David Decker's Open Salon Blog

Heartbroken

Mon, 1 Aug 2011 15:08:11 -0400

How easily you get used to complete, unquestioning acceptance. Unalterable kindness. Quietly, they sink into the ocean of a busy life. And sweet comes in countless flavors, too often ignored.

So wrap up the gentle, silky fur of commonplace adoration mixed with the soul of an angel in need, and place it deep, down into your heart. Then forget it dwells there, alone, but patient...loving still.

Years become nothing more than hours and minutes, strung together, one after another, hammering home your ignorance.

Then witness the light of that soul ebb and flicker, weaken to a glow. Still, busy life presses on, easily ignoring the steady drum of tenderness beating next to your heart.

When finally you watch the glow flicker and die and are forced to meet her unwavering stare, you’re at a loss to know.

Where did she go?

Jasmine

Fathers and Sons, Part I of II: Kindertransport

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:06:13 -0400

Otto Decker’s Family, 1962

I know my father loves me. I always have.

Still, there are some childhood memories of feeling distant from him, of wondering who this stranger was in our house. Those feelings are long gone, but it’s odd I had them since he was and still is a good father. No one could call him an absent dad. He did work a lot though, and as a mechanical engineer successfully climbing his way into management, he was away on frequent business trips.

I can find reasons for some of the distance between us then, a few things on my side and a few on his. And there’s always the traditional push and pull of fathers and sons. But there’s one thing that helps put all this into perspective: My father doesn’t have many memories of living with his parents as a child. At the age of five or six, he was sent to a boarding home so he could attend a distant school. And by the time he was eight, his parents sent him even farther away...for good.

Amidst the gathering storm in Germany of September 1930, Ilse Decker gave birth to her second child, a boy named Otto. Her first son, Rolf, had been born a year and a half earlier. Together with her boys and husband Hans, they lived in Biberach, Germany. But life was becoming increasingly difficult for them. With Adolf Hitler firmly in control of the country by the end of 1933, his anti-Semitic ideas were taking hold. That same year there were government-sponsored attempts to remove Jewish children from schools. And just two years later in September 1935, when Otto was only five, Germany passed the Nürnberger Gesetze, the Nuremberg Laws, effectively stripping all Jews of their civil rights and citizenship. Ilse was Jewish, and according to the Jewish religion – and now German law – her children were as well.

And so one of the many heartbreaking decisions Hans and Ilse had to make had practically been made for them. They couldn’t send their children to public schools in Wiesbaden, the town where they now lived. And the nearest Jewish school the boys could attend was The Philanthropin in Frankfurt, which was over thirty miles away. So they found a boarding home for Jewish boys in Frankfurt, the Flersheim-Sichel-Stiftung, and sent their young sons away – for the first time.

When I wonder why there might have been a divide between my younger self and my father I can’t help but remember the instances of innate love. There were many, both big and small. It was him I'd go to as a 5-year old waking up with a stomach ache in the middle of the night, fearing the sick that was about to come. My father, not my mother. He’d gently bring me to the bathroom and rub my head while my body was retching. And afterward, he'd bring a basin into my room and sit next to me on the bed, softly kneading my shoulders until I drifted off to sleep.

Except for a couple Sunday visits from their parents every month, the boys were on their own. Hatred for Jews was spreading, and gangs of brown-shirted Hitler youth often threatened or beat them on their mile and a half walk to school. They found safety in numbers when the older boys accompanied them.

Then, in November of 1938, the plague of anti-Semitism grew violent with Kristallnacht (Crystal Night). For two days, the Nazis attacked Jews and their property, homes and synagogues. At the boarding home, the boys were given a stern warning. On the first night, they were sent to bed and told not to show any light or make any noise, no matter what happened. A frightening night for anyone, let alone an 8-year old boy.

The morning after, police came to their boarding home, arrested the boys’ guardian and took the children of Polish Jews away. The guardian was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, leaving his daughters to care for the remaining children. Hans and Ilse immediately brought their sons home to Wiesbaden. After a week, though, when things had settled, they sent the boys back to Frankfurt to continue attending school.

But Kristallnacht was the unmistakable turning point. Jews now had tangible proof that life was no longer possible in Germany; their growing nightmare was not going to simply fade away like some passing fad. Many sought to leave Germany, but other than permitting the regular trickle of immigration, the doors across Europe, as well as to the United States, were closed.

The British government, however, decided to allow Jewish children from Nazi Germany and the occupied territories into the United Kingdom. This Kindertransport quite literally saved the lives of nearly ten-thousand young souls between December 1938 and September 1939 (the start of World War II). My father and his brother were two of them.

I also recall being seven or eight and having an existential crisis of sorts. I’d figured out that some day I would die – that simply not existing was in my future. Through the tears and the hics of my ragged breathing, I kept repeating, ‘But I don’t want to die’ plaintively – as though someone could simply say, ‘Okay’. I remember my father’s frustration at first, his not being able to make it better with truthful explanations. But I also recall that after he stopped trying to answer the unanswerable, he began rubbing my back while I sat like a puddle on his lap. The tide turned with my ear pressed into his chest; I could hear his heartbeat, feel the warmth of his body. How would it feel to go through that without a parent?

From Frankfurt, the guardian’s eldest daughter managed to make contact with the British representatives for James de Rothschild, who agreed to take thirty of the youngest boys from the home and care for them. But the price would be high. According to the conditions for transport imposed by England, not only couldn’t the parents leave with their children, they all had to unconditionally agree to send them away to fates unknown.

