Walking across Suffolk, WG Sebald stops off at the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold, now a one-room maritime museum “almost always deserted but for one or two surviving fishermen and seafarers sitting in silence in the armchairs, whiling the hours away.” Sebald starts leafing idly through one of the ships’ logs on display and then notices a large photographic history of the first world war, dating from 1933, where “page after page of pictures from Serbia, Bosnia and Albania show scattered groups of people and stray individuals trying to escape the War by ox-cart, in the heat of summer, along dusty country roads, or on foot through drifting snow.”
Later the same day, he sits in the restaurant of his hotel, picks up a newspaper and finds more images of Balkan massacres, committed 50 years before by the Croatian Ustasha militia (”its hand strengthened by the Wehrmacht and its spirit by the Catholic church”) at places such as the Jasenovac camp, where “700,000 men, women and children were killed in ways which made even the hair of the Reich’s experts stand on end.” Other children were deported to Croatia, many “so hungry that they had eaten the cardboard identity tags they wore about their necks.”
At hand was “a young Viennese lawyer whose chief task was to draw up memoranda relating to the necessary resettlements… For this commendable paperwork he was awarded the silver medal of the crown of King Zvonomir (with oak leaves) by Croatian head of state Ante Pavelic”-an early step in a career which eventually led to the post of UN secretary general. “In this last capacity he spoke onto tape, for the benefit of any extra-terrestrials that may happen to share our universe, words of greeting that are now, together with other memorabilia of mankind, approaching the outer limits of our solar system aboard the space probe Voyager II.”
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