The story of one life cannot be told separately from the story of other lives. Who are we? The question is not simple. What we call the self is part of a larger matrix of relationship and society. Had we been born to a different family, in a different time, to a different world, we would not be the same. All the lives that surround us are in us.

The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.

There is a circle of humanity, he told me, and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside.

The authorities did not wish to confront those citizens with the sight of the dead. Finally bodies were dumped unidentified into mass graves. Like plutonium waste which we would like to forget, these bodies had become poisonous.

War starts in the mind, not in the body.