North America's first Garden of the Righteous Gentiles honored Christians who saved Jewish men, women, and children during the Holocaust, recognizing people who risked their own lives and the lives of loved ones to rescue Jews from certain death. The concept in Delaware originated with Halina Wind Preston, who in her early twenties was hidden from the Nazis for 14 months in a sewer in Lvov, Poland, by Catholic sewer workers Leopold Socha and Stefen Wroblewski. Until her death at age 60 in 1982, she dedicated her life after the war to preserving the memory of the six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust, and after her death the Holocaust Education Committee she founded was renamed in her honor. Its first task was to formally dedicate the garden, whose tree planting ceremony was held on November 16, 1981, with bronze plaques beside the trees naming rescuers, including nine who saved Jews who later came to reside in Delaware; one honored Christian couple, Ger and Gerard van Raan, also immigrated to Delaware after their rescue efforts in Holland. Wilmington garden designer Robert Grenfell designed the original garden pro bono, including its entry paving and planting, and later, with stone mason Gabriel Gonzales, created a semi-circular entrance backed by a low serpentine wall bearing a message honoring righteous gentiles who saved Jewish lives during the Nazi Holocaust, 1933 to 1945; lettering from the original monument was saved, refinished, and reinstalled on the new entry in 1983. Grenfell dedicated his work on the new entrance to Doris Morris and Harriet Wolfson, and the garden was publicly dedicated on December 11, 1983, when Methodist theologian and Holocaust scholar Dr. Franklin H. Littell was the featured speaker and the refurbished entrance was unveiled. On April 7, 2013, two new trees were planted, one honoring the Artis Amsterdam Zoo, where Holocaust survivor Francisca Verdoner Kan was hidden, and the other honoring Andrée and Suzanne Romain, who saved Charles Rojer. At the garden's center stands a 6-foot-tall bronze sculpture by Israeli artist Aharon Bezalel, showing a figure holding a child beside a shorter figure representing child victims of the Holocaust; it was cast from two of the thirteen figures in his work The Last Kaddish at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the idea for a memorial to the estimated 1.5 million child victims originated with Wilmington resident Dorothy Krause Finger, herself a child survivor of the Holocaust.

Photo: Pete Skillman