I graduated from the medical faculty before the war, in 1939. At the beheading of John the Baptist, I asked my spiritual father to take my monastic vows: there was no time to tonsure me, because there were five days left before leaving for the army. I took monastic vows and went to the army, and there I studied something for five years; In my opinion, it was a great school.

     What did he learn?

     Obedience, for example. I put a question to Father Athanasius: I am now going to the army – how am I going to carry out my monasticism and, in particular, obedience? He answered me: very simply; consider that everyone who gives you an order speaks in the name of God, and do it not only outwardly, but with all your intestines; Consider that every sick person who needs help calls is your master; serve him as a purchased slave.

     And then there was a patristic life. The corporal came and said: we need volunteers to dig a trench, you are a volunteer... The first is that your will is completely cut off and completely absorbed by the wise and holy will of the corporal. Then he gives you a shovel, leads you to the hospital yard, says: dig a ditch from north to south... And you know that the officer said to dig from east to west. But what do you care? Your business is to dig, and you feel such freedom, you dig with pleasure: first, you feel virtuous, and then the day is cold and clear, and it is much more pleasant to dig a trench in the open air than to wash dishes in the kitchen. I dug for three hours, and the ditch turned out to be excellent. A corporal comes and says: fool, donkey, etc., it was necessary to dig from east to west... I could have told him that he had made a mistake at first, but what did I care if he was wrong? He told me to fill up the ditch, and once I had fallen asleep, I would probably have started digging again, but by that time he had found another "volunteer" who had received his share.

     At that time I was very struck by the feeling of inner freedom that absurd obedience gives, because if my activity were determined by the point of application, and if it were a matter of meaningful obedience, I would first fight to prove to the corporal that it was necessary to dig in a different direction, and everything would end up in solitary confinement. Immediately, simply because I was completely freed from the sense of responsibility, my whole life was precisely that I could respond completely freely to everything and have inner freedom for everything, and the rest was the will of God, manifested through someone's mistake.

     Other discoveries related to the same period. One evening I was sitting in the barracks reading; next to me was a pencil of this size, sharpened on one side and eaten up on the other, and there was really nothing to tempt with; And suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw this pencil, and something said to me: you will never be able to say again in your entire life – this is my pencil, you have renounced everything that you have the right to possess... And (this may seem to you to be complete nonsense, but every temptation, every such attraction is a kind of delirium) I struggled for two or three hours to say: yes, this pencil is not mine, and thank God.. For several hours I sat in front of this stub of pencil with such a feeling that I don't know what I would give to have the right to say: this is my pencil. And in fact, it was my pencil, I used it, I gnawed it. And it wasn't mine, so then I felt that not having was one thing, and being free from an object was quite another.

     Another observation of those years: that praise is not necessarily for a deed and scolded is also not necessarily on the merits. At the beginning of the war, I was in a military hospital, and I was expelled from the officers' meeting. For what? For the fact that I got a hospital room in which the stove did not work, and the orderlies refused to clean it; I threw off the mold, cleaned the stove and brought coal. For this, my comrades made a scandal that I was "humiliating the officer's dignity." This is an example that is in no way majestic, ridiculous; And of course, I was right, because it is much more important that the stove warms the hospital room than all these chase issues. And in other cases they were praised, perhaps, and I knew that they were praised in vain. I remember – when it came to confession – when I was still a little boy, I was invited to a certain house, and several of us were playing ball in the dining room, and with this ball we broke some vase. Then we were quiet, and I remember my friend's mother praising us for being so quiet, and for being so beautiful, and for being such an exemplary guest. Then I went home with such a feeling - how to have time to get down the stairs before she found the vase. So here is the second example: they praised me, and I was quiet, extremely quiet, but, unfortunately, I managed to break a vase before that.

