lives. As he writes characteristically: “My stray treasures have taught me tricks: smells, crushed thresholds, detailed debts …”.

The memories of the Grass war, born in 1927, are mixed with childhood experiences, images of everyday life and emblematic elements of the time: “Baptism, myrrh, vaccines, school. My game with bomb fragments. The Spirit of Saint and Hitler the portrait. Between these two I grew up … “.

The opposite by the sirens of ships And the “Baltic Gap” remains forever in memory – as a constant reminder of the loss, but also the need to preserve historical memory and human values.