"HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER"

Today is Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2022. Eight decades ago, on July 27, 1944, the Red Army liberated Lviv from German occupation, and my mother stepped into daylight after hiding in the city's sewers for 14 months.

This website honors two Jews who emerged from the depths of hell.

George endured both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, then had a long career as an engineer with the Du Pont Co. in Wilmington, Delaware. Halina hid for 14 months in the sewers of Lviv and was among the first survivors of the Nazis to speak publicly throughout the United States. They met in the U.S. in 1950. I was born five years later.

During four decades as a journalist in Philadelphia, I've explored my parents' lives and other matters concerning the Holocaust. I wrote a trilogy of cover stories about my parents in The Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday magazine, one of which made me a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. My work has exposed former Nazis in the U.S., including ethnic leaders in the Republican Party. I also have examined how a Swiss financier of fascism used Nazi funds to promote postwar Arab terrorism. You'll find all of it here.

My journey entered a new realm on Aug. 28, 2015, when I made an exciting discovery while cleaning out my childhood home in Wilmington: Four notebooks filled with 167 handwritten pages of original Polish poetry and prose written by my mother during her 14-month ordeal in the sewers. Seven years later, I'm in the homestretch of preparing the translation and publication of this material. Stay tuned!

Along the way, I've accumulated a significant collection of relevant documents and photographs -- some of which are disturbing -- and I've begun to publish them here under the heading  EVIDENCE. You'll find 17 photos shot by German soldiers when they entered Lviv in 1941, and 23 original four-page questionnaires required of Jewish medical professionals in Lviv and western Ukraine in 1941-42. More material coming soon. 

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