As a teenager, Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz searched for a gun to kill Germans. He imagined pulling the trigger, ending the life of somebody he assumed responsible for almost ending his.
But he changed his mind.
Instead of pursuing hatred, he pursued an engineering degree. After stints in Norway and South Africa, he came to Canada, where for decades he was a pilot, businessman and speaker about the Holocaust.
This year, the 97-year-old added member of the Order of Canada to his list of accomplishments.
“I didn’t expect it,” he said from his home in Toronto, describing his reaction to the phone call from the Governor General’s office.
Gotz is one of 80 Canadians recently appointed to, or promoted within, the ranks of Canada’s highest civilian honour. Founded in 1967 to celebrate Canada’s centennial, the Order of Canada recognizes people who have made outstanding contributions to Canada.
The latest cohort, announced Dec. 31, includes doctors, researchers, artists and Olympic medalist Andre De Grasse. Gotz will be officially installed as a member of the Order of Canada during a ceremony in March.
Gotz is being recognized for his decades of educating students about the Holocaust, including publishing a memoir, Flights of Spirit, in 2018.
The book “speaks to the importance of understanding the conditions that bring about genocide and serves as a genuine counterweight to Holocaust deniers,” his citation for the Order of Canada says.
Gotz’s recognition is particularly meaningful now. Antisemitism continues to surge in Canada. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Gotz, who moved to Canada with his wife and three children in 1964.
But as the number of living Holocaust survivors continues to shrink, researchers and educators are looking for ways to ensure their testimonies live on. Their stories demonstrate how quickly people can descend into violence and what moral courage looks like.
They also show the importance of resisting hate.
“It’s one of the failures of humanity that we hate,” said Gotz. “As an engineer, I’m so conscious of all the achievements of humanity. But when we hate, we produce nothing.”
‘So we starved’
The first thing German soldiers took from Gotz was his childhood.
The only child of a bookkeeper and a nurse, Gotz had a typical upbringing in Lithuania. But in June 1941, when he was 13, Germany invaded and forced Jews like Gotz into ghettos. Along with 30,000 other Jews, his family was “jammed” into a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire and guards.
Gotz was too young for forced labour, so he instead attended the ghetto trade school where he learned to become a toolmaker. Eventually, he started teaching other children too.
For three years in the ghetto, Gotz watched as the Germans took away everything his family considered valuable: jewelry, cameras, books — and their neighbours. He saw thousands of Jews taken away to be killed by machine fire. On Oct. 29, 1941, 10,000 men, women and children were taken out of the ghetto and killed at a military compound, the Ninth Fort.
After three years, only 8,000 of the ghetto’s original 30,000 residents remained.
The Gotz family decided they would rather die by suicide than be killed by Germans. In the summer of 1944, during a German search of the ghetto, they hid themselves in their basement. They had food and supplies to last them two weeks — and syringes that Gotz’s mother had prepared for lethal injections. Gotz volunteered to die first.
“I [didn’t] want to see my family die,” he told Canadian Affairs in a 2023 interview.
The family was not found in the basement, but their safety proved short-lived. When the family eventually left the base, they thought Russian soldiers had come to liberate the city. Instead, to their horror, they found the German soldiers were still there. The soldiers put them on cattle cars and shipped them off to concentration camps.
Gotz and his father were sent to the infamous Dachau concentration camp, near Munich. There, they worked 12-hour construction shifts, fueled only by bread and watery gruel.
“If a potato floated in the soup it was a good day,” said Gotz. “No meat, no fat, nothing, and one slice of bread for the whole day. So we starved.”
Gotz and his father managed to get a job working indoors, which spared them from frigid temperatures. His supervisor, whom Gotz says was a kind German, gave him extra bread and potatoes. Not everyone was so fortunate.
Gotz watched people around him die, from teenagers his own age to the elderly. “I got used to carrying dead bodies,” he said.
‘I gave up the hate’
American troops liberated the camp on April 29, 1945, a month after Gotz turned 17. Gotz was standing in line for soup and bread when he heard American soldiers had arrived.
When he returned to his father, who weighed just 65 pounds by then, Gotz excitedly told him about liberation. Worn down by starvation, his father’s first reaction was to ask for the bread.
“My moment of liberation was, ‘Have you got the bread?’” Gotz remembers.
Gotz spent six months in the hospital, regaining his strength. He and his father were reunited with his mother, who had been sent to the Shutthof concentration camp.
“I was the only [patient] who had both parents,” he said. “I didn’t tell anybody. I was embarrassed by how lucky I was.”
Lucky, yes. But not truly free. Every time he saw a German, he was filled with hatred. While living in a German refugee camp, he hunted for a gun. He needed to kill the Germans. He needed revenge.
For months, thoughts of revenge consumed him. Until one day, while searching for a gun, he stood still. He looked around. He asked himself if he really knew whether the man near him had been a Dachau guard. He could have just as easily been a history professor who hated Hitler, Gotz realized.
“I gave [the hate] up,” Gotz told Canadian Affairs earlier this month. “I realized you can’t hate the whole people for what some of them have done. And when I gave up that hate, I started living for the first time.”
‘So full of joy’
When Gotz speaks about his experience, he warns students of the folly and danger of hatred.
It appears he has communicated that message effectively.
For years, Gotz led students on trips to Auschwitz to learn about the Holocaust. In feedback shared with Canadian Affairs, dozens of former participants said that hearing Gotz’s story was the most meaningful part of their trip.
“Elly is so full of joy,” wrote one student. “That’s really what his influence boils down to. He is proof that beauty can rise from ashes and pain can give way to new life.”
One of the goals of Holocaust education is preventing hatred. But increased antisemitic attacks in Canada, as well as the shooting during Hanukkah celebrations at Bondi Beach in Australia, have some reconsidering how to best deliver that message.
“I had high hopes some time ago [that Holocaust education could prevent antisemitism],” said Jan Grabowski, a history professor at the University of Ottawa who studies the Holocaust.
“But given the fact that we are now witnessing explosive growth of antisemitism after all these decades of Holocaust education, one conclusion I can take out of it is that perhaps we need [a] different kind of Holocaust education.”
“The path from peace, prosperity and inclusion to demonization and violence can be a rather short one,” said Artur Wilczynski, a board member of the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship.
“History teaches us that if we’re not vigilant, if we do not confront the kind of rhetoric and demonization of any community that goes on, that the potential for the dehumanization that leads to violence is real.”
The conflict in Israel and Gaza, as well as the rise of disinformation, makes the need for combatting antisemitism more obvious, Wilczynski says. “I think we need to redouble our efforts,” he said.
As more Holocaust survivors die, museums and educational organizations are finding new ways to preserve their stories, often through interactive digital storytelling.
Gotz often thinks about what will happen when the last of the survivors die. “There’s just a few of us left,” said Gotz, who still regularly speaks to schools. By the first week of January, he already had more than 20 presentations lined up for this year.
But the way he tells his story has changed. He cannot travel as much anymore. He gave up driving recently, at his wife’s request.
As a former pilot, he finds it hard to have his mobility restricted. But giving presentations from his home computer has some advantages.
“I can do it in my slippers,” he said with a laugh.
Does he condemn the Israeli genocide of Palestinians? Is he a Zionist?