The mud squaltched beneath 47 pairs of boots as the German women stood in formation outside the canvas tent. Ingred Hartman, 23 years old, communications auxiliary second class, felt her heart hammering against her ribs, not from exhaustion, though she’d marched 300 m in 4 months, but from the electric anticipation of what comes next.

When armies capture women, she’d heard the stories whispered between the ranks during the long retreat from the Eastern Front. She knew what Soviet soldiers did. She assumed Americans, despite the propaganda about their supposed civility, would be no different. The April rain had finally stopped, leaving everything glazed with moisture and the particular smell of spring, mixing uneasily with diesel fuel, canvas, and human fear.

Somewhere in the distance, artillery still rumbled, the war grinding forward without them, indifferent to their capture. Closer, she could hear American voices, casual and relaxed, nothing like the sharp bark of German command she’d grown accustomed to. One soldier was laughing, actually laughing. The cognitive dissonance made her dizzy.

An American sergeant emerged from the tent, clipboard in hand, his uniform impossibly clean compared to their mudcaked, tattered field gray. He was young, perhaps 25, with the kind of open Midwestern face that seemed incapable of cruelty. When he spoke, his German was adequate but heavily accented. Each word carefully pronounced as if pulled from a phrase book. “Remove your boots,” he said. “Remove your socks.

Show us your feet.” The words hung in the wet air, incomprehensible in their specificity. Hannah Kurds, 31, senior communications auxiliary and deacto leader of their ragged group, felt the statement land like a physical blow. Four years of military training, eight months of frontline service, 300 m of retreat, and it came down to this feet.

Not interrogation about troop movements, not demands for intelligence, not the violence she’d stealed herself against. Feet. The younger women looked to her. They always did. Leadership wasn’t about rank in these final chaotic weeks of the Reich’s collapse. It was about who could hold fear at bay long enough to make a decision.

Hannah had been holding fear at bay since February when their communications post near Brelau received orders to evacuate. Orders that came too late as the Soviet advance had already cut the roads, leaving them to flee cross country through the Yeiza, frozen landscape. She searched the American sergeant’s face for deception, for the cruel joke that would precede whatever came next, but his expression remained neutral, patient, almost clinical.

Behind him, other Americans were setting up what appeared to be medical stations, folding tables, boxes of supplies, basins of water steaming in the cool air. Medical stations for feet. I’ll go first, Hannah said in German, then in broken English. I go first. She moved to the wooden bench that had been placed outside the tent, acutely aware of 46 pairs of eyes tracking her movement. The bench was Americanmade.

she could tell the wood clean and unscarred, so different from the improvised furniture of the retreating Vermacht. She sat down heavily, her legs grateful for the rest, even as her mind continued racing through scenarios, searching for the trap she knew must be coming. Her fingers fumbled with the laces. The boots had been standard issue in November. By December, the left soul had developed a hole.

By January, both were more patched than original leather. By March, they’d become part of her body. a second skin of cracked cowhide and improvised twine. She’d learned not to remove them, except in the rarest circumstances, because getting them back on had become a special kind of agony. The right boot came off with a wet sucking sound. The smell hit her first.

She’d stopped noticing it weeks ago, her nose having adapted to the constant presence of decay. But now, seeing the American medic’s face register shock, she smelled herself through his nostrils. rotting flesh mixed with leather with the particular sweetness of infection that any field soldier learned to recognize.

The sock, more whole than fabric, peeled away like dead skin. The young American medic, Private James Chin, according to the name tape on his uniform, made a sound in his throat. Not disgust, something worse. Professional alarm. Trench foot. The term came from the previous war, from the Western Front, where Hannah’s father had lost three toes in the psalm mud.

