(JEWISH GROUP) How a righteous Joe Biden honored my Holocaust survivor parents
In the swirling debate over Joe Biden’s affections for Israel and the Jews, I recall two survivors in Delaware whose activism helped to mold the future president’s understanding of the Holocaust — my parents.
They were already Biden’s constituents when he served as a New Castle County councilman in suburban Wilmington while still in his 20s. My father, George E. Preston, was a French-educated DuPont Co. engineer who had survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald. My mother, Halina Wind Preston, was a Jewish educator who had survived 14 months in the sewers of German-occupied Lviv in 1943-44, hidden by Polish Catholic sewer workers.
In 1965, the year Biden graduated from the University of Delaware, my father made worldwide news testifying at the Auschwitz war-crimes trials. “Wilmington Man Tells of Stomping by Nazi,” blared the six-column headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer story of March 5, 1965, from Frankfurt. Three days later, “SS Tattoo 160581 Back Here After Auschwitz Testimony” was the headline in the Wilmington Evening Journal.
Five years later, when Biden was elected to the county council, my mother was making frequent appearances as Delaware’s eloquent spokeswoman for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. During his upstart campaign for the U.S. Senate before his election in November 1972, his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, carried their infant daughter, Amy, into our split-level home on Wordsworth Drive in Hyde Park. Tragically, weeks later they died in a traffic collision a few miles away.
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