Her name was Kate. She was calling from Providence. And when she thinks about soldiers patrolling the streets of Boston, she remembers a painful chapter in her family’s history.

It’s “horrifying to me, because, as a family, you know, that lost people in the Holocaust, the image of ... [the] military stopping people’s freedom of movement, which is probably on the docket there somewhere, is terrifying,” said Kate, who phoned into WGBH-FM’s “Boston Public Radio” program on Wednesday.

Since President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this week authorizing the creation of specialized National Guard units to put down civil unrest in states nationwide, the idea of soldiers in the streets in the city where the fight for American independence was born has gone from an abstraction

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