We all have emotional scars reaching our early childhood, when we were too young to understand what was going on. But it is beyond my comprehension, how this relates to the big hoopla in media about surviving in the bad man’s world.

I grew up in the shadow of the World War II. Most of my family members , teachers, and mentors experienced unimaginable atrocities. One of the kindest persons I ever knew was my former boss, who spent 10 years in Gulag; Solzhenitsyn mentions him in one of his books as lasting the longest during the hunger strike. “I almost forgot about that hunger strike” — he told me.

Who we are is defined by what we remember from our traumatic experiences not by what we went through.