The layers of meaning in Sebald's novel Austerlitz

After he visits the prison camp where his mother was held outside of Prague, the eponymous "Austerlitz," in W.G. Sebald's novel learns that as a very young boy he and his parents visited the Czech (?) spa at Marienbad - which then leads A., in typically Sebald narrative fashion, in which episodes unspool connected merely by strings of association, to recall his visit as an adult to Marienbad with a woman who, as she puts it, is trying to get him out of his isolation - i.e., she's in love with him, and he is a complete social isolate, unable to engage in any relations with men or women. The visit is a horror - he is obviously very attracted to her and even a bit in love with her, but when they arrive in M. he freezes over (even more than normal for him), he feels a complete and inexplicable dread. When she asks why he is so cold and distant, he can't even try to answer her. End of the relationship. So why would this happen? You might think the visit would bring back a recollection of the only time in his life when he was a beloved child. But in fact it's a completely repressed memory because, apparently, to remember his happy early childhood is to recollect that his family was broken apart by the Nazis and he was shipped away by his mother - and also, to commit himself to any person, lover or friend, is to risk being abandoned once again. This is powerful as a personal narrative and it's also obvious that it is a narrative about European history and about Sebald's own life: the torment of growing up as an innocent child during WWII in Germany. We see why in Sebald's novels the past is always seen as a ruin, and the present is screen that obscures the dim memories of the past, of history, and job of the writer is to probe and to uncover the relics and their hidden meanings and terrors.