Holocaust Survivor Skydives For The First Time At 89 — ‘I Loved It’
Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz skydived for the first time earlier in July. Image by youtube
By Ari Feldman July 13, 2017
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 feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman.
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