I moved into this country 3.5 years ago, an immigrant from a different country—one that carries a heavy burden in terms of history.

As a German born to parents traumatized by World War II, it was mandatory for me to study and learn about the dark parts of our history, to avoid the return of fascism and murder. It was and still is our responsibility.

Now I am sitting on my front porch at our beautiful spot where we live. Everything should be OK—we fought so hard to get my green card—but I’m sorry, it isn’t.

Something has gone completely wrong in this country, and it has to do with democracy.

I see a country divided between the believers of a criminal egomaniac—which actually seems to be more a cult than a party—and the Democrats, who have their own faults and imperfections.

But then I see that it’s now about the handicapped son of Gov. Tim Walz and his heartwarming reaction to his father’s nomination. A young man not able to speak, but full of love for his dad.

And again I watch it and the whole situation reminds me of Germany shortly before Hitler’s rise.

I’m afraid that people who are “different” will be again the ones who have to suffer and probably die in camps—and no one will have known it. I remember my father telling me about a “clinic” in Hadamar, Germany, just one village away from where he lived as an eight-year-old child. It housed people with psychiatric illnesses or other “abnormal” conditions, from intellectual challenges like Down syndrome to full-blown psychosis. He knew about the buses at night that traveled to the clinic full of people and always came back empty. Fifteen thousand people—15,000—were murdered in gas chambers there, and there were many places like that. Three hundred thousand people murdered because they were handicapped, to “improve the health of the race,” and how many millions looked away?

In Germany there’s a poem by Erich Kästner that says “The light at Hitler’s is still on”—but now this house stands in the U.S.

The price of believing in the cult surrounding Hitler was millions of dead people—not only Jews, but LGBTQ+, Roma, Christians, members of the political opposition, handicapped people and soldiers.

My warning lamps are still red; it’s not enough to have Kamala as a candidate. There’s only the choice between the possibility of a totalitarian White House with a president who said he wants to be a dictator, and democracy in all its imperfections in a dual-party system. There’s nothing else to choose from, as sad as it is.

I don’t have the right to vote in this country, but I just ask you to vote.

Not voting isn’t an option. It’s actually like claiming, as some of the Germans did at the time, “I didn’t know what they were doing.”

The lights at Hitler’s are still on. Let’s turn them off wherever we find them.