Nazis Aimed Their Guns At The Little Girl At The Checkpoint… Until Someone Said One Sentence
They pointed a gun at the little girl at the checkpoint. But one answer changed everything. There are moments in history when everything depends on a single sentence. When the fate of an entire life or of many lives is concentrated in the words someone chooses to say in the one second when there is no time to think and only time to respond.
And what that person says in that second reveals something about them that no other circumstance could ever have revealed something even they themselves did not know was inside them until the moment drew it out the way water is drawn from a well. No one knew existed until someone became desperate enough to dig.
This story takes place at a Nazi checkpoint in occupied Poland in 1943 at an inspection post where German soldiers stopped every person, examined every document, and decided in a matter of seconds whether what stood before them was a threat or a mere formality. And at that checkpoint, a woman stopped with a 7-year-old girl holding her hand and a soldier pointed his weapon at the child.
And the woman said something that no resistance training had ever taught her to say. Something no survival manual contained. Something that rose out of a place within her that works differently from rational thought. And that in that moment worked better than anything rational thought could have produced. Before you keep going, I want you to tell me in the comments what you think that woman said because almost nobody guesses it.
And because thinking of the answer before you hear it will tell you something about how your own mind works under pressure and that is worth more than anything else I could offer you today. Part one, Warsaw before the abyss. Warsaw in 1939 was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in central Europe with a blend of cultures and languages and religions that made it to anyone who loved it.
Living proof that diversity could be not only tolerated but inhabited with a natural ease of people sharing a city the way they share a market. each with their own customs and shops and favorite streets without the presence of the other being a threat, but simply part of the urban landscape. One learns to read the way, one learns any language, awkwardly at first, and then with the fluency that comes from daily immersion.
of Warsaw’s approximately 1,300,000 inhabitants in 1939. Around 370,000 were Jews. Nearly 30% of the city, the largest Jewish community in Europe outside the Soviet Union, with a culture of its own that included theaters and newspapers and schools and hospitals and political organizations of every shade of the spectrum, from Zionist to socialist to strictly religious.
A community so deeply woven into the fabric of the city that separating it from that fabric as the Nazis would try to do would require not only physical violence but conceptual violence. It would require convincing people that what had always been part of the landscape was actually something different. Something that had to be marked and then separated and then eliminated with the efficiency Nazism applied to its most ambitious projects.
The woman at the center of this story was named Helena Shimansska. And in 1939, she was 34 years old and worked as an elementary school teacher in the Jolie’s district, the neighborhood of Warsaw’s Intelligencia, where intellectuals and artists and professors lived in the dense closeness of people who shared not only space but conversation, where ideas flowed through cafes and living rooms with the same ease with which they circulated through universities.
where Helena had grown up and where she had found her calling in the seven and eight-year-olds who came into her classroom with that particular mix of curiosity and fear that defines a child’s first real year of school and that Helena considered the most interesting material a teacher can work with.
She was not what anyone would have called a political figure before the war. She had not belonged to any party or signed any manifesto or marched in any protest. She had taught fractions and reading and the rivers of Poland with the dedication of someone who finds in teaching not just a job but a vocation. And that dedication had defined her completely until September 1939 when the entire definition of what her work was changed because the world in which that work existed changed.
And Helena, like everyone living in that world, had to decide what kind of person she was going to be under the new conditions the world had placed before her. The person she became was someone she herself would have found impossible to imagine in August 1939. And that inability to foresee oneself is one of the most persistent truths confirmed again and again by the stories of this period.
that people do not know what they are made of until circumstances put them under enough pressure to reveal it. And that this revelation can go in either direction, toward greatness or toward cowardice. And that the direction it takes is not determined by who they were before, but by decisions they make in the moment.
Decisions sometimes made in fractions of a second with the most permanent consequences imaginable. Part two, the ghetto and what lay on the other side. The Warsaw ghetto was officially established in November 1940 when the Nazis ordered that the city’s 370,000 Jews be confined to an area of roughly 3 square kilm in the historic center, surrounded by a 10- ft wall topped with barbed wire with 22 gates controlled by guards who regulated the minimal movement the system allowed.
which was the movement of workers and of smugglers. The latter being the difference between survival and non-s survival for a population whose official rations provided the caloric equivalent of a slow death instead of a quick killing which was exactly the calculation the system had made. Helena lived on the other side of the wall on the side Nazi documents called the Aryan side which was normal Warsaw where life continued with the appearance of normality that occupation imposed for its own purposes where shops opened and
closed and trams ran and schools still taught. Although the curriculum had been stripped of everything the Nazis considered culturally inappropriate, which was everything not instrumental to producing workers useful to the machinery of occupation and eventually of war.
