The Current - Order of Canada: Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Pinchas Gutter has been named to the Order of Canada for decades of work in Holocaust education. The concentration camp survivor is in his 90s, and says his work is far from over.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. To kick off 2025, we have been introducing you to Canadians who are being recognized with the Order of Canada. Pinka Scooter is a survivor of the Holocaust who experienced firsthand the horrors of Nazi death camps.

He's an educator who has been recognized internationally. His book, Memories in Focus, is used by teachers in classes across this country. Pinka Scooter joins me in studio. Good morning. Good morning to you. Congratulations. Thank you very much. What does this honor mean to you? It means quite a lot. It means more than anything because it means that the Governor General,

and I think the public in Canada, is prepared to recognize people who are trying to create a better world for us in general, you know, drop by drop by drop, but because it doesn't help quickly. I came to Canada by chance because I was visiting my late brother-in-law who emigrated to Canada in the 60s. When I was walking on the waterfront with my nephews who were then 12, 13 years old, and I was using the subway and I was using everything in Toronto, I felt a freedom.

You know, I was living in a country at the time, I was living in a country where there was apartheid, which I didn't want to live. I mean, I went there really by being almost forced to because my wife's family were all born and bred in South Africa. And you know, my mother, and I avoided, I went back to England, I went to South America to find jobs

because I was a poor person and working hard. But I finished up in South Africa, which I didn't want to. And I always looked for a way out. And I was so poor that I couldn't find a way. But eventually I worked myself up and slowly, slowly, and in 1976 I decided that this is the time, it's finished. I can't wait any longer. My company that I was working for

sent me to the United States. On the way back, I came to Canada, and when I came to Canada, I felt that the air was free. I was breathing each time and I was given a breath walking on the Wabafront. There was kind of freedom, multiculturalism and everything. And I said to Dorothy, when I came back, I said, we are going to Canada. So she said, where is that? And now you feel like you've had an obligation, as you say, to make this country even better, to help improve the place that...

Well, I tried very much. When I became in my early 40s, I looked around to do... I could afford by that time to be able... I had the manager's position and I could afford already to do some community work. And I wanted always to help people, people that needed help. And so I started working with the agent, because the agents are the ones that people don't like working with. You know, they drip, they have Alzheimer's, they look funny, and people don't like working

with them. So I started working with the aged people. And when I retired, I decided that I would do community work. And I didn't only work with the Jewish community, I worked with the indigenous community, I worked with everybody that I could find and help. I studied chaplaincy for two years and became a chaplain at different hospitals and

nursing homes. I was a chaplain at the Toronto jail and so forth and so on. So I tried to help people that needed help. And when I see iniquity, when I see people who are suffering, it breaks my heart. Today, when I see things that are going on in the world, it actually, I can't watch the television. The citation from the governor general says that you are a renowned Holocaust educator, recognized for your promotion

of transformational dialogue on human rights. This is something that you didn't embrace initially. It took you years before you talked about what you'd been through in the camps, what you had lived through in the camps. Why is that? Because what happened is the first time that I was asked to speak, it was in the 60s, I was approached to speak

at the commemoration of the Holocaust at a cemetery in a place called East London in South Africa where there was a small Jewish community. And I prepared myself, I decided that I wasn't going to speak about my own experiences because of apartheid, which I abhorred, so I decided that I would make a speech. And the speech would be involving Holocaust experiences, but at the same time talking about the existing situation in South Africa, the suffering of the black people, colored people, Indian people,

anybody else, and the way the politics are. And I gave that speech, and it was well received. But after that, I started shivering and shaking. And there were some doctors there, and they they gave me tea but I've got a feeling that they laced the tea with some other stuff and I fell asleep. And after that I started having nightmares and I started having problems trying and I was poor

and I had a wife and three children and I needed to make a living. And thank God for my wife, Dorothy. She looked after the children, kept them away from my nightmares. I used to scream during the night and wake up and then have to go to work. And I decided that I can't continue speaking because if this is going to continue like that it would be impossible. And the nightmares were about what you had lived through? The nightmares were, for example, that I was being, when you go in my Danek, I didn't know at the time,

if you go to the left you go to the gas chamber, if you go to the, you go to be chosen still as a worker. And I lost my parents, my twin sister, because they were pushed, they were gassed, murdered, the day we arrived and I was spared and I was going to be used as a slave worker. And I thought that they would be alive because if I was saved, they said that you're going to work. They tried to fool you all the time. So these were the nightmares.

