Student Questions

Q & A with George J Elbaum

1. What inspired you to write your book and then to  start speaking about your experiences?  For over 60 years I kept a safe emotional distance from the Holocaust and very seldom talked about it.  I saw how my mother frequently relived her Holocaust memories and how these agonized her, and I didn’t want that for myself.  Then late 2009 I saw the documentary movie “Paper Clips” where one of the scenes shows aged Holocaust survivors from New York  visiting a middle school in a small Tennessee town and telling their stories.  While the stories were not new to me at all, seeing the students and teachers crying had a huge and unexpected impact on me, as it made me realize suddenly that there is value in telling these stories to those whose minds are open and who can accept that these horrible events really  happened, as told by those who lived through them and survived them.  After the movie ended my wife asked me, as she had done many times before, whether I would reconsider my previous refusals and document my memories.  After a brief thought I surprised her and myself when I answered: “I’ll do it.”  The next day I started, a few months later I finished and published my book, then I was invited to speak at the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Boston on April 11, 2010, and  afterwards several attendees suggested that I continue to tell my story, which is what I am doing here.
2. Did writing the book change your mind about anything?  No, but it triggered more memories from the war years.  It also made me fully conscious of the reasons why I have led my life, even in adulthood, according to the title that I chose for my book, “Neither Yesterdays Nor Tomorrows”: I focus on the present and don’t look back because the families who hid me and saved me were not always kind to me, and I don’t look forward because my childhood’s tomorrows were very uncertain, never knowing when or even whether I would see my mother again.
3. Did you ever visit or keep in touch with the school in the movie “Paper Clips” that inspired you so much?  After publishing my book I contacted the school’s principal (the current one, not the same person whose idea gave birth to the movie) and also the movie’s director, and sent each of them a copy of the book.  The contacts went no further.
4. Have you been back to Poland or do you plan to do so?  When asked this question until a few months ago, my answers was always ”no” to both parts.  I’ve certainly had the opportunity, flying over Poland on each of my frequent trips between California and Russia, but I’ve not had any desire to go back into my past.  (That’s even reflected in the title of my book.)  However, last September I spoke at a high school in Tacoma that had some Polish  students and teachers for an international exchange event, and they asked me the same question, telling me that Poland is much changed since I left it 60+ years ago.  My usual, non-committal answer was that someday we’ll take a trip to Eastern Europe and then we’ll also visit Poland.  Even when the Polish teacher asked me to come speak at their school’s upcoming international event I again demurred.  However, after that teacher returned to Poland, she surprised me by emailing me a page from the 1939 Warsaw phone book with my father’s name, profession, address and phone number.  This had such an unexpected emotional effect on me that I emailed back, thanking her for it and accepting this invitation for the May 2013 event.
5. Have you met any Holocaust deniers like that Boston nurse in the last part of your book and how did you deal with this?  First, I very seldom told my story until writing my book a couple of years ago, so there were not many occasions for it.  Next, I still do not understand the psychology of people who can continue to deny (or accept) things or events in spite of tons of evidence to the contrary, but I’ve learned that personal testimony or photos or anything else will change their minds.  A perfect example of this occurred a few years ago.  A man with whom I used to hang glide in Southern California moved to Europe some years ago and would email me videos or photos on hang gliding.  Then his emails became political, reactionary and conspiracy-fearing, and then Holocaust-denying.  He did not know of my Holocaust background because I seldom talked about it, and initially I countered his claims that the Holocaust didn’t happen with facts that were easily verified in Wikipedia, etc.  When he ignored all my replies and instead continued to send me different but equally far-fetched claims, I finally emailed him that I and my mother survived the Holocaust in Warsaw but the other 10 family members perished at the hands of the Nazis.  For a week or two he did not reply, and then he emailed me that he did not know my background, regretted that I lost most of my family, but included some additional “facts” to show that the Holocaust didn’t really happen.  I was shocked, but realizing that he would not accept any input whatsoever that countered his views, including from me as a first-hand witness whom he knew, I terminated all communication with him. 
6. How was it to transition from Poland to America and then to assimile in a US high school?  The first difference was in the life in Warsaw and Paris, where I lived before coming to the US, vs. the small 1000-population farming community in North Carolina.  Thus I faced not only a new language, new environment, new attitudes and life-styles, even new games like baseball, so I definitely felt like an outsider.  However, in high school I learned about and bought into “the American ideal”, that if you want to accomplish something and are willing to work hard for it, in America you can attain it, which was not so in Poland, and this has served me well.  Another, more negative, difference that I quickly noticed and which saddens me to this day is in education: I was used to the European 6-day school week, was surprised that in the US it was only 5 days, and when tobacco harvest started in North Carolina we went to school only 4 1/2 days a week so the kids could help with the harvest that extra 1/2 day.  Thus even though my last schooling in Europe was the 5th grade, I found 6th & 7th grade academics in North Carolina very easy, so I skipped 8th grade when I moved to Oregon.  European K-12 education was and still is much better and more advanced than in the US, and it pains me that we are losing our competitive advantage because of our inadequate K-12 education.
7. Did you keep in touch with Leon or any other families who hid you?  No, because I didn’t know the names or addresses of any of the families and I remembered only the one name, Leon, a first name.  Also, since my mom defected from the Polish government service while in France, our letters from America to a still-Communist Poland might have endangered their recipients.
8. How did you feel having to move from one family of strangers to another, over and over again?  At first it was frightening and overwhelming, as I describe in my book’s chapter ”A Beggar with a Burlap Bag,” but after a few times it became normal.
9. What was your relationship with the Polish families with whom you lived?  Did you feel accepted?  No, probably because I wasn’t treated particularly well – for example, small toys that my mom would bring me on her visits would be taken away from me after she left and given to their children.  Also, even though I was very small I had to carry buckets full of coal and potatoes up several flights of stairs from the basements.  However, these families saved my life by hiding me, even risking their lives by doing it, and now that I know this I cannot complain about the treatment. 
10. Did you know or are in contact with any other children hidden by Polish families?  No, I didn’t, nor did I seek or try to find and connect to them after the war.  That would be looking back to the past, and I don’t do that, as voiced by my book’s title.       
