"As the farewell dinner came to an end, my old friend Bob Berger signaled that he needed to talk to me. We had followed different professional paths, he was performing heart surgeries, while I was healing broken hearts through conversation. Yet, we felt a strong connection between us that we knew would last a lifetime. When he grabbed my arm to pull me aside, I knew something extraordinary was happening. Bob rarely touched me. We psychiatrists notice such things. He leaned in and whispered hoarsely, 'Something very heavy is happening to me... the past is breaking loose... my two lives, day and night, are becoming one. I need to talk to someone.'

I understood. After his childhood, which he spent in Hungary during the Holocaust, Bob lived two lives: one in the morning, as a gentle, dedicated, and tireless heart surgeon, and another at night, where fragments of horrific memories haunted his dreams. I knew everything about his morning life, but in the fifty years of our friendship, he had never revealed anything about his nighttime life. I had never heard a clear request for help from him: he was closed off, mysterious, enigmatic. [...]
He published feverishly, taught, and performed surgeries tirelessly. He was the first person in the world to implant a partial artificial heart, ensuring long-term survival. And he did 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. I was consumed by curiosity because I had never met anyone else who had firsthand experience of the horrors of the camps. However, Bob dismissed my questions and accused me of voyeurism." [...]