International March of the Living congratulates Holocaust Survivors and Educators Mariette Doduck and Pinchas Gutter on being awarded the Order of Canada.

These two exceptional Holocaust survivors have dedicated their lives to Holocaust education through their eloquent testimony and unwavering advocacy for the preservation of the memory and lessons of the Shoah.

In the last two decades, Mariette Doduck and Pinchas Gutter participated in the March of the Living and March of Remembrance and Hope programs, sharing their moving stories in Poland with young students from across Canada.

Please join us as we salute these two remarkable individuals for this richly deserved recognition.

Marie Doduck

Marie (Mariette) Rozen Doduck was only five years old when the Nazis invaded her hometown of Brussels, Belgium, in 1940. During the war
she and her siblings hid with non-Jews and in convents and orphanages.

During this time, they worked in the resistance where Marie served as a messenger for the resistance. Marie lost many members of her family during the Shoah, including her mother and two brothers who perished in Auschwitz.

When Allied forces liberated France toward the end of WWII, Marie recalls feeling that “it was like taking a breath of fresh air… All of a sudden I could breath….Just to take a breath and maybe to sleep through a night without being moved from place to place with strangers.”

Marie immigrated to Canada in 1947 as a war orphan with three of her siblings and settled in Vancouver. Marie is actively involved in Holocaust education and is a cofounder of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Her story, A Childhood Unspoken, was published by Second Story Press as part of the Azrieli Foundation’ Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. See here

Pinchas Gutter

Pinchas Gutter (b. 1932 in Łódź, Poland) was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp, where his parents and sister were murdered. He later survived Buchenwald and a death march to Theresienstadt before being liberated by the Red Army in 1945. After the war he was sent to Britain, and then enlisted in the Israeli army, following which he lived in Brazil, and South Africa before immigrating to Canada in 1985.

Gutter’s story was documented in several films and books as well as USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony initiative, a technology that enables people to have “virtual conversations” with Holocaust survivors, even after their passing.

In the March of the Living publication, Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations’, he stated: “It’s very important for Holocaust survivors – or anybody else – to spread togetherness and goodwill – and I think it’s the young people specifically who can create this. Because drop, by drop, by drop, like water on a stone, the world can become a better place.” See here

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