11. What religion do you practice and has it changed with your experience?  During the war I didn’t know that I was Jewish, lived with Polish Catholic families and was taught by them (as a 4-to-6 years old) to pray side by side with their own children to attract minimum attention from outsiders.  I remember kneeling & praying with their children by the bedside every night and in church at Christmas.  However, at that young age prayers meant little to them and to me: we didn’t understand the meaning of praying but we prayed as we were told.  After the war, Poland’s government was communist, so religion was largely suppressed and I had no further religious training, Catholic or Jewish.  After coming to America we lived a secular life, and as a result I consider myself an agnostic: while I cannot say whether God does or does not exist, I feel strongly that the basis of all religions is the Golden Rule – treating others as I would want to be treated – and I definitely abide by that rule. 
12. What is your goal in speaking to schools or members of the younger generation?  I focus my talks on the younger generation because you are old enough to understand what I lived through, what I survived, yet you are young enough to still have an open mind and decide for yourself if, as you go through life, you want to be on the side of truth and fairness and justice or the side of hatred and intolerance.
13. What advice or thoughts do you have about obligation?  That’s a very deep question.  First, I am a hopeless optimist, but only vis-a-vis individuals, not groups, because human nature and instincts change only at the speed of evolution.  That’s why we continue to have genocides, throughout history till today.  However, I feel that fairness and justice is a worthwhile goal, and that its practice on a personal level will hopefully increase in society over time, albeit slowly. 
14. As the last generation to hear firsthand the accounts of Holocaust survivors, what is our obligation to pass on their story?  When faced with Holocaust deniers, you should say strongly: “I met someone who lived through it!” …and to live by the Golden Rule, treating others as you would want them to treat you.
15. What is your mother’s story?  She was a very smart and strong woman, a young attorney before the war, and during the war when there was always danger and serious problems to solve, she would focus on these and how to overcome them.  This focus and her strength and intelligence are the reasons why she and I survived.  However, the horror of losing most of her family and the constant stress of survival took its toll on her and scarred her emotionally.  After the war, especially after coming to the US where her single-minded focus on survival was no longer necessary, she had difficulties adjusting to a normal life.  She lived in Los Angeles for many years, was a very successful businesswoman, and died in 2004 shortly before her 91st birthday, but she was never quite happy and at peace with herself.
16. What is your most vivid memory from your childhood?  Probably the one shown on the cover of my book and described in the book’s chapter “The Shed.”
17. How did you and your mother get out of the ghetto?  I don’t remember, but my mom told me after the war that I was put into a large knapsack – I was 4 years old but very small.
18. Did you ever learn your father’s fate?  No, not specifically, except that he was killed when the Germans attacked Poland’s Eastern border with Russia.
19. How many different last names did you have during the war?  How did that feel?  I probably had 3 or 4 different last names, a new one each time that my mother bought a new set of ID papers for herself and told me what my new name was if asked.  How did that feel?  Well, I did what I was told and learned instinctively that changing names didn’t change who I was and how I felt.
20. With how many different families did you live during the war, and why did your mom moved you from one family to another?  I probably lived with 4 or 5 different families, and my mom would move me whenever the family informed her that I and they were in danger because someone suspected that I was Jewish. 
21. Did you understand what was happening and why your mother was taking you from one family to another one?  No, it was simply the life that became “normal” for me after a while.  I don’t even remember how my mom explained to me, a 4-year-old, why she was leaving me with strangers the first time right after she  smuggled us out of the ghetto, but I do remember my fear-driven tantrum when she moved me from one household to another a few months later, as described in the chapter “A Beggar with a Burlap Bag” of my book. 
22. When did you realize that so many people, including your own family, were murdered in the Holocaust?  It was only after the war and not everything at once, so around 7-to-8 years of age. 
23. Having survived a traumatic childhood, what advice can you give to kids who have trauma or troubles in their own lives?  Because the circumstances are so different in every case, the only advice I can give is what I did to survive emotionally, what sustained me from childhood through my teen-age years, and that was a total focus on surviving the moment plus a long-term goal, an important goal that I wanted to achieve.  (In my case, the goal was to become an aeronautical engineer.)  As a result, I learned instinctively to block out the pains of the past, the yesterdays, as well as the uncertainty of the future, the tomorrows.  It worked for me, so it could work for others.
24. Did you ever get attacked yourself?  Did you do violence yourself?  Only one time did I get attacked and resonded with violence.  It was shortly after the war, when I was 7 years old, I found a throwing dart and a much bigger kid attacked me and tried to take it away from me.  He threw me to the ground and was on top of me, beating me and trying to take it away, while I was trying to fight back with one hand while holding tight onto the dart.  Finally I lost all restraint and started stabbing him with the dart in his back and butt till he got off me and ran away.
25. Did you face any prejudice or anti-Semitism after coming to the US?  While I’m aware that prejudice and anti-semitism exist even in the US, I personally experienced it only once in school in North Carolina, shortly after coming to the US.  A big kid who was a bully started it (though I didn’t fully understand it at the moment because my English wasn’t good enough yet), but a teacher quickly stopped it.
26. What did you think about “Schindler’s List”?  I thought that Schindler was a very good man for saving so many Jews, but he was also very bad to his own family.
27.  Do you hate Germany or Germans today?  No, I do not, because I think most younger Germans regret their country’s Nazi past and the Holocaust, as do many older Germans.  In college I had a good friend who was German, and made friends with young Germans while skiing in Europe.   However, among older Germans there are many Holocaust deniers, or at least “minimizers”.  In the early ’60s one of my office-mates in the aerospace industry was a German rocket engineer who worked on the V-1 and V-2 rockets in Peenemunde.  Regarding WWII, he claimed that neither he nor anyone in his family were Nazis, which is highly unlikely considering the secret facility where he worked, and also that the biggest atrocity in the war was the Allied bombing raid on Dresden which caused a fire storm and killed thousands of civilians.  In his mind, that was worse than the millions that were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, and that tells me that deep-down he did not have regret  for the atrocity.
28. Do you speak Polish?  Not any more – I’ve not spoken it since coming to America in 1949, so I’ve forgotten it.  However, it’s probably still somewhere “in the back of my head” because when I started travelling to Russia on business every month or two in the early ’70s, I picked up  Russian quickly without any formal lessons, and that’s surely because Russian and Polish are quite similar (both are Slavic languages) and the Polish that’s still in the back of my head did it.
