"As the farewell dinner was coming to an end, my old friend Bob Berger signaled that he needed to talk to me. We had taken different professional paths; he was a heart surgeon, I healed broken hearts through conversation, yet there was a close bond between us that we both felt would last a lifetime. When he took me by the arm to pull me aside, I understood that something extraordinary was happening. Bob very rarely touched me. These are the kinds of things we psychiatrists notice. He leaned into my ear and said hoarsely: 'Something very heavy is happening to me... the past is breaking out... my two lives, night and day, are becoming one. I need to talk to someone.'

I understood. After his childhood years, which he spent in Hungary during the Holocaust, Bob lived two lives: one in the morning, as a sweet-talking, dedicated, and tireless heart surgeon, and another at night, where fragments of horrific memories roamed in his dreams. I knew everything about his morning life, but in the fifty years of our friendship, he had revealed nothing about his night life. Nor had I ever heard a clear request for help from his mouth: he was closed, mysterious, enigmatic. [...]
He published feverishly, taught, and operated tirelessly. He was the first person in the world to implant a partial assist artificial heart, ensuring long-term survival. And all of this completely alone in the world - he had lost all his loved ones in the Holocaust.

But he said nothing about his past. Curiosity was eating away at me because I had never met another person who had firsthand experience of the horrors of the camps, but Bob dismissed my questions and accused me of voyeurism." [... ]