Elly Gotz

Holocaust Survivor, Engineer, Author, Educator, and March of the Living Witness

Elly Gotz was born on March 8, 1928, in Kovno, also known as Kaunas, Lithuania. He was an only child. In June 1941, after Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania, Elly and his family were forced into the Kovno ghetto, where they remained for three years. As a teenager, Elly was denied the normal education and childhood he had expected, but he continued learning and eventually taught other children in the ghetto trade school.

In the summer of 1944, during the liquidation of the ghetto, Elly and his parents were deported by cattle car to concentration camps. His mother was separated from them and sent with the women to Stutthof. Elly and his father were deported to Dachau, where they were forced into slave labour constructing a massive bomb-proof aircraft factory.

Elly survived the Kovno ghetto, the Kaufering subcamp of Dachau, and the final months of the war under conditions of starvation, forced labour, and extreme brutality. He was liberated from Dachau by the United States Army on April 29, 1945, at the age of seventeen.

After liberation, Elly spent time recovering in postwar Europe and was reunited with his parents. His family lived in Germany while trying to emigrate, then went to Norway as refugees in 1947 before moving to Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, to join extended family. Elly later moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he continued his education and earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Elly married Esme Cohen in 1958. The couple lived in South Africa before immigrating to Toronto, Canada, in 1964 with their three children. In Canada, Elly established several businesses and fulfilled a lifelong dream of becoming a pilot. Later, he also became involved in glider flying.

“When we hate, we produce nothing”

In recent decades, Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz has devoted much of his life to Holocaust education, sharing testimony with students, educators, and community audiences across Canada and beyond. Drawing on his own experience of surviving the Kovno Ghetto and the Dachau concentration camp system, Gotz has used his presentations to teach young people about the dangers of hatred, antisemitism, and indifference, while emphasizing memory, moral responsibility, tolerance, and the conditions that can lead societies toward genocide.

Elly has also been connected with March of the Living and March of Remembrance and Hope, helping younger generations encounter the human reality of the Holocaust through survivor testimony. In 2024, at age 96, he sent a message to participants marching in Lithuania on the National Memorial Day marking the genocide of Lithuanian Jews, reflecting on his birthplace, the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry, and the need to pray for a better future and peace.

Elly Gotz was officially appointed a Member of the Order of Canada on October 17, 2025, recognized for his decades of dedication to Holocaust education, mentoring hundreds of thousands of students across Canada, and his ongoing work to promote human dignity and stop hate.