Not like the films

No big deal. Not when compared with blood and gore. But two days ago at 1.30am* or thereabouts my sleep was shattered by the downstairs bay window breaking, spraying the room with shards of splintered glass.
This is what we deduced had happened:
There were three of them. One was in the getaway car. One (or maybe two) had climbed the back garden wall and taken a spade leaning against a wall. He (or they) went around to the front of the house, through the open gate, turning immediately left by the dustbins to the front of the house by the bay window. He/they would have been visible from both up and down the street and from all the upstairs windows of the houses opposite. Using the spade they broke the window, stepped in, supporting themselves on the lid of the scanner and, stretching between the two printers, grabbed the closed laptop from the desk. Attached speakers would have crashed to the floor. The mouse pulled through the window remained disconnected and dangling.
By the time I reached the room I heard the screech of car tyres. A neighbour across the road saw two young people. He said: "they must have been young to move that fast". They were running to the car parked at the corner which sped off with a screech of tyres. The neighbour opposite the side of our house also saw them get into the car and thought there might have been a 'v' in the registration.
The 999 police arrived quite quickly. The officer told me they were after the laptop and that it might have been better not to have left it on the desk in front of the bay window.
Good things and bad things have happened since.
I wish I had backed up my laptop. I had just bought some discs to do this.

*a neighbour has since told me that it was 3.30am

Bridge of understanding, ethic of disagreement, etiquette and high manners

I was going all the way.
I was on the 98 bus and its terminus was Red Lion Square.
At Conway Hall there was to be a meeting; a Dialogue with Islam - Is Islam a Threat to the West?
We had not travelled very far down the Edgware Road. In fact we were still some way from the Lebanese restaurants and the gatherings of men smoking their hubble-bubble pipes, when a young woman leapt onto the bus clutching a crutch. It was one of those that allowed the forearm to rest in a half cylinder. She showed a ticket to the driver. He said it was out of date. She told him that she was disabled. He ignored what she said. She, in a matey sort of way, suggested: Go on, take me just as far as Marble Arch. You can see I'm disabled. He replied: you must buy a ticket.
Are you blind? Can't you see I ain't fit?
You must have a proper ticket.
I don't have the money.
It wasn't crowded on the bus. About six or so of us downstairs and I assume not too many on the upper deck. Impatience began to murmur. The driver switched off the engine.
What did I think? I thought she was probably trying it on. She probably had a little bit of money but now felt she couldn't back down, but neither could the driver. I took a decision. I had heard someone mention one pound fifty. I opened my wallet. I had pound coins but not a fifty pence. Thankfully, for the sake of self respect, I didn't hesitate too long for fifty pee. Here you are, I said, giving the young woman two pounds. She somehow acknowledged the gift with a gesture somewhat short of a thank you and immediately launched at the driver: see I have got the money.
I can't issue tickets you have to buy them from the machine.
(There are ticket machines by all the bus stops in Central London. Only outside the central area can you buy your ticket on the bus. Our bus had come from outside the central area.)
You'll drive off.
I can't wait.
I'm not getting off the bus. You'll drive off.
I offered, in an unconvincing way, to get off and buy the ticket. It wasn't convincing because I was some way down the bus and couldn't easily get passed the woman with the crutch.
You see. He's offered to buy me a ticket.
I can't wait.
I hesistated. I retreated.
For fuck's sake, said a blur of a woman, sell her a fucking ticket.
I can't.
Yes you fucking can. I am going to be late. I want my eighty pee back and I'll fucking walk.
I can't give refunds. The driver sounded very calm and resigned.
I thought: eighty pee? - now I hadn't used money to pay for my fare. I had used my "touch-and-go" Oyster pre-pay card. Eighty pee? Where had I got one pound fifty from? She had taken my two pounds!
I want your number. Demanded the woman issuing expletives. She moved between the woman with the crutch and the driver's cab and peered through the perspex protective window. Don't you have a number? He doesn't have a number.
Give her a ticket. Someone shouted from behind me.
I can't sell tickets and I don't give refunds.
Part of the reason for my giving her the money was for us to get moving, but I seem to have made matters worse.
The machine's jammed, said the woman with the crutch. Bad move that; blaming the machine.
How do you know? asked the driver.
For fuck's sake I'm walking. She was gone - the swearing blur of a woman who I presume was a paying passenger.
Just now a calm and dignified woman approached the bus and was about to board. The woman with the crutch thrust the two pounds at her and said: buy me a ticket love?
Of course.
She bought a ticket from the 'jammed machine', boarded the bus and handed the ticket to the woman with the crutch.
You see I've got a ticket now.
The driver started the reluctant-sounding engine.
The calm woman handed the excess money to the crutch-woman - one pound. Hang on, I thought, don't these machine's give change? But I refused to dwell further on twenty pence.
We were on our way. I feared the driver might turn erratic. In fact he drove disturbingly smoothly.
The woman with the crutch passed me by and blessed me. She then began talking with another passenger: If you ain't got an addess you can't get a disabled ticket. You need an address. I ain't got an address. That's my problem. She paused and turned to look at me. Thank you mate. God bless you. After two stops she got up to stand by the exit and started punching and jabbing at the stop button. You could hear it buzzing in the driver's cab.
I am just winding him up. She confided, smiling at me. I said: don't do that. We're staying on the bus.
She laughed and hopped off.
I was still in time for the meeting.
BBC Newsnight's Diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, was chairing the meeting.
There was talk of the need for a bridge of understanding. an ethic of disagreement and of etiquette and high manners. The meeting was calm and polite and I only found Charles Moore former editor of the Daily Telegraph slightly frightening.

