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The Week in Germany: Current Affairs May 4, 2007 Federal Interagency Holocaust Remembrance Observed in Washington
The theme for this year's national Days of Remembrance (April 15-22), as designated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is Children in Crisis: Voices from the Holocaust. The 14th annual Federal Interagency Holocaust Remembrance will be observed on May 10 with a special program featuring a child survivor of Auschwitz, Ruth Muschkies Webber, and one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, John Dau. It will be moderated by veteran Washington newscaster Gordon Peterson, senior correspondent and anchor of ABC7/WJLA-TV's News at 6 pm, at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium.
Ruth Muschkies Webber was born in Ostowiec, Poland, on June 28, 1935. After the war started, she lived in a ghetto in her hometown with her family for three years. She and her mother were then moved around to several work camps, ghettos and concentration camps. After liberation from Auschwitz, she was transferred to an orphanage in Krakow, where she was later reunited with her mother and her older sister. Her father and other relatives perished in the Holocaust. Ruth moved to Toronto in 1948, where she graduated from high school and worked as a bookkeeper. In 1955 she met her husband Mark and shortly thereafter moved to Detroit, where she has been a volunteer for a number of Jewish organizations for over 40 years. Three daughters and five grandchildren later, she is still happily married to her husband of 51 years and grateful for the life she has been able to lead in the United States.
John Dau is among the thousands of African young men whose southern Sudanese villages were systematically attacked by the northern Arab Sudanese government in the 1980s and 1990s. This Sudanese civil war resulted in over a million killed and millions more displaced. In August, 1987, John's Dinka village in Duk County was attacked and he barely escaped into the brush. He survived by eating wild roots, pumpkins in a farmer's field, grass, grasshoppers and even mud. John and his fellow orphaned and separated refugees became known as "The Lost Boys." John's 14 year epic journey of over a 1000 miles included refugee camps in Ethiopa and Kenya. Since coming to America (a place he never heard of until age 17) in 2001, John has helped found two Sudanese support organizations. He now serves as Director of Sudan Project, Direct Change, Inc, an organization which raises funds to help rebuild Southern Sudan. George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium is located at 730 21st
Street, NW, Washington, DC. Links: Federal Interagency Holocaust
Remembrance United States Holocaust Memorial Museum German Parliament Unanimously Agrees to Ease Access to Vast Holocaust Archive (TWIG, March 30, 2007) National
Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism "For the dead and the living we must bear witness" (TWIG, Jan. 26, 2007) |
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