I was being gassed, I was being chased, I was being, all the experiences that I had, I used to scream and wake up in the middle of the night. How did Dorothy, your wife, how did she help you cope with those memories? She was an angel. When I woke up with screaming, she would calm me down. She would look after the children and keep them away

from my experiences so they shouldn't have this post-Holocaust children's trauma. And she went to speak to the schools when we had, you know, teachers and parents association, because I had to work hard and make a living. And if I had these nightmares, you know, it was difficult for me to work. And I had to work.

I had to bring, you know, bread on the table. So it was not an easy way of being able to cope. And that's why I decided that the less I get involved in Holocaust is better for me. And it abided. I had psychiatric help and it abided. And by 1975, I could cope, and I learned how to cope with it in a way

which didn't interfere with my life anymore. And also, it allowed me to get promotions at my work and so forth and so on. How has talking about this now, I mean, how has that helped you cope with those memories? Talking about it now is still difficult. I was liberated on the 8th of May, 1945 by the Russian army. But when you are liberated,

it doesn't mean that you liberated from the Shoah, from the Holocaust. That it's still in you. It lives inside you. It's like post-traumatic things for soldiers that fight and the wars that go and they come back and they suffer from these post-traumatic things. And I've got a photographic memory, which means that I can see the pictures. I can actually, when I speak about it,

I can actually, the pictures float. And I suppose one of these days, they're gonna be able to, with IT and TI and God knows what, they're gonna be able to project, you know, your brain onto a screen, and then you'll be able to actually see the pictures. But it became easier, and not only that, but I was approached many times by Eli Rubenstein, who has these trips to March of Remembrance and Hope and March of the Living.

And I said to him, I will only be prepared to go if I go with not Jewish people, especially Catholics, because I want to be closer. You know, I was persecuted by Christians and I want to find out how I can relate to them today because I don't have hate in my heart and I want to do it. So my first trip was with a university, St. Elizabeth, the College of St. Elizabeth,

which is a women's only university, but they had their nuns and they had the bishop there and they had some students that came with and we did a pilgrimage first to Czernstochowa, to Matka Boska. It's a place of pilgrimages for Catholics particularly, and I grew very close to them, and the empathy that was flowing from them, I learned about humanity, and I learned about human beings and so forth. It helped me a lot in being able to then start being a person who can relate to everybody

and try without any prejudice whatsoever. Because if you are subject to experiences like I did for five years, and don't forget I was eight when it started, and for five years, and I was in five or six concentration camps, I don't even remember how many of them I was. I was in Majdanek, and I was in Buchenwald.

So I was in some of these horrible places, and I suffered in Buchenwald. So I was in some of these horrible places and I suffered a lot. But I also got help from people who were in the camps. So I saw goodness and I saw badness. But you know, my brain wasn't educated. I had to educate myself after the war because I didn't want to live on charity. So I started working at the age of 14.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. What do you remember, if you don't mind me asking,

and again, understand that the memories can be difficult, but what do you remember about the Day of Liberation, May 8th, 1945? The Day of Liberation was very, very much in my mind. It's because I learned to become a person with feelings and emotions which have been stinted. When we were liberated on the 8th of May, I still had the strength to run out. The gendarmes, the Czech gendarmes, and everybody ran away.

And so the doors, the gates were open and we ran out to see me and some other people ran out, you know, prisoners that were in Theresienstadt. out prisoners that were in Theresienstadt. And we saw Russian infantry. And they were chasing out the Germans that were settled by Hitler. And these were women with prams and little babies and old men and young women and very few young men because obviously they were all in the in the army and they were being beaten they were being I didn't know what was going on because I had no idea about sex or anything but I saw these soldiers taking young girls

and pushing them and I felt terribly sorry for them after suffering at the hands of Germans for five years and having lost my whole family, something like 150 members of my extended family, including those that I knew, I had great uncles and things, but I felt empathy. I felt them.

When they were suffering, I felt for them. And I spoke to some other young men that were also prisoners, and they felt the same. I think it was embedded in me then that it doesn't matter who you see suffering, it's somebody that you go to help. What was it like for you to go back to those camps years later?

