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Holocaust survivor brings stories of horror and hope to U of G

Elly Gotz, 90, said he could finally move forward when he was able to let go of the hate

Elly Gotz wanted to go first.

If the Nazi soldiers found their hiding place, he wanted to be the first one of his family to receive one of the syringes his mother had neatly lined up on a tray so that they could all commit suicide.

“I decided, I’m going to go first. I don’t want to watch my family die. It will probably be painful and they’ll be laying on the floor screaming. When the time comes, I’m first,” said Gotz.

And so began the riveting, occasionally horrific and, at the end of the day, uplifting story of Gotz, a 90-year-old survivor of the Holocaust who brought his story and his message to roughly 450 students at the University of Guelph Thursday night.

The event was part of the U of G’s Holocaust Education Week.

Gotz was living a normal life in Lithuania. He loved planes and wanted to be an engineer.

Suddenly, in 1941, there were German tanks in the streets and everything changed.

“Jews, who had lived in Lithuania for 800 years, were suddenly not citizens,” he said. “The Nazi’s said ‘Jews are the worst in the world.’”

His family hid for days in a secret hideout in their home where his the family decided they would commit suicide with medication Gotz’s nurse mother had taken from her hospital rather than be taken and killed by the soldiers.

After days they emerged to see people heading for trains. They thought that was a good sign That nobody was being killed, just taken somewhere.

That somewhere was the man-made Kaunas Ghetto where Jews were packed into, forced to work as slave labour for the Nazi war effort.

On Oct. 29, 1941, 10,000 people were marched out of that ghetto, taken to a hill, and killed. Gotz's family survived by the luck of the draw.

“Ten thousand in one day,” said Gotz, whose ordeal is detailed in his memoir Flights of Spirit.

The Nazi responsible for those murders, Helmut Rauca, was eventually found in 1982, living in Toronto. For years he operated a motel in Huntsville.

“It took the RCMP 32 years to find him. I could have found him in five minutes. He was living near me in Toronto and his name was in the phone book in his own name,” Gotz said.

Gotz became a locksmith and, at 15, a teacher of metal work during those years in the ghetto.

He told the hushed audience of the day 3,000 children were rounded up and killed.

"All in the same day,” he said.

After three years in the Lithuanian ghetto, he and his father were shipped to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

“A known place of torture and death … a place of horror,” he said.

The men were forced to work hard labour 12 hours a day, given watery soup and one slice of bread per day. Every second day they were given a one inch square of cheese.

Everyone and everything was infested with lice.

“We worked and we died,” Gotz said. “In the morning we carried out the dead and they were counted. I carried more dead bodies than I can count.”

When a friend died in the night laying beside him, the first thing Gotz did was reach into the dead friend's pocket to see if he had saved any of his bread.

On April 29, 1945, American soldiers liberated the camp.

“In six or seven months we were all skeletons. When we were liberated, I weighed 70 pounds and my father weighed 65 pounds.”

Gotz spent six months in hospital recovering.

“I was full of hate,” he said. “I had a plan: ‘when I get out, I’m going to kill Germans for revenge. I was ready to kill any German.

“I lived with this thought for quite a while. Total hate,” Gotz said.

One day he had an epiphany.

“I thought of Germany, this beautiful country, and I thought, ‘they can’t all be murderers.”

Hating Germans just for being Germans made him no better than those that hated Jews just for being Jews, he realized.

“When I gave up hate, I started living for the first time since liberation. I’m still amazed I could do that,” he said.

Eventually his family was reunited. Lived for a while in Norway, then later South Africa, where he met his wife of 60 years Esme.

Unhappy with the political climate of the day in South Africa, they moved to Canada in 1964, where Gotz became a successful businessman.

His closing message to the mostly students in attendance that it is a waste of time to hate.

“When you give up hate you go forward in life instead of going back,” Gotz said.


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Tony Saxon

About the Author: Tony Saxon

Tony Saxon has had a rich and varied 30 year career as a journalist, an award winning correspondent, columnist, reporter, feature writer and photographer.
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