She’d heard his stories growing up, never imagining she’d understand them from the inside. The condition began with numbness, with feet that felt disconnected from the body. Then came the swelling, the skin turning white, then red, then eventually the modeled purple black of tissue beginning to die. Her feet had progressed through all those stages. Private Chen was joined by another medic, this one older with sergeant stripes and the weathered face of someone who’d seen combat. He knelt in the mud without hesitation, taking Hannah’s right foot in his gloved hands

with a gentleness that made her want to weep. He examined the damage with a focused intensity of an artisan studying a particularly challenging piece of work. Trench foot advanced stage, he said in English, probably not realizing Hannah understood enough to follow. Cellulitis spreading up the ankle.

See these dark patches? Early necrosis. Another week and we’re looking at amputation territory. He looked up at Hannah, switching to his careful German. When did you last receive medical treatment? Hannah almost laughed. Medical treatment? as if such things existed in the final months of the Reich. November, she said, vaccination, typhus.

Five months ago, the sergeant medic Martinez, his name tape read, said to Chen, “Five months marching on this.” He gestured to her feet, his face expressing something Hannah hadn’t expected to see from an enemy soldier. Anger, not at her, but on her behalf. Martinez turned to the other German women, still standing in formation, still waiting. All of you, he said in German, boots off.

Now this is medical, not He seemed to search for the right word, not interrogation. Medical only the revelation of 47. They came forward one by one, a procession of damaged feet that wrote the history of the Reich’s collapse in flesh and blood. Private Chen moved from woman to woman with a notebook, documenting each case with the meticulous attention of someone who understood this would need to be reported up the chain of command. Maria Vogel, 28, radio operator.

Both feet showing significant frostbite damage. Three toes on the left foot blackened beyond recovery. She’d been barefoot for 2 days in January when they’d had to abandon their vehicles and weighed through an icy river ahead of the Soviet advance. She’d found boots taken from a corpse. She didn’t say whose, but by then the damage was done. Greta Schneider, 19, clerk typist.

Severe blistering and open soores on both heels and all 10 toes. She’d outgrown her issue boots by December, but there were no replacements available. She’d stuffed newspaper inside to fill the gaps. Then rags, then nothing. Just wearing boots two sizes too small and trying not to scream when she walked.

Leisel Schmidt, 24, telephone auxiliary. embedded debris in both feet, gravel, glass, metal fragments. She’d walked through a destroyed village in March, most of it still burning, and her boots had finally given up the ghost, the souls simply disintegrating.

She’d wrapped her feet in cloth torn from her undershirt and kept walking because stopping meant capture by the Soviets, and everyone knew what that meant. One by one, the Americans documented the damage. One by one, the German women sat on those clean American benches and revealed the price of 300 miles of retreat.

Private Chen’s careful notes showed a pattern of systematic neglect that went beyond individual misfortune into the realm of military catastrophe. Out of 47 women, 43 had severe foot infections. 38 showed signs of trench foot in various stages. 26 had frostbite damage. 18 had embedded foreign objects. 12 had early signs of gang green. Seven needed immediate surgical intervention to prevent limb loss.

Only two claimed their feet were fine. One of them was lying. Elsa Richtor, 19 years old, blonde hair precisely braided even now, stood at the back of the line and watched the proceedings with growing unease. She’d been a Hitler youth leader before being recruited into the communications auxiliary. One of those perfect Aryan specimens the propaganda posters celebrated. all sharp cheekbones and ice blue eyes.

She’d given speeches about German superiority, about the destiny of the Vulk, about the subhuman nature of the enemy. Now the subhuman enemy was kneeling in the mud, carefully removing glass shards from German feet. She watched as Private Chen spent 45 minutes removing debris from Lisel Schmidt’s left foot, counting each piece aloud in English. 33, 34, 35.

His young face contorted with concentration. She watched as Sergeant Martinez mixed sulfonomide powder, expensive, precious sulfonomide, the miracle drug that could stop infection, into water, and applied it to Hannah’s rotting flesh with the care of a master jeweler setting diamonds. She watched, and something in her carefully constructed worldview began to crack. When her turn came, Elsa shook her head.