29. How did you make a living here?  After college I worked as an aerospace engineer and manager, then I switched to foreign trade and for 25 years I commuted between California and Moscow representing US companies in the Soviet Union.  When that government fell apart, I founded and managed Reebok’s operations in Russia until I got tired of travelling all the time.
30. Since your family saw anti-Semitic acts before, did they think it would escalate to the Holocaust?  Neither my family nor anyone else (except the Nazi leaders) could possibly imagine that anything on the scale of inhumanity and horror of the Holocaust could happen, especially caused by Germany which the probably the best educated country in Europe.
31. Why did you not talk about your experiences during the war for so long (60+ years) or want to visit Poland?  Because my mother was scarred emotionally and haunted by the Holocaust till the day she died (in 2004), I didn’t want that for myself so I kept an emotional distance from the Holocaust.  Then seeing the movie “Paper Clips” made me realize the value in telling my story, especially to young people like you, and that’s when I wrote my book and started speaking in high schools.  Re visiting Poland, that’s been a part of my not wanting to revisit the past (per the title of my book, “Neither Yesterdays Nor Tomorrows”).  However, a few months ago I spoke at an international student exchange event in Tacoma which included Polish students and their teachers.  Afterwards, they invited me to speak at a similar event  planned at their school in Poland for May 2013, and I didn’t really consider it seriously until a month later when one of the teachers surprised me by emailing me a copy of a page from the 1939 Warsaw telephone book that showed my father’s name, profession, address and phone number.  Seeing this very mundane reference to his existence, to him as a person, moved me much more than I would have expected, and now I am planning to visit Poland and speak at their event next May.
32. Why did the Russian soldiers come to the farm where you lived with Leon’s family in January 1945?  The Soviet army was fighting the German army and pushing them out of Poland, so the arrival of the Soviet tank that night meant that the battle front had just passed us.  A week or two later we learned that the Soviets liberated Warsaw from the Nazis, and shortly later my mom and I returned to Warsaw. 
33. Since Polish Catholic families risked their lives to hide you during the war, what do you think you would have done in their shoes?  I strongly believe that we can’t really know how we would react in an emergency or a life-and-death situation until it happens, so my first answer is “I don’t know.”  However, the closest I’ve come to a similar situation was when I was 7 years-old, a few months after the war ended, when another boy in our building’s courtyard called someone ”a dirty Jew.”  I didn’t know that I was Jewish, but I replied that there were good Jews and bad Jews, just as there were good Poles and bad Poles.  He stuck to his words and I to mine, and we got into a fist fight about it.  I was willing to fight for that principle.  However, my mother happened to witness it from our window and decided that it was the right time to tell me that I was Jewish, and when she did I started crying – I was willing to defend the Jews but I didn’t want to be one as I didn’t want the burden of their fate in Poland.
34. You spoke about not asking your mother many questions, even when you were an adult.  Do you remember choosing not to ask?  No, I don’t remember choosing and I don’t remember asking.  However, I have a very selective memory: I forget bad things, bad  situations very easily, and since many of the unasked questions that arose while I was writing this book were regarding unpleasant situations, such as why did my mom leave me so often, perhaps I would ask the questions and then block it out.
35. Did you ever try to take your toys back from Leon’s daughter?  To be truthful, I really don’t remember.  However, if I did do it, I apparently never got caught or I might remember getting a beating from Leon for it, as I remember his beating for disobeying and eating the rhubarb.
36. Did these families know that you were Jewish?  I’m sure they did, as that was the reason my mother gave me to them to hide from the Germans.
37. Were you ever afraid that they might betray you to the Germans?  No, because I didn’t know that I was Jewish.
38. How did your mom find the families who would hide you?  I don’t know.  That’s one of the many questions that occurred to me when I was writing my book but that I never asked her while she was alive (she died in 2004).
39. What happened to your grandmother?  Before my mother smuggled herself and me out of the ghetto she arranged and paid for my grandmother to go into a “bunker.”  This was the name used for the hidden apartments which were quickly built in basements of ghetto buildings by entrepreneurs who then sold places in them for high sums of money.  The builders would stock these “bunker” apartments with food for a year or two (expecting that the war would be over by then), and after the places were sold and the occupants inside, the builders would seal the entryway to hide it from Nazi soldiers who searched ghetto buildings for occupants to ship them to concentration camps.  Bunkers were meant to be places of safety and survival, and my mother felt that my grandmother would be safe in a bunker.  However, the Polish man from outside the ghetto who delivered the food for the bunker waited till he was paid and then sold the bunker’s location to the Nazis, and all the occupants were killed.  My mother learned this only after the war.
40. Do you think the Holocaust could happen again?  While I am very much an optimist on a personal level, that doesn’t apply to my view of humanity as a whole.  Thus my answer is “yes, it can happen again”.  In fact, genocides have continued to happen, in Cambodia, in Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Sudan, and they will probably happen again and again.  Human nature changes only at the speed of evolution, and post-Holocaust genocides show that group hatreds, be they based on ethnic or religious or political differences, lie just below the surface of civilized behavior, so power-hungry demagogues can bring these out into the open relatively easily.
41. Did you have a Bar Mitzvah?  No, I did not.  In America we’ve lived a very secular life.  
42. With all the negative experiences in your life, what is your secret for being happy?  I think that the overarching explanation is that I am very much an optimist.  I was lucky to be born that way.  The title of my book, “Neither Yesterdays Nor Tomorrows,” explains it more specifically: during the war most of my past was painful while the future was very uncertain – for example, I never knew when or whether I would see my mom again – so I learned instinctively to forget bad memories, to focus on today, and not to look to the future.  I really do forget bad things from the past, and even though I know that planning ahead is beneficial, especially in business, I nevertheless focus on today, not tomorrow.  
43. When were you most aftraid?  Were you ever afraid that you would not see your mom again?  I presume there were many moments when I, a young child, was very scared, though I don’t remeber ever thinking specifically that I would not see my mom again.  After the war my mom told me that I started stuttering after being told that she had been killed, but I don’t remember that situation specifcally.  However, that may be because I tend to forgot the bad.  Apparently I learned instinctively to forget bad things in my past, so the only scary moment I remember distinctly is described in my book’s chapter entitled “A Beggar with a Burlap Bag.”
