They were told the Americans would line them up against a wall and shoot them. They were told American soldiers were animals who would hurt them in ways too horrible to speak. So when the guard shouted, “Face the wall!” in broken German, the young women obeyed. They pressed their foreheads against the cold concrete.

 

 

 Some closed their eyes. Some whispered prayers. Some simply waited to die. But death never came. Instead, they heard something that made no sense at all. Behind them, American voices were laughing. Not cruel laughter, just normal laughter, like friends sharing a joke. And then came a smell. Coffee. Fresh, hot, real coffee.

The kind they hadn’t smelled in years. When they finally turned around, what they saw would change everything they thought they knew about their enemy. 

 To understand this story, you need to know who these women were. They were called Heler Inan, which means helpers in German. During the war, the Nazi government needed men for fighting. So, they trained thousands of young women to do jobs behind the front lines. These women worked as radio operators, typists, telephone operators, and nurses. They tracked enemy planes.

 They decoded messages. They kept the war machine running. Most of them were between 18 and 25 years old. They came from small towns and big cities. Some believed in what they were doing. Others just wanted to serve their country. Many had no idea about the terrible things happening in concentration camps.

 They were just young women doing their jobs, caught up in something much bigger than themselves. By 1945, Germany was falling apart. Allied bombs destroyed city after city. Food became scarce. The German army was retreating on all fronts, and these young women found themselves running for their lives.

 Margaret was 21 years old when the war ended. She had worked as a radio operator in a small military base near Berlin. When the Russians began closing in from the east, her commander told everyone to flee west. “Go toward the Americans,” he said. “The Russians will not be kind to you.” So Margaret ran. She joined thousands of other women moving west through a country that was falling apart.

 They walked through bombed cities where buildings still smoked. They slept in fields and barns. They ate whatever they could find, which was almost nothing. Their uniforms became dirty and torn. Their shoes fell apart. After two weeks of walking, Margarett’s group reached American lines. They were exhausted, starving, and terrified.

 They had heard so many stories about what the Americans would do to them. Nazi propaganda had painted Americans as monsters. They will torture you, officers had warned. They will make you suffer. The American soldiers who found them looked nothing like monsters. They were young men, some barely older than Margaret herself.

 

 They wore clean uniforms and carried chocolate bars in their pockets. They didn’t shout or hit anyone. They simply pointed toward a line of trucks and said, “Get in.” One soldier offered Margaret a canteen of water. She stared at it suspiciously. Was it poisoned? Was this some kind of trick, but her throat was so dry, and she hadn’t had clean water in days? She took a small sip. It was just water.

Cold, clean, ordinary water. The soldier smiled at her. He said something in English she didn’t understand. His voice was soft, almost friendly. This wasn’t how enemies were supposed to act. The women climbed into the trucks, too tired to resist. They sat on wooden benches, pressed against each other.

 As the trucks drove west through holes in the canvas, they watched the ruined landscape pass by. Burned tanks sat in fields. Destroyed bridges hung over rivers. Children with hollow eyes waved from the roadside. Where are they taking us? One woman whispered. “Does it matter?” Another replied, “We are prisoners now. Our lives are over.” Margaret said nothing. She just stared at her hands, which were cracked and bleeding from the long walk.

 She thought about her mother back home in Hamburg. Was she still alive? Was their house still standing? Would she ever see her family again? The trucks drove for hours. Finally, they stopped at a large building that had once been a factory. Now, it was surrounded by barbed wire and American soldiers. This would be their first prison camp.

 The women were ordered off the trucks and lined up in the factory courtyard. American soldiers walked among them, checking papers and taking names. Then came the moment that would stay with Margaret for the rest of her life. A guard pointed to a concrete wall. “Face the wall,” he ordered in rough German.

 “Hands up!” Margarett’s heart stopped. This was it. Everything they had been told was true. The Americans were going to execute them right here, right now. She walked to the wall on shaking legs. Around her, other women began to cry. Some fell to their knees. One girl, barely 18, started screaming for her mother. Margaret pressed her forehead against the cold concrete.

 She could feel the rough surface against her skin. She thought about her childhood, her parents, the boys she had loved in school. So this is how it ends. She thought against a wall in a foreign land. Behind her, she could hear American voices talking and laughing. How can they laugh? She wondered. How can they be so casual about killing us? Time stretched on. 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes.