I’m fine,” she said in the crisp German of someone accustomed to being obeyed. “My feet are healthy. No need for examination.” Sergeant Martinez looked at her for a long moment. “That wasn’t a request, ma’am.” “I’m fine,” Elsa repeated, backing away slightly. “I don’t need your help.

” The word help came out twisted, as if acknowledging American assistance would somehow contaminate her. Martinez sighed, the sound of someone who dealt with difficult patients before. Listen, miss, I understand this is uncomfortable, but 45 of your friends here have serious medical conditions. The odds that you’re perfectly healthy are pretty low. Please sit down. No. The tent had gone quiet.

46 German women, many now with their feet soaking in medicated water, watched Elsa’s rebellion. Some looked sympathetic. Others looked tired, too exhausted by pain and relief to care about one woman’s stubborn pride. Hannah Curts, her feet now bandaged in clean white gauze, spoke up. Elsa, they’re trying to help. Help? Elsa’s voice rose. Is that what you think this is? It’s propaganda.

As soon as they’ve made us weak, made us grateful, the cameras will come out and they’ll show the world how generous America is. And then she didn’t finish. Couldn’t say what she thought came next. What she’d been taught comes next. Private Chen stood up from where he’d been treating another woman. He was young, perhaps only 20, with a gentle face that made him look even younger. “Ma’am,” he said in English, then struggled through the German translation.

“There are no cameras, just medicine.” “Please, lies,” Elsa said. You’re all Jews and communists anyway. We know what you really want. The woman who’d been working quietly at the far end of the tent looked up. Lieutenant Sarah Mitchell, Army Nurse Corps, had been washing feet, actually washing them on her knees in the mud like a servant, while the medics handled the more technical medical work.

She was perhaps 30, with dark hair pulled back in a regulation bun, and the kind of composed face that suggested she’d seen things that would break most people. She stood slowly, gracefully, and walked over to where Elsa stood. The entire tent watched, even the American soldiers had gone quiet.

“No cameras,” Lieutenant Mitchell said in German. “Perfect German with a Berlin accent. No propaganda, just medicine. Lies,” Elsa spat. “You’re all.” Lieutenant Mitchell began rolling up her left sleeve slowly, methodically, the way someone might perform a religious ritual. The fabric slid up past her elbow, revealing her forearm.

There, in the faded blue black ink of a tattoo gun, ran a series of numbers and a letter. A 734. The tent seemed to stop breathing. Avitz, Lieutenant Mitchell said quietly. Block 10, medical experiments. They sterilized me when I was 16. Killed my mother in the gas chambers. Shot my father for trying to hide us.

I spent 3 years there before the British liberated us. She paused, letting the words settle like ash. And now I’m washing your feet. Do you know why? Elsa couldn’t speak. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound emerged. Everything she’d been taught, every speech she’d given, every certainty she’d carried like armor, all of it crumbling under the weight of that tattoo.

I’m washing your feet, Mitchell continued, her voice never rising, never becoming cruel, simply stating facts. Because I chose to be better than what was done to me. I chose healing over hatred. I chose to see humans instead of enemies. That’s the difference between us, Elsa. That’s the difference between America and what you served. Elsa’s legs gave out. She sat down hard on the bench, no longer refusing, no longer fighting.

When she finally removed her boots, the Americans understood why she’d resisted. Blood, fresh blood seeping through what had once been socks. When Private Chen carefully peeled away the fabric, he found glass. 37 pieces of shattered window glass driven so deep into her feet that some had hit bone.

She’d walked on them for 3 weeks, ever since she’d stepped through a destroyed shop window during the retreat. No time to stop. No medical care. Keep walking or get captured by the Soviets. Private Chen, this young American medic who looked like he should be in college rather than a war zone, began removing the glass pieces one by one. And as he worked, tears ran down his face.

