“We Are Unclean” — German POW Girls Refused New Clothes Until American Nurses Washed Their Hair-ZZ

Fort Ontario, New York, August 1944.

The processing center smelled of disinfectant and lake water, and through open windows h the sound of waves breaking against stone.

18 German girls stood in a single line, ages 12 to 17, their clothes gray with months of travel and their hair matted beyond recognition.

Army nurses had brought clean dresses, fresh undergarments, shoes that actually fit, but the girls would not touch them.

They stood rigid, hands at their sides, repeating the same phrase in broken English.

We are unclean.

We cannot wear clean things.

The nurses exchanged glances, uncertain what cultural barrier they had encountered, what programming the regime had installed so deeply that even freedom felt like contamination.

What happened in the hours that followed would reveal how thoroughly propaganda could reshape young minds and how patient compassion could begin dismantling those distortions.

The girls had arrived that morning on a transport ship from Naples, part of a larger group of civilian internees being relocated from European camps to American facilities under emergency humanitarian provisions.

The war had created millions of displaced persons, and Fort Ontario, a 19th century military installation on Lake Ontario’s shore, had been converted to house 1,000 refugees, mostly European civilians, caught in the conflict’s machinery.

Among them were these 18 girls, all ethnic Germans, who had been living in various parts of occupied Europe when circumstances had swept them into the internment system.

Some had been traveling with families when detained.

Others had been separated from parents and placed in youth camps.

The regime operated for ideological education.

All carried the distinctive marks of institutional life uniform posture.

Hesitant speech, the weariness of those who had learned that authority figures demanded specific responses.

Nurse Sarah Mitchell stood near the processing table watching the girls refuse the clothing with an expression at mixed confusion and concern.

She was 32 from Massachusetts with 2 years of army nursing experience that included field hospitals in North Africa and Italy.

She had seen trauma in countless forms.

But this particular manifestation was new girls so convinced of their own contamination that they would not accept basic dignity.

The translatter, a German American Red Cross volunteer named Helen Vber tried again.

The nurses want to help you, she explained in careful German.

These clothes are for you.

Clean clothes, proper fitting.

You can change and wash.

Everything is provided.

The oldest girl, perhaps 17, spoke for the group.

Her name was Greta Hoffman, and her accent carried the precise diction of someone educated in institutional settings.

“We cannot,” she said, her eyes fixed on the floor.

“We are unclean.

The regime’s teachings are clear.

Those who have been detained are contaminated.

We must not touch clean things until we have been properly purified.

” Sarah exchanged glances with the other nurses.

The statement carried implications that required careful navigation.

These girls believed themselves fundamentally impure, somehow corrupted by circumstances beyond their control.

The psychology was complex, clearly rooted in indoctrination that had taken ordinary shame and amplified it into comprehensive self- condemnation.

Helen Vber, the translator, understood immediately what they were dealing with.

She had fled Germany in 1937 before the worst began, but she had studied the regime’s social programs extensively.

The youth education systems emphasized purity racial, ideological, physical.

Those who failed to maintain proper standards faced not just punishment, but categorical rejection.

Contamination was a recurring theme in the propaganda.

Enemies contaminated, defeat contaminated, weakness contaminated.

These girls had internalized that message so thoroughly that even their own bodies felt like sights of pollution.

Sarah made a decision.

She gestured to the other nurses, gathering them for a quick conference away from the girls.

“We need to address this carefully,” she said quietly.

They’ve been taught something about purity that we’re not going to undo with orders or logic.

We need to show them rather than tell them.

What are you thinking? asked Lieutenant Patricia O’Brien, a nurse from Chicago who had been assigned to Fort Ontario, specifically because of her experience with traumatized children.

Sarah outlined a plan.

We start with hair washing.

Not because they need to be purified, because hair care is something we do together.

Something that shows care rather than judgment.

We make it communal, warm, gentle.

We demonstrate that cleanliness isn’t about purity in their sense.

It’s about basic human comfort.

The nurses prepared one of the processing center side rooms.

They brought in basins of warm water, towels, soap that smelled of lavender, combs and scissors for hair that would need significant attention.

They arranged chairs in a circle rather than an institutional row, creating space that suggested collaboration rather than processing.

Helen Vber explained the plan to Greta and the other girls.

The nurses would like to help you wash your hair, she said, not as purification, but as care.

