The 14th annual Holocaust Remembrance program was held on Thursday, May 10, 2007, at 11:30 am. The theme for this year's national Days of Remembrance, as designated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museaum, is Children in Crisis: Voices from the Holocaust. Our program this year extends the children in crisis to current events in Darfur.
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 Joining us will be Ruth Muschkies Webber,
born in Ostrowiec, Poland on June 28, 1935. After the war started in 1939, a ghetto was established in Ostrowiec and Ruth and her family lived there for nearly three years under increasingly difficult conditions. The Nazis began liquidating the ghetto in 1942, so Ruth's parents placed her older sister, a gifted pianist, with a Gentile family so she could continue her education. Her parents obtained special permits which allowed them to move to a work camp into which Ruth was smuggled and hid. Over the next two years, Ruth and her mother were moved to several work camps, ghettos and concentration camps finally ending up in Auschwitz/Birkenau in the summer of 1944. Her mother, Malka was transferred out to another camp in October, 1944 and Ruth was put into the children's block run by Dr. Mengele. She remained there until liberated by the Soviets in January, 1945 when she was 9½ years old.After liberation, she was transferred to an orphanage in Krakow, where she was later reunited with her mother (who was liberated from a work camp in Czechoslovakia) and her older sister. Ruth's father was on the last transport out of Auschwitz and perished in the Death March. Her extended family had perished at Treblinka. They know of no other surviving family members. In the fall of 1946, they went to Munich, and in 1948, distant relatives in Toronto succeeded in securing visas for them to come to Canada. Living in Toronto, Ruth graduated from high school and worked as a bookkeeper for a large company. In 1955, Ruth met her husband Mark, and a year later married him and moved to Detroit. For over 40 years, Ruth has been a volunteer for a number of organizations, including Hadassah, a Jewish food bank, the B'nai Israel Sisterhood, and the Jewish Community Center library. Ruth is especially proud of her three daughters, all of whom have graduated from the University of Michigan, and her five grandchildren. She is still happily married to her husband of nearly 51 years and is grateful for the life she has been able to lead in the United States. |
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 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, naked and bleeding and with no earthly goods, and with predators including militia, wild animals, and the harsh climate to contend with.He survived by eating wild roots, pumpkins in a farmer's field, grass, grasshoppers and even mud. John and his fellow orphaned and separated refugee's became known as "The Lost Boys." Few girls survived the village attacks because they were either raped, killed, or taken as slaves to the north. John's 14 year epic journey of over a 1000 miles included refugee camps in Ethiopa and Kenya. At one point he swam the crocodile infested Gilo River, where his large group of 27,000, fleeing one refugee camp, lost about 9,000 brethren. Since coming to the America (a place he never heard of until age 17) with 3,800 other Sudanese in 2001, John has been working on a degree at Syracuse University, has brought over his mother, sister and fiancée, and helped found two Sudanese support organizations. One, the Sudanese Lost Boys Foundation of New York, helps Sudanese youth through the United States to transition to life in America through counseling and educational programs. The other, American Care for Sudan Foundation solicits funds to operate the Duk Lost Boys Clinic at Duk Payuel in Southern Sudan. He now serves as Director of Sudan Project, Direct Change, Inc, an organization which raises funds to help rebuild Southern Sudan. John was the subject of the 2006 film "God Grew Tired of Us," a documentary chronicling his arrival and adaptation to American culture. The title is a phrase from an interview he did and describes the despair he and other Sudanese felt during the civil war. |
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 Our moderator this year will be Gordon Peterson, senior correspondent and anchor of ABC7/WJLA-TV's News at 6 p.m. Peterson has almost 40 years of experience covering the news in Washington - and around the world. Among his Emmy awards is one for Children of Belfast, studying the effects of the conflict in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s. |
Sponsoring Agencies
The 23 Departments and other agencies listed here provide financial and logistical support for the Holocaust Remembrance program:
Ruth Webber information and photo provided by her daugher, Sue Webber. John Dau information by Steve Frank. Gordon Peterson photo from the ABC7/WJLA-TV website, from which the information is paraphrased.
Programs and other information from several previous years are available.
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