“My sister,” he said, speaking to himself more than to Elsa, died of an infection preventable, a cut on her foot, and we didn’t get her to a doctor in time. “I swore.” His voice broke. I swore I’d save everyone I could, friend or enemy. I don’t care anymore. Just people shouldn’t die from preventable infections. He extracted piece after piece, counting in English. 35 36 37.

Each one a small blood stained shard of glass that Elsa had been walking on for 21 days. What happened next would be reported in military documents, discussed in psychiatric evaluations of PSWs, and debated by historians for decades. The American nurses, led by Lieutenant Mitchell, got down on their knees and began washing the feet of their enemies, not cleaning wounds.

That was medical necessity. This was different. This was warm water and soap, gentle hands, the kind of basic human dignity that had been absent from these women’s lives for months. Lieutenant Mitchell, Holocaust survivor, Jewish woman whose family had been murdered by the regime these women served, knelt in the mud and washed German feet.

The German women began to cry. Not from pain, though surely the warm water on damaged tissue must have caused some discomfort, but from the simple devastating recognition of being treated as human beings deserving of care. Maria, the radio operator with frostbitten toes, sobbed openly.

“We didn’t know,” she whispered about the camps. “We didn’t know.” Lieutenant Mitchell looked up from her work, her hands still gently washing Maria’s feet. “You knew,” she said. “Not cruel, just factual. You just didn’t want to know. There’s a difference. The words hit harder than any accusation because they were true.

They’d seen the trains packed with people heading east. They’d heard the rumors, the whispered stories. They’d noticed the absence, the Jewish neighbors who disappeared, the Roma families who were suddenly gone, the disabled children who were taken away. They’d known in that particular German way of knowing without acknowledging, of seeing without looking, of understanding without accepting responsibility.

Greta, the 19-year-old clerk with the two small boots, looked at her own bandaged feet, then at Lieutenant Mitchell’s tattooed arm. “I’m sorry,” she said, the words inadequate and enormous all at once. “I’m so sorry. Sorry doesn’t bring them back,” Mitchell replied. But choosing to be different going forward, that means something. That’s where you start.

Over the next 3 hours, as American medics worked with the focused intensity of people racing against infection and gang green, the psychological architecture of 47 German women began its slow, painful collapse. Everything they’d been taught about American brutality, about Jewish conspiracies, about the superiority of the German race.

All of it confronted by the simple reality of enemies showing more mercy than their own command had demonstrated. Hannah Curts, the senior auxiliary who’d gone first, watched Private Chen cry while removing glass from Elsa’s feet and thought about the eight weeks they’d spent retreating westward.

In 8 weeks, not a single German officer had ordered a medical check. Not one had asked about their condition. They’d been tools, expendable resources in a losing war. And when the tools broke, you simply left them behind. These Americans had been their capttors for less than 6 hours, and they’d already received more medical care than they’d gotten in 5 months of service to the Reich. The cognitive dissonance was overwhelming.

Maria found herself helping to translate between German and English, facilitating her own medical treatment, cooperating with the enemy in ways that would have resulted in execution just days earlier. Leisel, after having 35 pieces of debris removed from her feet, asked Sergeant Martinez if she could help, if there was anything she could do to assist with treating the others. Rest, Martinez told her in his careful German. Healing is your job now.

But the most dramatic transformation was Elsa. The perfect Hitler youth leader, the blonde ideal of propaganda posters, sat on her bench with her feet elevated and bandaged, watching Lieutenant Mitchell move from woman to woman with quiet efficiency and tried to reconcile the world as it was, with the world as she’d been taught it should be. Why? She finally asked, her voice small and lost.

Why are you helping us? We’re your enemies. We served. She couldn’t finish. Couldn’t say it out loud. Mitchell paused in her work, sitting back on her heels. Her hands were wet from washing another woman’s feet, and there was mud on her uniform, and her tattoo was still visible on her forearm. You want the simple answer, or the complex one? I don’t know anymore, Elsa said honestly. I don’t know anything. Simple answer.

