{"id":29263,"date":"2016-05-19T11:03:44","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T15:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/?page_id=29263"},"modified":"2016-07-15T08:38:04","modified_gmt":"2016-07-15T12:38:04","slug":"alum-shares-holocaust-story","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/news\/collegian-archives\/collegian-summer-2016\/alum-shares-holocaust-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Distinguished Alumni Award Winner Speaks about Jewish Memorial"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"David
David Wluka commissioned a memorial wall in Nowy Dw\u00f3r, Poland, on which to mount the Jewish headstones the Nazis used to fortify the roads for their tanks. Photo by Anita Wluka Davis<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In April, David Wluka<\/a> (\u201966, CAS\u201968, GRS\u201970) returned to CGS to speak to freshmen about the Nowy Dw\u00f3r Jewish Memorial<\/a> he established in honor of his father, Icek, who survived three years at Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

During a visit to his father\u2019s hometown of Nowy Dw\u00f3r, Poland, Wluka found that the Nazis had destroyed the Jewish cemetery and used the headstones to fortify the roads for their tanks. Wluka and Nowy Dw\u00f3r\u2019s citizens are working together to excavate the streets and have so far unearthed 125 headstones, which are now displayed at the cemetery site.<\/p>\n

Hosted by the Social Sciences division, Wluka\u2019s lecture at CGS tied into the freshmen core class\u00a0Modernization of the Western World (now Modernization: Politics, Economics, and Culture<\/a>), in which the students were studying World War II and the Holocaust. \u201cThey were touched by his talk,\u201d says Susan Lee, chair and master lecturer in social sciences. \u201cSome came up to him afterward, and one student was in tears. I heard later from Mr. Wluka that she was a Maori student who identified the sufferings of her own people with the Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wluka spoke \u201cmovingly about his father\u2019s experiences in his home village and at Auschwitz,\u201d says Lee.\u00a0\u201cIt was clear that he felt a powerful sense of obligation to commemorate the suffering and losses from the Holocaust, especially in his ancestral village.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wluka will be honored in the fall with this year\u2019s CGS Distinguished Alumni Award<\/a><\/strong> for his dedication to peace and tolerance, for his commitment to preserving the history of the Jewish people of Poland, and for his loyalty to his alma mater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In April, David Wluka (\u201966, CAS\u201968, GRS\u201970) returned to CGS to speak to freshmen about the Nowy Dw\u00f3r Jewish Memorial he established in honor of his father, Icek, who survived three years at Auschwitz. During a visit to his father\u2019s hometown of Nowy Dw\u00f3r, Poland, Wluka found that the Nazis had destroyed the Jewish cemetery […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11957,"featured_media":0,"parent":29150,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29263"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29263"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29830,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29263\/revisions\/29830"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}