Samuel Gutman, survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and longtime Colombian businessman, died in Bogotá at 100. One of the nation’s last living witnesses to the Holocaust, his century stretched from Nazi-occupied Poland to a life rebuilt with discipline and dignity in Colombia.
From a textile house to a walled city
Samuel Gutman was born in Warsaw on April 13, 1925, into a family that owned a curtain-fabric workshop in a city where Jewish life flourished in shops, synagogues, and schools. That world collapsed almost overnight with the Nazi invasion. By late 1939, Jews were ordered to wear armbands, forced out of most professions, and confined to a shrinking district.
On November 16, 1940, walls closed around nearly a third of Warsaw’s people—some 450,000 individuals crammed into a space less than 3% of the city’s area. Six or seven souls shared rooms built for two. Rations amounted to a starvation diet. Disease spread unchecked.
Gutman’s own family was torn apart. His brother died inside the ghetto. His mother and two sisters were deported to Treblinka and murdered there in the summer of 1942. He carried their absence for the rest of his life. Yet even within those walls, life resisted despair. Underground schools, youth movements, a symphony orchestra, and the Oneg Shabbat archive all fought back against erasure. Memory became a weapon. For the young Gutman, to survive meant to hold onto truth when everything conspired to silence it.
Escape by disguise, service by conviction
Refusing to be another number in the Nazi transport lists, Gutman slipped into disguise. He posed as a Polish Catholic farmhand and escaped the ghetto’s suffocating net. With forged identity and constant fear of discovery, he made his way out of occupied territory and ultimately to Switzerland.
From there, he did not seek only refuge. He enlisted with Allied forces, driven by the conviction that service was the only reply to atrocity. In uniform, he bore his grief like ballast, a reminder of where he had come from and whom he had lost.
By 1945, Europe was a graveyard of names, towns, and entire communities. Gutman was among the few who could begin again. His father, who had fled Poland at the start of persecution with plans to return for the family, could not save those left behind. Instead, father and son reunited in Bogotá, turning loss into determination to build anew.
A second homeland, a steadfast witness
In Colombia, Gutman embraced the rhythm of ordinary life. He worked, invested, raised a family, paid bills, and became part of the Jewish community in Bogotá. To his peers, he was not a man of speeches but of presence: steady, precise, reliable.
The Confederation of Jewish Communities of Colombia, announcing his death, called him one of the country’s last survivors of the Holocaust—a bridge between the era of testimony and a future in which such voices grow rare. His life embodied what immigrants so often give their new homelands: the willingness to plant roots deeply, even after being ripped from the soil once before.
Community members recall his witness as unflinching. He told what had happened without embellishment. He honored the names of those lost. He reminded neighbors, friends, and students that survival was not only a matter of staying alive but of choosing to live with gratitude, purpose, and vigilance.
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Why his century matters now
The temptation with a life like Gutman’s is to reduce it to a symbol. But his story does the opposite: it humanizes history’s vastness. The Warsaw Ghetto was not only statistics or ruins—it was hunger in the gut, absence at the dinner table, a family workshop turned to rubble. Gutman bore that knowledge into every Colombian morning he opened his ledger, every holiday he celebrated, every story he shared.
His century teaches that truth must be kept precise—names, dates, places—so that denial finds no space to grow. It warns how quickly laws can turn neighbors into targets. And it shows what societies gain when survivors are embraced not as relics of tragedy but as citizens shaping the present.
For Colombia, Gutman’s life stands as proof that its identity has room for those who arrive with nothing but memory and resolve. He crossed an ocean, rebuilt a business, gave back to his community, and became an anchor of continuity for a people dispersed by violence.
When he turned 100 earlier this year, the celebration was about more than longevity. It was a statement: that a boy who once faced extermination could live to see his great-grandchildren, and that memory could outlast tyranny.
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Samuel Gutman’s century has ended. Its responsibilities remain. To remember, carefully. To live purposefully. To guard the dignity dictatorships always seek to cheapen. He saw the walls of the ghetto rise and fall. He crossed continents and chose to build. In a world so quick to forget, his decision to live faithfully is his final, enduring word.