In a troubling scene for Bengals fans, Cincinnati quarterback Joe Burrow was helped off the field after suffering a right calf injury at Thursday’s training camp practice.

Burrow was scrambling out of the pocket during a non-contact scrimmage when he came up limp, while favoring his right leg. He was then helped off the field by teammates, as recorded by the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Kelsey Conway. 

She later said that Burrow has a strained calf but it is not yet known how long his absence will be to recover from the injury. 

The former first-overall draft pick is expected to sign a massive contract extension, although it’s unclear if a potential injury could impact negotiations.

Burrow tore the ACL in his left knee during the 2020 season and has battled injuries during previous training camps as well. 

Head coach Zac Taylor said the team has no information on the injury yet, but added that he hopes to give an update on Friday.

Burrow had a sleeve on his right calf when he went down Thursday despite not wearing one earlier in practice. 

When asked why Burrow put on the sleeve before getting hurt, Taylor told reporters: ‘I think a lot of guys after the first day had some soreness.’

Burrow and the Bengals are expected to contend for the Super Bowl this year, and the former LSU star is also expected to sign a long-term extension, although the progress on those talks remains unclear.  Cincinnati Bengals executives on Monday refused to discuss the state of the negotiations with the franchise quarterback.

Signing the 2022 Pro Bowler and 2021 AP NFL Comeback Player of the Year to an extension was a goal of the team this summer. Both sides have done an incredible job of keeping details of the talks locked down tight.

‘I have bound myself not to talk about Joe’s contract,’ Bengals owner Mike Brown told reporters a day before camp opens. ‘They don’t think it’s helpful for the negotiations. The other side has made the same commitment, and they have not broken it.’

The new deal for the top overall pick in the 2020 draft is expected to make him one of the highest paid players in the NFL.

Cincinnati picked up the fifth-year option on Burrow’s rookie contract in April ahead of an expected megadeal, which, based on what other top quarterbacks are making, could put him in the range of $50 million a season.

Brown said he’s not alarmed that talks have run into the start of training camp.

‘I’m not shocked that this thing is where it is,’ the 87-year-old owner said. ‘It’s only natural that they want to get what they can get, the best that they can get.’

The 26-year-old Burrow, who reported to camp Sunday, led the Bengals to a Super Bowl after the 2021 season, a 23-20 loss to the Los Angeles Rams.

Last season, Cincinnati finished 12-4, winning the AFC North for the second straight year, with Burrow setting franchise single-season records for completions, pass attempts and passing touchdowns.

During summer workouts, Burrow demurred when reporters inquired about his contract situation. He did say his goals are to win a Super Bowl in Cincinnati and supplant the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes as the ‘best in the world.’

Mahomes won his second league MVP last season before winning his second Super Bowl in four years. He also won his second Super Bowl MVP. Mahomes’ Chiefs defeated Burrow’s Bengals in the AFC title game.

Brown said a year ago that the team had begun restructuring finances in order to ink Burrow to a long-term deal. The Bengals cleared more salary cap space when running back Joe Mixon accepted a restructured deal and pay cut this month to stay with the Bengals.

Other things are on hold until Burrow’s deal is done, including a contract for receiver Tee Higgins, who also is eligible for an extension. Star receiver Ja’Marr Chase will be eligible for an extension after this season. Both likely will command salaries that put them among the highest-paid receivers in the league.

‘I don’t know how these pieces are going to fit just yet,’ Brown said. ‘We have a pretty good idea of how much we have to spend and how it’s accounted for in the cap. And we don’t know where these other deals will end up. But we know we will be pressed to fit them all in.’

Burrow can look forward to perhaps the best offensive line during his time with the Bengals. The team signed four-time Pro Bowler Orlando Brown Jr. to play left tackle on a line that was consistent last year until three starters were injured late in the season.

Jonah Williams, a first-round pick in 2019 who has lined up at left tackle for the Bengals in all of his 47 career starts, will compete to be the starting right tackle.

‘This is a good as I’ve felt going into a season,’ offensive coordinator Brian Callahan said.

We didn’t have nightmares,’ writes Lidia Maksymowicz of the 13 months she spent in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, from 1943 to 1945, aged from three to almost five, ‘because nightmares walked with us at every moment. Our lives were the worst nightmare it was possible to imagine’.

