Bogotá.- Businessman Samuel Gutman, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and one of the last Holocaust survivors, died this Monday in Bogotá, four months after turning 100 years old, reported the Confederation of Jewish Communities of Colombia (CCJC).
“Lamentamos el fallecimiento de Don Samuel Gutman, sobreviviente del Gueto de Varsovia. Don Samuel se radicó en Colombia después de la guerra y celebró su cumpleaños número 100 hace unos meses. Uno de los últimos sobrevivientes en Colombia”,
señaló la CCJC.
Gutman was born on April 13, 1925, in Warsaw, where his family owned a curtain fabric factory.
His brother died in the Warsaw Ghetto while his mother and two sisters were murdered in the gas chambers of the Treblinka concentration camp.
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Gutman avoided being taken to the Nazi concentration camps because he pretended to be a Polish Catholic peasant and then fled to Switzerland.
Then he joined the Allied troops and, at the end of World War II, emigrated to Colombia to meet his father, who had left Poland when the persecution against the Jews began, with the promise of returning later for his family, but was never able to return.
According to his son, Abraham Gutman, his father was the first Holocaust survivor to arrive in Colombia and is one of the last to die.