When the city around you is in ringing silence, when on the street there is only the whistle of tires of cars leaving forever from their homes, when people sleep with their pets on the subway platforms. When you don’t know if you will find food tomorrow, if you can get to the neighboring area of the city under firefights, when you don’t let go of your backpack - everything you have, moving from room to room, because you don’t know if you can return. When you stay away from windows.
Fear is sleeping in turns not to miss the sirens, not to know about the atomic bomb or to miss the evacuation. Although it can hardly be called a sleeping.
Fear is when any stranger in a bomb shelter can turn out to be a russian saboteur and open fire.
Fear is also a dissociation, when you don't understand, half an hour or 5 hours have passed. How long have you been sitting in a bomb shelter? You don’t feel the body until you start rubbing your palms, you don’t even understand that you have it. You're just a dot, you feel nothing but fear. Your speech is slurred and you can hardly understand what others are saying to you.
I could never understand why in the films about the apocalypse the main character cannot just stay in a quiet place - in the war I understood this. Fear turns you into a small animal, you are a solid survival instinct and therefore you run. There are no right or wrong decisions in war, there are only decisions of this inner animal that leads you. Mine brought me to Berlin 7 months ago. Every day since that moment, it seems to me that only now I am beginning to realize what I experienced.
