(to appear in the April issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine)
When Fred Kahn looks back upon his early years, growing up in a Jewish household in Germany at the dawn of the Second World War, certain scenes spring to his mind. He remembers neighborhood children riding on sleighs, and the blare of the trumpets coming from the nearby Biebrich castle. But no memory is more vivid than the eve of October 1, 1938, when he left the town of Wiesbaden and the home of his aunt and uncle—the only parents he had ever known.
Kahn spent his childhood hiding in Belgium, and moved to America after the War. He graduated from SAIS in 1963, with an M.A. in Advanced International Studies and a fiancée. After 30 years of civil service, Kahn says it was his childhood memories that motivated him to give back to society. In September, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich appointed him to the new Task Force to Implement Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance Education. But Kahn attributes all of his success to his dramatic escape, at age 5, from Nazi Germany.
In the middle of that fateful October night, Kahn’s Uncle Siegfried awakened him and told him to put on his best suit. The sleepy boy was taken out to the porch of the house he had lived in for four years, ever since his biological parents and older brother had fled to Belgium. The night before, when the Munich Agreement was signed, Germany gained the political momentum that would eventually lead to world war. When Kahn’s parents heard to news, they called Siegfried with one urgent message: Get the boy out of Germany. Kahn still remembers what was said on that porch, under the full moon: “My uncle told me I was about to go on a big trip.”
Siegfried took him to a Christian German, Maria, who would accompany him to the German-Belgian border. But first, Siegfried took Maria aside and gave her his most valued possession: a gold pocket watch. “He gave it to her on the condition that if he didn’t survive,” Kahn says, “she would make sure I would get it.” Maria took the boy by tram to the border—to no-man’s land. “They assumed that nobody would pay attention to me,” Kahn explains, “but when I arrived there they wouldn’t let me in because I had no papers—nothing.” While the officers made phone calls, he could see his family calling to him from the other side. “My father was yelling ‘C’est mon fils!’—That’s my son!” he recalls, “but of course I didn’t know who he was.” Eventually, the five-year-old was admitted as a political refugee.
Within six weeks, Siegfried and his wife, Rosa, had been deported to concentration camps, never to be seen again. Kahn and his parents, using the old identity papers of a Catholic family, survived the rest of the war in Belgium, storing their valuables in friends’ basements and moving every six months to avoid being listed on the registry of Jewish families. When the Germans left Belgium in 1944, the Kahns were finally able to go back to their home. “I ran into my old friends, kids on the street,” he recalls, “and they couldn’t believe I was still alive.”
Kahn moved to the United States at 19, and was quickly drafted to the U.S. Army. After his military service, he attended the University of Maryland, and in 1960 he received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at SAIS. Kahn sat with fellow classmate Madeleine Albright in the popular “Wide Wide World” course, and took part in off-the-record lounge sessions with government VIPs like Director of the CIA Allen Dulles, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. After graduating in 1963, Kahn was recruited by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity to launch Job Corps. He worked as a political economist for the Department of Labor until his retirement in1992.
His childhood experience and lifetime commitment to civil service made Kahn an ideal member of Maryland’s new Task Force to Implement Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance Education. Kahn says the mission of the group is to advise the state University System on the creation of workshops for how to promote tolerance and sensitivity when teaching Holocaust history. The 13-member group’s first meeting was in December, and they plan to submit a report to the governor in 2007.
Today, Fred Kahn still treasures his uncle’s gold watch. He says his story gives life lessons that apply to everybody, not just Jews. Tolerance education is crucial, he says, “so that you learn not to pick up a gun just because someone is different from you.” Kahn shares his story by moderating a Yahoo! internet group, called Remember the Holocaust, for about one hundred members from around the world. “It is my major hobby now,” he says, “and an education in itself.”
1.31.2006
1.26.2006
New Clip
Read ya some giant earthquake business:
http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/ARTICLES/earthquake2.asp
http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/ARTICLES/earthquake2.asp
1.19.2006
May Spring Bring Hope
(soon to be published in the Hopkins School of Nursing Magazine….and no, writing about death and kids is NOT fun.)
From the January day six-year old Lucas Livingston was diagnosed with leukemia, to a time three months later when his body rejected his father’s transplanted bone marrow, his family and caregivers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center had but one resolve: treat to cure. But in the next two months of fighting, Lucas’ condition only got worse. His father Gordon Livingston, in his memoir Only Spring, recalls spending the last 11 days in intensive care, watching his son fade in and out of consciousness. “When your child dies,” says the Hopkins-trained psychiatrist, “it’s just an inconceivable loss. It’s not the order things are supposed to go in, and people have no preparation for this.”
Dr. Livingston never once lost hope in the five-month ordeal, but fears too many of his son’s doctors and nurses did. “If anything, the doctors were afraid to be hopeful,” he says. “But it wasn’t helpful to us to see them dragging in on rounds like funeral directors.”
