When Jews are forced underground as hostages in Gaza or into shelters in Israel during missile attacks, and when Ukrainians must seek subterranean refuge from Russian drone strikes, David Lee Preston’s message is as timely as today’s news. 

His mother, Halina Wind Preston, was among 10 Jews who hid for 14 months in the sewers of Lviv in 1943-44, protected by Polish Catholic sewer workers. She was the first Holocaust survivor to speak publicly around the United States, beginning in 1949, and became a beloved Jewish educator and Delaware’s spokeswoman for the victims and survivors. She died in 1982. His father, George E. Preston, a French-educated engineer who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, had a successful postwar engineering career with the DuPont Co. in Wilmington. He died in 2006.

A graduate of The Tatnall School in Wilmington and the University of Missouri, David retired five years ago after a half-century in journalism that included 40 years as an award-winning reporter, columnist, and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer. There he authored three ground-breaking cover stories about his parents in the Sunday magazine:

• A Bird in the Wind, on Mother's Day 1983, which historian Michael Berenbaum called “the best article written on the life of a survivor,”
• Journey To My Father's Holocaust, which made him a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, and
• Speaking for the Ghosts, about his 1992 trip to his mother's hometown in the Carpathian Mountains just after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Ten years ago, David got the biggest scoop of his career while emptying his childhood home in Wilmington, and that will be a focus of his presentation.

Learn more at his website, https://www.DavidLeePreston.com