Samuel Gutman, the last Holocaust survivor who settled in Colombia after the end of World War II, has passed away in the South American country. Gutman, who was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, died just a few months after turning 100, according to the Confederation of Jewish Communities in Colombia.
His story became known to Colombians after an appearance on a well-known and popular television program, where he shared his teenage experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. He managed to survive and later moved to Colombia, where he lived until his death at the age of 100.
With his passing, a living voice that bore witness to Nazi barbarism is extinguished, but also a lasting example of resilience and memory built far from the horrors of Europe.
Samuel Gutman, Colombia’s last Holocaust survivor, dies
Born in Warsaw in 1925 to a Jewish family, Samuel Gutman experienced the horrors of World War II firsthand before emigrating to Colombia. He was 14 when Adolf Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland. Along with his mother and siblings, he was confined to the Warsaw Ghetto, where more than 400,000 Jews — about 30% of the capital’s population — lived in overcrowded conditions.
Gutman’s story is especially significant because he was the first Holocaust survivor to arrive in Colombia and, later, the last one still alive in the country. This made him a symbol of resilience and historical memory within Colombia’s Jewish community.
On April 13, Gutman had celebrated his 100th birthday, though his relatives noted that “in his last months of life, he felt fragile and had balance issues.”
He arrived in Colombia in 1945, after a life story that seemed straight out of a movie — one that allowed him to survive the greatest horror of the 20th century in Europe, reunite with his father, and build a family.
A life story that moved Colombia
Samuel Gutman’s story is like that of so many Jews who endured the horrors of Nazism in Europe. However, his testimony on Colombian television brought that firsthand account, in the voice of someone who became part of Colombia, to every corner of the country.
As he told the program Los Informantes on the local channel Caracol TV, he survived by repeatedly sneaking out of the Warsaw Ghetto, where he and his family were confined, to barter household items in other parts of the city.
On one of those return trips, he discovered that his home had been destroyed and his family had fallen victim to Nazi atrocities. “His brother was killed in the ghetto. They picked him up off the street and put him into a van. These vans (mobile gas chambers) had their exhaust pipes redirected into the rear compartment. Once the van was in motion, the gas would kill the prisoners, and the vehicle would not stop until there was no more noise inside. That’s how he died. The fate of his mother and sisters was no different: they perished at the Treblinka extermination camp, where they were taken directly to the gas chambers after being unloaded from the Warsaw train,” explained Abraham Gutman, one of Samuel’s sons, in a television interview.
Afterward, he worked on farms, served as an altar boy in a Catholic church despite being Jewish, was forced into labor for the German army in Germany, escaped to Switzerland, enlisted in the Polish regiment of the British Army, and joined the Allies in World War II. He was only 18 and used the identity of Franz Darkowski, a former neighbor whose name he remembered. During the war, he fought in the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, where he was shot in the hand.
At the end of the war, Samuel was able to correspond through letters with his father, Moisés, who had settled in Colombia before the Nazi invasion of Poland, with the intention of later bringing his family. Samuel still remembered the post office box his mother used to write to from Warsaw and sent a letter to let his father know he had survived and had not perished like the rest of his family.
The Jewish diaspora in Latin America after World War II
After World War II, thousands of Jews who had survived Nazi persecution embarked on an exodus in search of refuge. Many had no homes to return to in Europe and found in Latin America a chance to start over. It is estimated that between 40,000 and 50,000 Jews arrived in the region between 1945 and 1952, fleeing the trauma and devastation left by the Holocaust.
Argentina was the main destination, receiving around 30,000 survivors thanks to its relatively open immigration policies and the prior presence of an organized Jewish community. Brazil welcomed about 12,000, while Chile and Uruguay each received around 2,000. Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia also took in survivors, though in smaller numbers.
The newcomers integrated into existing communities and built new cultural, religious, and educational institutions. In many cases, their personal stories remained unspoken for decades, but in time, they bore witness to the horrors they had endured in Europe. Today, Jewish communities across Latin America remember those survivors not only as victims, but also as builders of memory and life in their adopted lands.