last word
David Lee Preston
CONTRIBUTES TO HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE
JARRAD SAFFREN | STAFF WRITER
Photo by Ronda Goldfein
O n April 30, 1981, two years
aft er Congress declared
April 28 and 29 to be
the Days of Remembrance of the
Victims of the Holocaust, Halina
Wind Preston, a Holocaust survivor,
was interviewed by Elma Andrews of
WHYY-TV in Delaware.

Th ey were at the Holocaust monu-
ment in Freedom Plaza in downtown
Wilmington, where two years earlier
Wind Preston had addressed a crowd
of 150 people at the monument’s ded-
ication. During a news report, Andrews
asked Wind Preston if the Shoah
could happen again. Her answer,
according to her son, David Lee
Preston, was “chilling.”
“Absolutely,” she said.

“And what we are afraid about (is)
that while there is still the blueprint
for the old genocide, someone might
very well use it and plan a second
genocide,” she added.

“And, as I mentioned, the victims
may be just about anybody,” the sur-
vivor concluded.

Wind Preston died the year aft er
that interview. But her warning con-
tinues to motivate her son today.

David Lee Preston, a Philadelphia
resident and B’nai Abraham Chabad
member, spent his career at Th e
Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN.com and
other news outlets, writing and editing
the fi rst draft of history. But it is his
personal story that has led to perhaps
his best and most important work.

He wrote three cover stories for the
Inquirer’s Sunday Magazine about his
parents’ Holocaust experiences. His
father, George Preston, was also a sur-
vivor, of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

And Lee Preston continues to orga-
nize a lecture series, Th e Halina Wind
Preston Memorial Lecture on the
Holocaust, which adds other Holocaust
experiences to our historical memory.

Th e next lecture will be the fi rst one
David Lee Preston holds up his father’s Buchenwald uniform.

in fi ve years and take place on Nov.

13 at the Siegel JCC in Wilmington.

Brothers David and Oscar Speace will
discuss their book and play, respec-
tively, on their mother Janka Festinger
Speace’s survival story. Festinger
Speace survived Auschwitz and mar-
ried an American GI, Robert Speace,
“whom she met in postwar Germany,”
according to an event poster.

Festinger Speace did not go into detail
about her story to her sons. But in
1998 aft er she died, Oscar Speace found
a 60-page letter she had sent “from
Germany to an uncle in Cleveland,” the
poster added. It was all in there. Th e let-
ter inspired David Speace’s book, “Janka
Festinger’s Moments of Happiness: Her
Holocaust Letter and More.” Th e book is
self-published, but Lee Preston wants to
illuminate it anyway.

“It resonated with me because they
only learned the full story when they
got hold of a letter she had written to
an uncle in Cleveland letting him know
that she survived and the whole rest of
the family did not,” the journalist said.

Th e brothers’ experience was similar
to one that Lee Preston had in recent
years, too. In 2015, he was cleaning out
his childhood home when he discov-
ered four notebooks that his mother
fi lled when she was hiding in the sew-
ers of Lviv, a town in Ukraine, for 14
months between 1943 and ’44.

Lee Preston had the diary translated
by a Polish-American who lives in
Elkins Park, and he learned “a num-
ber of things I hadn’t learned before,”
he said. Th e notebooks revealed “inti-
mate details” of how “10 Jews who
were strangers to her before she found
herself in the sewer interacted with
each other under the most horrifi c
conditions imaginable.” Somehow,
Lee Preston said, they found a way to
have “a day-to-day existence.”
Each person had different
responsibilities, according to the
son. Th ey also found ways to enter-
tain each other. And they especially
looked forward to visits from the
Polish Catholic sewer workers who
brought them food.

Halina Wind Preston started
speaking about her experience in
1949. She was one of the fi rst sur-
vivors to do so, according to her
son. Yet she never spoke about any
of this.

“All these years later, we’re still
able to fi nd artifacts of this type
that illuminate what happened,”
Lee Preston said. “And they illumi-
nate what could still happen.”
More recently, Lee Preston found
a letter his father wrote to an uncle
in Boston. It was sent four months
aft er George Preston’s liberation
from Buchenwald, and it detailed
one experience in particular. A
man the father considered his best
friend was killed right in front of him.

Unlike his wife, George Preston was
reticent about his Holocaust story, but
he started doing events aft er her death.

Yet he never spoke about losing the
man he called his best friend. Lee
Preston had never heard that man’s
name until he read the letter.

“Th at underscores why it’s essential
to preserve these materials,” the son
said. To learn about Lee Preston’s work,
visit his website at davidleepreston.

com and subscribe to his free monthly
newsletter. JE
jsaff ren@midatlanticmedia.com
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 27