 No gunshots came. Instead, something strange happened. A warm spray of water hit her back. Then another and another. Turn around, a voice said. Margaret turned slowly, expecting to see guns pointed at her face. Instead, she saw American medics holding spray hoses. They were smiling. Actually smiling. Delooing, one of them explained, pointing to the hose. Kills the bugs.

You understand? No more lice. Margaret didn’t understand. Not really. Her mind was still waiting for the bullets. But slowly, the truth sank in. They weren’t going to be shot. They were being cleaned. The women were led inside the building where real showers waited. Hot water poured from the nozzles.

 Real soap sat in dishes along the wall. White, fragrant, beautiful soap. Margaret hadn’t seen soap like this in over a year. In Germany, soap had become a luxury. People washed with sand or didn’t wash at all. She stepped under the hot water and began to cry. Not from fear this time, but from confusion. The water ran brown as months of dirt washed away.

Around her, other women were crying too. Some laughed and cried at the same time, unable to process what was happening. “I don’t understand,” one woman kept saying. “I don’t understand.” None of them did.

 A young woman named Helga stood under the water for so long that a guard had to tap her on the shoulder and tell her to move. She had been filthy for so many weeks that she had forgotten what it felt like to be clean. The hot water running over her skin felt like a kind of rebirth. Some women stayed silent, lost in their own thoughts. Others talked nervously, trying to make sense of what was happening. One woman kept repeating, “This has to be a trick.

This has to be a trick. But if it was a trick, it was a strange one. What kind of enemy cleans you before hurting you? After the showers, they were given clean clothes. Not fancy clothes, just simple work dresses and underwear. But they were clean. They smelled fresh. They didn’t have holes or stains.

 For women who had been wearing the same filthy uniforms for weeks, this felt like a miracle. Their old uniforms were taken away and burned. The gray green cloth that had marked them as servants of the Reich disappeared in flames. Some women watched with relief. Others felt a strange sadness, as if a part of their identity was burning, too. Margaret touched the sleeve of her new dress. The fabric was soft against her skin.

 When had she last worn something soft? She couldn’t remember. Then came the food. The women were led to a large room filled with tables and benches. The smell hit them before they even sat down. Meat, bread, coffee, real food, not the watery soup and sawdust bread they had survived on for months. Margaret sat down and stared at the tray in front of her.

 There was a thick slice of meat, potatoes with butter melting on top, green beans, a roll that was soft and white, not gray and hard, and a cup of coffee, steam rising from the surface. She picked up her fork with trembling hands. Around her, other women were having the same reaction. Some ate so fast they made themselves sick.

 Others couldn’t eat at all, just staring at the food as if it might disappear. Is it poisoned? One woman whispered. Who cares? Another replied, “If I die, at least I die with a full stomach.” Margarett took a bite of the meat. The taste exploded in her mouth. rich, salty, real. Tears ran down her cheeks as she chewed. She couldn’t help it.

 The contrast was too much. Just that morning, she had expected to be dead by now. Instead, she was eating the best meal she’d had in years. An American soldier walked by their table. He saw the women crying and stopped. For a moment, his face showed something like confusion. Then, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a chocolate bar.

 He set it on the table in front of Margarette for later, he said in slow English, pointing at the chocolate. Then he walked away. Margaret picked up the chocolate bar. Her hands were shaking. The rapper said Hershey’s in big letters. She had never heard of this brand, but she would never forget it. We were taught they were monsters, Margaret would write later in her diary. But monsters don’t give you chocolate.

 After a few days in the temporary camp, Margarett and the other women were moved to a more permanent facility. The camp was located in rural France in an area that had been farmland before the war. Now it was surrounded by fences and guard towers, but inside it looked almost like a small village. There were wooden barracks for sleeping, each one holding about 50 women.

 There was a mess hall where meals were served three times a day. There was even a small building that served as a store where prisoners could buy things with special camp money they earned from working. The daily routine was simple. Wake up at 6:00 a.m. Breakfast at 7, work from 8 to 12, lunch, more work from 1 to 5, dinner at 6, free time until lights out at 10:00. The work was easy compared to what they had done during the war.

 Some women worked in the camp kitchen preparing meals. Others did laundry, washing American uniforms and sheets. Some worked in nearby fields, helping with the harvest. They were paid a small amount of camp money for their work. “This is prison?” one woman asked in disbelief.

