It was a strange day. The dawn was bright, spring-like, but as the day wore on and we heard the news, it got darker and darker, it began to cloud over, and at night it even started drizzling, it was cold, which wasn’t very common, almost wintry. Like an omen.
I wandered around, searching, waiting for the armed resistance that never was, and that didn’t exist, because everything was totally in disarray.
The result was trauma: from one day to the next, when everything was in full swing, living to the fullest the 24 hours a day, when you were in a meeting or in the student centre or studying or doing an activity, from one day to the next, they tell you it’s over, and they tell you everything you do is bad and if you do it you will be shot, and that all your leaders are bandits, they are terrorists, that they are all being persecuted.
We went from house to house that week, you could already sense what was coming. Later came the raids, persecutions, meeting contacts away from your home, and surveillance, the phone was always tapped. Over the years I’ve looked back and thought.. how did we manage to sleep; how did we manage to get up and go out the next day; how come we didn’t end up going crazy.
From then on life changed completely, our world was turned upside down. And everything else is known, death, torture, imprisonment, exile, unemployment and depending on where you were living, all kinds of forced displacement.
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