George Edward Preston, No. 160581

As a student of history, I have come to appreciate the power of oral histories, which predate the printed word and recording machine and are without a doubt the most vivid way to capture past events and ways of life.

One of the most fascinating oral histories with which I am familiar is the Halina Wind Holocaust Testimonies Project, a modest but growing collection of video and audio recordings of concentration camp survivors and liberators who lived in Delaware. Part of a larger Yale University project, it is housed in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.

The scholars, students and families of the survivors and liberators who use the collection have an extraordinary man of my acquaintance by the name of George Edward Preston to thank.

Preston, who died on Wednesday at age 92, was a Russian-born and French-educated engineer who spoke eight languages.

He was born in 1914 Grisza Priszkulnik in Rovno in the Russian province of Volhynia, now Rivne, Ukraine. He studied engineering at Polish universities in Warsaw and Vilna, but rising anti-Semitism prompted him to leave for France in 1935, where he completed his education at the University of Caen in Normandy.

When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Preston was working for an engineering firm in Lille. After France surrendered, the company moved south, and in 1941 he took a job with another French engineering firm.

Meanwhile, in November 1941, in enormous pits dug into the woods outside Rovno, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered 18,000 Jews in a single day, including Preston's father, stepmother and brother.

There was no escape for him, even in France. Walking out of a Lille market in August 1942, he was arrested by the Gestapo, and for almost three years was a prisoner of the Nazis.

The number 160581 was tattooed onto his left forearm at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his technical training enabled him to survive as a slave laborers for Siemens-Schuckert (now Siemens AG) at a subcamp called Bobrek.

In January 1945, with the Russian army approaching, the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz, and Preston was moved to Buchenwald, near Weimar, Germany.

When American troops liberated him from Buchenwald in April 1945, he weighed 80 pounds.

Preston emigrated to the U.S. and in 1951 married Halina Wind, a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, who had survived the Nazi occupation of Poland by hiding for 14 months in a sewer beneath the city of Lwow.

They moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where I met them through son David. His parents were tireless Jewish community affairs activists, and his late mother is honored in the title of the Holocaust Testimonials Project.

In 1984, the Philadelphia Inquirer sent father and son to the sites of the father's past. David's resulting article, "Journey to My Father's Holocaust," was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.

(Photo courtesy of the Preston family)