Flights of Spirit

Sixteen-year-old Elly Gotz hides with his family in an underground bunker in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania, prepared to die rather than be found by the Nazis. After surviving three years in the ghetto, where thousands from his community have been murdered, Elly and his family refuse to be the Nazis' next victims. But there is no escape from the ghetto's liquidation in the summer of 1944, and Elly and his family eventually surrender, only to be separated when he and his father are taken to the notorious Dachau concentration camp. There, Elly's skills as a locksmith and metal worker--learned in the ghetto trade school--literally save his life and that of his father's. But as the Allies fly over the camp and the end of the war looms, Elly's father weakens, and Elly fears his father will not live to see the day of liberation. After the war, fleeing from Europe and their past, Elly fights to regain his lost youth and his years of missed education. His motivation and enterprising spirit give him the determination to succeed and to, ultimately, find strength in flight.

Elly Gotz was born in 1928, in Kaunas, Lithuania. After the war, his family lived in a Displaced Persons camp for two years before immigrating to Norway and then Zimbabwe. Elly graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree. He married in 1958 and immigrated to Toronto in 1964. In Toronto, Elly achieved his lifelong dream of becoming a pilot. In 2017, at 89, he fulfilled another aeronautical dream by going skydiving. Elly has educated thousands of students and 2018 will mark his third trip on the educational tour the March of Remembrance and Hope.