The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 106

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Friday, April 12, 1996 Review: Television F20 Retracing his mother's escape from Nazis NOW ON SALE BUY DIRECT From The Manufacturer Get The Best Prices Possible. Magnificent Bedrooms Living Rooms Dining Rooms Bars-Mantels Wall Unit Mirrors Lamps Pictures and Objects D'Art year, Preston and his wife listen to a tape recording of his sister chanting prayers. "We stood there as prayers filled the countryside," he says, "overlooking the town of Turka, a town of no more Jews." By Robert Strauss FOR THE INQUIRER David Lee Preston had spent his whole life planning his trip to the Ukrainian village of Turka, in the foothills of the Carpathian Moun-? tains. Over 2000 Unusual Unique Designer Items This is where your friends have gotten ylAVANT GARDE CHAIST I 1 Regularly $2000 II AVANT GARDE CHAISE Regularly $2000 sometimes awkward video footage. Recent Channel 12 documentaries have often been too simplistic and spare.

In the case of Visiting the Past, however, the spareness of Preston's words and the pictures that accompany them serve well to evoke the proper mood of one man's search for just a small touch of his family's brutal past. old Jewish quarter, recounting stories of its residents, even showing off some of his own family heirlooms: clocks and a barometer that came from the shop owned by Preston's grandfather. Eventually, they reach the basement where Feiga and her family hid from the Nazis, the home above destroyed and replaced after the war. Producer Janine Jaquet Biden makes elegant use of Preston's those fabulous buys NOW UV3 Despite this somber beginning, Preston eventually finds some solace in the person of Victor Lesyk, the unofficial Turka town historian. Lesyk guides Preston through the US! Pulaski Curio Mfr.

Sugg. Retail $399 Regular Selling Price $199 LA-Z-BOY SPRING BREAK $169 P- MHH A liVV Chaise Recliner Ul ir Jl I NSSw Mfr. Sugg. Retail $649 yiyj I price 5499 JJ wI ILZjII SPRIMG BREAK tad $399 Finally, in November 1992, Pres-' ton and his wife, Ronda Goldfein, "went to Turka, not with Polaroid and Fodor's guidebook, but with video camera and a mission to fill a void in his family's collective mem-; ory. For Turka is the place from which Preston's mother escaped in 1942.

She was one of a handful of the town's 6,000 Jews not to die(at the hands of the Nazis. the story of Preston's trip to Turka and what he found there are the basis for the documentary Visiting the Past, to be aired Sunday at 7 p.m. on Channel 12. The documentary, in turn, arose from a story Preston was researching that was published last Mother's Day in Inquirer Magazine. "I was a very young boy when my mother sort of put the obligation on my shoulders to write the story of her survival," says Preston, an In- quirer columnist, over shaky home movies of one of his early birthday parties, presided over by Halina Wind Preston, looking like any other postwar suburban mother.

The next shots are quite a bit more grim, taken from a car passing through the somewhat broken-down modern streets of Turka. Though Preston's mother died in 1982, it took him 10 years to get to Turka, which had been a closed Soviet city until Ukraine established its independence. The 19-year-old Feiga (later Halina) Wind, daughter of a local watchmaker, had been chosen by the last three Jewish families to be the one to escape in 1942. She lived for 14 months in a sewer in Lvov, Poland, before being liberated by, the Allies, and soon emigrated to new life in America. In Turka, Preston discovers the old Jewish cemetery on a hill overlooking the town.

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