That was in 1992. Since then, Hopkins has taken many strides to give better care to its dying patients, and especially its young ones. “Sometimes people think that when we start speaking about palliative care it means we’ve given up hope,” says Dr. Cynda Rushton, Johns Hopkins associate professor of nursing and Program Director of Harriet Lane Compassionate Care, Hopkins’ pediatric palliative care program. “But instead of focusing on the death, we want to help them to live as well as they can, for as long as possible.”
In the fall of 2004, Rushton and her colleagues brought together more than 40 healthcare professionals and parents who have lost their children at the Maryland Pediatric Care Summit at the SON. A detailed report of the Summit, which tackled problems noted in both Hopkins patient surveys and national data, was published this September. The participants discussed making palliative care more family-centered, improving systems of care and education, and changing state financing guidelines so families don’t have to choose between end-of-life treatments and skilled nursing. Also discussed was the construction of a new Children’s Center, with all private rooms, to give healing spaces for families to gather while a child is dying.
Some problems are specific to children. In order to receive hospice services, for instance, patients have to be expected to die within a six-month time period. But as Rushton explains, “children’s diseases are usually not that predictable.” This regulatory barrier prevents some families from receiving the benefits of hospice until close to the child’s death. Ideally, Rushton says these specialized services could be integrated with curative treatments from the time of diagnosis.
The most noticeable progress at Hopkins has been educating doctors and nurses in compassionate communication and decision making. “Everybody involved in the child’s treatment has a responsibility to have these skills,” Rushton says. To this end, on March 12-14 the Children’s Center will co-sponsor an intensive training program for professionals, focusing on how healthcare providers can work together with parents in these emotionally draining situations.
Dr. Livingston agrees this caregiver education is desperately needed, as the pessimism of even one individual can make the entire experience more painful. “We had one nurse in the PICU who actually told us: ‘if I thought of them as children I couldn’t work here,’” he says, “but then we had other nurses who wept with us.”
“Those who work everyday with dying kids just need more help in the way of training,” he says, “to know what things work with parents and what don’t.” Indeed, with the continued efforts at Hopkins to improve the quality of palliative care, dying children and their families may soon feel the hope of spring.
From the January day six-year old Lucas Livingston was diagnosed with leukemia, to a time three months later when his body rejected his father’s transplanted bone marrow, his family and caregivers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center had but one resolve: treat to cure. But in the next two months of fighting, Lucas’ condition only got worse. His father Gordon Livingston, in his memoir Only Spring, recalls spending the last 11 days in intensive care, watching his son fade in and out of consciousness. “When your child dies,” says the Hopkins-trained psychiatrist, “it’s just an inconceivable loss. It’s not the order things are supposed to go in, and people have no preparation for this.”
Dr. Livingston never once lost hope in the five-month ordeal, but fears too many of his son’s doctors and nurses did. “If anything, the doctors were afraid to be hopeful,” he says. “But it wasn’t helpful to us to see them dragging in on rounds like funeral directors.”
That was in 1992. Since then, Hopkins has taken many strides to give better care to its dying patients, and especially its young ones. “Sometimes people think that when we start speaking about palliative care it means we’ve given up hope,” says Dr. Cynda Rushton, Johns Hopkins associate professor of nursing and Program Director of Harriet Lane Compassionate Care, Hopkins’ pediatric palliative care program. “But instead of focusing on the death, we want to help them to live as well as they can, for as long as possible.”
In the fall of 2004, Rushton and her colleagues brought together more than 40 healthcare professionals and parents who have lost their children at the Maryland Pediatric Care Summit at the SON. A detailed report of the Summit, which tackled problems noted in both Hopkins patient surveys and national data, was published this September. The participants discussed making palliative care more family-centered, improving systems of care and education, and changing state financing guidelines so families don’t have to choose between end-of-life treatments and skilled nursing. Also discussed was the construction of a new Children’s Center, with all private rooms, to give healing spaces for families to gather while a child is dying.
Some problems are specific to children. In order to receive hospice services, for instance, patients have to be expected to die within a six-month time period. But as Rushton explains, “children’s diseases are usually not that predictable.” This regulatory barrier prevents some families from receiving the benefits of hospice until close to the child’s death. Ideally, Rushton says these specialized services could be integrated with curative treatments from the time of diagnosis.
The most noticeable progress at Hopkins has been educating doctors and nurses in compassionate communication and decision making. “Everybody involved in the child’s treatment has a responsibility to have these skills,” Rushton says. To this end, on March 12-14 the Children’s Center will co-sponsor an intensive training program for professionals, focusing on how healthcare providers can work together with parents in these emotionally draining situations.
Dr. Livingston agrees this caregiver education is desperately needed, as the pessimism of even one individual can make the entire experience more painful. “We had one nurse in the PICU who actually told us: ‘if I thought of them as children I couldn’t work here,’” he says, “but then we had other nurses who wept with us.”
“Those who work everyday with dying kids just need more help in the way of training,” he says, “to know what things work with parents and what don’t.” Indeed, with the continued efforts at Hopkins to improve the quality of palliative care, dying children and their families may soon feel the hope of spring.
1.11.2006
When night is almost done
When night is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It’s time to smooth the hair
And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.
-Emily Dickinson
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It’s time to smooth the hair
And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.
-Emily Dickinson
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