Morgan Lueck, a native of Sumner who now lives in China, Maine, served as a sergeant in the Marine Corps. He holds a Master of Science degree in counterterrorism and homeland security from American University.

As I reflect on this past Veterans Day, I am reminded of what military service demands and of what national decisions about war truly cost. It is about remembering the profound weight of what is asked when a nation chooses conflict.

The burden is not theoretical; it is carried by service members, their families and their communities for generations. Because of this, those we elect have a solemn obligation to exercise judgment before committing Americans to war.

That obligation is not being met.

The recent U.S. maritime and aerial operations have included lethal strikes that United Nations experts describe as extrajudicial killings in international waters. The president has stated that he “does not need a declaration of war” to expand these operations.

The deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group to the Caribbean signals an unjustified escalation, without clear objectives, legal grounding or an exit strategy. Senior lawmakers report they have not been given the required legal basis for these operations. 

Maine has a senator who chose to ignore that history.

Sen. Susan Collins serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Her duty is to oversee covert military activity and ensure compliance with U.S. law. That role is not symbolic. It is the constitutional safeguard intended to prevent undeclared war.

Twice now, the Senate has considered bipartisan measures to require congressional authorization for further U.S. strikes in Venezuela. Twice Sen. Susan Collins has voted to block those measures. Most recently, the measure failed 51–49, and hers was the decisive vote. 

Her vote preserved the administration’s ability to conduct lethal operations without congressional approval. And it confirms what Mainers who serve in uniform have long known: her self-styled reputation for moderation does not extend to upholding constitutional checks on war power. 

This was not an isolated misjudgment. It was the continuation of a pattern.

Collins has built her reputation on careful deliberation. This was careless. It is an abdication of the oversight she is uniquely positioned to exercise and was entrusted with by her constituents. Collins did not defend constitutional war powers or demand transparency on their behalf. She chose the path of least resistance and opposed the guardrails. She claimed the restrictions were “too broad.” We have seen this pattern from her before.

When she voted to authorize the war in Iraq, she did so under the same framework she invokes now: deference to executive assurances, an avoidance of hard constraints and a disregard for the human cost of what those decisions set in motion.

Maine remembers that cost. We remember it in the names etched into stone on town memorials, in flag-lined funeral routes through our smallest towns, in the quiet corners of our lives where someone’s absence is still felt. The Iraq War reshaped families and communities here at home. The lesson should have been clear: war must not be entered quietly, casually or without clarity. Yet the pattern is repeating. Only the geography has changed.

Those of us who have served are not “anti-intervention.” We are against unexamined intervention. We are against wars entered casually and exited slowly. We are against repeating the pattern that has taken so much from so many for so little strategic return. 

Make no mistake, Nicolás Maduro is a dictator, and Venezuela’s alignment with Russia, China and Iran is strategically concerning. But recognizing a threat is not the same as authorizing a war.

If the United States is to use military force, the administration must explain the rationale, Congress must debate and approve it and the mission must have clear goals and limits, including a plan to end the conflict before it begins.

If Americans are going to be asked to risk their lives, then those we elect to vote on our behalf have a duty to stand up, speak clearly and take responsibility. That duty is not being met. And once again, Sen. Collins is choosing caution over courage, and silence over leadership, at the very moment when bravery and clarity are required.

Decades after surviving the Holocaust, Charles Rotmil often shared a simple but powerful message: “I don’t live in the past. The past lives in me.”

Rotmil, one of Maine’s most significant voices in Holocaust remembrance and human rights education, died Tuesday morning, his partner, Cathryn Wilson, confirmed. He was 93.

After emigrating to the United States and settling in Maine, Rotmil shared his story with thousands of students and pushed for schools to teach about the genocide committed against Jews by Nazis in Germany.

“We need to know what happened during this period so that it will never happen again,” Rotmil said in 2021 during testimony before the Legislature.

Rotmil, of Portland, was remembered Wednesday as a storyteller, survivor, artist and teacher whose openness about his horrific experiences as a child impacted the lives of many Mainers.

“Through his stories, his art, and his courage, he inspired countless students, educators, and community members to stand against injustice and embrace compassion,” Tam Huynh, executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, said in a statement. “His presence will be deeply missed, and his legacy will live on in every student he taught and every life he touched.”

