to be on Earth when humans first touched another world. We also want you to get a sense of what life was like in this different time, five decades ago. From India to Canada, Sudan to Iran, we want to take you around the world and back in time.
We hope you enjoy this sort of global folk history of Apollo that we’ve had the pleasure of hearing and assembling. We are honored to share these stories with the world and, most of all, want to thank those who shared their precious time and memories with us. They have provided us all with a gift, to have the opportunity to relive this unique time in human history.
Lying in bed staring up at the stone ceiling of the St. Ottilien Monastery, fatigued, exhausted, and still recovering from the most horrible of atrocities, Elly was torn between emotions. A part of him was relieved and felt safe for the first time in years. The other part of him was intensely angry and overcome with hatred.
It was the spring of 1945. Elly Gotz was seventeen and recuperating in a makeshift hospital near the town of Geltendorf in the south of Germany. When he looked up from his bed, he saw a three hundred-year-old stone ceiling held up by old wooden arches. The monastery was a cold place of mostly hard surfaces like stone floors and wood benches. The wheeled-in hospital cots were the only soft surfaces, and the first comfort Elly and most other people there had felt in years.
The long halls of the monastery housed dozens of other weakened men, women, and children. All had just been rescued from the main Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. Among these men was Elly’s father, a fifty-four-year-old Lithuanian who now barely weighed his own age in pounds. Elly himself only weighed about seventy pounds and struggled to lift his emaciated body from the bed. When he did have the strength, he would walk the stone stairs of the monastery to exercise and rebuild what muscle he could.
If he wasn’t exploring the grassy surroundings of the monastery, Elly was with his father and the other survivors in their room. Conversations filled the long stone halls with lively voices: German, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian, among others. The rows of beds the only soft surfaces to mute the echoes.
Like everyone there, Elly had been rescued from the darkest of situations. His body saved from slave labour and starving conditions that would have taken his life eventually, his mind saved from the constant presence of death and the thought that, at any moment, he or his father could be killed.
While the physical torture of the Holocaust was over, Elly’s mind remained in a dark place. He was full of hate for those who had done such horrible things to him and millions of other Jewish people across Europe. By the end of World War II, over fifteen million people had been killed by the Nazi regime. Six million of these were European Jews, singled out for genocide by the Nazis and murdered in mass killings at concentration camps as part of the Holocaust—what the Jewish community now calls the Shoah.
Slowly gaining back their strength, Elly and his father spent their days trying to find Elly’s mother and the rest of the family, sending frantic letters to the Red Cross. As they did this, Elly wondered: Could he ever live a meaningful life? Was he to be forever full of hate for the people who had done this? At night, when he couldn’t sleep, he thought about the hate that had begun to overwhelm him. He knew his entire life would be defined not only by what happened to him and his family during the war, but also by how he chose to let it affect his future. He had a choice to make.
•••
Four years later, Elly was in Johannesburg, South Africa, studying to become an electrical engineer at Witwatersrand (Wits) University. To do so he had to leave his parents who were living in Rhodesia (known today as Zimbabwe). Despite the difficulty of being away from his family after they had endured so much to be reunited, he was thrilled to be attending university and learning about two of his favorite subjects: physics and engineering.
For Elly, the best part of university was being surrounded by other people interested in science. He and his friends would come to class early to talk about everything happening in the world. At the time, major scientific fields were undergoing a revolution. Albert Einstein’s theories were still new, being hotly tested and debated in physics lectures around the world. The computer chip had only recently been invented and was paving the way forward beyond the primitive technology of World War II, and engineers in America and Russia were successfully launching rockets high enough to pierce the atmosphere and into space.
Elly would walk to class among Johannesburg’s world-famous Jacaranda trees that gave the Wits University campus a bright purple hue amongst the otherwise green landscape. As beautiful as the Wits campus was, his gaze was never limited to just the greenery. Whenever a plane flew overhead, Elly would stop. He would try to see if he could tell what kind it was. He was absolutely fascinated by flight. Before the war, his dream had been to become a pilot, to control a machine in the air and leave the ground behind.
After the war, things felt a bit different. Becoming a pilot didn’t seem realistic. First and foremost, Elly wanted an education. He decided to become an engineer, and his talents made him well-suited to chase this goal. He loved to create new ways of doing things, to invent machines to solve problems, and to question old beliefs. In short, he was a born inventor, able to think differently than others his age and always curious if things could be done a new way…though this habit of questioning things didn’t always do Elly favors.
One semester, when his class was learning about the makeup of waveforms, Elly doubted his professor’s claim that an irregular wave can be broken into an endless number of regular sine waves. The professor proceeded to schedule a lesson specifically to prove that the theory was correct. That day Elly happened to be late, arriving a few minutes into the lecture. As he walked into the lab, he immediately heard the professor say, “There he is, the doubting Thomas”—an old nickname for people who are skeptical by nature.
After the professor successfully proved the nature of irregular waves, Elly would have to put up with being called “doubting Thomas” for a few more years. But he wasn’t bothered by his reputation for being curious and questioning. He knew his curiosity drove his desire and ability to learn. Eventually it paid off. In 1952, Elly graduated from Wits University with a degree in electrical engineering.
After graduation he moved back to Rhodesia to reunite with his parents. At that time, the economy there was far from booming. Unable to find a job as an engineer, Elly put his degree to work and opened a radio repair shop. His people skills and technical know-how led to success, and he eventually opened a recording studio. In these years Elly met his wife, Esme, and had three children. When the opportunity presented itself, he moved back to South Africa to open and operate a plastics factory.
Sadly, South Africa in the 1950s brought new scenes of horror to Elly’s life. Racism was everywhere. Many of the white people of South Africa treated black Africans as second class, lesser humans. Elly had seen it before. He worried what would happen to his children if his family remained there, not wanting them to grow up surrounded by racism and the violence that follows it.
Because of the atmosphere in South Africa, