up, were hanged in rows like crows or magpies. Not far from Jasenovac, in a radius of no more than ten miles, there were also the camps of Prijedor, Stara Gradiska and Banja Luka, where the Croatian militia, its hands strengthened by the Wehrmacht and its spirt by the Catholic church, performed one day's work after another in a similar manner. The history of this massacre, which went on for years, is recorded in fifty thousand documents abandoned by the Germans and Croats in 1945, which are kept to this day, according to the author of the 1992 article, in the Bosanske Krajine Archive in Banja Lua, which is, or used to be, housed in what was once an Austro-Hungarian barracks, serving in 1942 as the headquarters of the Heeregruppe E intelligence division. Without a doubt those who were stationed there knew what was going on in the Ustasha camps, just as they knew of the enormities perpetrated during the Kozara campaign against Tito's partisans, for instance, in the course of which between sixty and ninety thousand people were killed in so-called acts of war, that is to say were executed, or died as a result of deportation. The female population of Kozara was transported to Germany and worked to death in the slave-labour system that extended over the entire territory of the Reich. Of the children who were left behind, twenty-three thousand in number, the militia murdered half on the spot, while the rest were herded together at various assembly points to be sent on to Croatia; of these, not a few died of typhoid fever, exhaustion and fear, even before the cattle wagons reached the Croatian capital. Many of those who were still alive were so hungry that they had eaten the cardboard identity tags they wore about their necks and thus in their extreme desperation had eradicated their own names. Later they were brought up as Catholics in Croatian families, and sent to confession and their first holy communion. Like everyone else they learnt the socialist ABC at school, chose an occupation, and became railway workers, salesgirls, tool-fitters or book-keepers. But no one knows what shadowy memories haunt them to this day. In this connection one might also add that one of the Heeresgruppe E intelligence officers at that time was a young Viennese lawyer whose chief task was to draw up memoranda relating to the necessary resettlements, described as imperative for humanitarian reasons. For this commendable paperwork he was awarded by Croatian head of state Ante Pavelić the silver medal of the crown of King Zvonomir, with oak leaves. In the post-war years this officer, who at the very start of his career was so promising and so very competent in the technicalities of administration, occupied various high offices, among them that of Secretary General of the United Nations. And reportedly it was in this last capacity that 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.
5. Conrad and Casement — The Boy Teodor — Exile in Volgda — Nowofastów — Death and interment of Apollo Korzensiowski — Sea and love-life — A winter journey — The heart of darkness — The panorama of Waterloo — Casement, the slave economy and the Irish question — Casement tried and executed for treason
On the second evening of my stay in Southwold, after the late news, the BBC broadcast a documentary about Roger Casement, who was executed in a London prison in 1916 for high treason. The images in this film, many of which were taken rom rare archive footage, immediately captivated me; but nonetheless, I fell asleep in the green velvet armchair I had pulled up to the television. As my waking consciousness ebbed away, I could still hear every word of the narrator's account of Casement with singular clarity, but was unable to grasp their meaning. And when I emerged hours later, from the depths of a dream, to see in the first light of dawn the test card quivering in the silent box, all I could recall was that the programme had begun with an account of Casement's meeting with the writer Joseph Conrad in the Congo. Conrad considered Casement the only man of integrity among the Europeans whom he had encountered there, and who had been corrupted partly by the tropical climate and partly by their own rapaciousness and greed. I've seen him start off into an unspeakable wilderness (thus the exact words of a quotation from Conrad, which has remained in my head) swinging a crook-handled stick, with two bulldogs: Paddy (white) and Biddy (brindle) at his heels and a Loanda boy carrying a bundle. A few months afterwards it so happened that I saw him come out again, leaner, a little browner, with his stick, dogs, and Loanda boy, and quietly serene as though he had been for a stroll in the park. Since I had lost the rest of the narrator's account of the lives of Casement and Conrad, except for these few words and some shadowy images of the two men, I have since tried to reconstruct from the sources, as far as I have been able, the story I slept through that night in Southwold.
In the late summer of 1861, Mme Evelina Korzeniowska travelled from the small Ukrainian town of Zhitomir to Warsaw, with her boy Józef Teodor Konrad, then not quite five, to join her husband Apollo Korzeniowski, who that spring had already given up his unrewarding position as an estate manager with the intention of helping pave the way for a revolt against Russian tyranny through his writings and by means of conspiratorial politics. In mid-October the illegal Polish National Committee met for its first sessions in Korzeniowski's Warsaw flat, and over the next few weeks the young Konrad doubtless saw many mysterious persons coming and going at his parents' home. The serious expressions of the gentlemen talking in muted tones in the white and red salon will have suggested the significance of that historic hour to him and he may even, at that point, have been initiated into the clandestine proceedings, and have understood that Mama wore black, which was expressly forbidden by law, as a token of mourning for her people suffering the humiliation of foreign rule. If not, he was taken into their confidence at the end of October at the latest, when his father was arrested and imprisoned in the citadel. After a cursory hearing before a military tribunal Apollo Korzeniowski was sentenced to exile in Vologda, a god-forsaken town somewhere in the wastes beyond Nizhni Novgorod. Vologda, he wrote in summer 1863 to his Zagórski cousins, is a great three-verst marsh across which logs and tree trunks are placed parallel to each other in crooked lines; the houses, even the garishly painted wooden palaces of the provincial grandees, are erected on piles driven into the morass at intervals. Everything round about rots, decays and sinks into the ground. There are only two seasons: the white winter and the green winter. For nine months the ice-cold air sweeps down from the Arctic sea. The thermometer plunges to unbelievable depths and one is surrounded by a limitless darkness. During the green winter it rains week in week out. The mud creeps over the threshold, rigor mortis is temporarily lifted and a few signs of life, in the form of an all-pervasive marasmus, begin to manifest themselves. In the white winter everything is dead, during the green winter everything is dying.