Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984
Trying to Feel Human Again
"It was late. We left the house and returned to the station. To our relief the train was still there. The May night was marred. We started to walk two-by-two on the tracks along the train. M was walking with me, stopped and asked suddenly, "Are you married?" "No." "Don't go back to Bucharest, stop in Budapest, I beg you." "But I don't know anybody in Budapest." "I think that for the moment it's enough that you know me. You could stay at my mother's house. I go to her house first anyway. You know until I met you I knew exactly what I had to do. I'm all confused now. I like you a lot. Don't give me an answer now." He did not continue. He took my hand. I tried to pull back. He squeezed it gently but firmly. I left my hand in M's strong hand and I felt a kind of peace enveloping me, a peace in me to melt the violence to which I had been exposed the past year. I wasn't in love with him, and he probably was not in love with me. But at that moment we needed each other. We both knew that the feeling of that certain instance was very delicate and very beautiful. But me, it was the first time if there are long periods of emptiness of my feelings for human again. As we went to sleep each in our compartment, he said simply, "Goodnight my darling." And I felt protected. I woke up in the morning before the others and as I lay there I began to think again of those long months of horror which killed my feelings, my power to love. How could I describe, how could I explain the meaning of loving or caring? The ones I used to feel when thinking of a loved one wasn't there anymore. For instance, I knew I was in love with my fiancé, but I didn't feel, I didn't feel it during that year of intense pain and humiliation. I didn't even care about his well being anymore. There was nothing in my heart, only an alarming emptiness. I was extremely disturbed by my discovery because I started to wonder if I was becoming indeed the animal the Nazis wanted us to be reduced to. For a while I didn't dare to talk to anybody about that. The days were filled with cruelty and horror. We endured such hardships, were subjected to su ...to indescribable torture invented by those distorted minds that I couldn't think of problems of loving or not loving."
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