1942: Rage.

The scene where I’m standing on an empty beach, a cloudy and windy day, though not too cold, comes back over and over again. I’m quite sure it was the day I woke up from the sedation and went out to take some fresh air. Johann was dead. And I was paralyzed. I just couldn’t talk, couldn’t cry, couldn’t shout. We had dreams. We often talked about our future, “when the war is over”. I was utterly alone, hopeless, scared to death. Didn’t want to live in a world where I could get killed any moment, and not only by the enemies, but also by the hand of people who had invaded my dear Prague. I was nothing to them. They had forced me to join the Army. But I didn’t want to be there, shouldn’t be there, in a strange country where they looked at me the same way I had looked at the Germans in their tanks, with their rifles and their threats.  

I was just a shadow, a ghost. I was already dead, long before I was shot in the belly.

I feel I’m back in 1942. August, to be more exact. Anniversary of Johann’s death, as I mentioned in my last entry. When I had no specific memories, the only thing I could say was “I am depressed and I don’t know why. Probably it’s only the end of the summer”. Well, no, the end of the summer is not reason enough to be depressed. Today, I not only know the cause of this depression, I also have constant flashbacks in my mind of fragmented scenes of things that should never have happened. They come and go, they almost disappear while I’m reading something on the Internet or someone takes me out for a bit of exercise... but those memories keep being there. It’s like these plastic small televisions we had when we were kids: you look through the hole and you find the slides there, pushing a button, one after the other, pieces of a life that once were. Now it’s gone, all the people are gone, but the emotions linger and hurt, just like the first day.

Sadness. A hole in my soul. But deep inside there’s a lot of rage as well, very similar to the widow’s rage, only Katrina lacked the will to take it out. Rage is pain. A reaction to pain. But it’s no good to use violence to express your pain, violence doesn’t free you of pain, maybe it soothes pain for a while, but it has no any healing effect. I wish I knew how you get rid of pain and rage though, the secret of emotions’ alchemy. It’s a process, they say, like those stages of mourning. But it looks like it’s a damn long process, to keep affecting me eighty years later. I am still standing in that beach, staring at the sea, paralyzed, watching the darkness grow in my heart, stealing away my will to live. I let the darkness win, I didn’t fight the pain and I ignored the rage, and they never went away. And now I only have words to get it all out... words and tears that more oft than not pile in my throat just like Katrina did back then. How can I get over it? Like I once said, I’m afraid the only way to do it is to let the wounds bleed... bleed until the last drop of my blood is shed, until there’s no more pus inside... there is no other way.