Excuse me if I wander a little today — and if it bothers you, don't blame me, blame Vladimir Putin. After all, I didn't decide to invade Ukraine, the place my grandfather fled almost 140 years ago. I suspect, in fact, that I was an adult before I even knew such a place existed. If I could be accused of anything, maybe you could say that, for most of my life, I evaded Ukraine.
All of us are, in some fashion, now living inside the shockwaves from the Russian president's grotesque invasion and from a war taking place close to the heart of Europe. I was not quite one year old in May 1945 when World War II in Europe ended, along with years of carnage unparalleled on this planet. Millions of Russians, six million Jews, God knows how many French, British, Germans, Ukrainians and … well, the list just goes on and on … died and how many more were wounded or displaced from their homes and lives. Given Adolf Hitler's Germany, we're talking about nothing short of a hell on Earth. That was Europe from the late 1930s until 1945.