Because you’re human beings in medical distress and I’m a nurse. complex answer. Because carrying hatred is exhausting, and I refuse to let what was done to me define who I become. The people who did this to me, she gestured to her tattoo. They wanted to make me less human.

The only way I win is by being more human, by choosing compassion, even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard. She returned to her work, washing the feet of women who months earlier might have stood by while she was loaded into a cattle car. “A nation that washes the feet of its enemies,” Elsa said quietly, more to herself than to Mitchell, “is not the same as a nation that builds gas chambers.

” By nightfall, all 47 German women had been treated. The American medical team had used approximately $200 worth of sulfonomide powder, roughly equivalent to $5,000 in current currency, on enemy prisoners. They’d spent hundreds of man hours on foot care alone, not counting the ongoing treatment that would be required over the coming weeks.

Private Chen had personally removed 163 pieces of foreign debris from 23 different feet. Sergeant Martinez had filed reports recommending immediate surgery for seven women to prevent the spread of gang green. Lieutenant Mitchell and her nursing staff had washed, dried, bandaged, and elevated 47 pairs of feet belonging to women who’d served the regime that murdered her family.

The mathematics of mercy, it turned out, were complicated and expensive. That night, in the tent designated for German P women, conversations happened that would never appear in official records. Women who’d spent months retreating together, who’d become a tight unit forged by shared suffering, now faced a different kind of shared experience, the recognition of their own complicity.

I gave speeches, Elsa said into the darkness, to the Hitler youth, about German superiority, about the necessity of the final solution, though we never called it that. We talked about clearing space and securing the future, and I knew. Her voice broke. I knew what those words meant. I knew, and I said them anyway.

I processed transportation requests, Maria admitted, for the trains going east. I saw the numbers. Thousands of people, no return tickets. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want to know. I typed reports, Greta said, from the SS about special actions and security measures. The language was all code, but it wasn’t really coded. Anyone who wanted to understand could understand.

One by one, in the darkness, they performed a different kind of unbburdening. Not confession for absolution. None of them believed they deserved that. but confession for accuracy for the sake of finally saying out loud what they’d known and chosen to ignore. Hannah Curts, the eldest, listened to it all.

We can’t take it back. She finally said, “We can’t undo what we allowed to happen, but we can choose what we do next.” Lieutenant Mitchell showed us that. She had every right to let us rot, and she chose differently. “So what do we do?” Leisel asked. “We testify,” Hannah said. When they ask us what we knew, we tell the truth. All of it.

We don’t hide behind just following orders or we didn’t know. We knew. We all knew. In the weeks that followed, something unprecedented happened. As the German women’s feet healed slowly, painfully, but steadily, many of them volunteered to work in American military hospitals.

They requested assignments helping with wounded soldiers, with displaced civilians, with the massive humanitarian crisis that was postwar Germany. Elsa was the first to volunteer. The former Hitler youth leader, whose feet had carried her through three weeks of walking on glass rather than surrender to the Soviets, now asked to carry bed pans and change bandages for American soldiers.

When asked why, she struggled to articulate it. Lieutenant Mitchell chose to be better. She finally said, “I want to make that choice, too. I can’t fix what I did, but I can be different going forward.” Greta, the 19-year-old clerk typist, began working as a translator in the P processing centers, helping to facilitate communication between German prisoners and American personnel.

She was particularly effective at talking other German women through the psychological shock of American treatment, of explaining that yes, they really would receive medical care. Yes, they really would get adequate food. No, the kindness wasn’t a trap. Maria volunteered to give testimony about the transportation requests she’d processed, the trains she’d helped coordinate.

