It is cold, so bitter cold, on this dark, winter day in 1942. But it is no different from any other day in this Nazi concentration camp. I stand shivering in my thin rags, still in disbelief that this nightmare is happening. I am just a young boy. I should be playing with friends; I should be going to school; I should be looking forward to a future, to growing up and marrying, and having a family of my own. But those dreams are for the living, and I am no longer one of them. Instead, I am almost dead, surviving from day to day, from hour to hour, ever since I was taken from my home and brought here with tens of thousands other Jews. Will I still be alive tomorrow? Will I be taken to the gas chamber tonight?
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Back and forth I walk next to the barbed wire fence, trying to keep my emaciated body warm. I am hungry, but I have been hungry for longer than I want to remember. I am always hungry. Edible food seems like a dream. Each day as more of us disappear, the happy past seems like a mere dream, and I sink deeper and deeper into despair. Suddenly, I notice a young girl walking past on the other side of the barbed wire. She stops and looks at me with sad eyes, eyes that seem to say that she understands, that she, too, cannot fathom why I am here. I want to look away, oddly ashamed for this stranger to see me like this, but I cannot tear my eyes from hers.
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Then she reaches into her pocket, and pulls out a red apple. A beautiful, shiny red apple. Oh, how long has it been since I have seen one! She looks cautiously to the left and to the right, and then with a smile of triumph, quickly throws the apple over the fence. I run to pick it up, holding it in my trembling, frozen fingers. In my world of death, this apple is an expression of life, of love. I glance up in time to see the girl disappearing into the distance.

The next day, I cannot help myself-I am drawn at the same time to that spot near the fence. Am I crazy for hoping she will come again? Of course. But in here, I cling to any tiny scrap of hope. She has given me hope and I must hold tightly to it.

And again, she comes. And again, she brings me an apple, flinging it over the fence with that same sweet smile.

This time I catch it, and hold it up for her to see. Her eyes twinkle. Does she pity me? Perhaps. I do not care, though. I am just so happy to gaze at her. And for the first time in so long, I feel my heart move with emotion.

For seven months, we meet like this. Sometimes we exchange a few words. Sometimes, just an apple. But she is feeding more than my belly, this angel from heaven. She is feeding my soul. And somehow, I know I am feeding hers as well.
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One day, I hear frightening news: we are being shipped to another camp. This could mean the end for me. And it definitely means the end for me and my friend. The next day when I greet her, my heart is breaking, and I can barely speak as I say what must be said: "Do not bring me an apple tomorrow," I tell her. "I am being sent to another camp. We will never see each other again." Turning before I lose all control, I run away from the fence. I cannot bear to look back. If I did, I know she would see me standing there, with tears streaming down my face.

Months pass and the nightmare continues. But the memory of this girl sustains me through the terror, the pain, the hopelessness. Over and over in my mind, I see her face, her kind eyes, I hear her gentle words, I taste those apples.

And then one day, just like that, the nightmare is over. The war has ended. Those of us who are still alive are freed. I have lost everything that was precious to me, including my family. But I still have the memory of this girl, a memory I carry in my heart and gives me the will to go on as I move to America to start a new life. Years pass. It is 1957. I am living in New York City. A friend convinces me to go on a blind date with a lady friend of his. Reluctantly, I agree. But she is nice, this woman named Roma. And like me, she is an immigrant, so we have at least that in common.
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"Where were you during the war?" Roma asks me gently, in that delicate way immigrants ask one another questions about those years.

"I was in a concentration camp in Germany," I reply.

Roma gets a far away look in her eyes, as if she is remembering something painful yet sweet.

"What is it?" I ask.

"I am just thinking about something from my past, Herman," Roma explains in a voice suddenly very soft. "You see, when I was a young girl, I lived near a concentration camp. There was a boy there, a prisoner, and for a long while, I used to visit him every day. I remember I used to bring him apples. I would throw the apple over the fence, and he would be so happy."

Roma sighs heavily and continues. "It is hard to describe how we felt about each other-after all, we were young, and we only exchanged a few words when we could-but I can tell you, there was much love there. I assume he was killed like so many others. But I cannot bear to think that, and so I try to remember him as he was for those months we were given together."
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With my heart pounding so loudly I think it wil1 explode, I look directly at Roma and ask, "And did that boy say to you one day, 'Do not bring me an apple tomorrow. I am being sent to another camp'?"

"Why, yes," Roma responds, her voice trembling.

"But, Herman, how on earth could you possibly know that?"

I take her hands in mine and answer, "Because I was that young boy, Roma."

For many moments, there is only silence. We cannot take our eyes from each other, and as the veils of time lift, we recognize the soul behind the eyes, the dear friend we once loved so much, whom we have never stopped loving, whom we have never stopped remembering.

Finally, I speak: "Look, Roma, I was separated from you once, and I don't ever want to be separated from you again. Now, I am free, and I want to be together with you forever. Dear, will you marry me?"

I see that same twinkle in her eye that I used to see as Roma says, "Yes, I will marry you," and we embrace, the embrace we longed to share for so many months, but barbed wire came between us. Now, nothing ever will again.
Sro Gold,
Almost forty years have passed since that day when I found my Roma again. Destiny brought us together the first time during the war to show me a promise of hope and now it had reunited us to fulfill that promise.

