Holocaust Survivor Skydives For The First Time At 89 — ‘I Loved It’
Elly Gotz, a Holocaust survivor, took to the skies earlier this month when he skydived for the first time, at 89 years old. Gotz, who was liberated from Dachau when he was 17, dropped from 13,000 feet in the air.
“I’m very happy I did it,” Gotz told The Star shortly after landing in Cookstown, a town in the Canadian province of Ontario. “I loved it, I just loved it.”
Gotz, who was born in Lithuania, was taken to the Kovno ghetto as a teenager. When he was liberated from Dachau, he said he weighed less than 70 pounds. After living in Africa and Europe, Gotz, his wife and their three children moved to Canada in the 1960s.
“He loves to learn, he loves to have new experiences, he has done a lot of things in his life,” said Julia Gotz, Elly Gotz’s daughter. “I think that is something too about living through the Holocaust, you really know you’re alive and not forever maybe. He doesn’t have as much fear as I do.”
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO