Gutter gave a lecture on his experiences through the Holocaust in the Noel Kinsella Auditorium at St. Thomas University on Jan. 27 – the international day to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.  

 “Every time I tell the story, my whole body gets shaken up,” Gutter said.  

 Laura Darrow, a St. Thomas University student, was at the lecture to show her support to Gutter.  

 She and her friend travelled to Poland with Gutter in 2007, they hadn’t seen Gutter since then.  

 “We travelled to the Majdanek concentration camp with him and heard his stories,” she said. “So we came here to support him because it is very important to pass the message to the future generation so that the same thing won’t happen again.” 

He explained to the audience that things didn’t happen overnight.  

“It’s very important to me to point out that nothing happened in isolation. They kind of belonged together.” 

 He said he encountered discrimination against Polish Jews even before the war. He was “recognizable as a Jewish boy” even with his blonde hair and blue eyes, he added.  

When he was a boy, he found a beautiful church and he knelt in front of the church, he said. Then, he was hit hard from behind and told “how dare you to contaminate the church.” 

 “It hurt me so much,” he said. “This is the situation I lived in before the war.” 

Yet, even with the discrimination he had to face, he said he still had a happy childhood.  

He was born into a religious, middle-class family with his father, mother and twin sister. His father was a winemaker and Gutter himself was a normal little boy who enjoyed all kinds of music.  

 But things were beginning to change when his father had to get his license as a winemaker and renew it on a yearly basis. Gutter added that his father had to go through all kinds of routines six months before the renewal.  

 “Even now, I remember, as a little boy, the tension in the home…because he (might) have to stop his work.” 

 In 1939, Gutter was only seven years old. In September of that year, World War II broke out and he encountered the Nazis for the first time.  

 Two Gestapo officers came to the apartment where his family lived and destroyed everything, beating his father and destroyed his winery.

 Later, they found his father still alive, and his father decided it would be safer to move to Warsaw and live there.  

 Yet, nothing happened as planned. The journey to Warsaw was tough and the life there was tougher. At that time, new laws against Jews were issued by German authorities every day, he added.  

 Gutter said almost 350,000 Jews were living in the Warsaw ghetto at that time and poverty, pandemic and hunger was everywhere.

 “Every morning, you saw dead corpses lying in the street, often completely stripped naked.” 

 His family spent three weeks there, avoiding deportation. But the day that changed his life forever was about to come.  

 His family was squeezed into transportation with thousands of other Polish Jews and sent to the Majdanek concentration camp. When they arrived, the selection started and his whole immediate family was murdered in one day.

 “From that time on, I can’t remember my sister’s face, anything except (for) the blonde braids,” he quietly told the audience. “She was part of me. We (were) born together. I remember every family, cousins, uncles, mother and father, but her face just disappeared from my mind.” 

 He somehow survived the selection every day while he was there for almost a month. Then, he was sent to another work camp and at one point, he became very ill and he was certain he was going to die.  

 When he was hiding in a bunk, a Jewish policeman came in and their eyes met.  

 “He risked his life and he shouted in German, ‘No one is here,’” he said. “And that’s when he saved my life.” 

 When asked what kept him going during these experiences, he smiled a little.  

 “I had no choice, but kept going,” he finally answered. “Everybody is a human being. Everybody got their right to be themselves.”