First principles: thinking things through #3 - Truth, lies and stories

We have all this in common, those of us alive, right now.
Our lives will be brief and individual. No one can have the same life as someone else. No matter how twin-like we are, we can never be twinned in space and time.
Our lives share something else in common and that is the living of it. We all try to distinguish the universal, or the almost universal (the things we all have in common, or almost in common) from the local and particular (our unique experience - our pain, our life).
And there is no way of sharing this, other than by telling someone; by word of mouth, by writing, by gesture, by mathematics, by any means that we have. Let us call the 'this' we are trying to share, a story. For these 'stories' are just the telling of something to someone. There are stories that tell of events that can be reproduced and are verifiable. They can foretell the future and predict the consequences of actions yet to be. This is mainly science.
And then there are the stories of experience which are personal and might be true, by which I mean that they have actually happened to you, although in the telling some lies inevitably creep in; or they might be false. The false stories might be intended to mislead (fraud, political spin, self-serving history, squeamish misrepresentations) or to enlighten (fables, parables, homilies, advice).
Those intended to enlighten may mislead and those intended to mislead may enlighten.
For some people this will be too much, too unsatisfactory, too many layers. But surprisingly this does not matter. The important thing is that the stories build; the stories have built. The false ones, the lies, the science, the fictions, the fables and the facts. And it doesn't matter whether you choose to think about it or not.
For you are living it. The 'it' being this moment. This moment in this particular part of a vast universe. This particular part that you now occupy and that you experience in your unique fashion, courtesy of the stories of others.

My Israeli uncle, said he thought I might want to read this..

On my recent trip to Israel I visited with family and we talked and ate together.
A favourite uncle, Yurko Marko, told me that he had been interviewed for Yad Vashem to provide a testimony of his Holocaust experience. He also told me that some time ago he had written down some memories which my aunt had translated into English. He gave me a photocopy of the few handwritten sheets.
The text was all in block capitals, as if to be read by a child.

I was ten years old in 1938 and could not grasp nor understand the events in Slovakia, nor the enormity and depth of the persecution of the Jews that led up to The Holocaust.
My memories till 1938 are those of an only child, somewhat spoilt,mischevious, enjoying a happy childhood with my contemporaries. In winter - 0f skating on the frozen stream (Trnávka); in summer - outings in the surrounding hills; in autumn - the grape harvest in nearby vineyards and the preparation of fruit and jams.

One of the first new rulings forbade Jews to attend secondary schools. Various other restrictions followed one another. By 1940 the leaders of East Slovakia outdid themselves in their zeal by ordering the Jews to wear a yellow arm-band, well before the general edict to wear the Star of David in the whole of Slovakia.
Jews were not allowed to live in houses on the main street, had to give up their valuables, and there was a curfew on their movements from sunset to sunrise.

