At 89, this Holocaust survivor decided to conquer his fear of jumping from a plane
Elly Gotz skydives to celebrate Canada's 150th anniversary. Courtesy of Elly Gotz
Elly Gotz smiled almost all of the way down, saying his biggest fear was losing his teeth
Shanifa Nasser · CBC News · Posted: Jul 03, 2017 9:17 PM ET | Last Updated: July 3, 2017
For almost all of his 89 years, Elly Gotz of Toronto has looked up at the sky and imagined what it would be like to be able to fly. Now, after his first parachute jump, he knows.
To this day, his wife Esme says, he constantly marvels at birds in the sky. "'Look at them. Aren't they having a good time? Wouldn't it be wonderful to be a bird?'" she quotes him as saying.
Gotz's love affair with flying started young.
"I had a dream, you see," he told CBC News.
Dreams deferred
At eight years old, he was building model planes. At 13, he dreamed of becoming an engineer. And all along, he longed for the thrill of jumping from a plane, scared though he might be of the hard landing.
But in 1944, when he was 16, his family was plucked from a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania and thrust into a life of forced labour in the concentration camps of Germany.
Gotz and his father were taken to the notorious Dachau camp; his mother to another. And on the 12-hour shifts he spent pumping cement, the birds looked very far away indeed.
This past Sunday though, Gotz got his wish.
Canada's 150th birthday as good a time as any
The now-retired engineer jumped more than 3,500 metres with two friends after resolving to take the plunge on his birthday back in March.
At eight years old, Elly Gotz was building model planes. At 13, he dreamt of becoming an engineer. And all along, he's longed for the thrill of jumping from a plane, scared though he might be of the hard landing.(SkyDive Toronto)
The fact that it was Canada's 150th birthday made it as good a time as any, he thought.
"One [is a] 60-year-old and I'm in my 90th year, so we thought, 'We're 150 years together. Let's do it!'"
Gotz's accomplishment is all the more poignant when you remember that he and his family barely survived their ordeal in the Nazi concentration camps.
He weighed only 70 pounds when he was liberated from Dachau. His father's weight was just 65 pounds.
'No country wanted us'
Back in 1941, he recalled half the population of the Lithuanian ghetto they lived in was murdered in one day. The man responsible, he says, was Helmut Rauca, who lived in Canada after the war for 32 years.
Rauca was a master sergeant who served in Adolf Hitler's SS, who was granted citizenship in Canada in 1956 and lived here until the 1980s. Rauca was extradited to West Germany for war crimes but died awaiting trial.
The war didn't shake Gotz's dream of being an engineer.
Despite having never gone to high school, he prepared himself for university, passing a difficult exam in Germany. He was ready to make his dream a reality ... that is, until his parents told him they were moving with him to Norway.
"No country wanted us. Canada was pretty closed for Jews. America was closed," he recalled. His family had relatives in South Africa, but they couldn't take Gotz's family at the time. Norway offered to take some Jews, so it was off to Norway.
Learning Norwegian wasn't too difficult for Gotz. After all, he already knew four languages.
By day, he worked as a mechanic, using the same skills that saved him from outdoor labour at Dachau. The evening was for night school.
And in the meantime, a relative in what was then Rhodesia — now Zimbabwe — found a way for Gotz to go to university. Before long, he graduated as a engineer in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Gave up flying 'at a proper age'
Along the way, he also met Esme, and the couple had three children. But Gotz wanted out of South Africa.
"I hated the apartheid regime. I hated the whole system there," he said. So, they made the choice to move to Canada.
"We looked for a country that was democratic … and we chose Toronto as being the centre of Canadian manufacturing at the time."
Here, well into his 40s, Gotz learned to fly.
The parachute opens and grabs you from behind and then you are floating down and you look at the countryside and it's beautiful.- Elly Gotz
"I got my own aeroplane and I was flying all over with the family. To Nova Scotia, we flew, and to Miami and I flew on business to Chicago and New York," he said.
"I loved flying, which I gave up at a proper age," he said, but he remained too afraid to actually jump from a plane.
So when his younger friend told him earlier this year he'd gone for a jump, Gotz jumped at the chance to do the same. After all, parachute technology had improved considerably and landings were much more controlled than they had been in the past.
'A slightly exaggerated pleasure'
So what was it like looking out of the open door of plane thousands of metres above ground?
"That's a critical moment, just before jumping out when you face the open aeroplane and the air is rushing by.... And he pushes you out and you fall head over heel and the cold air hits you. That is a moment of fear," Gotz said.
His wife, who watched the jump unfold from the ground, would agree.
Esme Gotz says whenever her husband, Elly, was anywhere, he'd marvel at the birds and wonder what it would be like to be able to fly. (Grant Linton/CBC)
"That's the first time I felt my heart go pitter-patter. Just thinking, I hope it's good, I hope it's good. I hope it's everything that he dreamed about," she said.
Gotz swears he was smiling the entire time — that is, after the freefall ended and the parachute kicked in.
"The parachute opens and grabs you from behind and then you are floating down and you look at the countryside and it's beautiful."
His only fear at that point? Losing his teeth, he said.
Would he do it again? Likely not, says Gotz. "I think it's a slightly exaggerated pleasure," he said.
To his wife, the entire idea was a crazy one, but she was on board.
"I love him and I love all his crazy ideas," she said.
"If he wants to do it at this age … He's not going to die young. What can I say?"
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This article was originally posted on November 1st, 2018 via Fortune.com