Although I’ve been reveling in Trump’s upward momentum in the polls, I have had a constant sense of “déjà vu all over again.” Democrat perfidiousness, Republican cluelessness, the UN being evil, China plotting, the world’s economic fragility...day after day, the news is the same. But sometimes, wonderful things happen. I had wonderful things happen twice in the past month, and both times because the internet lived up to its original promise.

For context, I need to tell you a little bit about my mother.

My mother came from a mixed marriage. Her father came from a very upper-class assimilated German Jewish background, while her mother came from a very upper-class German Lutheran background. Neither was religious, which may explain how they came to be married in 1920.

At the time, they were living in Holland, but, in the fallout from WWI, my grandfather was unable to find work. However, for Europeans in need of work, the colonies were always an option, so Oma and Opa (the German words for grandmother and grandfather) headed to the Dutch East Indies, aka Batavia, aka today’s Indonesia.

Image: Women in Tjideng’s infirmary recovering after their liberation. Public domain.

My mother was born in Djakarta in 1923. There was a certain gypsy quality to the family, though, with my mom and her sister raised in Holland and Austria before following their father, an ardent Zionist, to British-mandate Palestine.

Mom and my aunt adapted well to life in Tel Aviv. Mom even made a special best friend, Niura, German was the lingua franca, but all the young people became fluent in Hebrew, a language that was again conversational for the first time in 2,000 years.

There was not a lot of money in Tel Aviv, but, ironically, war made things better because the fighting in North Africa saw the British military flooding into British-mandate Palestine. They needed housing and office building for the troops and Opa was one of the architects they hired.

Opa became quite chummy with the British officers. They confided to him that they didn’t believe they could hold out against Rommel. In that case, every Jew in the Mandate would be slaughtered. Opa decided to send his daughters to Batavia, as far from the war as possible.

The girls arrived in early 1941, and all was lovely. Then, a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese conquered the entire Malayan Peninsula (the Philippines, Batavia, Malaya, etc.), and the good times ended. Civilians trapped on those islands became prisoners of war, a situation that lasted until Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrender.

Mom and my aunt were in two prison camps: Tjideng and Adek. Food was scarce, disease was rampant, and abuse was constant. Kenichi Sone, the commandant of Tjideng, was the only civilian concentration camp commander in the Pacific theater to be executed for war crimes.

Wikipedia’s essay on Tjideng summarizes things well: “The Japanese camps were described by ex-prisoners as concentration camps or passive extermination camps; due to the large-scale and consistent withholding of food and medicine, large numbers of prisoners died over time.” The Japanese, incidentally, never paid reparations.

When the war ended, my mom and aunt were repatriated to British-mandate Palestine, where they took up with their old friends and got on with life. They got married and served in the IDF as cartographers during the Israeli War of Independence while their husbands were in the infantry.

For reasons that none of their children quite understand, the sisters and their husbands decided to come to America, where they raised their families. Mom and my aunt lived to see their grandchildren, but both passed away a few years ago.

So, where does the internet come in?

Well, remember I told you about my mom’s bestie, Niura? A month ago, Niura’s daughter and I, who had met during two trips I made to Israel in 1980 and 1982, found each other through Facebook. That, after all, was Facebook’s original purpose before it got into the business of political censorship.

And then, yesterday, I got a wonderful email from a reader in Australia in response to my post about the recent anti-nuclear Nobel Peace Prize. In the post, I pointed out that those who are here because America dropped the bombs on Japan have reason to be grateful for nuclear weapons. Because I briefly mentioned Mom’s wartime experience, this man wrote to tell me that his mother-in-law had also been interned in Adek and that she, unlike my mother and aunt, is still alive and sharp as a tack at 100.

Today I heard from his mother-in-law and, miracle of miracles, she knew my mom and aunt well! My sister, my cousins, and I have all had our minds blown.

I mention these stories because they’re a lot more interesting to me today than politics and because they remind us that the internet’s early adopters were excited because of the internet’s promise. Naively, we didn’t imagine tech oligarchs and governments using it to constrain liberty. Instead, we saw the world shrinking in the best way possible as human networks stretched throughout communities and across the globe.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could wrestle control from the tyrants in business and the government and return the Internet to the people where it belongs?