It wasn't easy. I went back, I've been back 20 times to Poland and Germany and but the beauty of it was that I was surrounded with Canadian students from all different universities on a march of remembrance and hope and on the march of the living with adult people. And the empathy, the flowing, the togetherness, I mean, these were some of the students, they were doing their PHDs, they were doing their master's,

and we had the briefings every night, and they could actually kind of open up with their own problems, and their problems somehow, which they kind of kept inside them, it helped them by seeing a Holocaust survivor talking about the Holocaust, and talking about other things that happened in the Second World War in Poland and in Germany, it helped them to open and to be able to deal with their

own things. There was an indigenous young woman who kept quiet right through the 10-day trip. Never participated, not in the belief things, didn't open at all. When we were going back home, she came up to me, I didn't know what she was, and she hugged me and she said, I love you, Pinchas, and she gave me a letter which I didn't read then, I only read it when I was sitting in the airplane and in the letter she poured her heart out and she managed to be able to deal with something.

She was raped, she was given HIV which she still has to take things, and she contemplated a few times of taking her life. And because she had been and because she saw the way I managed to work through, she now got a second life. Is that why you use the word beautiful to describe that experience of going back to the camps with those young people? Well, what was beautiful is that to be able to share something and to feel the closeness, the empathy from people from every creed, color, religion or anything like that. It made me feel that the world is actually a very beautiful place. And they accepted me without any compunctions. The empathy that was flowing to both between us was so beautiful that it actually helped me to tell the stories and to continue with

my work. How do you see the world now? We have seen an explosion of anti-Semitism in this country and around the world. How does that strike you? Well, it makes me very sad. I have been an optimist all my life. When I finish a talk at the schools or universities or even the United Nations, I give them a torch, you know, like the Olympic torch. The Olympic torch has only got one flame and the flame is goodwill amongst the athletes. They should compete properly and so forth and so on.

And as soon as one Olympics finish, they travel all the countries that where it's, you know, which you're going to participate. My flame and my torch is called the torch of graciousness. And I say to them, it's got more than one flame, it's got more than five, it's got hundreds of flames, but I'll give you the first five. And the first five is what you must remember, and that is no religious discrimination,

no racial discrimination, no homophobia, no xenophobia, and above all, please do away with hate. Don't keep hate inside you because hate is vicious, it's pernicious, it creates vengeance. So I used to believe that this is, and light up the world, light up the world with these flames, make the world a better place. At the moment, I still believe,

and the reason why I believe is because when I think about the 1930s and I think about what's happened today, regardless of anything, the world has moved in the right direction and it has improved. Why? Because in the 30s, nobody wanted to take refugees. No refugees. It didn't matter what reason. We have taken, according to the news, 30,000 Syrian refugees.

It's become something that is important. It's talked about. So I am still optimistic about the world moving in the right direction slowly, but I'm very despondent about what is going on in the world now. What do we do about that? I mean, if you remain optimistic, what do you do to tackle hate broadly,

to get people to understand what you have been promoting over the course of your life? To do every person to do something. Don't be a bystander. We, each one of us, when we see something going wrong, we can do something. And if enough voices are going to be raised in the world,

then the world is going to change. And that's what I am trying to aim. I would like to see each person, and that is what I do when I try and teach, is each person to do just a little bit. You're being celebrated by the Governor General for your life's work and you're in your 90s now. You could relax, you could put your feet up and not keep doing this work. Why is it important for you to keep going?

What is it that keeps you speaking about this? I can't stop. I have now got, thank God, I have two great grandchildren. And when I look at them, I would like their life to be different. You know, they're half Jewish and half Christians, and they don't yet know of any things as anti-Semitism or being this, that or the other. And I would like the world for them to be. So how can I stop? I can't stop. I want to create humanity that is... and I want to tell you something. I don't even want people to tolerate people. I want them to accept something. I don't even want people to tolerate people. I want them to accept people,

because when you tolerate, you make a decision about, yeah, okay, he's a Jew, but he's a good Jew, or he's a black man, but he's a good black man, and he is okay, so I will tolerate him, and I'll make him friendlies, and so forth and so on. I want acceptance I want that every human being should be accepted. There's only one God I don't know who God is, but I am a religious person. So I know only one per one individual or one thing created our universe and

We are all being given free will. So we should do something about it. And I believe that as long as I've got breath in my body, then I need to continue doing it. I hope the breath stays in your body for a long time to come and that you continue to do that work. Congratulations again and thank you. Thank you very much. And that you continue to do that work. That's very kind. Congratulations again and thank you.

Thank you. Toda Raba. Pinka Scooter is a survivor of the Holocaust. He experienced firsthand the horrors of Nazi death camps. His memoir, his memories in focus, and Pinka Scooter has just been named to the Order of Canada.