Many years ago I worked with- and was friends with- a woman who was 14 years old in Germany when the war ended. (When she was 16 she came to this country and married a GI she had met during the war) This was a goodhearted, gentle-spirited person and I enjoyed her a lot.

One day she said that Jewish families had had a camp down by the river in her town and she said, And "Ebbie", they really were dirty. In astonishment, I said, Can you imagine anyone living in a camp by a river who isn'tdirty?

We still spent time together but from then on we had a tacit agreement not to discuss uncomfortable things. To this day I don't know where she was going with that thought.

Obviously I would handle it differently now, but I was in my 20s then- and hadn't yet learned not to leave something 'unreproved'.

Ebbie