6 year old, Pavel Averbukh, was fortunate to escape the port city of Odessa, Ukraine before 5000 civilians, including most of his family and friends, were slaughtered by the ruthless militia invading from the north. The year was 1941, and the invading soldiers were German, not Russian. Pavel is now 86 and lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Little Odessa. Little Odessa has the highest concentration of Russian immigrants in the western hemisphere. I have been reading a WW II book entitled, "A Higher Call", which was recommended to me by a close friend. The book has made it painfully obvious how little I know, or how much I have forgotten, about World War II. I found a docu-series on Netflix that helped me quickly fill in some of the empty spaces. It has been fascinating (and terrifying) to see the similarities between what was happening in the 1940's and what is happening now in the exact same area of the world. I know that all of us are being inconvenienced right now by the increased fuel prices resulting from what is happening overseas. I don't like it either. But I think it would do us all some good to think about those who have been forced from their homes into shelters and the streets, separated from family, and even killed over the past several weeks. Their inconvenience seems somewhat higher.
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