I am deeply concerned that history is repeating itself. Anti-Semitism, Jew hatred, the demonizing, terrorizing, and killing of innocent Jews, especially women and children, is returning with a vengeance. I want to take us back 83 years to December 15 of 1941 in Liepaja, Latvia. For 3 terrifying days, German Nazis and Latvian collaborators rounded up thousands of Jewish women and children, forced them to march in the freezing cold to a beach on the Baltic Sea, ordered them to strip off their clothing, and shot them dead in groups of 10 while others looked on terrified. This horrific massacre has been memorialized by a brilliant Jewish artist in my community, Victoria Carlin Milstein, in a sculpture she has named ``She Wouldn't Take Off Her Boots.'' The sculpture, which stands in LeBauer Park in downtown Greensboro shows a grandmother, her daughter, and her three granddaughters, arms locked together, awaiting their gruesome fate. All are barefoot, except the grandmother, who in an act of defiance, refused to take off her boots. The sculpture was based on a haunting photograph taken by the Nazis to document their cruelty. The artist has placed a bronze camera in front of the statue so each person can look through the camera lens and see exactly what the photographer saw before the family was shot. Each person who looks through that camera is a witness to the unimaginable cruelty that was inflicted on innocent Jews while others stood by either complicit or silent.…
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