     In war, there was still a certain amount of danger, and therefore the consciousness that you are really in the hands of God sometimes reaches a very great extent. Along the way, you make all kinds of discoveries: that you are not so wonderful, that there are things much more important than you; about the fact that there are different layers in events. There is, say, a layer on which you live and you are afraid, or some other feelings overwhelm you, and there are two more layers in addition to this: above, above you, is the will of God, His vision of history, and below, how life flows, not noticing the events connected with your existence. I remember once I was lying on my stomach under fire, in the grass, and at first I was tight to the ground, because it was somehow uncomfortable, and then I got tired of huddling, and I began to look: the grass was green, the sky was blue, and two ants were crawling and dragging a straw, and it was so clear that here I was lying and afraid of shelling, and life was flowing, the grass was green, ants crawl, the fate of the whole world lasts, continues, as if man has nothing to do with it; And in fact, he has nothing to do with it, except that he spoils everything.

     Well, and then there are very simple things that suddenly become very important. You know, when it comes to life and death, some questions are completely removed, and under the sign of life and death, a new hierarchy of values appears: insignificant things acquire some significance because they are human, and some big things become indifferent because they are not human. For example, I was engaged in surgery, and I remember it was clear to me that to perform a complex operation is a technical question, and to deal with a patient is a human question, and that this moment is the most important and the most significant, because any good technician can do good technical work, but the human moment depends on the person, and not on the technique. There were, for example, the dying; The hospital had 850 beds, so there were quite a lot of seriously wounded, we were very close to the front; And then, as a rule, I spent the last nights with the dying, in whatever department they were. Other surgeons found out that I had such a strange thought, and that's why I was always warned. At this point, you are technically completely unnecessary; Well, you sit with a person – young, in his early twenties, he knows that he is dying, and there is no one to talk to. And not about life, not about death, about nothing like that, but about his farm, about his harvest, about the cow – about all sorts of such things. And this moment is becoming so significant, because there is such devastation that it is important. And so you sit, then the person falls asleep, and you sit, and occasionally he just feels: are you here or not? If you are here, you can continue to sleep, or you can die peacefully.

     Or small things; I remember one soldier, a German, who was taken prisoner, wounded in the arm, and the senior surgeon said: remove his finger (it was festering). And I remember the German said then: "I am a watchmaker." You see, a watchmaker who loses his index finger is already a finished watchmaker. Then I took him into circulation, worked on his finger for three weeks, and my boss laughed at me, said: "What nonsense, you could finish this whole thing in ten minutes, and you mess around for three weeks - for what? And I answered: yes, the war is going on, and therefore I play with his finger, because it is so significant, the war, the war itself, that his finger plays a colossal role, because the war will end, and he will return to his city with or without a finger...

     And this context of big events and very small things and their correlation played a big role for me – maybe it may seem strange or funny, but this is what I found then in life, and I found my scale in it too, because I have never been an outstanding surgeon and have never done major operations, but this was life. And it is precisely the deep life of mutual relationships.

     Then the war ended and the occupation began, I was in the French Resistance for three years, then back in the army, and then practiced medicine until 1948...

     And what did they do in the Resistance?

     He did nothing interesting; this is the most shameful thing in my life, one might say, that neither during the war nor during the Resistance did I ever do anything specifically interesting or specifically heroic. When I was demobilized, I decided to return to Paris and returned partly legally, and partly illegally. It is legal in the sense that I returned with the papers, and it is illegal because I wrote them myself. It was very funny. My mother and grandmother were evacuated to the Limoges region, and when I was demobilized, I was demobilized to the ACER camp in Pau – I had to go somewhere. I got there and began to look for my mother and grandmother, I knew that they were somewhere here, I got a letter that they had written to me three months before, it traveled to all the army authorities. And I found them in a small village; my mother was ill, my grandmother was not young, and I decided that we would return to Paris and see what we could do there. My first thought was to move to France Libre, but this proved impossible because by that time the Pyrenees were blockaded. Maybe someone more enterprising would have made it, but I didn't.