 After the first week in Germany, we worked harder than this when we were free. The camp even had a small church where Sunday services were held. A German-speaking chaplain would come and lead prayers. The women could sing hymns they remembered from their childhoods. It was a small piece of normaly in a very strange world. There was also a small library with books in German.

 Most were old novels and religious texts. But the women devoured them anyway. After months of chaos and fear, sitting quietly with a book felt like a luxury beyond measure. The biggest shock was the food. It never stopped coming. Every meal brought meat, vegetables, bread, and coffee. There was butter for the bread.

 There was sugar for the coffee. There was always enough and often there was too much. The women couldn’t believe it. Back in Germany, their families were starving. Cities had been bombed. Farms had been destroyed. People were eating grass and boiling leather for soup. And here they were, prisoners of the enemy, eating better than they had eaten in years.

 Margarett started hiding food in her pockets at first. Old habits died hard. During the war, you never knew when your next meal would come, so you saved everything you could. But after a few weeks, she stopped. The food kept coming. There was no need to hide it anymore. Her body began to change. The sharp angles of her face softened. Her arms grew stronger.

The constant tiredness that had followed her through the war started to fade. She was becoming healthy again. here in prison while her family at home was probably starving. The guilt was overwhelming. After a month in the camp, the women were allowed to write letters home. Margaret sat for hours trying to find the right words.

 What could she say? Dear mother, I am a prisoner, but I am eating meat every day. It seemed cruel. She kept her letter simple. I am alive and safe. The Americans are treating us well. Please don’t worry about me. How are you? Is the house still standing? Please write back. Weeks passed before she got a response.

 When it finally came, the letter had been opened and read by sensors on both sides. Her mother’s handwriting was shaky, harder to read than before. My dear Margaret, thank God you are alive. The house was damaged in the bombing, but we are living in the cellar. There is little food here. We eat what we can find. Your brother is still missing from the Eastern Front.

 We pray for him every day. Stay strong, my child. We will see each other again somehow. Margarette read the letter over and over. Her mother was living in a cellar, probably eating scraps while she sat in an American camp with three meals a day and chocolate bars. The unfairness of it made her sick.

 That night, she couldn’t eat dinner. She just sat at the table staring at the food, thinking about her mother. The camp had a small store where prisoners could spend their work money. The shelves held things that seemed impossible. Chocolate bars, cigarettes, toothpaste, soap, combs, and even lipstick. Yes, lipstick. In the middle of a prisoner of war camp.

 The first time Margaret walked into the store, she thought she was dreaming. These were luxury items. Back in Germany, women traded wedding rings for a single bar of soap. Here, soap cost almost nothing. She bought a bar of chocolate and a small bottle of shampoo.

 As she walked back to her barracks, she felt like a criminal. How could she enjoy these things when her family had nothing? Other women handled the situation differently. Some refused to buy anything, sending all their camp money home in letters. Others bought everything they could, trying to forget where they came from.

 Most fell somewhere in between, caught in a strange new reality they didn’t know how to process. The American guards were another source of confusion. They were supposed to be the enemy, but they didn’t act like enemies. They were mostly young men, some barely 20 years old, who had been sent far from home to fight a war they probably didn’t fully understand.

 Some guards were strict and professional, keeping their distance from the prisoners. Others were friendly, trying to practice their German or sharing cigarettes through the fence. A few even started secret relationships with the women, though this was forbidden and dangerous for both sides. One guard, a young man from Wisconsin named Tommy, often worked near the laundry where Margaret worked.

 He had a round face and a gap between his front teeth. Every day, he would try to teach her an English word. “Coffee,” he would say, pointing to his cup. “Coffee. Coffee, Margaret would repeat, feeling strange about talking to an American. Good, Tommy would say, grinning. Tomorrow I teach you another word. It was such a small thing, but it was also huge. Here was an American who didn’t see her as an enemy or a monster.

 He just saw her as a person, a person worth talking to. Margaret didn’t know what to do with that. She began to look forward to Tommy’s daily lessons. Bread, he would say one day. water. The next friend. The words accumulated slowly. Each one a small bridge across the gap between enemy and something else.