44. Were there days when you were really happy?  Yes, I remember late summer of 1944 on the farm during potato harvest, when I turned 6 yrs old.  We would dig out the potatoes, put some into a shallow hole in the ground, cover it with dirt, build a bonfire over it to bake the potatoes, and eat them at the end of a workday.  The farmers also made vodka from sugar beets in a primitive still, and they would drink the warm vodka while eating the baked potatoes.  One time they jokingly offered some vodka to me and the farmer’s 6-year-old son, and we said “yes”, and we loved it!  However, when we wanted more they said “no” and we started crying.
45. During the Holocaust did you have friends and interact much with other kids?  I interacted only with the kids who were in the household where I lived because I was never allowed to go outside, both for my safety and for the family’s who kept me.  Only when we left Warsaw for the farm in August 1944 was I allowed to play outside.
46. Do you have nightmares of things that happened to you?  No, and the only nightmare I remember from my childhood is the repeating nightmare I had immediately before the Warsaw uprising, as described in the chapter “August 1944 – Warsaw Uprising.”  On the other hand, I have forgotten most bad things, so I might have had many more nightmares and forgotten them.
47. How does your past affect you as a person now?  That’s probably best shown by the title of my book, “Neither Yesterdays Nor Tomorrows.”  I learned to focus on today, on what has to be done now, more-less ignoring the yesterdays that were painful and tomorrows that were very uncertain.
48. Did you ever think of leaving your hiding place?  I don’t remember having that thought specifically.  However, if I did, it would have been because I was very unhappy about something that had just happened, and I now know that I tend to forget most bad situations, so my not remembering it doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.  Besides, where would a 4-year-old go to if he doesn’t know where he is?  My mom would take me from one unfamiliar-to-me family to another in some other part of town, and I was never allowed to go outside, so I didn’t even know where I was.
49. Have you kept contact with other Holocaust survivors?  No.  To the best of my knowledge we were the only immigrants in the small towns in North Carolina and Oregon where we first lived in America, then in college and subsequently working in the aerospace industry I didn’t seek any contact with immigrants who might have been Holocaust survivors.
50. If you were to change anything about the Holocaust, what would it be?  I don’t play “what if” games.  It sometimes infuriates my wife when she asks me a “what if” question, but I just never want to go there.  Perhaps the obvious answer is that the Holocaust had never happened, but it did! 
51. What type of food & drink did you have during the Holocaust?  Mostly I remember having bread, soup, and potatoes - I was often given a pail which I would fill with potatoes stored in the basement of the apartment house (where it was cold) and would have to carry them up several flights of stairs.  The other food-moments I remember are the rhubarb at Leon’s apartment and the vodka made on the farm in the summer of 1944.
52. Do you speak any languages other than English?  Now it’s only English and Russian.  I’ve actually forgotten Polish, just as I seem to forget bad situations, bad things, so it’s probably a phychological issue, a safety mechanism.  I learned French when I lived there in 1949 before coming to America but have forgotten it.
53. How could the Germans know who was Jewish?  The German soldier described in my “The Soup and the Machine Gun” book chapter could have made me drop my pants to see that I was circumsized, because only Jewish males were circumsized in Poland at that time while Catholics were not.  There were official government records in Poland and other European countries that identified Jews on documents such as passports, residence records, etc.  Also, all ethnic groups have some physical characteristics typical to most (though not all) of its members, such as tone or color of skin, hair and eyes, facial features, even accent or speaking manner which could be noticed without looking at documents.  Thus there were several ways the Germans could identify, or at least suspect and check, who was Jewish.
54. How did you meet your wife?  It was in early 70s and we were both working in an aerospace-industry think-tank -  I headed a systems engineering department and she was an editor in our publications department.  One spring I had a very important report to submit to a Navy customer on very short notice, and publications did a good job on it quickly, so I wanted to somehow thank them.  Fresh strawberries just appeared on the market (unlike now, when they’re available year-around), so I bought a large batch, took them to publications and passed them around.  When only a few strawberries were left in the basket  I asked who would like another one, and only she raised her hand.  I liked that, asked her is she would go for lunch with me on my motorcycle, and that’s how it all started.  However, a car hit us on the way back to the office, so afterwards she wouldn’t ride with me on my motorcycle, but she did marry me. 
55. How long did it take after the war to normalize your life?  I can’t really answer that because, as a young child, whatever life I had at the moment was “normal” to me – it’s all I knew.  Thus, as things changed after the war, I accepted each change as ”normal.” 
56. Did you ever feel angry towards your mom for leaving you so many times during the Holocaust, or question her why she did it?  I probably did, and I also probably repressed any memory of it, since my tendency has been (and still is) to repress or forget bad events.
57. What did you do to pass the time while you were in the ghetto?  As a 4-year-old it was not difficult to occupy myself.   The only play that I specifically remember is riding my tricycle, which I got for my 3rd birthday.
58.  Do you have children?  How much did you tell them about the Holocaust?  I have one son who is now 44, and I did tell him some of my childhood experiences, but not all nor with any continuity.  That’s why in my book it says: “I wrote this for my son Jordan because it’s his heritage.”  Then, when I was invited to speak in Boston on the Holocaust Remembrance Day, I told Jordan (who lives in Seattle with his wife & daughter) and he asked if they could all fly in for the event.  Needless to say, I was very pleased that he wanted to be there.
59. How do you feel about German soldiers?  The only close-up encounter I now remember is when I was 4 years old and the soldier was standing looking down at me while I was eating soup, as described in my book in the chapter “The Soup and the Machine Gun,” and I felt neutral about it.  However, a year or so ago at a middle school I was shown a children’s book on the Holocaust and I happen to open it to a page that included a loose drawing of a small group of Nazi soldiers.  This image caught me by surprise and I felt a strong chill go through me. 
60. Can you now watch movies and visit exhibits about the Holocaust?   Yes, but I still would rather not. 
61. Do you think you would have reacted the same way now?  I think most adults would react to a situation differently from how they would react as children.  However, probably for my emotional survival, I instinctively learned not to play the “what if” game, which is why my book is called “Neither Yesterdays Nor Tomorrows” – I learned not to dwell on the past nor plan into the future. 