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows came to know Rotmil well while she was the director of the HHRC and said it was inspiring to see his courage, authenticity and resilience in action.

“It must have been difficult and painful for Charles to tell the stories of the Holocaust and his personal losses over and over again, but he recognized how important it was,” Bellows said. “He had seen the worst of the worst. He lost his parents, he lost everything, yet he survived to share the lessons of the Holocaust with the next generation.”

SURVIVING THE HOLOCAUST

Charles Rotmil, of Portland, describes fleeing Nazis and losing his family during the Holocaust to Orono Middle School students at the The Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine in Augusta in 2019. (Andy Molloy/Staff Photographer)

Rotmil was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1932, six months before Hitler came to power. He would later tell people his childhood was normal until his family moved to Vienna, Austria.

After Nazis closed the synagogues, religion centered around the dinner table for Rotmil and his family, he told students during a 1994 school visit in Waterboro.

“To this day, I like to linger at the table,” he said.

During Kristallnacht — two nights of violent persecution of Jewish people across Germany and Austria in November 1938 — German soldiers smashed down the family’s door and arrested Rotmil’s father after beating his head against a table.

The next morning, Rotmil and his sister walked over shards of glass and past walls scrawled with antisemitic graffiti. The family fled to Belgium, where Jewish refugees were being accepted. Rotmil’s father carried him trough the woods during their journey.

When Belgium was invaded in 1940, thousands of Jews were forced to walk into France while airplanes shot at them from above. The scene was “total chaos,” with fires burning on the horizon and dead bodies strewn across the road, Rotmil recounted decades later.

Rotmil’s father, Adi, left the road to find a wheelbarrow for their bags and disappeared, but the family continued on and boarded a train. His sister died when the train hit a car on the tracks, and his mother died a week later from her injuries.

Rotmil and his brother, Bernard, were eventually reunited with their father and went back to Austria. There, his father was turned in by a neighbor and arrested. He was executed upon arrival at Auschwitz concentration camp.

With help from Father Bruno Reynders, a Belgian monk who hid over 350 children, Rotmil and his brother were sheltered in Christian homes. They often had to change their names and lived in constant danger, according to the HHRC.

On a foggy morning in December 1946, Rotmil and his brother arrived in the United States aboard the Ile de France and went to Peekskill, New York, to stay with their aunt and uncle.

A CREATIVE LIFE

After college, Rotmil worked as an assistant to a prominent photographer in New York City, where he was active in the downtown arts scene in the 1970s. He photographed artists Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana, said Wilson, Rotmil’s partner. His photographs of artist Bob Thompson were included in a retrospective at Colby College a few years ago.

Rotmil was also a painter and filmmaker. His short film “The Eternal Hat” was featured in the 1970s in the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Another short film, “Street Musicians,” won an award from Space Gallery in 2007, Wilson said.

Holocaust survivor Charles Rotmil plays Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” on harmonica to end his speech during a Kristallnacht remembrance ceremony on Nov. 9, 2018, in the at the Holocaust and Human Rights Center at University of Maine at Augusta. (Joe Phelan/Staff Photographer)

He played a variety of instruments, including guitar and Japanese flute. He often brought his harmonica to schools to play for students during his presentations. He enjoyed writing both fiction and nonfiction, and was working on a manuscript about his life before his death.

“He was a very gifted artist on many different levels,” Wilson said. “He was a very alive, creative person with a great sense of humor. People would be caught by surprise.”

Rotmil, who had four children, moved to Maine in 1982 and started a career teaching foreign languages to high school students. Wilson said he was somewhat of a teaching nomad, working at schools across the state — from the mountains to the Midcoast to Aroostook County.

Wilson said Rotmil, like many Holocaust survivors, didn’t always speak openly about his experience in the decades after he came to the U.S. But by the 1980s, more people were interested to hear from survivors about their experiences, she said.

“He was aware that hatred still exists. He thought there were very important lessons to be learned about what happened during the Holocaust so it wouldn’t happen again. He sensed a responsibility to share what had happened,” Wilson said.

Bellows said Rotmil was a charismatic and compelling speaker. When he was talking to students, it was sometimes the first time students were learning about the Holocaust. It was clear some students felt shock, anger and sadness, but he also “brought some light and hope for the future to his stories,” she said.

“He was always able to communicate the importance of human rights and standing up to evil,” Wilson said.