Almost 90 and flying through the sky

LANA JACOBSON

From 4 000 metres below his wife Esme, his daughter and son-in-law, stood rooted to the ground, nervously staring into the sky while Elly’s parachute opened and he floated to earth.

“It was really scary for one second only, but then as the parachute opens, it’s the most amazing feeling in the world,” he exclaimed exuberantly.

“I love adventure and I have always nurtured this dream of parachuting to earth from a plane. This was the perfect timing to live my dream. I’m about to turn 90 and Canada has just celebrated its sesquicentennial – 150 years anniversary.

“I’ve always been jealous of birds floating so freely above earth. It’s an amazing feeling.  You look around and it’s the most beautiful thing in the world to be drifting so peacefully, so beautifully.

“With everything that’s happening in the world, it’s a privilege to be free, in Canada and able to have opportunity to choose what I want to do. I loved it, I just loved it,” he extols.

The South African-qualified engineer has every reason to celebrate being free and alive. His has been a life of torturous lows and many highs.

Born in Lithuania in 1928, he was taken to the Kovno Ghetto with other Jews and he was later sent to work in a camp in Dachau, Germany.  

For Elly, life settled in the ghetto. Children aged 12-15 attended trade schools, and from the age of 15, everybody was put to slave labour for 12 hours each day.

With Elly’s love of electronics, he chose metalwork and blacksmith classes, trades which later saved his life. He became an instructor.  

Between classes, when the weather was warm, Elly would remove the slats in the roof where the books were hoarded.  “I read all the German and Russian classics, and became fluent in both languages. To this day I know Pushkin off by heart. I loved Dostoevsky…Tolstoy.” This became his formal high school education.

By 1944, there were only 8 000 survivors and they were told the ghetto was being liquidated.

To the Gotz family this meant certain death, so they hid in a basement room, covering the entrance with a cupboard. They made a pact: If discovered by the Germans they would commit suicide. Sonja, a nurse, neatly laid out syringes she had stolen and a formula which when injected, immediately stopped the heart. These she stole from the hospital where she worked,

After three days, without food or water, soldiers came down the stairs, kicked in the coal shed door and the door of the room opposite. “There is nobody here,” they said, and passed on by.

After five days, the family crept out slowly to witness the Jews being marched towards a train. The Germans were not murdering, but rather relocating the Jews to Dachau. The Gotz family joined the queue, where females were separated, dispersed, relocated elsewhere, where indescribable horrors awaited them.

The carriages were so crowded that people lay atop one another, given no food or water. One after another during the four-day journey, they died.

In Dachau, the survivors subsisted; 60 000 jam-crammed into a camp equipped to accommodate 24 000, 50 to a room.

Inmates were given striped pyjamas, and put to manual labour, building a giant underground factory for bomber planes. They were given a slice of bread and a small bowl of soup daily. Hunger occupied their every moment, day and night.

His technical training earned Elly an inside job working at the pumps, with his father as his assistant. Most of the outdoor labourers died of cold, hunger and exhaustion.

Every day the barracks were littered with more dead bodies; men dying of disease and starvation. Typhus raged, there were no bathing facilities, no water with which to wash. The outside taps were frozen.

Elly’s father lay on his deathbed – where the last inhabitant had just died. He was too weak to get up and queue for his slice of bread.

Miraculously, at that precise moment a cry of liberation arose. “The Americans are here!”

Seventeen years old, six feet tall and weighing seventy pounds, Elly was hospitalised together with his comatose father for six months and nursed to recovery.

Eventually, they traced Sonja, miraculously alive, having survived surgery, for an abdominal wound from a bomb attack.

Free, healthy and living in a displaced persons camp in Germany, Elly was taught radio repairs and became a radio technician.

Determined to become an electrical engineer, he saved parcels of food given to survivors by the United Nations and sold them to pay for university fees.  

The Norwegians took in 900 Jews, including the Gotz family.

It took Elly three months to learn Norwegian, working as a radio technician by day and by night he was schooled to write his matric. 

Julius, his father had a wealthy relative in South Africa, who urged them to immigrate so that he could help fund Elly’s schooling. At the time Jan Smuts, then prime minister, said: “They will crucify me in Parliament if I let in even one Jew to South Africa.”

“So my family ended in Zimbabwe, (then Rhodesia), I was19, had to learn English and write my matric, which I managed within a year. Maths and physics were easy, but English was more challenging. 

“I got a student’s visa for South Africa to study engineering at Wits in 1949. I finally got my wish to study electrical engineering.

“The injustice in SA affected me very badly. I protested as much as I could, but I was on a visa; I had to ensure I was not expelled; that I graduated as an electrical engineer.

“In 1952, I graduated, returned to then Rhodesia, worked in the battery radio industry. I expanded into advertising and after marrying Esme, my South African wife, I went into electronic plastic welding.

“We had three children, and decided, together with Esme’s entire family, to immigrate to Canada in 1964, due to the unacceptable political situation.

“My engineering degree was perfect for my future successful business career in North America, where we, with other family members, began a plastics manufacturing company.

“Today South Africa is a non-racial, democratic country, how I always imagined it should be. I have come full circle, and life couldn’t be more perfect.”