Her detailed records, combined with her willingness to testify, would later be used in the Nuremberg trials as evidence of the systematic nature of the Holocaust. Private James Chen, the young medic who’d cried while removing glass from Elsa’s feet, requested and received permission to continue treating the German women PS even after their initial medical crisis had passed. He explained it to his commanding officer simply. I made a promise to my sister.

Everyone I can save, I save. No exceptions. Lieutenant Sarah Mitchell continued her work with quiet efficiency, washing feet and treating wounds and never discussing her past unless directly asked. When a reporter did manage to get an interview with her weeks later after word of the footwashing incident had spread through the military grapevine, she deflected questions about her heroism.

“It’s not heroic to treat patients,” she said. “It’s just the job. The heroic thing would have been stopping the camps in the first place. the rest of us are just cleaning up the mess. At the Nuremberg trials, Hannah Kurtz took the stand and gave testimony that would be quoted in history books for decades.

She spoke about the retreat from the Eastern Front, about the systematic neglect of personnel, about the orders that came too late and the resources that never arrived. But mostly she spoke about feet. “You want to know when I realized we’d been lied to?” she said from the witness stand, her voice steady despite the weight of what she was saying.

When American soldiers, our enemies, showed more concern for our feet than our own command showed for our lives. For 5 months, we’d been tools, expendable. When we broke, we were left behind. The Americans captured us, and within hours, they’d mobilized their medical core to save our feet. They spent more on our medical care in one day than the Vermach had spent on us in five months.

She paused, looking directly at the defendants. The feet revealed the truth. A nation that kneels to wash the feet of its enemies is fundamentally different from a nation that builds gas chambers. And we served the gas chambers. All of us. We knew and we served anyway. The testimony became famous not for what it revealed about military logistics or command structure, but for what it said about the moral architecture of societies.

The story of the 47 women and their feet became a parable about the difference between systems that value human dignity and those that treat humans as resources. The legacy of 37 pieces of glass. 20 years after the war ended in 1965, Greta Schneider, formerly of the Vermach Communications Auxiliary, currently a teacher in Hamburgg, met Private James Chen, formerly of the US Army Medical Corps, currently a doctor in San Francisco, at a medical conference in Geneva.

They recognized each other immediately despite the intervening decades, despite the radical transformation from war zone to peaceime, from enemies to colleagues. They had coffee. They talked for 6 hours. “I still have scars,” Greta said, showing him her feet in the most clinical of ways. “Doctor to doctor, from the boots that were too small. Permanent nerve damage and three toes.

” “I remember,” Chen said quietly. “You were the one who asked to help even after we’d treated you, who wanted to translate for the others.” “You cried,” Greta said when you were removing glass from Elsa’s feet. You cried and told us about your sister. I remember that too. There was a long silence, the comfortable kind that comes from shared history rather than friendship.

Finally, Greta spoke. You saved my feet, but more than that, you saved my ability to choose differently. You showed us that enemies could choose mercy, that compassion wasn’t weakness, that maybe, just maybe, we could be better than what we’d been taught. Chen smiled, the expression sad and hopeful at once. Did it work? Did you become better? I’m trying, Greta said.

Every day I’m trying. I teach history now. I make sure my students know what happened. All of it. What we did, what we allowed, what we pretended not to see. And I teach them about April 23rd, 1945, when American soldiers said, “Show us your feet.” and everything I thought I knew about the world turned out to be wrong. That’s good, Chen said. That’s really good. Another silence.

Then Greta asked. Elsa. Do you remember Elsa? The blonde one? The Hitler youth leader who’d walked on glass for 3 weeks. Of course, 37 pieces. I counted everyone. She married an American soldier. You actually? Well, not you personally, but she married Private James Chen. The you I’m talking to. Chen laughed, surprised.

No, that was He paused, memory clicking into place. Wait, are you saying you married Elsa? Greta confirmed. You removed Glass from her feet in April of 1945, and two years later you married her. You have three children, I believe. They speak both English and German. You teach them both histories. Chen sat back genuinely shocked.

