Holocaust survivor: 'It went from bad to worse'

The only visual memory Pinchas Gutter has of his twin sister, Sabina, is her blond braid as she hugged their mother before they were sent into a German concentration camp.

“Somebody that was my twin, somebody that I was born together (with), somebody I spent 11 years of my life together with, I haven’t even got a picture memory of her,” Gutter said.

“For example, we used to go and collect the Shabbat meal from the baker. I know she’s walking next to me, but I can’t see her. I can see everything else, but I can’t see her.”

On Nov. 3 – a couple of days before visiting with staff and students at Islands Consolidated School on Digby Neck – Gutter, 87, shared some of what he endured before, during and after the Holocaust, when he spoke at Pier 21 in Halifax for the Atlantic Jewish Council’s 16th annual Holocaust Education Week.

Before the Second World War, as Gutter grew up in Lodz, Poland, other kids would occasionally tease him for being Jewish.

“Anti-semitism didn’t affect my life before the war. I was a very happy child,” he said.

But Gutter’s happy childhood was quickly ripped from his hands when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Shortly after, all nonGermans were ordered to evacuate Lodz, so Gutter’s family headed to Warsaw to join his father’s sister.

German authorities soon turned Warsaw into the Warsaw Ghetto, where more than 400,00 Jews were imprisoned by brick walls and barbed-wire in a 3.4-squarekilometre space.

“The Warsaw Ghetto was an apocalyptic hell,” he said, describing how each person was rationed to only 180 calories a day and diseases spread rapidly.

“Toward the middle and the end of 1941 things started being so bad, people started dying by the 100s, so there were lots of bodies in the streets,” Gutter recalled. “I shut off. I knew what was happening, but didn’t understand why these things were happening and it went from bad to worse.”

On July 22, 1942, signs appeared that people were going to start being relocated to the East, where they would work on farms and have a better life.

“They never used the word deportation, but my father didn’t trust the Nazis at all, so we decided we wouldn’t do anything but be hidden,” Gutter said. “The rumours started and these things weren’t what they said they were. They went in and they never came out.”

Gutter’s family hid with about 150 people in a bunker for three weeks until they were found and sent to Majdanek concentration camp in 1943.

Gutter and his father were separated from his mother and sister as Jews were sorted on arrival by men and women.

“They pushed us into a room and I saw showers and I knew in the Warsaw Ghetto if you see showers, that’s where you’re going to die, so I started saying my prayers and waited for the gas to come out,” Gutter said. “But in my case water came out.”

Gutter got dressed in prison clothes he was given and looked around for his father, but could only find a man he recognized from the bunker.

“I ran to him and I said, ‘Did you see my father? Where is my father?’ and he didn’t answer and after a minute or so, he lifted his eyes to heaven and that’s all. He never said a word and I knew my father was murdered.”

Gutter, 10 years old at the time, was the only member of his immediate family that wasn’t murdered upon arriving at Majdanek.

He endured months of beatings before being sent to a labour camp where he was forced to make ammunition, bombs, mines and grenades for the German army.

There, Gutter survived typhus, starvation and horrific conditions before the camp was evacuated near the end of the war. Gutter was sent on a “death march” to Buchenwald concentration camp and bounced from concentration camp to concentration camp before he was liberated in 1945 by the Red Army and sent to Britain.

“I can only tell you what happened at the time, I can’t tell you my feelings,” Gutter said of his first day of freedom.

“I had no feelings. I was only functioning and doing things, not feeling things.”

Gutter lived in France, Israel, Brazil and South Africa before settling in Toronto with his wife in 1985.

“I felt this kind of freedom when I first walked the waterfront in Toronto and that’s how I feel to this day. This is my home,” Gutter said.

“My birthright was taken away from me, but now I feel at home. I feel this is a wonderful country and I feel at peace.”