 Not friend exactly, but not enemy either. Something in between that didn’t have a name. Other guards were learning too. Some of them picked up German words from the prisoners. A strange kind of exchange began happening, not just of languages, but of humanity. The barriers that war had built were slowly, quietly beginning to crack.

 As months passed, something changed inside Margaret. The beliefs she had grown up with began to crack and crumble, like old paint falling off a wall. She had been raised to believe that Germans were superior. She had been taught that Americans were greedy, selfish, and cruel.

 She had been told that the Reich was fighting for a noble cause, that all the suffering was worth it in the end. But what she saw in the camp didn’t match what she had been taught. The Americans weren’t cruel. They were organized, efficient, and often kind. They fed their prisoners better than Germany fed its own citizens. They provided medicine when people got sick. They didn’t torture anyone or shoot people for small mistakes.

 One night, lying in her bunk, Margarett found herself asking dangerous questions. If the Americans are so evil, why do they treat us so well? If Germany was fighting for good, why did we lose everything? If our leaders were right, why are we here? She didn’t have answers, but the questions kept coming. The other women wrestled with similar questions.

 Some refused to think about it. They buried themselves in work and routine, trying not to examine their beliefs too closely. Others became angry, insisting that the American kindness was just a show. A performance designed to make Germany look bad. But a growing number began to admit quietly in private conversations that maybe they had been wrong. Maybe the things they had been taught weren’t true. Maybe their country had done terrible things.

And maybe they had been part of it without even knowing. Once a week, the camp showed movies for the prisoners. They were American films, often comedies or musicals, projected onto a white sheet hung on the messole wall. At first, the women watched with suspicion. This was enemy propaganda, wasn’t it? They shouldn’t enjoy it. But the films were just fun.

 People singing, dancing, falling in love, getting into silly situations. Nothing about war or politics. just ordinary people living ordinary lives. Margarette found herself laughing at the jokes. She caught herself humming the songs afterward. The film showed an America that was colorful, happy, and free.

 An America where people had cars and nice clothes and big houses. An America that seemed impossibly wealthy. Is that really what it’s like there? One woman asked after a film. Nobody knew for sure. But watching those films, seeing that version of America made the old propaganda seem more and more like lies. Then came the day that changed everything. The Americans gathered all the prisoners in the mesh hall.

 They said they were going to show a special film, something everyone needed to see. The film showed concentration camps, real footage shot by American soldiers who had liberated places like Dhau and Bukinvald. It showed piles of bodies, starving prisoners who looked like skeletons, gas chambers, mass graves, horror beyond imagination. The room was completely silent. Some women covered their eyes.

Others ran outside to vomit. Margaret sat frozen, unable to look away, unable to process what she was seeing. She had heard rumors during the war. Everyone had strange stories about camps in the east where Jews and others were sent. But she had told herself it couldn’t be true.

 Germany wasn’t capable of such things. It was just enemy propaganda. Now she saw the truth. And the truth was worse than any propaganda. After the film, nobody spoke. Women walked back to their barracks in silence. Their faces pale, their eyes empty. The weight of what they had seen pressed down on everyone like a physical force.

 That night, Margarette wrote in her diary, “I served the people who did this. I worked for them. I believed in them. What does that make me? I thought we were the good ones. I thought we were fighting for something noble. We weren’t. We were monsters. And I helped. The shame was overwhelming. For days, she could barely eat or sleep. She looked at the American guards differently now.

 They had every reason to hate her. They had every reason to treat her cruy. But they didn’t. They just kept doing their jobs, feeding the prisoners, maintaining order, as if the German women were human beings deserving of basic dignity. That dignity felt like the crulest punishment of all.

 In the weeks after the film, the barracks became a place of quiet conversations. Late at night, when the lights were out, women would whisper to each other about what they were feeling. “Did you know?” someone would ask. Did you really not know? The answers varied. Some truly hadn’t known anything. Others admitted they had heard rumors, but chose not to believe them.

 A few confessed that they had suspected the truth, but pushed it out of their minds. “We didn’t want to know.” One woman said it was easier not to ask questions. Margarett thought about this for a long time. She remembered moments during the war when something had felt wrong. orders that didn’t make sense.

 Trains going east packed with people. The way certain topics were never discussed. She had noticed these things, but she hadn’t asked questions. She had looked the other way. Now in an American prison camp, she couldn’t look away anymore. The truth was everywhere. In every meal she ate, in every kind word from a guard, in every comfortable night in her clean bed. The enemy was treating her better than her own country had treated millions of innocent people.

 She had to face what Germany had done. She had to face what she had been part of and she had to figure out how to live with that knowledge. One day, Margaret was selected for a work detail outside the camp. She and a group of other women were taken to a nearby American military base to help with laundry.

 It was her first time outside the camp fence in months. The truck drove through the French countryside, past villages that were slowly rebuilding after the war. Then it turned onto the military base, and Margarett’s breath caught in her throat. The base was like a small city. There were rows of buildings, trucks, and jeeps parked everywhere, soldiers walking around in clean uniforms.

 But what struck her most was the sense of abundance. Crates of food stacked high, fuel tanks lined up in rows, equipment that looked new and well-maintained. In the mess hall where they worked, she saw American soldiers throwing away food. Not rotten food or scraps, but actual food that they simply didn’t want to eat.

 A halfeaten sandwich, a barely touched piece of pie. They tossed it in the trash without a second thought. Margaret stood frozen, watching. In Germany, people killed for less than what she saw going into that trash can. Her mother was probably eating grass right now, and these Americans were throwing away pie. The wealth was almost obscene.

 And in that moment, she understood something important. Germany had never had a chance. They had fought against a country that had more food, more fuel, more equipment, more everything than they could ever dream of. The war had been lost before it started. That evening, back at the camp, Margaret looked at herself in the small mirror by her bunk.

 She barely recognized the woman staring back at her. Her cheeks had filled out. Her hair was clean and shiny. Her skin had color again. She looked healthy. She looked alive. The enemy had done this. The Americans had fed her, cleaned her, and made her healthy. Meanwhile, her own country had starved her, worked her to exhaustion, and sent her into a war she couldn’t win.

 Who was the real enemy? She thought about all the years of propaganda. The posters showing Americans as monsters, the speeches about German superiority, the promises of victory that never came. She had believed all of it. She had worked for a system that told her these lies every day. And now, standing in an American prison camp with a full stomach and clean skin, she had to admit the truth. The propaganda was wrong.

 The Americans weren’t monsters. Her own country had been the monster all along. The question felt like betrayal. But she couldn’t stop asking it. The Americans didn’t break me with cruelty, she wrote that night. They broke me with kindness. Cruelty I could have understood.

 Cruelty would have proved that our leaders were right, that the enemy was evil, that our suffering meant something. But kindness, kindness proves that we were wrong about everything. And that is harder to accept than any punishment. As 1945 turned into 1946, rumors began to spread through the camp. The war was over. The prisoners would be sent home soon. Germany was being divided into zones. Life was slowly returning to normal.

 For most prisoners, going home was what they dreamed about. But Margaret found herself feeling something she didn’t expect. Fear. What would she find when she went back? Her mother’s letters painted a picture of desperate poverty. The country was in ruins. There was no work, little food, and millions of refugees flooding the streets.

 The Germany, she remembered, no longer existed. Worse, she would have to leave the strange safety of the camp. No more regular meals, no more clean clothes, no more hot showers. She would go from prisoner to free woman, but in some ways it felt like going from safety to danger. Is it wrong that I don’t want to go? She asked a friend one night.

 Her friend was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “I feel the same way. Does that make us traitors?” Margarett didn’t know the answer. The day came in early spring of 1946. Margarett’s name was on the list for release.

 She packed her few belongings, a small bag containing letters from home, a comb, a bar of soap, and the diary she had kept throughout her captivity. The women lined up at the camp gate. American soldiers handed them papers and a small amount of money for travel. The process was quick and efficient, like everything the Americans did. As Margaret walked through the gate, she stopped and looked back.

 The camp that had been her prison looked almost peaceful in the morning light. The barracks where she had slept. The mess hall where she had eaten. The fence that had kept her trapped. Tommy, the guard from Wisconsin, was standing nearby. He raised his hand in a small wave. “Good luck,” he called out. “Go home.

” “Thank you,” Margaret called back in English. It was one of the words Tommy had taught her. She had never said it to an American before. It felt strange on her tongue, but also right. She meant it. Margaret waved back. Then she turned and walked away toward the trains that would carry her back to Germany. She carried a small bag with her few belongings.