Afterward, if you choose, you can wear the clean clothes, but there is no requirement, no judgment, just an offer of help.

The girls conferred among themselves in rapid German.

Sarah [snorts] watched their body language, the protective huddle, the way younger girls deferred to older ones, the visible anxiety about breaking rules that seemed absolute.

Finally, Greta nodded.

We will accept the hair washing, she said through Helen, but we cannot promise about the clothes.

That depends on whether we are made clean enough.

The compromise was imperfect, but it was movement.

The girls filed into the side room, their expressions mixing fear and desperate hope.

Sarah and the other nurses had arranged six washing stations, planning to work in small groups that would feel less institutional.

Greta [snorts] sat in the first chair.

Her hair was dark blonde, matted into sections that would require patient work to untangle without causing pain.

Sarah stood behind her, wetting the hair section by section with warm water from a pitcher.

The temperature was carefully calibrated warm enough to be comforting, not so hot that it would startle.

“I’m Sarah,” she said, speaking slowly so Helen could translate.

“I’ve been a nurse for 10 years.

I had two younger sisters growing up, and I learned to do hair when I was about your age.

This might take a while, but were not in a hurry.

Greta said nothing, but her shoulders tensed under Sarah’s touch.

The physical contact seemed to trigger additional anxiety.

She had been taught that she contaminated others, that her presence polluted clean spaces.

Sarah sensed this and adjusted her approach.

Your hair is very thick, she observed conversationally.

That’s good hair, strong.

It’s just been neglected for too long.

Once we get it clean and untangled, it will look beautiful again.

Beautiful.

The word seemed to startle Greta more than anything else.

As if beauty was a category she no longer qualified for, a standard she had forfeited through whatever circumstances had led to detention and transport.

Sarah worked methodically, wetting sections of hair and applying gentle soap that would break down months of accumulated oil and dirt.

The water in the basin turned gray almost immediately, evidence of how long proper washing had been impossible.

She rinsed carefully, then began the slow process of combing through tangles with a patience that seemed infinite.

Around the room, other nurses worked with other girls.

Patricia O’Brien had a 12-year-old named Anna whose hair had been cut short at some point, but had grown out unevenly.

Lieutenant Mary Chun, a nurse from San Francisco, whose parents had immigrated from China, worked with twins named Elsa and Ing.

Their identical blonde braids now matted into unrecognizable masses.

The room filled with sounds water pouring quiet conversation in German and English.

The occasional soft exclamation when a particularly stubborn tangle released.

The atmosphere gradually shifted from institutional processing to something more intimate.

The nurses worked with hands that communicated care through touch, demonstrating that physical contact could be gentle rather than violent, and attention to appearance was dignity rather than vanity.

Greta felt tears begin sliding down her face as Sarah worked through her hair.

She tried to suppress them, crying was weakness, and the regime’s teachings emphasized strength, but the gentleness was overwhelming.

For months she had been moved through systems that treated her as administrative problem rather than human being.

She had been counted, cataloged, transported, assigned numbers and categories.

But she had not been touched with care since before her family’s detention began.

Sarah noticed the tears but said nothing directly.

She continued working, her movements steady and unhurried.

After several minutes, she spoke quietly.

“You’re safe here,” she said.

And Helen translated.

“Whatever you were taught about contamination, whatever you believe about yourself, none of it changes the fact that you deserve to have clean hair and comfortable clothes.

Being detained doesn’t make you impure.

It just makes you someone who needs help right now.

” The statement contradicted everything Greta had absorbed during two years in institutional settings.

The regime’s youth programs had been explicit.

Those who failed, who were detained, who found themselves outside proper society, had demonstrated fundamental inadequacy.

Purity was maintained through strength and adherence to ideology.

Contamination resulted from weakness, defeat, association with enemies.

She had been taught this so consistently that questioning it felt like betraying truth itself.

But Sarah’s hands in her hair communicated something different.

They suggested that Greta was worth the time this process required, that her comfort mattered, that she had not forfeited basic human dignity through circumstances mostly beyond her control.

The contradiction between teaching and experience created cognitive dissonance that Greta had no framework for resolving.

The hair washing continued for over an hour.

Some girls required even longer hair that had gone months without proper care needed careful patient attention.

