Writers and Readers discussion

It's Release Day for The Decision, a novel that tries to explain an unlikely, and possibly lifesaving, decision.

It is autumn of 1938, in Hitler’s Germany, in the capital city of Berlin, perhaps a month before the devastating anti-Jewish violence of Kristallnacht. Three Jewish boys have received new bicycles — because their family has, with difficulty, arranged to leave Germany, and they will not be allowed to take much cash with them. Two of the boys are experienced bicyclists, but the youngest is less so. On a downtown street, the latter’s lack of skill causes an accident. The traffic policeman on the scene wears, just visible under his uniform, the brown shirt of a member of Hitler's storm troopers.

It's no spoiler -- because this scene begins the novel -- to say that this Nazi policeman let the boys go, even ordering them to "DISAPPEAR."

The boys were my father and uncles.

Why did the policeman make the choices he did? What life did he live that led him to make them? The novel imagines possible answers to those questions.

https://www.amazon.com/Decision-Novel...