Sighet is a small town where electrical wires are so numerous in the streets that they seem to stretch toward the sky. It is full of light, but there are just as many shadows.

In Sighet, I taught in a school and assisted men and women in a psychiatric hospital. I loved every face I encountered with all my heart, and in doing so, I realized that all the love I had for them was only a shadow of the love they, instantly, felt for me. In the faces I met in Sighet, I found hope.

In Sighet, I learned that we have hands for embracing—especially for embracing. I took refuge in the arms of those I was supposed to help because helping means standing beside someone, not a step ahead. Helping is pouring a glass of juice and sitting close together. Helping is, sometimes, simply seeing the pain that a soul is experiencing. Telling them, “I see that you are suffering, your pain exists. You are not alone in your pain.”

There are places that, if no one describes them, seem not to exist in the eyes of the world. There are cries that no one hears, screams of pain that reach no ears. I have heard those screams, those anguished pleas for help, for mercy. Sometimes, there is nothing that can be done—except to listen. And sometimes, that is enough. Sometimes, the only wish of those who cry out is to let the world know they exist, that they have a voice, that they can speak.

Someone must listen to this cry, this cry against the wind that no one hears. That is why I will always remember every psychiatric patient (“I will think of you, and thinking of you will be like a warm wind,” a woman told me on the day we said goodbye, perhaps forever) and every child in the school.

Sometimes, God plays hide and seek and watches how we react, especially when life seems so dark that it cannot contain even a glimmer of light. In Sighet, there are men who, even though they have the same eyes as ours, see a different world—one in which, despite the darkness, they find clues to God’s “hiding places.” Even in this world, they sometimes manage to smile. But the absence of love can turn into a void that, at times, is stronger than anything else.

There is so much that can be done to restore even a tiny drop of the love that is missing. One can give time, space, tenderness—small things that have an enormous impact. Many times, we look away, we don’t break the chain of thought that insists the world can only be filled with hatred. But it takes so little to break it—just a little tenderness. Life is not beautiful if it is full of things; it is beautiful if it is full of love.

And I became a child again. I let myself be cared for by the arms of people like me, clinging tightly to them, as if I had been afraid of slipping away my whole life.

Thus, in Sighet, I understood that hope is tied to pain—with the difference that hope triumphs over pain.

Today, I can remember, to give the pain I have seen the dignity and weight it carries. If I see it, it exists. If we see it, one day it will cease to exist. Today, I can say that I will never forget all of this, even if I were forced to live as long as God Himself.

Never.