For months now, I've found myself thinking about the woman with a swastika tattoo.

My husband saw it first.

His hip banged into mine, his eyes widened in alarm before shifting to the woman standing behind us.

I recognized the universal language of spouses quietly trying to tell their partner something’s off, but I didn’t see it. Not right away. 

And then all of a sudden, I couldn’t unsee it. 

There was the international symbol of Nazi ideology, of antisemitism and racism, permanently imprinted on the body of a woman standing in a store in Liberty, the Sullivan County town widely acknowledged to have been named for freedom. 

If I were writing a fictional novel, the setting would feel almost too on the nose. This wasn’t fiction. 

We were standing within walking distance of the old Grossinger’s property, once the heart of the Borscht Belt, itself a symbol of safety and acceptance for Jewish people escaping everything her tattoo represents. 

We were standing in a store staffed by immigrants in the Sullivan County town that’s enjoyed the sharpest spike in immigration of any Sullivan County town over the past few years. More than a third of Liberty’s current residents were born outside of the United States, and much like the English, Irish, and German immigrants who first arrived to develop the lands of the Native American Lenape tribe in the 1700s, they continue to shape our community. 

I don't know what I expected myself to do in that moment.

Say something? To the woman with the tattoo? To the store full of people who may or may not have seen it? Call someone? 

File a report with the Department of People Who Display Their Hatred in Public and Make the Rest of Us Uncomfortable But Not Really Sure What to Do About It?

I’m ashamed to say it, but I did what most people do. I looked away. I did what I’d come to the store to do. I left.

And then I spent the next several months thinking about it. Here's what I've landed on after several months of sitting with it: I don't actually know what I should have done. What I know is that doing nothing felt like a small betrayal of the people in that store, of our community and of something I can't quite name. 

Maybe that discomfort is the point. Maybe that's what it's supposed to feel like when you look away.