Sebald's Austerlitz and the recovery of the past

As noted yesterday, W.G. Sebald's "Austerlitz" goes through a turnabout at the mid-way point and now the eponymous A. begins to recollect memories from his own early life - he realizes that his obsession with antiquities and ruins was a defense against his own repressed memories of his earliest childhood as a young Jewish boy in Prague - and he learns that his mother sent him off at 4 on a rescue train to England - now the novel focuses on A's visit to Prague and his (somewhat improbable) meet-up with his old "nanny" and mother's best friend, Vera, still living in her apartment there - and V. fills A. in on his parents' life and death. It's a somewhat familiar yet still harrowing story of the gradual Nazi takeover of life in Prague, increasing restrictions on Jews, eventually A's mother sent off to a prison camp where she dies - A. goes off to visit the ruins of that camp. A few things I find strange: V. is a rather cold and dispassionate raconteur, and you have to wonder is she as good as A. sees her, or even as Sebald sees her? Did she really do anything to help V. or any other Jews? Was help possible? (We know from other accounts that there were heroes, but maybe not many and not in Prague perhaps - see Kieslon's fiction, e.g.) I see V. as a representative of the silence of the German/European public during the Holocaust, witnessing yet unwilling and unable to do anything humane, to take any action. And the very way that A. himself has no memory of his Jewish childhood - he is like Europe itself, erasing its past and oblivious of its history - yet he, as an avatar for Sebald - is fixated on this history and devotes his life to the recovery of the past.