Though they couldn’t have realized it at the time, Ilse and Hans likely saved their sons’ lives by agreeing. Many parents couldn’t bring themselves to do it.

Preparations were made; the Rothschild’s lawyer and a businessman signed agreements with the parents, the guardians and the Nazis, and by March of 1939 about thirty of the boys from the Frankfurt boarding home were prepared to travel to the United Kingdom. Ilse and Hans spent more time than usual with their children that month, though my father doesn’t recall much conversation about their future. It didn’t make much sense to him, but he and his brother received some new clothes to wear and posed for pictures with their parents. To Otto, it seemed like an adventure.

Rolf, Otto and Ilse Decker, Frankfurt, March 1939

To his parents it was anything but. At this point in the Kindertransport, the Nazis had decided to put an end to the gut-wrenching emotional scenes taking place in train stations across the country when Jewish parents sent their children away. They wanted to ensure the image of Germany wasn’t tarnished in the world press. So fathers and mothers were forbidden from accompanying their children to the stations and seeing them off. The Decker family said goodbye and parted ways at the boys’ boarding home in Frankfurt.

It wasn’t until much later in their lives when Otto and Rolf learned that, after saying goodbye to their children, Ilse and Hans drove to a point along the railway, somewhere on the Rhine between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. They knew which train their sons were on and stopped there by the road to say their final goodbyes and watch helplessly as the boys were taken from them once again, perhaps forever.

- To Be Continued in Part II -

Otto Decker, German Travel Papers, March 1939

Courtney Cox in ‘Cougar Town’

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:06:35 -0400

ABC’s tag line for promoting this one:

‘Two Words, ME OW!’

Ever since this one came up on our competitor’s reel (here @work), there’s been some debate about who would watch this and whether it will become popular. Yeah, the word ‘Cougar’s already been done to death (and yeah, lots of people don’t like the term). Plus, of course, whether anyone watches the show will depend on, well, how good it is. Still, I wonder. Would you tune in?

Truth: I did laugh (more than once) watching this promo.

Good News for a Change – Data’s Here

Sun, 7 Jun 2009 19:06:55 -0400

Um, no, not this guy:

This stuff:

Plain old...data. I like data. You should, too. Let’s spread the word. The government just gave us a whole bunch of it and they’re giving us more soon.

This is President Obama making good on some of his promised government transparency. In March, he named Vivek Kundra the nation’s Chief Information Officer. You can read about his work, along with that of Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government here.

The good news is that at the end of May, amidst the sturm and drang of all the impossibly difficult issues these days, and without much of a media spotlight, Kundra, Noveck and the Obama administration unveiled data.gov.

What’s the big deal?

Well it’s not big yet – they’ve only just begun with 50 data feeds. But as a May 25th New York Times editorial says, this month (June) there should be 240,000 additional ones, with more on the way.

Firstly, it’s our data. We, the taxpayers – we own it. A lot of the stuff that the entire constellation of government agencies collect and organize – from the big ones, like the DoD (Department of Defense), the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and the FBI (um, you know that one) down to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is now or will soon be hooked up.

And secondly, the sky’s not even the limit for the type of data and its uses. There’s good stuff out there. Information that was difficult if not impossible to find before should now become easier to not only find, but also use. Researchers, scientists rejoice! Home buyers wary of earthquakes and faults, take heed. Weather shoppers, take heart! And techno geeks in general, well...geek on.

They’ve made this web-based data aggregation site compatible for programmers and developers to create widgets for embedding into websites or applications, iPhones or TVs, enabling all sorts of fascinating things.

Listen to Vivek Kundra himself on a great ‘All Things Considered’ NPR story that aired May 29th.

Here’s a tiny example: I could take my love of meteorology and build my own personal webpage for local weather by plugging into the National Weather Service’s various feeds and building an interface that will update itself automatically, complete with maps, radar, temperatures, precipitation, alarms, yada yada yada. Their KML/KMZ files look great when they open on Google Earth. (See below for some recent precipitation/marine layer radar images over San Diego and Coronado). I can fly in or out of my block, town or state, tracking any kind of weather I want. You had to pay professional fees to AccuWeather, Inc. to get close to doing that before – and I’m not sure it’s as customizable. This is much better than what’s available on current websites, the weather channel or those new Digital TV between-station channels.

Of course, I wouldn’t expect to plug into the Pentagon’s live-tracking of Russian nuclear powered submarines anytime soon, but it sounds like the intention is to work hard at making as much as possible available to everyone.

Plus, since it’s ours, Beth Noveck wants our feedback. They’re having a ‘brainstorming’ session that’s open to all of us through June 19th. They want to make government more transparent, responsive and (go figure) efficient. And they think some creative new application or process that will make use of everything the government has its hands in is more likely to come from the public than the old-guard. Got an idea for how to improve government and what it does for us? Think technology can help? Go on! Send your ideas in. Lots of people and groups are participating and you can follow the Open Government Blog as Beth Noveck and others chronicle their progress and some of the more interesting ideas being submitted.

Come on. Let’s take back our government!

Well...at least it’s a start.

The Onion: Why the New Star Trek Movie Fails

Thu, 7 May 2009 01:05:36 -0400

As you may have heard the latest Star Trek movie hits theaters this Friday. But you haven’t seen this new ‘reboot’ version covered until you’ve seen it covered by The Onion:

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'