Pinchas Gutter

Pinchas Gutter was born to a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland. He was eight years old when Nazi Germany occupied his hometown at the start of World War II. He, his twin sister Sabina, and his parents Chaja and Menachem Gutter fled to Warsaw to live with a relative, thinking it would be safer. Later they were confined with other Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. They survived the major deportations of 1942, but after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, they were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to the Majdanek extermination camp. His parents and sister were murdered there. Pinchas was sent to a series of forced labor camps and concentration camps. Toward the end of the war, he was sent to Buchenwald, then to another labor camp in Germany, and then sent on a death march to Terezín (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia. After surviving to be be liberated by the Red Army at age 13 in May 1945, he was sent to an orphanage in the UK. He later moved to Paris to live with a cousin, and in 1950 left for Israel, where he volunteered for the army. He met his future wife Dorothy while attending school to learn Hebrew. They moved to England and married there. They lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil and South Africa before emigrating to Canada in 1985, settling in Toronto. The couple had three children. Pinchas was featured in documentary films, including Political, Polish Jew: The Story of Pinchas Gutter (2014), directed by Zvike Nevo; and The Last Goodbye (2016) by the USC Shoah Foundation. He is an active member of his community, serving as a cantor in his synagogue, and speaks and shares his story widely. His memoir Memories in Focus (French translation Dans la chambre noire), written with Myrna Riback, was published in 2017 in the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs.