The writing of one who traverses the realm of suffering and supreme devastation has an unmistakable sound that cannot be replicated, no matter how masterful the writing of a man devoid of life’s great trials.

If you open Alexandra Fourney’s book, Diary 66. The night I burnedyou will see the writing of one who has lived through burning, and then how the fire redraws his body, lingering in the bowels, which can neither be extinguished nor banished, as, after all, it hides in the storehouse of memories for the rest of its life.

“The human body is not designed to feel something so terrible. (…) I am crying and bleeding, completely empty, empty of skin, empty of everything human in me. (…)

The right hand was so swollen that it was cut in the middle so that it would not burst on its own. It is split by a deep cut, through which the white tendons, fragile, break out. I have no skin at all on my forearm and hand. I see my reddish flesh. Glossy I turn my head. The left shoulder looks like the work of a mad sculptor. It is empty, deformed, as if fire had eaten into it to quench its hunger. Blood spurts from the gaping belly of the viscous dark red wound. Horror. This is not real. Nightmare. Wake up, wake up! In vain.”

From there, from this suffering, where “the body becomes an instrument of torture”, Oleksandra rises through words to a place where none of us have reached. Was she not given a different right to speak the words “life” and “death” than the rest of mortals?

The weight of Alexandra’s words, written at the end of what she experienced in the Colectiv on the terrible evening of Friday, October 30, 2015, then two months in the “burning hospital” in Bucharest, is doubled. On the one hand, it highlights the place of extreme suffering in the human condition: how far can suffering go, humanly speaking? How long can a person’s body and soul burn continuously?

“I wonder how much longer I can go. Pain spills over everything I am, tearing me apart. One day I will go mad and either die or get out of the bath and run as far away from this place as empty as I am. I would collapse on the dirty asphalt in front of Burns Hospital, stripped of everything I was, and most of all, my humanity. I will make a pitiful lake beneath me, and they will see their merciless face reflected in its bloody waters. It’s getting harder and harder for me to believe that I’ll ever get out of here. And if I do, I will be someone else. Moment by moment, something breaks inside me. i This dying skin covers an equally tortured soul, clamped in the vise of suffering and indifference, shrugging its shoulders, roaring and begging for painkillers. Nothing is the same. Nothing will be the same again.”

On the other hand, these words changed the state of the world from us. They scourged our “emotional laziness”, laid bare the monstrosity of an existence we pretend not to know, at least until it touches us. So let’s close our eyes until society assigns us a torture chamber somewhere behind the scenes.

But now, when Oleksandra confesses to her, KNOW. In Alexandra’s book, the words “hell” and “inferno” appear more than 30 times, and she puts before our eyes the only real hell: the one that we, humans, we arrange ourselves for each other.

“The suffering I experienced during my hospitalization was abuse, torture hidden behind the walls of a building dedicated to healing. Only sort of. In fact, it was hell there.”

A televised lie by a modern minister—”we have everything we need”—kept the death chambers at Arcey Hospital open for two months. (Has someone in our country managed to push several dozen people into the arms of death with five words? I wonder how long it takes people’s justice to judge this person?) That is where many of the “65” ended up. Some of them would be alive today if the “servants of the people” had recognized that we do not have them and we need the help of foreign hospitals to treat our burns; if there was no hidden layer, we all live in our disguised, lying and corrupt Romania.

But why does a place intended for healing, turned into a “house of death”, become a symbol of an entire country? A symbol is an image in which you see more than the image below the eyes. When I say that the author experienced Magazine 66 in the Arshi hospital acquired symbolic value, I mean the fact that the “hospital-camp” on Calea Griviței, where the patient screamed in pain, begging to be given an analgesic, where he was deceived, humiliated and tortured (read it if you don’t believe!) it causes the whole country to suffer. In other words, the hospital of Arcy, described in Alexandra Fournea’s book, has a terrible malignant pregnancy and, compared to the whole country, thus acquires symbolic vocation. He becomes one concentrated value and it makes us suddenly see, moving into another orbit, that we are a society in which, in all areas, transplants are applied to pus-filled wounds. He encourages us to see what a society looks like, in which, just like there, but on a completely different scale, the truth is hidden from us: the truth that, living the way we live, rubbed by the bacteria of corruption, we risk disappearing. as a people We are a country where we have been talking about “educated Romania” for six years, and we are in first place in all rankings.

Why, then, did Colectiv mean “a chronic disease that Romania suffers from”? Because, to put it simply, he became a symbol of the war that the political class and its corruption have been waging against our lives for 30 years. The one whose treatment is Romanian hospitals that have become hotbeds of death,” where doctors aided by politicians have effectively become torturers.

“What the fire saved, they killed in this camp hospital, where treatment is torture, where the specter of truth agonizes in the corridors, dressed in worn robes, smeared with blood and pus, whispering when it seems that no one knows her hears that we are all dead, covered by bacteria, eaten by them.”

Of course, we can stubbornly ignore this civil war, but then that means we always accept that others, always others, not us, to become his victims. You close the book with this unanswered question: how long can we Romanians be “blind to the great evil in the world”? Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro