Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff Read Free Book Online Page A

museum that has been systematically destroyed. Every book in the library has been ripped up and tossed onto the floor. Every glass exhibit case has been smashed. Every photograph has been defaced. Every file has been pulled out of every drawer, every table and chair has been upended, all the curtains have been cut to ribbons, all the windows have been smashed, and all the walls have been daubed with excrement and slogans. Some quite amazing hatred of the past has taken hold of the people who did this: as if by destroying the museum, they hoped to destroy the memory of what was done here.
    Several thousand Croat militia were billeted in the museum in October 1991, and it is likely that they vandalized the place, although the walls have also been defaced with graffiti left behind by the Serbs who shelled the center and retook it from the Croats.
    I wade through rooms shin-deep in ripped books and torn photographs, and with these I can struggle to piece together what the exhibits might have been like. On the floor, a picture of a crowd of prisoners waiting at the barbed wire lies beside a photograph of a young woman, her hair in plaits, leaning on a fence. Next to that a photo of a prelate shaking hands with an SS officer lies on top of a pile of ripped-up prisoner’s files, and beside that, shredded portraits of Tito. The whole history of Yugoslavia seems to lie amid the shattered glass and filth at my feet.
    I can see how the children struggled to understand what they were told by the museum guides, because their drawings lie scattered all over: barbed wire, barracks, and guardsin bright watercolors, the walking skeletons at the brick-works, as seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old trying to understand.
    Among the shards of glass and masonry I find scraps of film, ripped from the projectors in the museum cinema. Bending down in the filth, I hold the frames up to the light through the shattered windows open to the sky. In one strip of film I see frame after frame of an old man weeping; in another, a starved woman tottering down the road; in another strip of film, eighteen frames of a headless corpse.
    Light streams through a gaping shell hole in the roof of the lecture theater, and a lectern is all that remains standing in the burned-out wreckage of seats and cinema screen and wall paneling. On the front of the lectern there are the words, in Serbo-Croatian, that mean: Lest We Forget.
    I walk out into the field behind the museum, now strewn with artillery shell casings, toward the railway cars, their ventilation holes sealed with barbed wire. I ask myself how such a place can ever be drained of its capacity to poison the living.
    After 1945, Tito had the camp bulldozed in the hope that Serbs and Croats might forget. Then, in the 1960s, when Tito supposed the wounds had healed, the memorial center was opened. But after all the school visits and lectures and film showings, Yugoslavia never came to terms with what happened here. The past remained unmastered and unforgiven.
    If the new Croatian state, proclaimed in May 1990, made one central mistake on the road to war, it was its failure publicly to disavow the Ustashe state and what it did at Jasenovac. The President of free Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, fought the Ustashe as a young partisan, but in the euphoria of independence he tried to unite all of Croatia’s torturedpast into what was called a national synthesis. So he never came to Jasenovac. He never got down on his knees, as Willy Brandt did at Auschwitz. If he had done so, Serbs and Croats might have begun the process of ending the past, instead of living it over and over. Because Tudjman did not come here, Serbs in Croatia were manipulated by Belgrade and by their local leaders into believing that the new Croatia was the fascist Ustashe come again.
    Serbs scoff when you say Tudjman should have atoned for Jasenovac. “Are you crazy?” they say. His party was financed by Croatians abroad, in Toronto and