His memoir, Memories in Focus, was published through the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. The memoir follows his childhood in Łódź, his years in the Warsaw Ghetto, the murder of his family at Majdanek, his survival through concentration camps and a death march, and his long postwar journey before rebuilding his life in Canada.
Pinchas Gutter has also become one of the best-known figures in the preservation of survivor testimony through new technology. He is one of the survivors featured in USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony, an interactive biography project that allows students and museum visitors to ask questions and receive responses drawn from pre-recorded survivor testimony. USC Shoah Foundation launched a web-based interactive biography of Pinchas on IWitness in 2021.
He is also the narrator and central witness in The Last Goodbye, a virtual-reality testimony experience created with USC Shoah Foundation. The project takes viewers to Majdanek, where Pinchas’s parents and twin sister were murdered, preserving his testimony in an immersive educational format.
In 2024, Pinchas Gutter was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. The Governor General’s citation recognized him as a renowned Holocaust educator whose work promotes dialogue on human rights, whose memoir is used in classrooms across Canada, and whose virtual-reality testimony has helped expose the horrors of the concentration camps to new generations.
Holocaust Survivor, Educator, Author, and Digital Testimony Pioneer
Pinchas Gutter was born on July 21, 1932, in Łódź, Poland, into a Hasidic Jewish family. He and his twin sister, Sabina, grew up in a religious Jewish community before the German invasion of Poland changed the course of their lives. In 1939, after his father was attacked by Nazis in Łódź, the family fled to Warsaw, where they were later trapped inside the Warsaw Ghetto.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, Pinchas experienced hunger, fear, hiding, and the destruction of Jewish life around him. During the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, his family hid in a bunker. After the uprising, Pinchas, his parents, and his twin sister were deported to Majdanek. Pinchas was ten years old. His parents and sister were murdered there, and he became the only survivor of his immediate family.
After Majdanek, Pinchas was sent through a series of Nazi concentration and forced labour camps. He survived Buchenwald and other camps, and in the final weeks of the war was forced on a death march toward Theresienstadt. He was liberated by the Soviet Army on May 8, 1945.
After the war, Pinchas lived in several countries, including England, France, Israel, Brazil, and South Africa, before immigrating to Canada in 1985 and settling in Toronto. In Canada, he became a leading Holocaust educator, speaking to students, educators, museum audiences, and community groups about the Holocaust and the responsibility to confront hatred, antisemitism, and indifference.
Pinchas has been closely connected with March of the Living and March of Remembrance and Hope, joining educational programs that bring students into direct contact with survivor testimony. March of the Living identifies him among the survivors who have travelled with the program, and MOLDAP’s Holocaust Survivors section lists him among the survivor pages being preserved through the digital archive project.