62. What is the best way to handle people who don’t believe that the Holocaust ever happened?  Perhaps the best that you can do is to tell them that you met someone who survived the Holocaust as a child in Poland but lost 10 of his 12 family members to the Nazis.  However, my own experience is that Holocaust deniers ignore documented fact and photos and witnesses because they don’t want their minds changed, period!  Some years ago I used to hang glide with a man who all of a sudden started trying to convince me by email  that the Holocaust didn’t happen.  At first I tried to refute his arguments with well-documented facts, but when that didn’t work I finally told him of my own background and family loss.  His reaction, however, was to express regret for my personal loss but then try again to convince me with trivial facts that there was no Holocaust.  At that point I stopped our communications.
63. What is your favorite hang-gliding experience?  My favorite was flying in the Sierra Nevada mountains and over Mt. Whitney, looking down at the many tiny and perpetually-frozen  lakes, their blue ice contrasting with the white snow around them.
64. How did you stay so focused when you were eating soup and the German soldier was next to you?  I’m very focused on whatever I’m doing at the moment, so apparently I was that way even as a young child, and besides, I was hungry.
65. Was your mother wealthy (before the war)?  No, she came from a middle-class family who valued education, and that’s why she went to the university and was a young attorney when the war started.
66. What was the hardest decision you ever had to make?  That’s a tough question, but it definitely was not during the Holocaust when I was a young child and very few decisions were up to me.  In retrospect, viewing my whole life, the hardest decision was to get a divorce from my son’s mother.
67. Did you ever use alcohol or drugs to make the pain go away?  No.
68. Did you play sports?  In high school and college I wrestled and also fenced, then after college it was hang gliding and skiing.
69. How were you able to stay so calm?  Partly because I was too young to understand how bad things really were, and partly because I’m such an optimist that I ignore bad things. 
70. Do you blame your parents or anyone for your childhood and the Holocaust?  No, I don’t – blaming does not accomplish anything positive.
71. Was it hard emotionally writing your book?  Once I decided to do it, writing itself was not hard and I did it fast.  On the other hand, the first time that I read a completed draft to edit it, my heart was in my throat much of the time, so that was hard.  My only explanation (to myself) is that writing is active, and I was very focused on doing it, while reading is more passive, so I had time to reflect and feel.
72. Are you glad that you wrote the book?  Yes, very much so, because it led into speaking to students like you, so I feel that I am giving back for my good luck in having survived.  Giving back is very gratifying.
73. Did your experience and that scene you describe in “The Shed” influence your career choice?  Yes, ever since then I’ve been interested in airplanes and aviation, and it resulted in my hobbies (model airplanes, hang-gliding) and my education and profession (aerospace, at least for a few years).
74. Did you feel your mom abandoned you?  What was your relationship with her?  It was definitely a complex relationship.  My mom was a very intelligent and capable woman and was very successful professionally, both in Poland after the war and in business after coming to America.  However, she had a very strong personality, and as long as I was a child and needed her our relationship was very good.  However, it became difficult when I reached adulthood and she no longer felt needed, and this resulted in several long periods when we were estranged.  It was only in 1995 while I was visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, that I suddenly realized that she could not have survived the Holocaust without deep emotional scarring.  At that time we had been estranged for over 6 years because I had been treating her as a normal adult rather than one who is emotionally scarred.  Upon returning home I went to see her and resumed a relationship, but with this new awareness I treated her differently than beforehand, and the 9 years till she died were much, much better.
75.  How did the horror that you experienced affect your belief system?  During the years when I was 4 to 7 I was taught to pray as a Catholic, but I feel that I prayed mechanically – did what I was told – just as did the children of the families with whom I lived who were my age.  Learning after the war that I was Jewish was traumatic and I cried – I was willing to defend Jews but I didn’t want to be one, probably because I knew how badly they were treated during the war.  However, in communist Poland after the war all religions were suppressed so I had no religious training at all.  Once we came to the US we lived a very secular life so I did not develop a religious identity.  However, I came to believe in the Golden Rule, i.e. doing to others as I would have them do to me.  I feel it is the core of all religions and I definitely live by it…. religiously. 
76. As a member of the audience, I’d like to share a centuries-old story about the ancient Rabbi Hillel and the Golden Rule.  A man came to Rabbi Hillel and said that he’d convert to Judaism if the Rabbi could explain Judaism while the man stood on one leg.  Rabbi Hillel then said: “What is hateful to you do not do to others.  The rest is commentary.  Now go and learn.”
77. Was it ever difficult to leave any of these families?  Did you ever get attached to any of them?  In retrospect, none of them treated me so well that I got attached to them, and the only difficulty was the change, the fear that the next family would treat me worse than the one I was leaving (see “A Beggar with a Burlap Bag” chapter in my book).
78. When you see pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto, do you recognize any people or places?  No, not at all.  I was 4 years old then, so too young to remember these details, but also most of the people living there have been killed by the Nazis and most buildings were destroyed in the ghetto uprising.
79. Do you practice Judaism?  No, I don’t.  During the war I was raised as a Catholic, but for a 4-6 yr-old that meant only doing that which I was told to do: kneeling and reciting mechanically several prayers.  After the war, Poland under communism discouraged all religion, so my mom focused me on the Golden Rule, and to this day I live my life by it.  I was never taught to practice Judaism. 
80. Was your family observant before the war?  I think that my mom’s parents were observant Jews in the traditional sense but my mom was more modern, more “reformed” even though there was no Reformed Judaism in Poland at that time.  After we came to the U.S. she observed the major Jewish holidays, though she would tell me that she was doing it ”in honor of (her) mother.” 
81. When did you tell your wife about all this?  We’ve been married for 38 years, and over that time I’ve surely told her most of the various episodes of my childhood, though not with any intended continuity.  Once I started writing my book my wife would help me edit it and then review & edit the final draft.  However, the fuller & more heartfelt answer is on the “thank you” page of my book, immediately before the table of contents.
82.  Why the title of the book?  During the war I learned instinctively to focus on the present because the past was mostly painful as I was often not treated very well while the future was very uncertain as I never knew when I would see my mom, or even whether I would see her.  Even now I continue to live my life much the same way.  Thus “Neither Yesterdays Nor Tomorrows.”
