Read Online By Any Means: His Brand New Adventure From Wicklow to Wollongong by Charley Boorman - Free Book Online

independence but they didn’t need all that land. The Serbs wanted access to the coast.’
    ‘So they rolled the tanks in.’
    After breakfast we met up with Natalia, the woman who’d spent three months in her basement. Echoing what Dean and Kristijan had told us, she said that since the conflict ended in 1995 the younger people in Vukovar had moved on. That wasn’t necessarily true of the older generation, though. Some of their Serb oppressors had previously been their neighbours, some had committed atrocities and others held positions of power locally, particularly in the police force.
    Natalia pointed out a water tower that we’d seen from our hotel. You can see it from lots of vantage points around Vukovar; it stands as a symbol of Croatian unity. When the Serbs shelled the defenders of the city, the water tower was hit six hundred times, yet still it remained standing. Every building around it was flattened but as if in defiance of the brutality, the tower refused to crumble. The Croatian people refer to 1991 as the ‘Time of Hate’: like a cancer they saw it consume individual people, communities, whole towns. When the fighting was over and Vukovar was overrun, the Serbs dragged two hundred and sixty-one wounded defenders and civilians from the hospital and brought them to an old building that is now a museum. There’s a massive cross outside with lighted candles and smaller crosses draped in rosaries. Four people died from beatings that first night and over the next few days twenty people at a time were loaded onto a trailer and towed by tractor to a farmer’s field. They were shot then dumped in a mass grave, all two hundred and sixty-one of them. The youngest was seventeen and three of them were women.
    Natalia told us that so far two hundred had been identified, but seventeen years later the others are still to be named.
    In a quiet suburban street across the road from a little petrol station there’s a set of tall yellow gates that mark the site of one of the camps where the Serbs held Croat prisoners. Natalia’s house is just up the road, a little place with pebble-dashed walls and a brown tiled roof. She told us how she and her mother hid in the basement with only raw potatoes to eat. They remained there for three months.
    ‘It was terrible,’ she told us. ‘We are very afraid: every day soldiers come along the street tossing bombs into the basements.’
    Russ was appalled. ‘You mean grenades? They threw grenades into people’s houses?’
    She nodded. ‘Every day we thought it would be our house, every day.’ She had been a small child; her father hadn’t fought as a defender but he’d been hauled off to a concentration camp anyway. He was a good man and believed they would survive, but he had no idea whether he would be shot and there was nothing he could do for his wife or daughter. He just had to hope and pray. In the end it was a Serbian neighbour that saved them, plucking them from the basement and taking them to safety.
    I’ve always felt very strongly that war achieves nothing but suffering and misery. Listening to Natalia, the full horror of this conflict really hit me hard - perhaps because it happened so recently and most of the people killed were my age. Earlier we had paid our respects in a massive cemetery: it had beautifully paved walkways and sculpted trees, flowers everywhere. The headstones were black marble, and reading them I had realised that most of those who were killed had been born between 1959 and 1966. I was born in 1966: I have a wife, two beautiful children and a great life. These people hadn’t made thirty; some of them not even twenty. There was one entire row where the victims had lost their lives within a few days of each other.
    Feeling sombre we left Vukovar, hitching a ride on a maintenance barge to the town of Ilok further down the Danube. We could see the water tower from the deck; an everlasting reminder of Vukovar. At Ilok we’d cross into Serbia.
    The