Mariette Doduck, 89, and Pinchas Gutter, 92, have a lot in common beyond being among the estimated 5,800 living Canadians who survived the Holocaust.
Both were children when the Nazis invaded their homes. Both have devoted their lives since coming to Canada as tireless Holocaust educators and community leaders. Vancouver is where Doduck eventually settled in 1947 as a war orphan, while Toronto has been Gutter’s permanent home since the 1980s.
They’ve both joined March of the Living trips as educators. And on Dec. 18, 2024, the Governor General named both to the Order of Canada for their contributions to making the country a better place.
The nomination process began four years ago, started in secret by their friends and supporters. Now, the two honourees hope that their ongoing work to fight hatred, racism and antisemitism receives a big boost because the announcement of their awards came just ahead of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
As world leaders joined a group of 50 survivors at the site of the notorious Nazi death camp in Poland on Monday Jan. 27, Doduck and Gutter remained at home, vowing to continue teaching the lessons of the Holocaust so they can fight their growing dread of a world with loud echoes of the social and geopolitical conditions of their own stolen childhoods.
“No child should live the five years that I lived in hiding,” said Doduck during an interview with The CJN Daily. “So I think this will be a way of maybe moving the awareness faster by this honour.”
When the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, Doduck was five years old and living in Brussels with her widowed mother and some of her 10 older siblings. Doduck’s mother sent her into hiding with non-Jews, where she survived the war by remaining silent. The Nazis murdered her mother and two of her brothers at Auschwitz. Doduck also worked as a messenger for the resistance. She came to Canada together with three older siblings who had also survived. They settled in Vancouver. (Doduck’s sister Esther Brandt died in that city on Jan. 7.)
Gutter was a Polish boy of seven when the war started, living in Lodz with his Hasidic family of winemakers and his twin sister. The family moved into the Warsaw Ghetto but after the uprising in 1943, the Nazis deported the Gutters to Majdanek, where his parents and sister were immediately killed. He survived six concentration camps, including two where he worked as a slave labourer. It would be another four months after the liberation of Auschwitz until Gutter was freed by Russian and Czech troops, who opened the gates to Theresienstadt in May 1945. After the war, Gutter lived in Israel and South Africa before moving to Toronto in the mid-1980s. He was the first survivor to participate in the USC Shoah Foundation’s digital hologram program.
They both sat down to explain what receiving the Order of Canada means to them, and why they won’t retire, especially after Oct. 7. The interview took place over Zoom, and both survivors were wearing their new Order of Canada lapel pins—even though they are not officially members until a ceremony expected to take place later this year at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.
(This transcript has been edited and condensed from the interview featured on The CJN Daily.)
Ellin Bessner: Do you know how you ended up getting nominated? Has anyone told you that they were the little birdies that did it?
MD: It was suggested by a girlfriend in Toronto who started the ball rolling, got in touch with my daughter, who just told me, and she did all the work with my friends. but they did it in 2020. It took four years. So that also was a surprise. I knew nothing about it. My children, my daughters never said a word. They did all the groundwork, So for me. It was a kind of a shock.
EB: Did you get a call from the Governor General?
MD: I was in Philadelphia visiting my newest great-grandchild. Benjamin. and I get this call, and this lady says ‘Congratulations!” and I said, ‘Excuse me. I think you’ve got the wrong number, and I hung up.’ Then she called me back, and she was laughing, and she said,’ Is this Mariette?’ She says, ‘It’s my first time on the job, and I’m being hung up on.’
And I said, “Are you playing a joke, is somebody playing a joke on me?” And she became very formal, and she says “We do not play jokes. I want to congratulate you on being bestowed this honour”. And I was like, in shock. I wanted to verify it. That thought, you know, I need papers. I needed documents, which she sent right away, and she said, “You must not tell anyone. You can tell your children, but you’re not to tell your family. Nobody. Not until Dec. 18, when it will be announced.”
PG: I know several people who did that, but of course they don’t want me to tell anybody that they did so, but I knew that. One of them started actually, a few years ago. It’s a long process. It’s not something that happens overnight. They asked Eli Rubenstein (national director of March of the Living Canada]. Eli phoned me and told me that he not only did that, but he sent all the alumni from the March of Remembrance and Hope. You know mostly 95 percent of them are not Jewish people. They’re all from different universities doing their PhDs.
But I can tell you it’s the same thing that happened to me. I got this phone call but I didn’t answer. I thought it was one of these scams and things like that, so I didn’t answer it.
The person said, “I’ve got a very important message for you and something, something.” And I thought to myself, this sounds like something genuine. So I better phone her back. And when I phoned her back, the first thing she did was the same as what she said to Mariette. She said “Congratulations you’ve received the Order of Canada, and you can tell your children and your wife, but you mustn’t tell anybody else until Dec. 18.”
