grenades, the joy of the assault. But now he is occupied with polish-ing boots, washing dishes in cold water, trying to shave in such crowded conditions that he cannot move his arms, collecting rubbish from the paths, cleaning the floor, and folding blankets according to a very complicated scheme.
And he is not doing that of his own free will. It’s all about obeying orders. You are driven, shouted at, urged on. Each unit has its share of the slothful and the undisciplined who increase the pressure applied to the unit. The most striking thing about this first phase is being completely cut off from the world outside. This is not just a physical separation, but mental too. You lose interest in all the things that used to be important and precious: cultural, political, and social. That all belongs to "Outside." And "Outside" is strange and distant. In the first few days you still try and get hold of a paper in the reading room. But after a week you only read the headlines, and after two weeks have gone by you don’t read anything at all.
Your relationship to "Outside" is reduced to one dimension: the family, the girlfriend, or some other person who symbolizes the outside world. The one you think about when you dream of a short leave. Go home and visit the girlfriend — that is as much as you can yearn for. For that much, you are prepared to take risks - you vanish for one evening and spend a day in the arrest cells.
The second experience is the company in which you find yourself. "Outside" you know a relatively small number of people, who you more or less get on with. But here young people are mixed together at random, with no account taken of personality, job, origins, or edu-cation. At the beginning that is painful. You find it difficult to make contact with those you are thrown together with, twenty-four hours a day. You have no space to yourself. And whether you like it or not, you have to make the best of it. After a while you begin to notice that some of your comrades are nice and some less so. You discover sides of yourself that you knew nothing about. Unexpected contacts are made. Shared experiences, memories, and unpleasant events bring you closer together.
Eventually, after a few days that feel like half an eternity, you find your place. Y ou learn quickly how to get out of unpleasant tasks, how to get a feel for what’s going on. You get used to things that not long ago seemed to be pure bloody-mindedness and torture. All of a