Marie Yovanovitch’s father, Mikhail Yovanovitch, was my Russian teacher for four years at The Kent School in Connecticut. I spent over 500 hours with him in a very small class and wish I had studied harder. He was a kind, brilliant, sweet man, much like his daughter, Marie, or Masha, whom I remember also as a little girl. Marie also went to Kent and then Princeton. Mr. Yovanovitch, as we called him, was a short man who walked as if he were seven feet tall, but not with hubris or pretension. He loved his Russian heritage and spoke about his native land with deep sadness. He fled Stalin’s tyranny and settled in Montreal before immigrating to the U.S. He rarely talked about his tribulations as a refugee. He and his wife, Nadia, also a refugee who escaped both Stalin and Hitler and who died just a few weeks ago on October 22, which hasn’t been mentioned during the impeachment hearings, brought up Marie as a proud but humble first generation American. Marie’s integrity and smarts shone through today during her testimony, revealing Trump through her example alone as an heroic ambassador, while barely mentioning her boss’s name, as the mountebank he is. She was the same as the child I remember. So smart, studious, circumspect, and kind.