The masked man on the balcony still haunts me to this day.
I don’t know whether these are real memories, real time wounds, slashed in my then seven-year-old brain. Or are they a cumulation of painful reminders echoed through news clips, books, and digital articles I have been subjected to for years.
When I press my eyelids closed to forget, they are met with the stinging of my salted tears. The memory of being so frightened that somehow that masked man on the TV set was going to come hunting for this scared seven-year-old boy, thousands of miles away. The memory of asking my parents if this marked the return of a Holocaust-like situation.