*IN YIDDISH* Pinchas Gutter, Mayne Iberlebenishn in der Tsveyter Velt Milkhume
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Himel Family Yiddish Lecture Series
Israel and Sala Disenhouse Memorial Lecture
Co-sponsored by the Al and Malka Green Fund in Yiddish Studies
Pinchas Gutter (Toronto)
Mayne iberlebenishn in der tsveyter velt milkhume
Born into a well established family, who can trace their roots back 400 years in Poland. Pinchas was born in Lodz and was 7 years old when the war broke out. He, along with his twin sister and entire family fled to what they thought was safety in Warsaw after his father had been brutally beaten by Nazis in Lodz. Pinchas and his family were incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto for three and a half years until April 1943, the time of the Ghetto uprising. Although the effort was a valiant one, after three weeks the family was deported to the death camp, Majdanek. The day the family arrived after a horrendous journey, Pinchas' father, mother and twin sister were murdered by the Nazis. Pinchas was sent to a work camp where people were beaten, shot, or worked to death. He passed through several other concentration camps, including Buchenwald, and worked at loading and unloading enormous weights of iron and other slave work. Towards the end of the war, he was forced on a death march from Germany to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, which he barely survived. He was liberated by the Russians on May 8, 1945 and under the auspices of UNRRA was taken to Britain with other children for rehabilitation. After spending many years in South Africa, he emigrated to Canada where he resides. Pinchas divides his time between speaking out against the Holocaust, volunteering as a chaplain and is an honourary full time Cantor in the Kiever Shul.