Escape from East Prussia

Fiction:'Everyone should know their history", warns a Jewish coffin-maker at the start of The Flight. Since the end of the second World War, this need never to forget has moulded Germany's post-war struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust.

The Flight By Bryan Malessa Fourth Estate, 246pp. £14.99

With this story of an East Prussian family forced to flee the advancing Red Army in 1945, Bryan Malessa joins the ranks of Günter Grass, Rachel Seiffert and others in taking on the major preoccupations of post-war German literature - National Socialism and the fear of history repeating itself, the complicity of the German people in the crimes perpetrated in their name, and the role of literature in history and memory.

It is an ambitious project for a first-time novelist, but one that Malessa embarks on with confidence. A graduate of the creative writing programme at Trinity College's Oscar Wilde Centre, Malessa clearly feels an affinity with his subject matter - the 12 million ethnic-Germans from eastern Europe who moved west in 1945 - and he chronicles in dark detail an event that remains relatively unheard-of outside Germany.

Caught in the middle of this westward flow of humanity are Ida, her children Peter and Lenya, and her nephew Otto, all of whom Ida must keep safe as they journey from their East Prussian village to her sister's home in Berlin. Malessa captures all the indignity and uncertainty of their personal flight - Ida submits to repeated rapes in order to save the children's lives - and highlights the desperation of the refugees' plight in stark yet poignant images: "A discarded milk can was the promise of food to come and spent shell casings a reminder of the war they had left behind and the peace that awaited them in the West".

As Ida and the children make the physical journey from East to West, her eldest son, Karl, undertakes his own psychological journey from boy to man, from unthinking Nazi soldier to an individual who makes his own decisions.

Early in the novel he is warned to "be cautious of people who forced their ideas on him", but it is only after he kills a Jewish boy that he realises his mistake: "It occurred to him that if he had tried to help in some way before it was too late, his own life might have taken a different path". Like Germany, Karl must confront his past before he can contemplate his future.

At the novel's end, as the dead lie buried and the living turn their faces towards an uncertain future, a lightning-struck tree is uprooted and a sapling planted in its place. It is, Malessa suggests, the growth of hope in a landscape of despair.

Freya McClements is a writer and journalist.