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Pinchas Gutter was born on July 21, 1932. He lived in Łódź, Poland with his parents and twin sister. While writing his memoir, Memories in Focus, he was able to recall his life before the tragedies of the war. He expressed his love for cooking and remembers all the times he would accompany his mother in the kitchen. Pinchas mentions one specific Jewish dish, cholent, repeatedly, which has stayed with him since childhood. Cholent was a dish that his mother would make for the family, and they would often have it on Saturdays as a midday meal. To this day Pinchas still cooks this cholent the same way she did.
As the war began to progress in Europe, Pinchas’ time in his mother’s kitchen quickly came to an end. When he was seven, his family was forced out of Łódź due to a non-German evacuation. They ended up in Warsaw, which, shortly after, became the Warsaw Ghetto. After three years of living there, they were sent to the Majdanek concentration camp, where Pinchas experienced the tragedy of losing his whole family in the span of fifteen minutes. In 1945, after surviving multiple concentration camps, he was liberated in Theresienstadt by the Soviet army.
Pinchas was then sent to England through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He later stayed in Paris with a surviving cousin of his for 3 years until he moved to Israel to join the Army. It was in Israel that Pinchas met his wife, Dorothy. After moving around for years, the couple and their 3 children found their way to Toronto, Canada. Despite all the horrors Pinchas endured, he was able to hold on to his faith and become an active member of the Jewish community. To this day he continues to spread awareness and share his story.
Pinchas at age 14, after the war.
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