 But she also carried something else, something invisible but heavy, a new understanding of the world that would take years to fully process. The journey home took several days. The trains were crowded with refugees, soldiers, and displaced people of all kinds. The countryside was scarred with bomb craters and burned buildings. Every city they passed through was damaged in some way. When Margaret finally reached Hamburg, she barely recognized it.

 Half the city was gone. Mountains of rubble stood where buildings used to be. People walked through the streets with empty eyes, carrying whatever they could find. She found her mother living in the cellar of their destroyed house, just as her letters had described. Her mother had aged 20 years in the time Margaret had been away.

 Her hair was gray, her face lined, her body thin and fragile. When they saw each other, they both burst into tears. They held each other for a long time, crying and whispering and not wanting to let go. You look healthy, her mother said finally, touching Margaret’s face. How? The Americans fed us well, Margaret said. The words felt heavy with guilt.

 Her mother nodded slowly. I heard stories. I didn’t believe them. They’re true, Margaret said. All of them. That night, Margaret shared the bar of soap she had brought from the camp. Her mother held it like it was made of gold. She smelled it, touched it, turned it over in her hands. Real soap, she whispered. I had forgotten what real soap smelled like.

They used that soap carefully over the next few weeks, making it last as long as possible. Every time Margaret washed her hands, she thought about the American camp, the showers, the food, the unexpected kindness. She thought about how wrong she had been about so many things.

 In the years that followed, Margaret would often think about the Americans who had guarded her. She wondered what happened to Tommy from Wisconsin. Did he go home to his family? Did he tell them about the German women he had taught English words to? Did he ever think about her? She hoped he was happy. She hoped all of them were happy. They had shown her mercy when they didn’t have to.

 They had treated her like a human being when they could have treated her like dirt. That kindness had changed her in ways she was still discovering. Germany slowly rebuilt. Margaretta found work. First cleaning rubble from the streets, then in a small office as a typist. She used the skills she had learned during the war for something peaceful.

 The country that had destroyed so much was now trying to build something new. Margarett lived to be 89 years old. She married, had children, and watched Germany rebuild itself from the ashes. She saw her country become a peaceful democracy, an ally of America, part of a united Europe. The world she grew up in vanished completely, replaced by something better. She never forgot her time in the American camp.

 The memories stayed with her like a scar that had healed but never disappeared. In interviews given late in her life, she would talk about it with a mixture of shame and gratitude. When they told us to face the wall, I was ready to die. She said, “I had accepted it. I thought this is how it ends. But instead of bullets, they gave us soap. Instead of pain, they gave us food.

 They didn’t have to do that. We were the enemy. We had helped destroy half of Europe. But they treated us like human beings anyway.” She paused, her old eyes distant with memory. Cruelty would have been easier to understand if they had hurt us. I could have kept hating them. I could have kept believing the lies I grew up with.

 But kindness, kindness broke something inside me. It made me question everything I had ever believed. And in the end, that was the greatest gift they could have given me. They didn’t just free my body, they freed my mind. And so a bar of American soap became more than just something to wash with.

 It became a symbol of unexpected mercy in the darkest of times. It proved that even enemies can choose compassion over cruelty. It showed that kindness offered freely can change hearts in ways that violence never could. The German women who faced that wall expected death. They found something far more powerful. Proof that humanity exists even in war.

 even among enemies, even when the world seems determined to prove otherwise. That is the story worth remembering. Margaret’s story was not unique. Thousands of German women went through similar experiences in American camps. Many of them carried these memories for the rest of their lives. Some wrote about it, others kept it private.

 But almost all of them remembered the same thing. the moment when their expectations of cruelty were replaced by unexpected kindness. War teaches us to see enemies as less than human. Propaganda paints the other side as monsters. But the truth is always more complicated. Behind every uniform is a person.

 Behind every enemy is someone’s son or daughter, someone who might choose kindness over cruelty if given the chance. The Americans who ran those prisoner camps didn’t have to be kind. They had every reason to be cruel. Their country had lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers fighting against Germany.

 They had liberated concentration camps and seen horrors beyond imagination. Hatred would have been understandable. But they chose a different path. They chose to follow the rules of war. They chose to see their prisoners as human beings deserving of basic dignity. And in doing so, they planted seeds of change that would grow for generations.