“My sometime babysitter, the mother of my mom’s good friend when I was growing up, spent her childhood in a Nazi concentration camp. Her ‘job’ at twelve years-old was scrubbing the floors after SS guards and Einsatzgruppen murdered Jewish prisoners by firing squad.

Her ‘work’ did not set her free - Allied troops did - after one of the bloodiest campaigns in human history.

I remember once when I was around six years-old being with this loving woman at a self-service laundry mat in College Park, Maryland, when a car suddenly backfired in the street outside. She immediately started to shake and lost control of her bodily fluids as the terror engulfed her. She rushed me quickly out, back to her home nearby so she could change.

I could sense her PTSD, her deep sorrow and the horror that must have still lived inside her.

An otherwise normal adult woman by appearance and manner, turned back into a terrified child at a sudden sound that reminded her of the worst of humanity.

I still have a gift she gave me for my elementary school graduation and memories of the turtle she kept in an open cardboard box in her bathroom.

There were some older men who lived in the woods, beyond the train tracks behind her house, that would sometimes use the water spigot on the side of her home to fill plastic jugs of water before returning to their camp.

She was the only one on the block who allowed them the courtesy; saying once to me, ‘Don’t be afraid, they’re not bothering anybody - they just got lost in life’.

She had compassion and empathy, the best kind of courage after what she had endured.

I remember her pain along with her stoic dignity.

She had no reason for the embarrassment she expressed to me in that moment inside the laundry mat in the mid-1970’s, but I would carry I deep shame for the rest of my days if I did not speak out on the horrors we now face.

Do not look away and do not take what we are witnessing lightly.“ noelcasler.substack.com…