Practically speaking, "Jacob has opened many doors for us with
funding sources, media, construction people, everyone," seconds
U.S. National Slavery Museum executive director Vonita W. Foster.
"But he's also been a personal inspiration. When I went to the
island to see his museum, even taxi drivers and waitresses seemed
to know and admire him. He's truly able, as the saying goes, to
walk with kings and still keep his common touch."
"Do you know how he got all that stuff in his museum?" Wilder
interjects. Answer: Not the way most millionaires acquire art
collections, by spreading around money through agents. "He went up
these African rivers himself, for several months, in a canoe! I
said, 'Where'd you put all that priceless stuff, in that little
bitty boat? Where'd you even sleep?' "
"He's a very simple person," Kura Hulanda
president Peter Heinen
agrees. When Dekker travels (which he does eight months a year),
"he goes off to the airport with a backpack. You wouldn't know he
had a penny."
Actually, explains Dekker, as a child growing up in WWII-torn
Holland, he didn't. His father, a middle-class Jewish real estate
developer who went underground, lost his entire fortune -
ironically, to the family of Dekker's mother, who were hiding his
father. "The farmers who hid people didn't do it because they were
humanitarian. They did it for money. After signing over most of his
property to my mother's family, he was labeled a shoplifter by his
in-laws, and my mother consequently hated my father and wanted
nothing to do with me. There was little
food anywhere anyway, and
since I was a sickly child, skinny like a rat, my mother would
always say, 'Oh, I'm not going to waste any food or time on him.
He's not going to last.' "