Decisions, decisions - The Jewish Standard

For a long time I regretted that, when we chose an apartment, it was not at Hackensack’s 300 Prospect Ave., which is (or was, till its parking garage collapsed a few weeks ago) “pet-friendly.”

I just did not like the way the rooms were laid out – there was not enough wall space for our bookcases, etc.

And yet, though we decided against that building, I kept thinking about all those cats and dogs, happily at home in Hackensack.

Except, of course, now they’re not. The tenants are (temporarily) homeless and so are their pets.

I was speaking about this – how sometimes a decision you think was wrong turns out to be right – with a friend the other day and he mentioned a book called “A Passover in Rome.”

Self-published by Henry Welch, according to its website it mostly “describes the World War II experiences of Aunt Rose, my mother Ghenia, and myself. In 1939, we were Polish Jews that had not adopted Soviet citizenship. As such, we became prisoners of war, and were shipped off to a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp.”

My friend, who had read the book, pointed out that the Polish Jews who had indeed adopted Soviet citizenship were allowed to settle in a town on the Poland-USSR border – and when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, those Jews – who had made what they thought was the right decision – were slaughtered. Meanwhile the Jews who had been sent to Siberia, according to Welch, “were freed, but obviously could not return.” He and his family “eventually traveled to Kazakhstan and other exotic places, where death rates were almost as high as they were in the parts of the Soviet Union that were at war with Germany. Eventually, at the end of the war, we found our way back to Germany and eventually on to Israel.”

Go know, as they say in our country….

RKB

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