Fake Holocaust Survivors: Elly Gotz
Another day, yet another ‘Holocaust survivor’ in this case we have the story of Elly Gotz who spends his days telling rather bizarre tales to school children about his alleged experiences in Canada and elsewhere.
We learn courtesy of CBC how:
‘Gotz was plucked from a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania and thrust into a life of forced labour in the concentration camps of Germany. After the war, he lived in a handful of different countries before settling in Canada where he spends much of his time speaking to people, young people in particular, about what he experienced during the war.
One detail that stuck with Almemou was Gotz's description of hiding with his family in a basement and, in a moment when capture seemed imminent, preparing to commit suicide rather than fall into German hands.
"He was in hiding and his family was contemplating killing themselves with injections," said Almemou, who was emotional when recalling the details of Gotz's story to CBC News.’ (1)
Now I did some additional digging to understand Gotz’s narrative which is rather… well… vague and has him getting deported to an unnamed ghetto in Lithuania and being resident there with his family till the advance of the Red Army caused him to be shipped to Dachau from said ghetto while his mother and other siblings were shipped to Stutthof. He also specifies that the Lithuanian ghetto concerned had circa 30,000 inmates of which only a ‘few thousand’ survived.
The only one of the Lithuanian ghettos which these numbers semi-fit and which was evacuated in 1944 due to the advance of the Red Army as part of Operation Bagration was the Kovno ghetto. This was evacuated on 8th July 1944 due to the advance of the Red Army and also fits with Gotz’ claimed narrative of the Germans offering the jews of the Kovno ghetto the opportunity to come with them as they evacuated.
This is another interesting part of Gotz’ narrative since he claims his mother – who was allegedly a practicing nurse in the ghetto – hid him and his siblings in a ‘secret room’ in a basement in the ghetto for five days after the evacuation was announced ‘because they knew the Germans would murder them’ and she had stolen several syringes of ‘poison’ with which to commit suicide as part of her work. Then the family made a mistake and emerged from their ‘secret room’ in the basement in the ghetto after five days and encountered the Germans ‘who hadn’t left yet’ and rather than being ‘murdered’: Gotz and his family were evacuated as refugees by the German personnel. (3)
Now clearly Gotz’s mother didn’t ‘acquire poison in syringes’ as part of her work as nurse, but rather more likely is that she acquired/stole significant doses of one medicine or another which would cause an overdose and thus death if injected all at once.
In other words: she likely didn’t steal or intend them as ‘poison’ at all but rather as medicine which she could use – at a pinch – to trigger an overdose either as something to barter on the ghetto’s black market or as supplies for the newly organized ‘jewish resistance’ in the ghetto (which repeatedly rose against the Germans in 1943/1944 in support of Stalin’s Soviet Union).
The fact that Gotz’s family hid in said ‘secret room’ in a basement suggests that they were actually part of the ‘jewish resistance’ since they were – by Gotz’s own admission – awaiting the arrival of the Red Army to ‘liberate them’ and Gotz makes little bones about his desire to ‘exterminate’ the German people ‘at that time’. (4)
Gotz was then deported to Dachau and the rest of his family to Stutthof both of which were work camps – Stutthoff in particular was huge and a key part of the German war effort in 1944 – where he was subsequently ‘liberated’ and wanted – again by his own admission – to ‘exterminate’ the German people then, (5) which he is now facilitating by lecturing school children of European descent about how they can’t ‘hate’ anyone and ‘shouldn’t be racist’.
Go figure.
References
(1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/jaw-dropping-london-students-moved-by-holocaust-survivor-s-words-1.7378495
(2) See https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/map/ghettos-in-the-baltic-countries-1941-1943 and https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kovno
(3) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/jaw-dropping-london-students-moved-by-holocaust-survivor-s-words-1.7378495
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.