And we just waited, and that was it. And then subsequently [we received] a little packet, where you got the pin you can wear. And so I’ve just put it on my jacket, and I’m waiting now for them to contact me when the ceremony is going to be. But I’m not concerned. I’ve got the Order of Canada, and I’ve had, like Mariette, I’m sure she’s had 50 to 60 phone calls. I had some from everywhere.
MD: I was in shock to receive this prestigious award, for my work has always been for children and not depending on public recognition. I’m also the co-founder of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. So I have always worked with this. I don’t think we’ve done this for recognition. We just wanted to make the world aware.
And for me, when I arrived here in Canada, in 1948, as a war orphan, I was told that I would die by the age of 30. That I wouldn’t see my 30th birthday. The government official also said that I would amount to nothing. That I would be a burden to the community or to the government.
I’ve worked all my adult life to make the world aware. So for me, I will use this award as an opportunity to draw attention to racism, to intolerance and antisemitism. Also I’m accepting this in recognition of all immigrants and child survivors who have arrived in Canada, in a place that originally did not want us. Like the book None is Too Many [by the late Irving Abella and Harold Troper documenting Canada’s racist policies which kept Jewish refugees from Europe out the country during the government of wartime prime minister Mackenzie King].
EB: Why did they say you were going to pass away by the age of 30? Because of your deprivation, and your being in hiding, and your malnourishment?
MD: The thing was, the four of us (siblings) weren’t accepted [as war orphans] at the same time. We couldn’t have a cavity. We couldn’t have this. We couldn’t have that. There were rules that they gave. I was only 12 years old, and they made it so difficult.
So I wanted a better world for children… because we then have a world where no child should live the five years that I lived in hiding.
I am honoured to receive this (award). If this will teach more and then listeners become witnesses for us, to what happened to us children. Camp survivors that I’ve worked with, child survivors who are in their eighties and nineties, we’ve always with this. I’ve dedicated my adult life since I was really a kid to this. So I think this will be a way of maybe moving the awareness faster by this honour.
I happen not to like publicity. I am quite shy. I’m very easy to talk to. I can speak off the cuff, but I am not comfortable receiving something. So for me this was like a shock.
EB: Pinchas, we’ve heard how it sits a little bit uncomfortable for Mariette, but also a little bit, sort of, finally, like a circle for her. But how does this award land for you?
PG: My attitude was a bit different. I didn’t expect to receive this award. I am a person who kind of doesn’t believe that you get the awards and things like that. But what actually happened to me is different.
Let me tell you a story. When I was liberated in 1945, by the Russian army on the 8th of May, the last day of the war, in Theresienstadt, after a death march from Germany to Czechoslovakia, we arrived there about two to three weeks before we were liberated. Those people who could still stand, ran out. Because the gates were open. The Czech gendarmes who were guarding us disappeared. And we saw Russian infantry with bandoliers with rifles and bullets, and they had Mahorka, which is tobacco, in one boot. They had these white boots. They had food in the other boot. They were chasing Germans out. And there were women with prams and little babies, and young girls and old men, and they were being beaten. They were being abused.
I was at that time going on 13, and I come from a Hasidic frum home. So I knew nothing about relationships between men, women, or sex, or anything like that. But I saw these Russians or Czechs or whoever grabbing young women, taking them away, and really being very nasty. and I felt compassion.
After five years and six concentration camps, and losing my extended family and my immediate family in Majdanek. My sister and my father and my mother were murdered the day we arrived in Majdanek, and there I felt compassion because I couldn’t feel anything else. I saw people suffering, and I felt compassion. And from that time on, whenever I feel people that need help, I try to do that.
And Mariette spoke about children. And when I came to Canada the first thing I did was I helped elderly people. Why? Because people don’t want to be volunteers at old age homes. People dribble. They don’t look very nice. You don’t want to see yourself when you get old, so it’s very difficult to get people to volunteer. So that was my first job, and it had nothing to do with the Holocaust.
And since then I’ve started doing a lot of Holocaust education. But I did it together with others: I worked with Indigenous people. I worked with Black people. I worked with all kinds of different people. I always worked with people that needed help, and it didn’t really make any difference to me.
So I was very apprehensive about getting [the Order of Canada] and I felt extremely honoured that I got it. I really felt that it would create a climate where other people would try and do the same thing. If one person can do it, another person can do it, and every person that does just a little bit can make the world a better place. You don’t have to go and solve all the problems of the world. It’s impossible. But you can do a little bit, and a little bit is important because it adds up, it adds up, and it adds up, and makes the world a better place.
EB: You see what Canada is like now since Oct. 7, where antisemitism is tolerated in the highest levels of academics, of unions, of government, of police who are trying to do whatever they do. But it doesn’t seem like they’re doing a good job. So I’m wondering when you talk to your Jewish audiences, how can your life and your legacy be effective now? When we’re living in this world where Jew hatred for your great-grandchildren is back.
MD: The question you’re asking about tolerance is understanding. Intolerance is ignorance. That’s what it means to me. I don’t know if that’s possible. We are trying to use tolerance because in our whole life, tolerance and patience and teaching is an important fact, and the teaching in our Judaism has always been about learning and teaching.
