George Elbaum - New Member of the Holocaust Center's Speakers Bureau

George Elbaum is a new member of the Holocaust Center's Speakers Bureau. He lives in San Francisco and travels to Seattle frequently. His memoir, Neither Yesterdays Nor Tomorrows, can be found on Amazon or borrowed from the Holocaust Center. The book can also be read at http://www.scribd.com/.

(See previous blog post "New Books" for information on George Elbaum's memoir.)

'Paper Clips’ helps S.F. man recall his Holocaust ‘Yesterdays’
Thursday, September 16, 2010 by marinell james
JWeekly.com

Warsaw, 1942: A 4-year-old Jewish boy is hiding under a table in a factory where his mother sews uniforms for the Nazi army. Soon, this arrangement becomes unsafe. The mother dyes her hair blonde, obtains the papers of a deceased Polish woman and changes her name. She smuggles her son out of the ghetto into the countryside, where she pays a Polish family to keep him safe in their home.

George ElbaumThe boy’s mother tells him that his name will now be Jerzy Kochanowski. It’s the first of several Polish names he’ll have during the war as he passes from one hiding place to another. For his protection, he will be raised as a Catholic, unaware that he is a Jew. His mother will visit when she can, sometimes not for a month at a time. San Francisco, 2010: The boy is now a 72-year-old man. Long ago, he moved to the United States and reclaimed his original Jewish name, George Elbaum. He has made a successful life for himself in business, been married 36 years, is a father and a grandfather. For six decades, he kept memories of his wartime childhood at a “safe emotional distance.”

But last year something happened that led Elbaum to finally close that chasm of time and memory.

While he and his wife were watching “Paper Clips,” a movie about schoolchildren in Tennessee who created a Holocaust remembrance project, he had “an epiphany.”

“The scenes where the children and the teachers were crying as they listened to the stories of survivors really hit me,” Elbaum said.

His wife sensed it and asked him, as she had in the past, if he’d write down his own memories. “I was surprised to hear myself say, ‘I’ll do it,’ ” he said. Read complete article.