83.  Did other countries know what was happening in the Holocaust?  As a young child at the time I didn’t  know anything about the world and other countries.  However, I now know that other countries, including the US, did know about some of the horrors but did little about it, primarily because it was inconvenient vis-a-vis their own interests.  It’s similar to what happens now whenever large organizations, be it government or corporate, are faced with whistleblowers who try to expose corruption or waste: their reaction is always to protect the organization, regardless of the truth or morality of the exposure. 
84. Do you feel guilty about surviving?  No, not at all, and I’ve never understood this so-called “survivors’ guilt.”  Perhaps it’s because I was too young to understand completely what was happening, but having survived not at someone else’s sacrifice, I cannot understand this guilt.
85. Does watching your granddaughter grow up make you compare your childhood to hers?  No, it does not, as it’s also not productive.  For example, when my son was growing up I did not deny him things just because I didn’t have them – I knew that the times and circumstances were different.  On the other hand, I didn’t want to spoil him by making it too easy for him, so when he was in college and wanted things that were nice to have but not necessary, I would offer to pay half if he earned the other half by part-time jobs, and he always did that. 
86. Did the Holocaust start all of a sudden or was it gradual?  It was definitely gradual, each unjust-but-livable restriction at a time, such as Jews expelled from universities or required to wear the yellow Star of David or forced into ghettos, each step ”livable” so not to cause outright panic and rebellion, until the shipments to the death camps began and led to the ghetto uprising in 1943.
87. How were you able to overcome the challenges you faced when you came to the US?  After all the difficulties and uncertainities I experienced during the war while alone and living with strangers, after coming to the U.S. I was with my mom so the challenges seemed more “normal” and managagable.
88. Does it get easier to face your past as you tell your story more?  I’ve not noticed it getting noticably easier.  I judge that by the number of times I choke up in a presentation, and (except for the very first time) it seems to stay about the same: 2 or 3 times when I read from my book, not when I talk, and in different places in the book each time.
89. Are you going to write any more books?  I don’t plan to, but then I didn’t plan to write the first one either.  I’m a firm believer in “never say never.”
90. Are the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide comparable?  They definitely are because both were aimed at exterminating a people, but the Holocaust is now much better known, perhaps because it is more recent and because it is better documented.
91. What was the longest time you didn’t see your mom? About 6 months, from the summer of 1944 till January 1945.
92. When did you change your name to Elbaum?  In 1961, when I was already in graduate school, I changed it back to Elbaum, my father’s last name and mine when I was born.
93. Did you always know you were Jewish?  No, my mom told me that only in 1945, after the war, and it was a painful moment which I describe in my book.
94. What was your happiest memory from the war?  Probably getting that sugar cube from the Russian tank commander.
95. Now that you’re telling your story, do you feel relieved?  No, probably because I never felt that I was repressing it.  However, I’m glad that I am doing it now because the feedback from students & teachers has been very gratifying.
96. Some wounds are transmitted to the next generation.  Do you think you’ve transmitted some of these to your son?  I think that I’ve been fairly successful in containing or overcoming any emotional or psychological wounds I may still have from my wartime experiences.  (One “wound” that occasionally surfaces as a reminder of those years is stuttering.)  So, overall, I can’t think of anything specific that I’ve transmitted to my son from the war years.  However, all parents want to transmit to our children those characteristics that we like in ourselves and to hide those that we don’t like, and in that effort we’re all only marginally successful.  
97. Do you have any siblings?  No, and I’m probably lucky in that respect, because if there had been 2 or more of us it’s highly unlikely that my mother could have saved all or any of us.
98. When was the last time you saw your mom?  A few days before she died in July 2004.
99. Have your experiences shaken your faith in humanity, your trust in people?  I trust my instinct to guide me about trusting a person, and it usually steers me right, though not always.  Thus I feel comfortable about trusting individuals, though I feel differently about large groups and society in general.  Genocide still happens, even right now in places like Darfur, and history shows over and over again how demagogues can lead the masses to do terrible deeds, as Hitler did with the German people.  That, unfortunately, is part of human nature, and human nature changes very, very slowly, only at the speed of evolution.
100. What was the most memorable simple pleasure that you remember from your childhood?  The sugar cube given to me by a Russian tank officer in January 1945, as described in the chapter “Winter 1945 - The War Ends” of my book. 
101. Have you been to Yad Vashem?  Yes, in 1995 we were on an archeological tour that ended in Israel.  I did not plan to visit Yad Vashem but my wife wanted to do it and I agreed to go.  Being surrounded in its darkness by images of the Holocaust, I suddenly realized that my mother or any sentient adult could not have survived it without deep emotional scars, and after we returned home I changed my reactions and behavior with her, which stabilized our relationship until her death 9 years later. 
102. What one word would describe how you felt when your mom told you that you were Jewish?  It would probably be ”crushed”, and I cried.  I was 7 yrs old, and having seen the effects of anti-semitism suffered by Jews in Poland, I didn’t want to carry that burden by being Jewish, though I was willing to defend Jews.  However, after some time I accepted it.
103. How did you question your mom’s authority when she would leave you with the different families who kept you?  Since I was 4-5 years old when she was moving me from one family to another, I cried and resisted as any 4-5 year old can, but I was too young for it to have any effect and that’s probably all for the better, as described in my book’s chapter “A Beggar with a Burlap Bag”.
104. What is the thing you most want us to take away from today?  It’s keeping an open mind and staying positive.  However, I don’t know whether I learned it as a child to survive during the war or if was born that way.
105. Did you ever want revange against the Germans?  No, I don’t think so, I don’t remember thinking about it.  However, I do admit that there were occasions in the past when hearing German spoken unexpectedly I felt a sudden pit in my stomach, so there must be some negative feelings deep in me.
106. Are you friends with any Germans today?  No, but there none that live near me, and there are many other nationalities  where I have no friends today.  However, in graduate school I did have a close friend and colleague who was German, but after getting his PhD he returned to Germany and we didn’t communicate afterwards.
