by George J Elbaum

City Arts and Leadership High School (CAL) is a tuition-free public charter high school dedicated to preparing students for success in college, career and life.  Located in San Francisco’s Mission Terrace neighborhood, CAL offers students a rigorous academic experience and a small, diverse community where students are known, cared-for and challenged.  Its current enrollment is 450 students (63% Hispanic, 11% two or more races, 11% African American, 7% Asian, 6% White), with average class size of 24 and 20:1 students-to-staff ratio.  

My presentation was organized by History Teacher Joe Steinberger for 100+ students in 10^th-12^th grade World History, which covered the 10 stages of genocide, survivor stories during the Holocaust, and involved discussions about the Nazi occupation. The teacher prepared the students for my presentation by giving background information and historical context to my story, and afterwards held a debriefing and discussion on what was shared and its connections to topics covered in class.

Arrangements for the presentation were made by Sadie Simon, Education Program Manager, JFCS Holocaust Center.

Notes from students

A few weeks after my talk to the City Arts and Leadership students I received several dozen Thank You notes, and as is our custom, my wife Mimi and I read these together after dinner, excerpted the statements that most resonated with us, and these excerpts are shown below.

• Hearing how you persevered through these traumatic events has really inspired me and my classmates to focus on and live in the moment and work through our challenges.  I hope other students are able to listen to your story and think the same about it.
• Your story has really impacted my perspective on perseverance, and you have shown me what it means to survive and thrive, refusing to give up and back down even when faced with such a great burden of surviving the Holocaust.
• Thank you for giving us a moment I will never forget.  I really felt your story.
• Your experience during World War Two left me without words when you put the killing in perspective.
• It made me grateful that there is no war close to home!
• You made me realize that our decisions really impact other people and that we have to be strong to get through life.
• Now it is our responsibility to continue educating our future generations your legacy.
• Your speech was very inspirational and I can see that we are very alike: from your philosophy to live in the moment and the way we learned English by listening when immigrating.
• The takeaway I took from your story is to view the world differently, to focus on the moment and make it work, rather than focusing and worrying about the future or the past.