The nurses worked without complaint, occasionally laughing at shared jokes, maintaining an atmosphere that felt almost domestic.

They brought in tea and cookies halfway through, serving the girls as if they were guests rather than prisoners or refugees or whatever administrative category they occupied.

Anna, the 12-year-old, asked Patricia why American nurses would spend so much time on German girls hair.

The question came through Helen’s translation, carrying genuine confusion.

Surely enemies did not waste resources on defeated populations.

Patricia considered her response carefully.

Because you’re children, she said simply, “Because taking care of children is what adults are supposed to do, regardless of politics or nationality.

Because no 12-year-old should feel unclean or unworthy of basic care.

” “Those reasons enough?” Anna nodded slowly, processing this radical proposition that care transcended political categories.

By early afternoon, all 18 girls had clean, carefully combed hair.

Some had received trims to remove damaged ends.

Others had been styled simply but attractively, their hair falling in ways that suggested normaly rather than institutional uniformity.

The transformation was visible.

They looked younger somehow, less hardened by circumstances, more like the children they actually were.

Sarah brought Greta to a mirror.

The girls stared at her reflection with an expression that mixed recognition and disbelief.

Her hair fell in clean waves past her shoulders, the natural blonde color restored after months of greyness.

She looked like someone who might belong in normal society rather than someone categorically excluded from it.

“Do you feel clean?” Sarah asked gently.

Greta touched her hair tentatively, as if expecting the cleanliness to be illusion that would dissolve under examination.

Yes, she whispered.

But clean hair does not make us worthy of clean clothes.

The regime’s teachings, Sarah interrupted carefully.

I don’t know what you were taught, but I know that clean hair means you can wear clean clothes without any contamination or impurity.

You’re not dirty.

You’re not impure.

You read just a young woman who has been through difficult circumstances and deserves to wear clothes that fit properly and feel comfortable.

The logic was simple, almost childishly so.

But sometimes simple logic could penetrate where complex arguments failed.

Greta looked at her reflection again and at the pile of clean dresses waiting on the table.

The cognitive dissonance was visible on her face teachings, insisted she was contaminated, but evidence suggested otherwise.

She reached for a dress.

The fabric was cotton, dark blue with small white flowers, practical but attractive.

She held it against herself, and the other girls watched with intensity that suggested this moment carried weight beyond one person’s choice.

“I will try the dress,” Greta said finally.

If it becomes contaminated, that will prove the teachings correct.

If it remains clean, perhaps the teachings were wrong about this.

The conditional acceptance was progress.

Greta changed behind a privacy screen the nurses had set up, emerging in the clean dress that fit properly and looked entirely normal.

She examined herself in the mirror with visible anxiety, expecting some visible sign of contamination to manifest.

When nothing happened, when the dress simply looked like a dress on a young woman, something shifted in her expression.

The other girls followed her lead.

One by one, they selected dresses from the pile, changing behind the screen, emerging to check mirrors for signs of pollution that never appeared.

The younger girls adapted faster, their indoctrination less thoroughly established.

The older ones moved more hesitantly, clearly struggling with teachings that had been reinforced through years of institutional life.

By midafternoon, all 18 girls wore clean clothes and had clean air.

They sat in the processing cent’s common area, eating sandwiches the staff had prepared, and the transformation was complete, not just physically, but psychologically.

They had violated the regime’s teachings about purity and contamination, and nothing terrible had resulted.

The dresses had not turned gray.

The nurses had not recoiled.

The sky had not fallen.

Sarah sat with Greta during the meal, speaking through Helen’s translation.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

Greta considered the question with visible care.

“Confused,” she admitted.

We were taught that contamination was absolute, that those who failed or were defeated could not participate in clean society without extensive purification protocols.

But you simply washed our hair and gave us dresses and we look normal.

You are normal, Sarah said.

Whatever happened to you before this, whatever circumstances led to your detention, none of it makes you fundamentally different from any other young woman.

The teachings about contamination were meant to control you, to make you believe you had no value outside the system.

But those teachings were false.

The statement was bold, direct confrontation with indoctrination rather than gentle redirection.

But Sarah sensed that Greta needed explicit contradiction.

Needed someone to name the lie clearly rather than dancing around it.

Greta was quiet for a long moment.

If the teachings about contamination were false, she said slowly.