107. Has speaking about your wartime experiences made you feel more connected to your mother?  No, not really.  I kept an emotional distance from the Holocaust for over 60 years  because I saw what it did to my mother, how the past tormented her and kept her from enjoying the present, including her business success in America.  I didn’t want to let that happen to me, so I refused to participate with her in dwelling and reliving the past.  It is only a year ago, almost 6 years after my mom died, that I had the epiphany which made me realize the importance of sharing my story, in writing my book and in speaking to students such as yourselves. 
108. What does the Holocaust mean to you?  What single image comes to your mind when you hear the word?  It’s German soldiers in their long, dark green coats, with helmets and rifles slung over their shoulders.  It’s a small group of figures such as the one I describe in my book’s chapter “The Soup and the Machine Gun.”
109. Does it bother you to tell us your story?  How do you feel when having flashbacks about the Holocaust?  I decided to talk to students, such as yourselves, for the same reason that I decided after 60+ years of silence to write my book: because it might make a small difference for the better, for understanding rather than intolerance and prejudice.  However, the memories and  feelings I describe are painful, which is why at least once or twice during each talk I choke up - it’s usually when reading from my book, and at different and unexpected places each time.  I’ve accepted the fact that it happens, but I still choke up.
110. How do we know you’re telling the truth?  Because I have no reason to lie.  Since I kept silent for 60+ years, and it still pains me to recount some of it, I’m certainly not doing it for any benefit to me, except hoping that it might help others.  Afterwards, students have written me that it has helped them, sometimes in unexpected ways, and that encourages me to continue. 
111. What’s your most vivid experience/flashback?  The airplane I saw through the roof of the shed where we were hiding in the ghetto.  That’s why the scene is on the cover of my book.
112. What was the feeling of losing 10 family members and still have to keep on going?  My memories start at my 3rd birthday, and by then only my mother, grandmother, and I were still together.  I have no memories of the others: my father (killed on the Eastern front), aunts, uncles, the other grandparents (sent to concentration camps).  However, my mother obviously remembered them all, and what helped her to “keep on going” was probably the responsibility for saving me and her mother.
113. Did you ever find out what happened to the rest of your family?  My mother learned and told me what happened to some but not all of our family.  For example, she told me that Nazi soldiers came for my father shortly after they occupied Poland, but since he was gone (with the Polish army sent to the Eastern front), they took my grandfather.  My grandmother’s fate is described above.  As for the rest of the family, either my mother didn’t know or I have forgotten what she told me.
114. If Jews were treated so badly, why would you want your children to be Jewish?  Jews have been a minority and subject to discrimination and worse for about 2000 years, ever since the loss of their homeland in what’s now Israel.  The reason Jews maintained their group identity through those centuries is their religion: all adults, not just Jews, who believe in their religion want their children to keep that religion, in spite or discrimination and hardship and risk.  In 1620 the Pilgrims came to America, despite the risks of a wild and unknown land beyond a huge and dangerous ocean, to freely practice their religion for themselves and for their children, and for the very same reasons Jews endured comparable risks throughout their history.     
115. Did you become immune to the violence of the Nazis, since you were born into such horridness?  Not at all.  Though I got used to seeing dead bodies (pg 27 of my book), killing of baby birds horrified me then (pgs 20-21), as does any cruelty to this day. 
116. When you were younger (during the Holocaust) did you know what was going on in the world?  Did you know when Hitler died?  As a 3-to-6 year old in an age before television, I neither knew nor was interested in anything except the small world immediately around me.  For example, I didn’t know about Hitler until after the war.
117. Was there segregation during the Holocaust?  If the Nazi policy that all Jews are to be killed can be called “segregation”, then the answer is ”yes”!
118. How do you feel now that you are alive and managed to survive the Holocaust?  Very, very lucky!   
119. Why were you willing to defend Jews but were upset to learn that you were Jewish?  I was only 7 years old so I’m not sure about my motives at the time, but from today’s perspective I suppose that having known and seen the results of anti-Semitism suffered by Jews, I didn’t want that burden.  After all, it’s easier to defend someone being persecuted than to suffer the persecution.
120. Is it important for Jews to have knowledge of their heritage?  I think it’s important for any societal group to know its heritage as it gives the group a sense of identity.  However, it’s especially important for minority groups displaced from their homeland and persecuted, as then it becomes the only tie to give the people their identity and group continuity. 
121. I felt that your mom and you seemed quite distant in your relationship even after the Holocaust.  Is that because of what happened, and that she was unable to distance herself from the Holocaust while you were able to do just that?  My mother bore the total burden of both the responsibility of keeping herself, her mother, and me alive after all other family members had been killed, and her awareness of the horrible monstrosity that the Nazis perpetrated on her family and her world.  In addition, she was surely tormented by the comparison of her life before the war, her life as it should be, versus the hell that she now faced every day.  These burdens left deep emotional scars on her psyche, scars that did not heal with the war’s end.  For example, even decades later in America she would have a strong adverse reaction to the sound of sirens, which reminded her of bombings and of German police sweeps.  I, on the other hand, was too young to remember a “normal” life, and to fully understand the monstrosity of the current situation.  I also seem to have developed, perhaps instinctively for my emotional survival, the capacity to forget the pains of yesterdays.  Thus after coming to America, when I was already old enough to view my mom with some objectivity, I saw her reliving the past and being tormented by it.  Seeing what that did to her, I developed an emotional distance from the Holocaust, and refused to “go there” with her, even at times when she tried to talk about it because of an inner need.  This probably put a distance between her and me, as you so perceptively noticed.
122. Have you seen the movie ”Schindler’s List” and do you think it depicts the Holocaust realistically?  Yes, I did see it and I was very moved by it, but much of it takes place in a concentration camp while I was lucky enough never to be in one.  However,  photos taken by American troops when liberating these camps and stories told by camp survivors convince me that “Schindler’s List” is a realistic depiction. 
123. How did you feel when you realized that it was a grenade you tossed that exploded in the ditch?  I realized that it was a grenade only a long time after it happened, so by then it no longer had much impact.
124. What do you remember most from those years?  The airplane I saw through the hole in the shed’s roof, and that’s why it’s on the cover of my book.
125. Did you realize the danger at the time, or were you terrified?   Either I didn’t realize it at the time or I’ve blocked the fear  from my memory, so I no longer remember the fear.  The closest to being terrified that I now remember is described in “A Beggar with a Burlap Bag.”