Valentine's Day, 1996. I bring Roma to the Oprah Winfrey Show to honor her on national television. I want to tell her in front of millions of people what I feel in my heart every day:

"Darling, you fed me in the concentration camp when I was hungry. And I am still hungry, for something I will never get enough of: I am only hungry for your love."

I'm the Only One

She was my sister and she was sleeping late. She's a lot older than me and at the time she was about to break into films, directing them, so everybody was indulging her. She was the only girl, too. If something didn't wk out in her life and she had to come home f a while, it was a big deal. It mattered me than if I f**ked up in one way  another. When Kelly was at home you had to creep around the house and keep your voice down even if it was in the middle of the afternoon. Our mother's Canadian - I don't know why I say that, except maybe it helps explain her opinion about Kel: Smarts Needs Special. It was this crappy little phrase that she had made up and it meant that clever people.wow power leveling, People with special talents, need special treatment. Like they have a disease. You have to meet the Canadian side of our family to understand how cute she thinks that phrase is. I remember thinking that it was bullsh*t when I was fourteen and it still smells bad now. But to my mother, Kelly was this asteroid that had landed in our lives and no one knew how she got there  what size hole she was going to leave. I've never been very good at school, and Pete, our older brother, is the same. Then along comes Kelly. So my mother has us all pussy-footing around like a family mime troupe, waving our hands, taking our shoes off.replica rolex,

I'm thinking of a particular mning, I was creeping around trying to make a silent breakfast, opening cupboards quietly, acting like I didn't exist. I'd been doing it f a couple of weeks since Kelly got back. It felt like I'd been doing it my whole life. The situation came about because earlier in the year Kelly had moved in with this guy called Aidan. They bought furniture, the whole wks. Then she cheated on him and he left her. Apart from Kelly being back in our house, it was also a shame because Aidan was the only man she ever went out with, befe  since, whom I've had any time f whatsoever. Aidan was a top, replica rolex,man, a good guy. The thing I like about him was that he was smart, but he didn't need much of this special treatment. He was Irish, from Dublin, and he could be funny, he could talk football and he liked to see other people's mouths open and close besides his own. It was good knowing someone like him. I needed it; what with dad not being around, Pete married and gone; and me in a house full of women. That was the year I was praying f a few me inches on my height and shaving the bare space under my nose hoping that something might turn up. So it was good to know Aidan, six foot three and hairy as a bear. He was hairy back and front and Kelly would tease him about it, and he would laugh her off  tell her she could do with losing a few pounds which, between you and me, was nothing but the truth. She was a fat little thing back then. And he went and told her, straight-up; didn't care that she was almost, st of, famous. He told it how it was. That was the way he loved her. She never appreciated it, replica rolex,though, and then she had this fling with some pretty boy in the film industry. But you could see she realised what she'd lost when he left her because she slunk back home and holed herself up in Pete's old room that I'd been using f weights. She took it over and lay in there all day in the dark curled up in a stinking duvet watching old black-and-white films. I remember asking her, 'Why can't you use your own bedroom?' She had a small bedroom upstairs that used to be covered wall to wall in her school friends' graffiti until she went off to university and mum whitewashed the whole thing. I asked her again, 'Why can't you use your own bedroom, that's what it's there f.' She said, 'I can't sleep and wk in the same room. I need a study.' She said it as if a study is one of those things you can't do without, like clean water. I said, 'But I need to exercise.' She said, 'You're fourteen. Your body isn't even developed. The only thing you need to do is stop beating the bishop befe you go blind.' This was classic Kelly. She always knew how to make you feel four inches long in every direction.
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So she came back, and I had to move out all my weights and spread them around the house wherever there was space. I put the bench press in my room along with the free weights. I put the Abdominizer in the lounge. I stuck the chin-up bar at the top of the stairs which lead down to the front do. And even though I was pissed off with Kelly f taking the spare room, having the weights all over the place did make it me like circuit training and doing circuits made me feel like I was Rocky. It's what they do in the middle of Rocky movies; a two-minute sequence to show that over a number of months he got fit and pumped up. You pray f that kind of speedy, magic-time when you're wking out, the same way you wish your adolescence would pass like it does in a TV serial: a school scene, a sex scene and graduation. It's slower and faster than that. And some events become still and solid, and turn into a thing in your life, an object like a lampshade  an ironing board. They hang around; you could reach out and touch them. This day I'm trying to tell you about is like that.
So: my exercise. I'd start in my room, and do about four sets of twenty. Then I'd run downstairs and start on the Abdominizer. If you've never seen one, they're like half of something fun, half a bike
replica rolex,  half a swing. You lie down in them and you do sit-ups. You spend good money trying to make sit-ups something else. In the end, a sit-up is a sit-up. But I'm a big a mug as anyone and I'd try and do two hundred sit-ups in that thing in sets of fifty. The pain was very bad. So I'd think of something that pissed me off, usually Kelly, and the anger would help me push out the last fifty. I wanted to show her that I could develop if I wanted to. Because there was always this thing between her and me that we were both kind of overweight, and always telling the other one that they were obsessed with it.So if Kelly didn't eat lunch,
I'm the Only One