What else was false? What other things we believed were simply control mechanisms rather than truth? Sarah smiled sadly.

That’s a question you’ll have to answer for yourself over time.

I can’t deprogram everything you were taught, but I can tell you that starting to question is healthy.

That thinking for yourself is not betrayal.

It’s actually reclaiming the independence they tried to take from you.

The conversation marked a turning point.

Over the following days, as the girls settled into Fort Ontario’s refugee community, they began testing other teachings against reality.

They had been told Americans would be cruel, but the staff treated them with consistent consideration.

They had been told enemy populations lived in squalor, but the facilities were clean and well-maintained.

They had been told that defeat meant permanent exclusion from civilized society, but they were included in educational programs, recreational activities, community meals.

Each contradiction weakened the broader structure of indoctrination.

The regime had built its control on comprehensive ideology that demanded absolute belief.

But absolute belief was fragile when confronted with systematic contradiction.

One crack in the structure, like discovering that clean hair did not require ideological purification, could propagate through the entire system.

Sarah continued working with the girls over the following weeks.

She taught basic nursing skills to those interested, providing practical education while building relationships based on mutual respect.

She learned their stories.

gradually families separated by war.

Detention that resulted from being in the wrong place when boundaries shifted years in institutional settings that emphasized ideology over individual development.

Greeda’s story emerged slowly.

Her father had been a journalist in Vienna, critical of the regime’s policies before annexation.

The family had attempted to flee to Switzerland, but been detained at the border.

Her parents had been separated from her and her younger sister sent to different facilities.

She had spent 18 months in a youth education camp that emphasized purity ideology, obedience training, and comprehensive indoctrination.

The teachings about contamination had been part of broader programming designed to create absolute dependence on the system.

If you believed yourself inherently impure, you needed the regime’s approval to feel human.

Sarah listened without judgment, asking questions occasionally, but mostly allowing Greta to process her own experiences.

The nursing became therapeutic in unexpected ways providing care while receiving confession, demonstrating compassion while acknowledging complexity.

By autumn, the girls had integrated into Fort Ontario’s community.

They attended classes taught by refugee educators, participated in work programs appropriate to their ages, formed friendships across the various national groups housed in the facility.

The transformation was visible not just in appearance but in comportment.

They stood straighter, spoke more freely, laughed without the nervous edge that suggested they expected punishment for expressions of joy.

One October evening, Greta approached Sarah in the medical clinic where the nurse was organizing supplies.

“I want to thank you,” she said in improved English that reflected weeks of practice.

“Not just for washing our hair that first day, but for treating us as if we had value when we believed we had none.

” Sarah paused in her work.

“You always had value,” she said.

You just needed help recognizing it after people spent years trying to convince you otherwise.

Greta nodded slowly.

I understand now what you did.

You did not just clean our hair.

You showed us that the regime’s teachings about purity were false.

And if those teachings were false, everything else they taught might also be lies.

That was the real washing removing the contamination of propaganda rather than physical dirt.

The insight was sophisticated evidence of intellectual development that institutional education had tried to suppress.

Sarah felt proud in ways that had nothing to do with her own actions.

Greta had done the real work of questioning, reassessing, rebuilding understanding on different foundations.

The war continued.

News filtered into Fort Ontario about Allied advances, about the regime’s collapse accelerating, about liberation of camps and cities across Europe.

The refugees processed this information with complicated emotions relief at the regime’s defeat, anxiety about what remained of their homelands, uncertainty about future possibilities.

The girls followed the news more carefully than most.

They had been taught that the regime was invincible, that its ideology represented truth, that defeat was impossible.

Each report of lost territory, each announcement of surrendered cities, each photograph of celebrating civilians contradicted those absolute certainties.

The cognitive dissonance was painful, but ultimately liberating.

If the regime could be wrong about victory, it could be wrong about everything.

Repatriation planning began in early 1945.

The war in Europe was clearly ending and discussions started about how refugees would return to their home countries.

For the girls, this created new anxiety.

They would return to a Germany that no longer existed in the form they remembered.

To families that might be scattered or lost, a society that would need to grapple with massive crimes and failures.

Sarah met with Greta privately to discuss the transition.

You’re going to face difficult things when you return, she said honestly.

Germany will need rebuilding, not just physically, but morally.

People will need to confront what the regime did, what they participated in or allowed through silence.

