Mimed stood off to one side and left me to myself. He bowed his head and prayed while standing in front of my parents’ grave, I tried to meditate, to remember happy times from my childhood with Papa and Maman. I couldn’t seem to do it, but I figured I’d soon get the hang of this meditation thing. Rachel got so good at it he went round philosophising like a council of imams. Suddenly I felt a stabbing pain, a spasm ripping through my guts. What had been vague, something I’d known only second-hand from reading Rachel’s diary, something I’d kept private, suppressed, carefully contained was now here before my eyes: my parents’ graves, the graves of Papa, of Maman, of our neighbours, the graves of childhood friends, of babies I had not seen born or grow up, all of them butchered like dogs by God knows who. My head exploded, I started to sob, to scream, I couldn’t think, I fell on my knees and started to beat my head against the ground. It was all so unfair, so strange, so many things had been hushed up, and everywhere I could smell the stink of injustice, twisting the knife in the wound. I didn’t know what to do. Then, suddenly, a sort of madness took me, I wanted to smash things, I was filled with hate – I hated myself, I hated the whole world, hated Rachel and this country and these people. I hated the way things were. I hated the people of Aïn Deb for living in silence, for tending to that silence like a sacred flame, like a barrier protecting them from themselves. I despised them for treating truth, treating life as things that could be hidden, hushed up, for bringing children into a life of lies, of pretence, of ignorance and amnesia. I am paying the price. Papa never told us anything, and when his turn came, Rachel never told me anything, the authorities tell us nothing, they have broken our spirit. We are helpless, pitiful, weak, ready to make any concession, agree to any cover-up, collude in any cowardice. We’re dead men, we’re sheep, we’re concentration camp prisoners. I hated my father for making us pariahs. I hated God through whose will things were this way, God who almighty, invisible, serene, extends across the universe, who doesn’t hear our cries, doesn’t answer our prayers. Well, fuck Him, His truth is not our truth, and our truth is not His. He is not one of us. That’s why I want this diary to be read by people all over the world, people like me, like us. I’ve nothing to hide, I don’t want to hide anything, I want people to see me for what I am, to know who I am and where I come from.