Helena had known Jewish families in Jolie for years, had taught their children, had drunk coffee in their homes, had discussed books and politics and education with parents who resembled her in every way except for the category the Nazis had decided was the only one that mattered. And when the wall went up and those families were left on the other side, Helena did not process that separation as an inevitable fact, but as a violent one that required an answer.
Though it took her several months to determine exactly what answer was possible given what she had available. What she had available was her appearance, which was the kind of appearance the Nazis had coded as Aryan in their absurd racial taxonomies. light hair, gray eyes, features that officers at checkpoints would read as those of a gentile Polish woman without feeling the need to examine the documents too closely.
And that advantage of appearance was a resource Helena recognized as such with the practical coldness the situation required and that she had developed in the first months of the occupation. learning to calculate what the system allowed her to do with what she was before thinking about what the system forbade. What she also had was her job because teachers were still necessary even in occupied Warsaw because even the Nazis needed the non-German population to maintain enough functionality to remain exploitable.
And that job gave her access to papers, to stamps, to the minor bureaucracy of occupied education that produced documents in sufficient quantities for one extra document. A birth certificate with a different name, a travel permit with a false photograph. Not to be as impossible to imagine as it would have been without that access.
The first time Helena crossed the wall into the ghetto was in January 1941, 2 months after it was established using a work permit she had obtained through a contact in the school administration who did not ask exactly what she needed it for because the bureaucracy of occupation generated enough paper traffic for one more request to seem like just one more request.
And what she found on the other side of the wall was something her imagination had not been able to prepare for adequately even though she had tried. Because there are categories of reality that imagination cannot represent faithfully without the sensory information only physical presence can provide. Part three, the network and the little girl.
The network that would eventually organize Helena’s work was called Jeota, the council to aid Jews. Established in December 1942 as a clandestine organization financed in part by the Polish government in exile in London, which provided false papers and money and medical contacts and hiding places to Jews who had managed to get out of the ghetto or urgently needed to get out because the deportations to Trebinka that had begun in the summer of 1942 had reduced the ghetto population from 450,000 to fewer than 60,000 in the span
of just a few months. And that reduction, so brutal and so swift, had transformed the nature of the problem faced by those who wanted to help. Because it was no longer the problem of making life inside the wall more bearable, but the problem of getting people out of a place that had become a waiting room for death.
Helena worked with Jagota from its earliest months, using her appearance and her papers and her knowledge of the city to do what the organization needed. people like her to do. Move between the two worlds, the ghetto and the outside, carrying money and documents and sometimes people using the routine of her job as a teacher as cover for movements that were in themselves completely illegal under Nazi law, which punished with death both those who hid Jews and those who helped them cross the wall.
with no distinction between degrees of involvement, death for the person who lent a document, and death for the person who built a hiding place. A policy designed to make the cost of any help extreme enough to deter everyone except those who had reached the kind of determination that does not calculate cost, but simply acts.
The little girl was called Marta Jabska, although that was not her real name, but the name Helena had given her. when she forged the documents that would turn her into Marta Jabwanska, daughter of a father killed in the war and a mother too ill to care for her. a gentile Polish girl of seven who needed to be moved from Warsaw to a farm in Mazovia where a family Helena knew through Jagota had agreed to shelter her indefinitely under that identity which required the child whose real name was Rivka Goldstein and whose mother had
been deported and whose father had died in the ghetto 3 weeks earlier to learn in the time available which was roughly 4 days how to answer to the name Marta. How to recite the story of her fictitious family naturally enough for it to sound true. How to cross herself if someone expected it of her.
How not to say anything in Yiddish. how not to react when she heard words in Yiddish because that reflex of recognition the body produces automatically in response to one’s own language is one of the signs informants and Jewish hunters had learned to look for in children who otherwise seemed perfectly gentile.