During all the years, just before COVID, I didn’t speak. Not on Zoom, not on anything, because I felt “What did we change?”
During COVID, I re-lived Europe because I was locked in.
Then came Oct. 7. I couldn’t breathe. With every IDF soldier that is dying out there, it’s like I’m losing a child.
Going back to tolerance and intolerance, I would say we made a niche. The Vancouver Holocaust Educational Centre, for example. It took us almost 50 years to get Holocaust education taught in Grade 6 and Grade 11 right now. The school board doesn’t want that. The B.C. government has agreed to put in a Grade 10 Holocaust education module. It’s been a fight uphill in Canada to teach about the past, about the Second World War.
But, I find I’ve got a bright light. I find my students today are better educated in history and I find their questions much more involved. Some. I’m not saying all those children ask me questions, but I mean when I speak, or even teachers when they’re asking
Oct. 7 didn’t just make the Jews hated. All children in the world were affected by it, by the news, by their parents talking about the hate that happened. So I’m saying now, again, the education [is key]
I find that in my symposium and everything there’s a long line up, and the questions are much better than they were just before COVID. So I have to say we are a light in the educational department of hate. Antisemitism has been an undercurrent our whole life, for 2,000 years we’ve had this current.
Even the first time I learned about the phrase “Jew them down” when I came to Canada. I said to my Canadian-born husband [Sidney Doduck]—I wasn’t going to marry a survivor—I said, ‘What does that mean?’
He had to explain to me. I didn’t know these slangs that people use.
PG: Every 100 years there’s a change. And there is this kind of uptick. In the 1930s nobody wanted to take refugees. Jewish refugees were anathema. They were not accepted anywhere except in one place in South America. They accepted a few people, and then there was this Evian conference, and everybody said, “Yeah, yeah, we feel sorry for them, but we don’t want them.”
Things have changed. I mean, the world has changed. I mean, according to the news, Canada has taken in 30,000 Syrian refugees that ran away. Then they took refugees from other places. Germany, who hates refugees, they have taken in first of all the Turks, and then they recently taken in Syrians and and others. So there is a change in the sense that people are actually doing things for refugees. You know. They put up tents. They give them some food. As bad things are, there is a change. So we do continue changing for the better.
I am a great believer. I was always an optimist. At the moment, I am a bit despondent, because, you know, things are going the other way from that point of view. But I still believe. And this is what I try to achieve in my teaching. And that’s why I don’t stop. I believe… the most important thing is not to be a bystander.
And that is why I’m not going to stop. I mean, like Mariette, there’s a limit to how much I can do nowadays. And, Dorothy, my wife, wants me to kind of do as little as possible, because she sees how much [mentally] it takes out of you. Of course it takes it out of you. People don’t realize you get liberated from the Holocaust, but you don’t get liberated from the Holocaust. The Holocaust is always inside you.
We’ve got my great-grandchildren, who live in Pittsburgh… and a few weeks ago we were in Pittsburgh, and spent four or five days together with our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It was a Mechiya as they say in Yiddish, you know, it was really fantastic. And that’s basically what I want to do. I want them to enjoy themselves. I want them to grow up, and not to have any kind of suffering.
I’m scared for them, I am. I wasn’t scared in the Warsaw Ghetto. I was all of eight or nine or 10 years old. I did everything that they didn’t allow you. I went to an underground cheder with seven other children, when my father could still have a melamed to teach us, and we studied the Talmud. I wasn’t scared of the Germans. I was fearful of something that they’re going to do to me, but I wasn’t scared inside me. Nothing at all. Today, I feel that I don’t want my children to have any kind of fears about it.
MD: I feel the same way. I have six great-grandchildren, and we are expecting my seventh. Only from three married grandchildren. So I’m lucky. So I’ve got a lot to live for. But I’m also fearful for them. We’ll keep on doing this, for them, to make their life a safer place.
I never was afraid. The students asked me, “Are you afraid?” I left home and I was four-and-a-half years old, and I didn’t come out till 1945. I knew about life. When I came to Canada at 11-and-a-half, I was in a child’s body, but in an adult mind. When I tell the teacher “I don’t want your children to live in fear,” I’m not fearing about Canada.
I’ll tell you a story. My grandson-in-law, and granddaughter are a young Zionist couple. They have three kids. When Oct. 7 happened, they wanted to go to Israel.
I said, ”John, you were born in Canada. We are the front line people. You have to stay in Canada. We have to fight here. The IDF will always fight for us, but if you are thrown out of Canada, today you have a place to go, as I didn’t when I was a child. So you are safe. You must stay in Canada.
We are the front line. We must stay and fight here in our country. In every country in the world, people shouldn’t run away. They should stay in the country where they are, and fight their government and fight their newspapers, fight the computers, all lines of communication. Because we are the front line. We are helping the IDF. Those are my last words.
