Pinchas Gutter was born to a Hasidic family in Lodz, Poland on July 21, 1932. Alongside his twin sister Sabina, he grew up in a religious Jewish community. Within a month of the Nazis’ 1939 invasion of Poland, the Gutter family, under false Christian identity, moved to Warsaw to avoid danger in their hometown. The family was interned in the Warsaw Ghetto, where they hid in a bunker during the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

They were eventually discovered and deported to the Majdanek concentration camp, where Pinchas’ parents and sister were murdered. Pinchas was then transferred to forced labor camps in Poland and later to the Buchenwald and Colditz concentration camps in Germany. From Colditz, he was sent on a death march to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia.

Pinchas was liberated from Theresienstadt by the Red Army in May 1945. After the war, Pinchas lived briefly in the United Kingdom, where he married his wife Dorothy, and then in Israel, before settling in South Africa for many years. He then immigrated to Canada in 1985 where he served as a lay chaplain at the Baycrest Jewish Home for the Aged in Toronto and as an honorary cantor at his local congregation.  Pinchas and his wife had three children and three grandchildren.