4 days is very little time for a 7-year-old girl to learn to become someone else. and Rivka who was intelligent with the particular precision of children who have grown up in the presence of danger and learned to read situations before they learn to read them out loud. Learned enough but not everything. Because there are things four days cannot install in a 7-year-old, no matter how intelligent that child is.
And the distance between enough and everything was the territory where the danger lived. danger Helena knew existed but had calculated as acceptable compared with the danger of not moving the girl at all which was danger of an entirely different order. Part four, the journey and what comes before the moment.
The plan was simple in its structure and complex in its execution which is the mark of good plans under conditions of occupation. Take the tram from central Warsaw to Warsawa Zakadnia railway station. Buy tickets to Soachev using the papers of Marta Jabanska and Helena Kowalsska which was the name Helena used in her operations and for which she had full documentation forged by Jagot’s counterfeits with the level of quality that months of practice and materials stolen from municipal offices had made possible. take the train to Soasha,
where a man Helena knew as Stanniswis, though she never learned his real name, would be waiting to take the child to the farm on his hay cart, while Helena would return to Warsaw on the next train and continue existing as an elementary school teacher under the appearance of normality. That was her best protection.
The most dangerous part always was the inspections. And the inspections at train stations were the most intense because the Nazis had learned that stations were critical transit points for Jews trying to escape to the countryside. And they had concentrated at those points a mixture of German soldiers and collaborationist Polish police and sometimes plain clothed Gestapo agents whose function was precisely to detect what Helena and the child were being, which was people who were not what their papers said they were. Helena had gone
through inspections dozens of times in the preceding months, always alone or with adults, and had developed the system that worked for her. Arrive at the checkpoint with enough time not to seem rushed. Have the papers ready, but not too ready, because too ready can look rehearsed. Maintain eye contact with the soldier to the appropriate degree without holding it too long because too much eye contact can look defiant. and too little can look guilty.
Answer questions with the natural cadence of someone who has natural answers to natural questions about a life that is actually hers. With the child, it was different. And Helena knew it from the moment Jagota assigned her this transfer. Because a 7-year-old cannot be fully trained in the techniques of emotional control and adult develops through practice.
And because soldiers at checkpoints looked at children differently than they looked at adults, sometimes with less attention because children seem less threatening. Sometimes with more because children traveling with adults who are not their biological parents sometimes carry in their eyes something soldiers with enough experience had learned to recognize as the particular fear of a child who knows she is in a dangerous situation without fully understanding why.
Rivka knew the situation was dangerous because her parents had been the kind of people who told her the truth even when the truth was hard. And Helena had continued that policy during the 4 days of preparation because lying to the child about the level of danger would have been preparation for disappointment at the moment the danger materialized.
And disappointment under extreme pressure in a seven-year-old produces exactly the kind of uncontrollable response Nazi checkpoints were equipped to detect and act upon. So Rivka knew and Helena knew that Rivka knew. And the two of them walked toward Warsawa Zakodnia station on the morning of March 17th, 1943.
with that shared knowledge creating between them a quality of mutual presence different from the ordinary presence between adult and child. Denser, more deliberate, more aware of every step and every glance and every person nearby who might be what they seemed or might be something more dangerous than what they seemed.
Part five, the checkpoint. Worshawa Zahodnia station in 1943 was a space of perpetual transit that the Nazis had turned into an apparatus of control as much as a transport hub with soldiers positioned at strategic points and the main checkpoint located in the corridor connecting the waiting room to the platforms.
An unavoidable bottleneck through which every person boarding a train had to pass. designed so that the density of inspection would be greatest at the point where there was no alternative to passing through. Helena and Rivka joined the line at the checkpoint at 9 in the morning when the station was busy enough for two more people not to stand out, but not so crowded that the soldiers would be distracted by sheer volume, which was the sort of balance Helena had learned to look for after dozens of crossings,
and which in this case she had managed reasonably well, although reasonably well was never entirely well, and there was always a margin of what you could not control, which was precisely the margin where all the danger lived. Rivka wore a navy blue coat that had once belonged to another little girl before that girl no longer needed it.
with a hat covering her hair, which was dark, but not the specific kind of dark the Nazis had coded as suspicious, although that coating was so arbitrary that any hair could be dark enough depending on the soldier and the day and the mood of the system at that particular moment. And she carried a small cardboard suitcase with clothes and the photograph of her parents that Helena had allowed her to bring because taking away that photograph would have been taking away something she needed more than the security its absence might
have provided. And that decision about the photograph was the sort of decision Helena made with the instinct of a teacher who has spent years learning what children need in order to function under difficult conditions. The soldier who received them at the checkpoint was young, around 22, with the look of someone trained to project authority and still learning how to fit that projection into a body that had not quite finished becoming fully adult.