126. How much of it was luck vs. conscious decisions?  I feel my mother’s survival was a combination of both, but for me it was almost entirely luck.
127. How did your experiences affect how you felt about how people treated you after you came to the US?  My book’s title, “Neither Yesterdays Nor Tomorrows,” describes how I learned to live my life during the war and afterwards, even into adulthood, so I address and try to solve current issues without digging into the past or worrying about the future.  Regarding coming to the US, I did feel like a foreigner through early high school, and for that reason my book goes only until I no longer felt like that, except for the very last chapter.  
128. From a visiting teacher – Are you optimistic?  I want to be better in giving back as a result of this week’s talks, such as yours.  I’m very optimistic by nature, perhaps blindly so if you ask my wife, but that’s about personal situations and one-on-one events.  However, I am not optimistic about real progress of society and humanity, because I think that human nature changes only at the speed of evolution, and that is very, very slow.  
129. Did you wear a yellow star?  No, probably because I was just a little kid and didn’t have to do so.
130. Were you ever in a concentration camp?  No.
131. Till what age did you use another name?  I came to America in 1949 as Kochanowski, my Polish last name for about 5 years.  Then my last name became Whiteman when I was adopted by my mother’s husband.  I even graduated MIT in 1959 as Whiteman.  However, later that year he was hit & killed by a car while on a sidewalk with my mother, so later I changed my name to Elbaum, the name with which I was born.  
132. Did writing the book bring back memories that you repressed?   It did bring back a few details but nothing major or especially frightening.  In fact, the actual writing was not emotionally difficult, probably because it’s an active process and I was very focused while doing it.  Reading, however, is more passive, and the first time I read the whole book to edit it my heart was frequently in my throat. 
133. Through the whole experience what was the hardest thing with which you had to deal?  I really don’t remember anything specific, but perhaps that’s because, to this day, I seem to forget bad things – not good things but only the bad ones.  It really happens.  Perhaps it’s something I learned instinctively for emotional survival during the Holocaust.
134. Did you know why your mother would leave you with others and how she found you on the farm many months after the Warsaw uprising?  I don’t know, and I also don’t know why I never asked her many such questions, even in the many years afterwards when I was already an adult.
135. What was it like to go through the Holocaust as a young kid?  That question is probably best answered by my book’s title, “Neither Yesterdays Nor Tomorrows.”  I learned instinctively to live in the present, not to reflect on the past because it was mostly difficult, and also not to look forward because that was so uncertain.  For example, I never knew when I would see my mother next, and I never considered (at least I don’t remember considering) that it may be never.
136. How did your early experiences affect your adult life?  I’ve learned instinctively to forget, or perhaps repress, bad memories, to focus on the present, and not to look to the future.  That’s expressed in the title of my book, and it’s evident in my avoiding anything Holocaust-related for 60+ years until my epiphany while viewing the movie “Paper Clips” (see the q&a above). 
137. How did your mom find the several Polish families with whom you lived?  I don’t know because I never asked.  That’s one of several questions that occurred to me while writing my book and that I never asked my mom, even as an adult.  Perhaps it was part my avoidance of revisiting the Holocaust. 
138. How did your mom keep finding you (as you moved from one place to another)?  I don’t know, and that’s one of the many questions that I never asked my mom while she was alive, but that occurred to me only when I was writing my book last year.  However, she died 6 years earlier, at 91.
139. Did you ever thank your mom for what she did for you?  Not directly, I think.  I was a little kid who only knew that one life and thought that it was normal. 
140. Did you see any suicides or think about it?  No, I think I was too young to understand it.
141. When you were old enough to get your own perspective, what were your feelings about the human race?  On an individual or personal level, each of us has a choice: to do what one knows is right, or what is safer, or what may bring some benefit even at someone else’s expense.  For example, during the Holocaust there were Poles who, at the risk of their own lives, helped to save Jews, such as the families who kept me, because they knew it was the right thing to do.  Yet there were other Poles, such as the man who betrayed my grandmother’s hiding place to the Nazis, who chose what brought them some benefit at the cost of others’ lives.  So on an individual level I’m an optimist because I feel that I can usually (though not always)  sense whom to trust and whom to avoid.  However, on a large group level, such as society in general, I am not so optimistic because 5000+ years of recorded history shows that human character hardly changed during this period.  While we can invent airplanes and computers and nuclear bombs, basic human character changes  only on the evolutionary timescale.  
142. What was your reaction to the Nuremberg Trials, and do you think that individual soldiers should have been held accountable or the leaders?  As I was only 7-8 yrs old  during these trials, I did not follow them and my reaction now is as an adult: the trials correctly focused on & punished the leaders who created the Holocaust and directed it.  Thus the primary responsibility was definitely theirs.  I feel that the responsibility diminished as the rank of the officer or soldier diminished - they were carrying out orders from above - although low-rank guards in concentration camps who were culpable for reprehensible brutality must bear the responsibility for their actions.
143. Do you consider yourself Polish?  No, I consider myself an  American.
144. Do you think some might deny the Holocaust because they’re afraid we’re capable of doing the same?  I can’t accept that reasoning, perhaps because I cannot see myself doing anything like that.  While I can see doing violence in defending myself, and have done so in the heat of a fight, but that’s not the same as the cold-blooded murders of the Holocaust.
145. Are you ever troubled by forgetting the bad?  No, not at all.
146. Do you think it would be a better world if everyone forgot the bad?  Probably not, because remembering the bad things one did activates the feeling of guilt, and that sometimes prevents people from doing the same bad things again… and sometimes it doesn’t.
147. Did you feel confused about faith, being raised during the war as a Catholic, then learning you were Jewish?  I was taught to pray as a Catholic when I was 5-6 years old, and I did it almost mechanically, as did the Polish Catholic kids with whom I lived at the time.  My mom told me that I was Jewish when I was 7, after the war, but Poland was then communist, so all religious practice was discouraged, and my mom focused me on the Golden Rule, which is at the core of all religions, and which I definitely follow in my life.
148. Do you know any Holocaust survivors?  No, I didn’t seek such  contacts.  Seeing what those memories did to my mom, I stayed away from all things Holocaust till seeing the movie “Paper Clips” a year ago and writing my book.
149. With your experience, what one advice would you give us?  Follow the Golden Rule and keep an open mind.