Raiding the unspeakable.

In July 1919, a man was born at Corso Re Alberto 75, in this city, and if I started walking now, I would walk only a little over a mile before I got to that apartment. In April 1987, at the age of 67, he died at the same apartment, Corso Re Alberto 75. A fall from the third floor. Possibly suicide.

This man, on whom my thoughts circle here in the middle of the night, lived only in this city. He lived away from this city for less than two years, but significant years: a year in Auschwitz, seeing what humans could do to humans; then liberation and almost a year getting back home, almost not getting back home.

The man who, despite having seen the worst of human enmity wrote: “Many people—many nations—can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’”

This man in whose night I attempt now to sleep, raiding the unspeakable.