I am in his kitchen. I regard him thoughtfully as I pour him another drink. I notice how the grey of his hair contrasts with the redness of his skin even though the sun is setting and it is getting dark.

Soon we are joking and laughing and feeling good and then suddenly, I feel it – I know the alcohol has triggered a memory and he has something to tell me.

I recognize that certain heaviness in his expression and brace myself for the words which begin to spill out of his mouth like lead weights. I am uneasy. I never know where to look when he starts on one of his stories or when to look away, when to laugh or when to sigh, when to intervene or when to shut my mouth.

And on this particular night he has a most horrible story to tell, which brings me close to tears, even now.

I can’t understand how this beautiful man could have gone through so much and stands in front of me re-telling his story with such strength; his brother was shot by a firing squad from only feet away. He was forced to fight for an army he hated, and never had a real home to return to.

I can’t help thinking someone owes him something for it all but no one wants to fork it over.

I rose my eyes back to him as he lowered his drink from his lips, wiped away the wetness and began.

“Behind the trees, the tanks were running over the bodies,” he says in a shrill voice. “They would burn them, throw them on the ground and run over them with the tanks.” He grips his glass tightly and shuffles from one foot to another.

I listened in a trance while visions of what he describes haunt my mind like a bad dream.

I try to put the pictures together but he leaves out details and my mind starts to wander. I wonder if he even knows what happened. He tells about what he saw but not exactly what he knew.

“I could smell something in the air,” he says. “A very bad smell. Looks like coal smoke and I look around but there were no houses. You know why,” he asks. I shake my head. “Behind the trees they burned the bodies of the Jews and the partisans.”

With that, a line popped into my head of Winston Churchill. “Drastic measures.” With all the horror that went on in the war, drastic measures didn’t mean anything to this old man in front of me.

He continued but my mind was having a hard time processing the last point.

I find it hard to follow him. His accent has not changed in 30 years.

Where his words fall shy, his eyes always tell the story. I couldn’t get over his eyes. His eyes were like rain. I could see right through them; right through him. He could be just a body living, with a heart that died long ago.

His voice grows louder and his adjectives become stronger. I find it hard to see the man I know.

“Come to bed,” she yells to him from the bedroom, and his eyes falter, as if they were just swept back into the present. He throws his hands up in the air and sits down in the living room.

“He doesn’t talk about that stuff,” his wife says to me. “He just wants to forget.” That’s exactly what I see in him. A man trying to forget.

“He talks to very few people about what happened to him,” his wife says. I look over at him and he is just sitting there on his chair, staring off.

There aren’t many times when we get to this point of total nonjudgmental conversation.

He will not even let me use his name because he is afraid of the judgment. Someone may think he is a Nazi because he fought for the Germans. Someone may think he is a traitor because he changed sides (forced at gunpoint) when the partisan group he was fighting for got taken over by the Germans.

Most of all, he is afraid no one will understand.