| | Hong, your article was fascinating and compelling, and I agree with the others who say they'd like to hear more. And I, too, would like to hear from Adam. There are a lot of books available on life under dictatorship, but when one knows you and Adam, and knows a little of the beauty inside you both, the events take on an even greater meaning.
You wrote: "The world as I now remember it was an ugly and suffocating one and I was starving spiritually, emotionally, and physically."
You echo Ayn Rand here. She told me that she often thought, while in Russia, that she could bear the poverty, the constant fear, the privation of her life -- but what she felt she could not bear was the endless ugliness -- the ugliness of life, of people reduced to thinking of nothing more than where they would get their next potatoes,
I have always hated Nazism, but perhaps never so passionately as when a friend, a German concentration camp survivor, told me a part of his story. I had once asked him why he had chosen to come to California from Europe, and he had answered, "I didn't want to see snow." Quite a while later, it struck me that that was an odd way to put it; he hadn't said he didn't like the cold, or snow -- he'd said he didn't want to SEE snow. So finally, I asked him why he felt that way. I shall never forget his answer.
He said that just before the end of the war, he had been part of the "death march" from one camp to another. The Nazis were trying to keep ahead of the Russians, and so were moving their victims. The weather was bitterly cold, the path they took lined with high snow drifts. The inmates, exhausted, freezing, starved, most without shoes or coats, kept falling as they walked; other inmates tried to help them, but the Nazi guards forbade it; instead, they shot the fallen. "You see," my friend said, "as we walked and people kept falling and shots kept ringing out, I saw great streaks of blood forming across the snow drifts. Since then, I cannot look at snow without seeing them."
Barbara
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