With the sort of expression young soldiers have at checkpoints, simultaneously rigid in protocol and variable in attention depending on what they see and what he saw. When Helena and Rivka reached the front of the line was a woman who looked like a gentile Polish woman with a small child, a category of people that in his experience over the months at that checkpoint, he had learned to process with a certain degree of automatism because they were common and because frequency produces automatism in systems of inspection just
as it produces automatism in any other system of processing. He took Helena’s papers first, looked at them with the attention protocol required, compared the photograph with the face, asked the standard question about destination and purpose of travel. Receive the answers in the tone of normality Helena had rehearsed thousands of times in her mind, though never out loud, because rehearsing out loud leaves memories in the body that can emerge at the wrong moments.
Then he took the girl’s documents. And this is where time changed speed in the way it does in moments that matter. Where every second expands to contain more information than it normally does. Where perception sharpens to the point that details that usually go unnoticed become enormous and precise and filled with possible meaning.
The soldier looked at the girl’s documents, then looked at the girl, and something in that second look was different from the first. With a quality of more intense attention that triggered in Helena, the same response it triggers in any animal when it detects that something in the environment has changed in a way that may mean danger.
That primal response the body produces before the mind has time to process what it has detected. The soldier lowered the documents and looked directly at Rivka and then did something no standard checkpoint protocol required. He drew his pistol and pointed it at the child. Not in a gesture of shooting, but in a gesture of interrogation, the gesture with which some soldiers at some checkpoints established the seriousness of what they were about to ask.
And he asked in Polish with a German accent. Is this girl Jewish? Part six, the second. What happened in the next second is what makes this story exist. What sets it apart from the thousands of similar stories that ended differently. What reveals something about Helena Shamansa that even she herself did not know was inside her until that second drew it out.
Helena could have answered with the papers, could have pointed to the birth certificate and the name Marta Jabwanska and the parish of origin and all the details Jagot’s forggers had built so precisely could have appealed to the bureaucracy of the inspection system with the logic that if the document said the girl was Marta Jabwanska then the girl was Marta Jabwanska because that was how documentation systems worked.
She could have answered with fear, with the genuine fear she did in fact feel, and which in another circumstance might have looked like the legitimate fear of a Polish mother whose daughter has just had a weapon pointed at her. Because the fear of a mother whose papers are in order, is not a sign of guilt, but simply the response of any person to a gun aimed at a child.
She could have answered with indignation, with the indignation of someone carrying proper documents and being treated improperly by the system, with the energy of someone protesting. Not because she has something to hide, but because the protocol being applied exceeds what protocol should allow. What she answered was none of those things and all of them at once in the sense that what she said contained elements of all three without being reducible to any of them.
And what she said was this in Polish with the perfectly calm voice of someone stating something completely obvious to someone who ought to know better. How dare you point a gun at a child? She did not answer the question of whether the girl was Jewish because answering that question, even with a no the paper supported, would have meant accepting the premise that it was a legitimate question requiring an answer.
It would have meant playing the game on the soldier’s terms, entering the territory where the soldier had all the advantage because it was his territory, the territory of protocol and suspicion and verification. Instead, Helena changed the territory, made the question itself the wrong question by making her answer challenge not the content of the question, but the gesture that accompanied it, which was the gesture of pointing a pistol at a little girl.
And that shift in territory worked because it appealed to something that existed even in the young soldier with his training in authority and his protocol of suspicion. It appealed to the basic human response to the image of a weapon aimed at a child, which is discomfort. The discomfort of doing something that feels wrong, even when the system says it is the correct procedure.
Part seven. What happened next? The soldier lowered the gun. Not immediately, not with the speed of someone obeying an order, but with the speed of someone who has just experienced something that needs processing. and who while processing it does what the body does automatically when it receives the signal that the level of threat it was applying was excessive for the situation at hand, which was to lower the weapon.