This was indeed a living hell. As always when reading a memoir about the Holocaust, you can hardly take in the level of cruelty and depravity that man can inflict on man, let alone on such a small child. This tiny little Belarusian girl — not Jewish, but the daughter of partisans captured by the Germans and loaded into cattle trucks — spent two freezing winters in the children’s barrack at Birkenau.

It was presided over by a female kapo who was herself a deportee and took her own fear out on the terrified children with her whip. There was no kindness, no heat, no washing, no lavatories, hardly any food, and not only the constant fear of being chosen by that quintessence of human evil Dr Josef Mengele for his next experiment, but the frequent reality of it.

Every time she heard Mengele coming into the barrack to choose his ‘guinea pig’ child for the day, Lidia darted away to hide under the lowest bunk against the back wall.

It didn’t always work; many times, Mengele hoicked her out, took her to his laboratory, injected poisons into her to watch their effects and put liquids into her eyes. ‘I was his favourite guinea pig,’ she writes in this devastating memoir.

She sometimes came back to the barrack in a coma, ‘my body as transparent as glass’. But at least Lidia was alive. Other children did not come back.

In an act of great bravery, Lidia’s 22-year-old mother Anna, housed in another barrack, crept 50m along the wall each evening to find Lidia and bring her some raw onion she’d managed to find while doing forced labour outside the camp.

Lidia remembers begging her: ‘Please don’t just leave me the onion, leave me your hands too, to keep me company in the dark.’ But, of course, Anna could not stay; she would have been killed if discovered.

What’s extraordinary is the inner strength that those children somehow found in order to survive. They did not make friends; they didn’t chat. They spent their days on their bunk shelves, rocking silently backwards and forwards, rocking, rocking, ceaselessly.

Lidia discovered a vital weapon: not crying. She didn’t cry when the tattoo needles spiked her skin, giving her the prisoner number 70072; she didn’t cry when Mengele injected her with poisons.

She was not going to give him that satisfaction. ‘Silence,’ she writes, ‘was the only possible response we could give our jailors… I learned to stifle all my feelings… I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t laugh.’

In early 1945, the weary children heard distant explosions. Something was changing. Mengele had stopped coming. ‘Everyone out now!’ shouted an SS man.

Snow ‘settled on our shaven heads, covered our filthy clothes, froze our hearts and froze our blood’. (She’s an extremely vivid writer.) The Russians had arrived. The camp was being liberated.

For the first time in years, a man smiled at her. This was a Russian soldier scarcely able to believe the horrific scene he was encountering.

Now we shift to the second part of this unforgettable book. A woman from the nearby Polish city of Oswiecim said to Lidia, ‘Will you come with me?’ ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Will you be good?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You can guard my geese.’ Thus Lidia’s new life began. She was adopted by a kind, bossy local woman longing for a child of her own.

But where was her biological mother? She had disappeared, or so it seemed. For 15 years, Lidia grew up happily with the ‘mother’ she now called ‘Mama Bronislawa’, making good friends with the local children — she was always the best at hide and seek after those years of practice in the barrack.

In her teens, her friends encouraged her to start searching for her mother. Mama Bronislawa was terrified of losing her, so Lidia assured her she didn’t want to leave — she just wanted to know the truth.

Eventually, in the late 1950s, she received a letter from the Red Cross: ‘Your mother is not dead. She lives in the Soviet Union. She has been looking for you desperately for years and years.’

Her first telegram from her mother reached her when she was aged 19. ‘I was in pieces,’ Lidia admits. ‘I felt betrayed. Why hadn’t she moved Heaven and Earth to find out what had happened to me?’

The Soviet Union was excited by the story of imminent reunion of mother and daughter two years later in 1961: it was good PR, an opportunity to show how the Soviet Union was devoted to its scattered children and wanted them back under its wing.

Cameras flashed as Lidia arrived at Moscow railway station — but her mother fainted, so the media never got its heart-warming reunion photo. Mother and daughter met later that day in a hotel room instead. ‘Luda, Luda, too much time has passed.’

It turned out that Anna had tried everything she could to find her lost daughter. The Soviet authorities had assured her and her husband (reunited after the war) that any surviving children from Birkenau were in Soviet orphanages. Anna had searched every single one, in vain. She had always baked a cake on Lidia’s birthday.

Lidia chose to carry on living in Poland rather than returning to the USSR. ‘I’m not choosing between Mama Bronislawa and Mama Anna,’ Lidia stated. ‘I choose both.’

The best moment of the reunion, she writes, was seeing her two mothers hug each other. Both women, in their different ways, had showed her infinite love and had ultimately saved her life.