It won’t be easy.

Greta had been thinking about this.

I want to work with children, she said.

Children like I was taught to believe propaganda, trained to accept authority without question.

I want to help them learn to think independently, to question, to recognize when they are being manipulated.

Someone needs to do that work.

Sarah smiled.

That’s noble work, important work.

The future depends on it.

But I don’t know how, Greta continued.

How do you teach someone to question without making them cynical? How do you help them reject propaganda without making them reject everything? Sarah considered the question.

You show them what you showed me today that you can acknowledge being wrong and still have value.

That questioning authority is not betrayal but responsibility.

That thinking independently is difficult but essential.

And you do it through relationship, through care, through demonstrating that humans can be trusted even when systems cannot.

The framework was simple but profound.

Greta absorbed it, recognizing that her experience at Fort Ontario, particularly that first day when nurses had washed her hair and dismantled her belief in contamination, provided a model for future work.

The girls left Fort Ontario in stages throughout 1945 and early 1946.

Some returned to Germany directly.

Others settled temporarily in displaced persons camps while family situations were clarified.

A few remained in America, sponsored by organizations or families willing to provide support.

Greta returned to Vienna in November 1945.

The city was divided into occupation zones, damaged but functioning.

She discovered that her father had survived detention and was working with provisional educational authorities.

Her mother and sister had not survived, a fact delivered clinically by Red Cross officials who had traced family members through various records.

The grief was comprehensive, complicated by years of separation that meant she had not seen them since she was 15.

But she carried forward the work she had identified at Fort Ontario.

She trained as a teacher specializing in elementary education and developed curriculum focused on critical thinking and independent judgment.

Her methods were unconventional.

She used stories and examples rather than lectures, encouraged questions rather than demanding obedience, taught children to recognize propaganda techniques rather than simply memorizing correct answers.

Other teachers sometimes objected to her approach.

Austria was rebuilding and some believed that discipline and respect for authority were essential for social reconstruction.

But Greta pushed back, arguing that blind obedience had enabled the regime’s crimes, that future prevention required teaching children to question rather than comply.

She wrote occasionally to Sarah letters that crossed the Atlantic with irregular timing but consistent themes.

She described her work, the children she taught, the slow process of helping young minds recover from ideological education.

And she always returned to that first day at Fort Ontario, the moment when American nurses had washed her hair and demonstrated that she was not contaminated that propaganda about purity was false, that human dignity did not depend on ideological approval.

Sarah kept the letters.

She had returned to Massachusetts after the war, working in a civilian hospital and raising a family.

But the months at Fort Ontario remained significant in ways that ordinary nursing did not.

She had participated in something beyond medical care.

She had helped dismantle indoctrination through patient compassionate attention to basic human needs.

One letter from Greta arrived in 1952 describing a breakthrough with a particularly difficult student.

The boy had been taught by his parents’ former regime loyalists that certain people were inherently inferior, that purity required separation and exclusion.

Greta had spent months working with him, using the same approach the nurses had used with her, demonstrating care, asking questions, gently contradicting propaganda through accumulated examples of human complexity.

Finally, the boy had asked the question Greta had been waiting for.

If what my parents taught me is wrong, how do I know what is true? And Greta had given him the answer Sarah had given her.

You learn to think for yourself.

You gather evidence.

You question authority.

You test claims against reality.

It is harder than accepting what you are told.

But it is the only way to avoid being manipulated again.

The work was slow, incremental, frustrating.

But it was essential.

Germany and Austria were rebuilding not just infrastructure, but moral foundations.

Children needed to learn different ways of thinking, different relationships to authority, different understanding of what it meant to be human in community with others.

Greet’s teaching contributed to this vast project, one child at a time, one questioned assumption at a time.

Sarah read the letter and felt satisfaction that had nothing to do with recognition or reward.

She had washed a teenage girl’s hair in a processing center in New York, had provided clean clothes and simple dignity at a moment when propaganda insisted the girl was contaminated.

That small act had cascaded through years and across continents, influencing how Greta taught children, which influenced how those children would raise their own children, which contributed infinite decimally to social reconstruction that would take generations.

The other girls from that original group of 18 followed similar trajectories.

Some became teachers.

Others worked in social services, healthcare, administration.

