I like to read crime novels while pedaling on the exercise bike at the gym. Today, at the end of my session, I was immersed in some paragraphs involving fiendish neo-Nazis fixated on dredging up U-boats sunk off the Louisiana coast. Just then, a couple of heavily-muscled, shaved-head guys started using a machine next to me. Soon they began to speak softly (almost conspiratorially?) to each other in a foreign language. I stopped reading for awhile to listen because I thought I overheard a few words that sounded familiar. Then it hit me, or, I should say, it jolted me: they were speaking German, they looked like they could be skinheads, they were only a few feet away from me—and I am Jewish!  It creeped me out, but I still had a couple of minutes left in my workout. Gaining composure, I finished pedaling, got off the bike, and as inconspicuously as possible, left the fitness center in a lather. Reading about murderously grotesque neo-Nazis and then encountering two body builders who spoke German and looked like Teutonic thugs reminded me that if in 1943, had I been born in Central Europe, instead of in America, I probably would have died in the Holocaust. But I hate to enter July 4 on a depressing note. I quickly got over my anxiety as I luxuriated in a hot shower that I did not even remotely relate to the showers in the gas chambers.That is a personal victory to celebrate.