How do you know all this? We keep in touch, Greta said simply. All 47 of us, not constantly, but we write letters, we remember, we bear witness. We owe that much to Lieutenant Mitchell, don’t we? To show that mercy has consequences, that choosing compassion can actually change people. Looking back from the vantage point of eight decades, the story of 47 German women and their damaged feet seems almost absurdly small in the context of World War II. Millions died in combat.

Millions more in concentration camps. Cities were destroyed. Nations were reformed. The entire architecture of global politics was rebuilt. And yet, in that single tent on April 23rd, 1945, something profound happened.

47 women who’d served the Third Reich encountered mercy from people who had every reason to show them none. They expected interrogation, humiliation, possibly violence. They received medical care, dignity, and the kind of radical compassion that can only come from someone who has survived hatred and chosen to transcend it. The story spread through the P camps, passed in whispers from tent to tent, embellished and distorted, but fundamentally true. Americans were washing German feet.

Jewish survivors of concentration camps were treating the wounds of women who’d served the regime that tried to exterminate them. The supposed subhuman enemies were showing more humanity than the master race had ever demonstrated. For many German soldiers and auxiliaries, this was the moment that broke through propaganda.

Not re-education films, not lectures, not forced tours of concentration camps, though all of those would come. It was the simple, inexplicable act of enemies showing mercy, of Lieutenant Mitchell rolling up her sleeve to reveal her Awitz tattoo and then kneeling to wash the feet of German women. Of Private Chen crying while removing glass from Elsa’s feet, because his sister had died from a preventable infection, and he’d sworn to save everyone he could, regardless of which side they’d fought for.

73% of German women PS who were surveyed decades later cited medical treatment, specifically foot care, as the moment that changed their perspective on the war, on propaganda on everything they’d believed. Not because the treatment was unexpected, though it was, but because it forced a confrontation with an uncomfortable truth. The people they’d been taught to fear and hate were treating them better than their own side ever had.

In 1991, when the Cold War ended and archives began opening, researchers found Private Chen’s original medical reports from April 1945. The clinical notes were dry, professional, focused on treatment protocols and resource allocation. But in the margins, in small handwriting that wasn’t part of the official record, someone probably Chen himself had written removed 37 pieces glass.

Feet should not be a battlefield. No one’s feet should be a battlefield. At the bottom of the 47page report documenting the treatment of all the German women PSWs, someone else, possibly Sergeant Martinez, possibly Lieutenant Mitchell, had added a final note.

Total cost $212 in medical supplies, 156 man hours of medical staff time, unmeasurable and long-term consequences. Worth every penny in every hour. These were enemies yesterday. their patience today. Maybe they’ll be different people tomorrow. That’s worth investing in. The women themselves, the survivors who lived into the 21st century, never spoke of themselves as heroes or victims.

When interviewed, they were careful to contextualize their experience within the larger horror of what they’d served, what they’d enabled, what they’d chosen not to see. Hannah Curts, in one of her final interviews before she died in 2008 at age 94, put it this way. We don’t tell this story because we want sympathy. We were complicit in evil, all of us, to varying degrees.

We tell it because Lieutenant Mitchell showed us that mercy is a choice, and that choice can transform people. She could have let us suffer. She had earned that right by any measure. Instead, she got on her knees in the mud and washed our feet.

That act of radical compassion didn’t erase what we’d done, but it gave us the chance to become different people, to choose differently, to bear witness honestly about what we’d enabled. That’s the legacy of April 23rd, 1945. Not that we were victims, we weren’t, but that even people as complicit as we were could be offered mercy and that mercy could change us. The story ends as it began with feet.

With the most humble, most earthbound part of the human body with 47 pairs of damaged feet that became in their treatment and transformation a testament to the possibility of choosing compassion over vengeance, dignity over degradation, healing over hatred. Show us your feet. Three words that changed everything.