Several married and raised families, teaching their children the lessons they had learned at Fort Ontario, that propaganda dissolves against reality, that questioning authority is responsible citizenship, that human dignity transcends political circumstances.

Anna, the 12-year-old who had asked why American nurses would help German girls, became a social worker specializing in refugee services.

She applied the compassion she had received, understanding that displaced children needed not just material support, but dignified treatment that acknowledged their inherent worth regardless of circumstances.

The twins, Ilsa and Ing, returned to Hamburg and opened a beauty salon.

The choice seemed superficial until understood in context.

They created a space where women could receive care and attention, where appearance became expression of dignity rather than ideological conformity.

They remembered the nurses at Fort Ontario who had spent hours washing their hair, and they provided the same patient attention to customers who needed to feel human after years of war and privation.

The ripples extended outward, impossible to trace completely, but undeniably real.

18 girls had been taught they were contaminated, had refused clean clothes, because propaganda insisted they were unworthy.

American nurses had responded not with force or lectures, but with simple careing hair, providing clean clothes, demonstrating through action that the propaganda was false.

That intervention had altered trajectories, influenced choices, contributed to reconstruction that extended far beyond those original participants.

Sarah Mitchell died in 1978, never fully aware of the extent of her influence.

Her obituary in the local Massachusetts newspaper mentioned her Army nursing service, her decades at the regional hospital, her three children and seven grandchildren.

It did not mention Fort Ontario.

Did not mention 18 German girls.

Did not mention the afternoon she had spent washing Greta Hoffman’s hair and dismantling indoctrination through patient, compassionate attention.

But Greta attended the memorial service.

She was 61 by then, retired from teaching, grandmother to children who had grown up learning to question and think independently.

She traveled to Massachusetts and stood in a church she had never visited, mourning a woman who had changed her life through what seemed like routine nursing care.

She spoke briefly at the service, explaining to confused relatives how she knew their mother.

Sarah washed my hair when I was 17,” she said.

And the statement sounded absurd until she continued, “I had been taught that I was contaminated, that I was unworthy of clean clothes or basic dignity.

Sarah showed me that those teachings were false.

She did not argue with me or lecture me.

She simply cared for me as if I mattered, and that changed everything.

” The relatives listened with interest.

Sarah had rarely discussed her time at Fort Ontario, had treated it as one assignment among many in a long nursing career.

But Grea’s testimony revealed that routine care had been transformative, that washing hair had been revolutionary, that simple dignity offered at the right moment could redirect entire lives.

The archive of Fort Ontario contains documentation of the refugee program arrival records, housing assignments, educational programs, repatriation schedules.

Buried in those files is a brief report from August 1944, noting that 18 German girls had required special attention during initial processing.

The report is clinical, mentioning that the girls had refused clothing due to beliefs about contamination, that nurses had addressed the situation through patient engagement, and by the following day, all girls were properly dressed and integrated into the facility population.

The bureaucratic language captures facts, but misses meaning.

It records that a problem was solved without documenting that young minds were beginning to free themselves from propaganda that had shaped their entire understanding of self and world.

It notes that nurses provided care without acknowledging that care was also education, that washing hair was also liberation, that clean clothes represented possibility rather than simply covering.

But the girls remembered.

They carried that memory through post-war life, through careers and families and the ordinary business of living.

They remembered being told they were unclean.

Remembered American nurses who refused to accept that categorization.

Remembered the moment when clean hair proved propaganda false and open space for questioning everything else.

And some of them, like Greta, dedicated their lives to providing others what they had received.

Patient attention that acknowledged inherent worth, compassionate care that dissolved toxic ideology, simple dignity that enabled rebuilding from foundations of self-respect rather than shame.

The work was undramatic, unheralded, invisible to historical narratives focused on military campaigns and political decisions.

But it was real and it mattered.

And it demonstrated that sometimes the most revolutionary acts are the simplest washing a child’s hair, offering clean clothes, insisting that human dignity transcends politics.

That was the true lesson of Fort Ontario.

August 1944, not that Americans were especially kind, or Germans especially receptive, but that propaganda, no matter how comprehensive, could not survive sustained contradiction.

That indoctrination required isolation from alternative evidence.

That showing care to those taught they were unworthy was not charity but justice.

And that sometimes revolution began not with manifestos or movements but with warm water, gentle hands, and the quiet insistence that everyone deserves to feel clean.