The Wolf of Sarajevo by Matthew Palmer Read Free Book Online Page A

Sarajevo—used nationalism to promote themselves. To take power. The more they took, the more they wanted, and like Mao said, ‘It’s easy to ride the tiger. What’s hard is getting off.’”
    â€œBut the hatred, the intolerance, it all seemed so real, so visceral. Was it all just made up?”
    â€œOh, it’s real enough. The anger is real. The bitterness is real. The sense of historical grievance on the part of all the parties is real. Just about everyone in this part of the world carries around a mental ledger of historical injustices, and the books are never balanced.”
    â€œBut aren’t the Serbs the ones responsible for what happened here?”
    â€œDepends on where you want to start the narrative. It’s largely true if you want to start the clock in 1991. But the Serbs don’t start it there. They look back to 1941. Some go back to the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as the starting point. And we in the West don’t always understand it. Did you ever read Rebecca West’s book
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
?”
    â€œWell, I bought it, but I’d be lying if I said I read it.”
    â€œIt is awfully long,” Eric agreed. “Eleven hundred pages to describe a six-week trip through Yugoslavia in the thirties. She’s not a great writer either, but she was a very perceptive observer. She wrote that Westerners who spend time in the Balkans have the unfortunate habit of adopting one of the nationalities as their pet, the one that can do no wrong. As she put it, ‘Eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.’”
    â€œSo Jasenovac explains Srebrenica?”
    â€œNo. Nothing can explain Srebrenica. And nothing can justify it. It was a singular act of evil.”
    â€œCan we just ignore the history? Tell them it doesn’t matter?”
    â€œWe can’t. It’s a part of what makes this place what it is. It makes the people who they are. I saw something similar up close with my grandparents. They were from a village near Trabzon on the Black Sea where they grew the sweetest grapes on planet Earth, or so my grandfather assured me. His family were farmers. My grandmother’s father was a shopkeeper. They were only teenagers when the Ottoman troops started burning the Armenian villages. The soldiers drowned tens of thousands in the sea and left the bodies floating on the surface like pack ice. My grandparents were the only two people from their village to survive. They eventually drifted to America on a postwar tide of refugees, got married, built a good life. But they never really left the village. Even after almost seven decades in sunny Southern California, they considered themselves villagers from Trabzon. Old Grandpa Petrosian had a photograph of his family’s farm, a sepia-toned picture of grape arbors and haystacks that he kept on his desk. Both the land and the genocide had worked their way deep into his soul, into his blood and bone. It was who he was.”
    â€œAnd they never went back to the village? Just to see it again.”
    â€œGo to Turkey? No way in hell. They wouldn’t even eat turkey.”
    Annika’s smile was tired but genuine.
    â€œI hope you don’t mean to tell me that it’s all hopeless.”
    â€œNot at all. We can’t ignore the history, but that doesn’t mean we should let it be the driver of policy, to dismiss them all asprisoners of their own prejudice. We overcome it. And that means we have to understand it. To share in the historical memory.”
    â€œMemory does seem to be something of a local specialty in the Balkans. It’s like what Talleyrand said about the Bourbons: ‘They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.’”
    â€œYes,” Eric agreed sadly. “They remember. They remember everything. Even things that never happened.”

JASENOVAC
    MARCH 20, 1942
3
    T he gruel was thin and tasteless, a few lumps of starch mixed with water