Under cover of raising silkworms (whose silk was used for making parachutes for the German airforce) we continued to meet at the "Betar" youth club. At that time some older boys and girls left for places that seemed to be safer the Sečovce.

The wider family lost contact. Most of them were among the deportees. Some of them in hiding. My parents and I, after a short stay in a nearby town, got to Bratislava (Pressburg). There, in May 1943 we received a postcard from my uncle Dr Lazar Geller, who was the doctor for a big transport from Sečovce a year earlier. The card from Majdanek made clear to us the fate of the deportees. He wrote that his wife Tlona (my father's sister) and their little son, Felix
were with a member of the family who died many years earlier. That confirmed to us that they were no longer alive. Similar information was received by others.

At that time my father was working at the Ministry of Finance (having obtained false papers proving his being a half-Jew) with the help of a non-Jewish friend. That lasted about a year, and then, on the warning and advice of the same friend, my father stayed at home on sick leave.

One evening, on 20th December 1944, when I returned from work, I found my father alone. He told me that my mother had been taken by Slovak nazis. Later we were told that as she did not have the necessary identification papers, she maintained in vain that she was not Jewish. My father and I hoped that she would be released, as had happened two months earlier. Having nowhere to go , my father and I stayed at home and waited. During that night the "hlinka" guard returned and took us both. We were interrogated and our denials of being Jews did not work this time. There we met up with my mother and the three of us were sent to a camp in Slovakia.

After a month in January 1945, we were separated from my mother and never saw her again. My father and I were deported to the concentration camp in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen. Later we were sent to a smaller camp, Berlin-Lichtenrade. We worked 16-18 hours a day in sub-zero temperatures, clearing the streets of Berlin after aerial bombardments by the Allies. We worked on the well-known "Unter Den Linden" and not less famous, Wilhelmstrasse, Hitler's residence and bunker.

After about a month, around fifty of us were transferred to a moored ship on the canal of Spreenhagen. We worked on a building site, erecting houses for the S.S. At that time light planes of the Russian airforce were constantly attacking the surroundings. We were exhausted physically owing to dreadful conditions, and very poor food, beatings and other maltreatment.

One day, when the tempo of my work did not satisy our 17-18 year-old S.S. guard , he ordered me to stand by a stone wall. He called my father to stand near him, and to frighten both of us, began shooting all around me.

At the end of April 1945, we were taken back to Sachsenhausen to work in an aircraft factory. At the begining of May, under chaotic conditions, we were ordered to march out of the camp and began "The Hunger March". Anyone who was unable to walk and who stopped at the roadside was immediately shot by the accompanying S.S. We marched five to a row. My father and his friend were supporting me to keep walking. Several times I begged them to leave me to my fate.
After five days of marching, we were give a boiled potato each.
We reached a big forest near the town of Wittstock. The following morning we realised our S.S. guards were gone, and we were guarded by old-Wehrmacht soldiers. Two of them were holding a placard "WIR ALTE WAFFEN SIND DIE NEUEN WAFFEN" (We old weapon are the new weapon), obviously a reference to the announcement that a new miraculous weapon would save Germany. Slowly these guards, too, disappeared.

The following day we were reached by the Canadian Red Cross, who distributed food packages to us. Many people weak from exhaustion and malnutrition, threw themselves on the food and some died as a result of eating amounts of unsuitably heavy, fatty food. My father sat himself on the box for the five of us, and gave us to eat bit by bit.

Out of nowhere two of my schoolfriends materialised, Mickey Samet and Alex Weinberger. They had heard from others about us and brought us some hot water concoction which tasted like the best soup in the world!
All of us were broken - but alive.

For many years I tried not to remember these terrible events, but as time passes the awareness of indescribable tragedy and catastrophe grows.

There is no consolation nor comfort.

We continue to bear the pain throughout our lives.

Yurko Marko (Milder)

The Encouragement of...good humor

The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the fundamental governing document of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was written by John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Bowdoin. The constitution was adopted in 1780 and is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world.


Chapter V, Section II. The Encouragement of Literature, etc.
Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.