He handed back the papers without any more questions. Not kindly, but not with any added hostility either, with the bureaucratic neutrality of someone who has completed a procedure and moves on to the next. And Helena took the documents with a hand that did not tremble because she had learned to control trembling with the same practice by which she had learned every other skill her operations required.
And she took Rivka’s hand and they walked toward the platform with a step of people who have a train to catch and a destination to reach and nothing that distinguishes them from the rest of the travelers on that morning in March. What happened in the 30 seconds between the solders’s question and the platform was for Helena the longest stretch of time in her life in the sense that it contained more awareness per second than any other period she could remember.
and what she remembered from those 30 seconds. According to the testimony she gave to Jagot in 1945 and which is preserved in the archives of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance was not so much what she thought as what she felt, which was the particular sensation that her body had responded before her mind had fully processed the situation and that this response before thought had been the correct response in a way deliberate thought would not have produced.
Because deliberate thought under extreme pressure tends toward the safest answers, the most conventional ones, the ones that do not change the territory, but operate within the existing territory. Rivka said nothing during those 30 seconds, nor during the time on the platform, nor during the first half hour of the train journey.
And Helena did not ask her anything because she had learned that children who have gone through something need time to process before questions become useful. And that shared silence can be more comforting than words when words have no way of improving what silence can simply hold. When Rivka finally spoke about an hour after leaving Warsaw with the winter countryside of Poland passing by the train, windows and the immediate danger far enough behind them that the body could begin to release some of the tension it had been holding
for hours. She said only one thing. In the whisper she had learned during the weeks in hiding was the appropriate volume for what mattered. Why did he lower the gun? Helena considered the question with the seriousness she gave all of Rivka’s questions, which was total seriousness because Rivka was the kind of child who asked real questions and deserved real answers even when the real answers were complicated.
And what she answered was because I reminded him that he was a person before he was a soldier and people do not point guns at children without feeling that something is wrong. It was an answer partly true and partly hopefraed as certainty because Helena did not know exactly why the soldier lowered the gun and probably never would.
But the way she put it to Rifka was the most useful formulation available for a 7-year-old girl who needed to believe the world still operated according to some principle that was not entirely arbitrary. Part 8. The farm and what continued. Rivka arrived at the farm in Mizovia that afternoon, and the man called Stanniswis received her with the discrete efficiency of someone who had done this before, and knew that discreet efficiency was more useful than any display of welcome.
And Helena took the return train to Warsaw without knowing whether she would ever see the girl again and with the certainty that that not knowing was the normal condition of her work, which does not allow the luxury of follow-up because follow-up requires connection and connection requires communication.
And communication requires risk and risk in sufficient quantities. Ends in arrests that end in everything. Arrests end in the farm family was Catholic with the depth of conviction of Polish rural families who had maintained their faith through generations of different occupations and had developed a version of Catholicism that was at once devout in ritual and practical in morality.
One that did not separate praying well from acting well. one that regarded helping people in danger as a religious commandment, every bit as concrete as any sacrament. And they had agreed to shelter Rivka, not without fear, because fear was the rational response to what the situation implied, but with fear processed as an acceptable cost of doing what had to be done.
Rivka lived on that farm for 26 months until the Soviet liberation of Poland in the summer of 1944 under the name Marta Yabwanska. Learning during those months the skills of farm life together with the Catholicism that was her cover and which she absorbed with the same seriousness with which she absorbed everything else.
Not as conversion but as adaptation. the way water adapts to the container without ceasing to be water. And when the war ended and the documents identifying her as Rivka Goldstein could be recovered, she recovered them and kept them together with those of Marta Jabwanska because both were in some way her the one she had been and the one she had had to become in order to survive.
And that double identity did not divide her, but completed her in ways that would take decades to fully understand. Helena continued working with Jagota after that March 16th, carrying out similar operations with other people, moving between the two worlds of Warsaw with the same system of papers and appearance and work routine until the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April 1943.
and then the general Warsaw uprising in August 1944 and then the systematic destruction of the city the Nazis carried out after crushing that uprising. And in each of those moments, Helena made the decisions she made with the same resources she had started with, which were her appearance and her documents and her knowledge of the city and that ability to respond before thinking that the checkpoint at the station had revealed as her most unexpected and most effective tool. Part nine.
