Last night, I returned to Elie Wiesel’s Night—that searing testament to the Holocaust, that chronicle of unspeakable suffering witnessed through the eyes of a boy who lost everything. Forty million souls caught in humanity’s darkest hour.

Among the book’s many haunting passages, one phrase pierces through: “Clench your teeth and wait.”

This advice came to young Elie when the anger, pain, and struggle of the Jews in Germany reached its crescendo. An inmate offered these words as counsel, as comfort, perhaps as the only wisdom left when the world has abandoned reason. Clench your teeth and wait. Endure. Survive. This too shall pass.

But I find myself asking: should we simply clench our teeth and wait?

There was a woman on the train to Auschwitz. She cried out all day, and the others grew irritated. They thought her mad, hallucinating. “I see fire! I see fire!” she screamed into the suffocating darkness of the cattle car.

Her fellow prisoners wanted her to stop, to be quiet, to not disturb what little peace they could manufacture in their terror. Then they arrived. The crematoriums blazed. Bodies burned. There was the fire she had foreseen—the fire no one else could see until it was too late.

I think of her often now. I see signs.

Not to the extent of Nazi Germany—not yet, perhaps never. But I see patterns, and they are deeply uncomfortable. I smell the fear of those forced to carry documents to prove their right to exist in places they’ve called home. I feel the anger and trauma of those afraid to speak against atrocities. I hear the silence of those who witness the unlawful treatment, the deportations, the deaths at sea. I see the loss of freedom to speak, the fear that keeps people inside their homes.

James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Yet I watch as we collectively refuse to face, what is unfolding before us. I see the struggle of good leaders, trying to become great leaders, their voices caught in their throats. Even presidents remain quiet. For a long time, I believed they knew better than I did—that their silence meant they understood something I couldn’t grasp. Now I realize they are as afraid as I am.

I see a judiciary that claims to correct past wrongs, while falling into the same patterns of lies and deceit that corrupted the courts of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Maduro’s Venezuela. The list grows longer.

Margaret Atwood reminds us in The Handmaid’s Tale: “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” This is the truth I cannot escape. It happens slowly, then all at once. Overnight, people are rounded up. Citizens deported within twenty-four hours. Then the news cycle moves on, and we fall into complacency, because our memories are short, and our capacity for horror is limited.

It happened to the Jews this way—slowly, methodically, lawfully for those who didn’t fall into the targeted class. It didn’t affect them, so they couldn’t see. It was for those people. People without faces. People who weren’t friends. Someone convinced the “normal” class that nothing would happen to them—only to those who looked different, talked different, believed different, those who didn’t fall in line with what the leader demanded.

W.H. Auden, understood this pattern when he wrote in “September 1, 1939”:

“I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.”

Like the woman on that train to Auschwitz, I find myself crying out: “I see fire. I see fire.”

Even writing these words frightens me. I have no criminal record, no pattern of dangerous behavior. But when power consolidates, when truth becomes negotiable, these facts can be erased and rewritten. A man wrongly deported suddenly becomes a human trafficker in official records.

A young girl arrested becomes a national threat, because she wrote in a university journal her views about atrocities in Gaza. A child brought here as an infant becomes a criminal for lacking papers. The machinery of injustice works efficiently once it begins turning.

I could fill pages with examples, but today my intention is simpler: to say aloud what I see. To refuse the comfort of silence. To be the woman on the train, however unwelcome her message may be.

I pray that these are merely my own fevered imaginings. I pray that I am delusional, paranoid, wrong. I pray that the patterns I perceive will dissolve into nothing more than anxious speculation. But history teaches us that the woman who saw fire was not mad—she was prophetic.

So I keep trusting that God remains present in the midst of suffering, as He was for the Jews, the Arabs, the Mexicans, the poor around the world. I pray for goodness and mercy to prevail. I pray for kindness to resurface in hardened hearts. I pray we might yet become, as Dr. King envisioned, the Beloved Community.

But I will not clench my teeth and wait in silence.

I see fire.

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