What one answer revealed? Helena Shamansa survived the war. Although Warsaw as a city did not survive it in any recognizable form, destroyed by more than 85% through the systematic demolition the Nazis carried out in retaliation for the uprising of August 1944. And in 1945, she walked through the rubble of the city where she had been born and where she had taught and where she had done what she had done with the feeling she described in her only public testimony as not victory but survival which are different things even if from
the outside they sometimes look the same. She was recognized by Yadvashm as righteous among the nations in 1969, 24 years after the war with the delay that characterizes recognitions that depend on survivors reconstructing and documenting events in the post-war years. And at the ceremony when she was asked what had led her to do what she did she gave an answer the Yadvashm archivists recorded because it was different from the standard answer about faith or morality or humanity.
She said she had not decided it that the choices she made in the moments that mattered had not been choices in the deliberate sense but responses in the most basic sense. like the reflex that pulls a hand away from fire before the mind processes the heat. And that what this had taught her about herself was that there was a part of her that knew how to behave correctly even when the part that thinks deliberately was too frightened to be useful.
Rivka Goldstein, who married in 1955 and whose children and grandchildren live in Israel, searched for Helena in 1971, 28 years after that March 16th at Warsawa Zakodnia station, and found her still living in rebuilt Warsaw, still teaching at the same elementary school in Jolie where she had taught before and during the war with the same method she had always had, telling complicated truths.
truths to 7-year-old children because 7-year-old children deserve truths even when they are complicated. The meeting between the two women in 1971 was the kind of meeting for which there is no proper language because the language that exists to describe reunions was designed for less extreme circumstances. and what Rivka asked Helena when they sat down in the small apartment in Jolie with tea that Rivka did not drink because she was too busy looking at the face of the woman who had saved her life.
What she asked was, “Did you think about what you were going to say before you said it?” And Helena, who was 66 years old and had had 28 years to reflect on that moment, answered with the honesty that had been her defining trait since before the war. I didn’t have time to think, and I believe that if I had, I would have said the wrong thing.
That answer is probably the most precise truth that can be drawn from this story. And it is a truth that contradicts the intuition that more thinking leads to better decisions. Because in situations where deliberate thought has time to unfold, that is true. But in situations where time does not exist, deliberate thought can become an obstacle rather than a help.
It can produce the safest answers, which are also the most predictable answers, which are also the answers. Systems designed to detect threats are best equipped to recognize as performances, as people doing what they think they are supposed to do rather than people being what they are. What saved Rivka Goldstein was not perfect planning.
Though the planning had been meticulous, it was not perfect documentation. Though the papers were excellent, it was not perfect appearance. Though appearance helped, it was a woman who, in the moment when the situation went beyond the plan, responded from a place that had not been planned and turned out to be more useful than any plan, the place where the human being she had been before the war turned her into a resistance operative still, existed and still knew that guns are not pointed at children, and that this could be said directly to the
person doing it with the conviction of someone stating something obvious to someone who should know it. The young soldier at the checkpoint in Warsawa Zakadnia station was never identified and probably never knew that the answer he received that morning was what determined that two people remained alive because for him it was one moment in one morning among many moments in many mornings over many years of work he had not chosen freely.
And whatever that moment revealed to him about himself, if it revealed anything at all, belongs to the part of the story we cannot access and therefore to the category of what remains mysterious. Even though what we know about its outcome is perfectly clear. What we do know is that he lowered the gun.
And that gesture, that lowering of the gun by a young soldier in a train station in occupied Poland in 1943 was enough. It was the opening Helena needed to walk to the platform and board the train and deliver the girl to the farm and return to Warsaw and continue doing what she did. And that opening was created not by any planned operation, but by a question phrased in the moment when there was no time to phrase anything, which says something about the moments that matter that no plan can say quite as well.
Rivka Goldstein is 87 years old in 2026 and lives in Tel Aviv and still remembers the navy blue coat and the cardboard suitcase and Helena’s hand in hers and the sound of the gun being lowered, which is not the sound of any victory, but the much smaller and much more precious sound of one person reminding another person that both of them are people.
A sound that should have been unnecessary, but that in 1943 at a train station in Warsaw was the most important sound in the world. And that in the story of that 7-year-old girl who became an 87year-old woman is the sound from which everything else exists. Tell me in the comments if you guessed it.
And if you didn’t, tell me what you would have said. Because that question about what you would have said is the most honest question you can ask yourself about who you are when the time for thinking runs out and all that remains is the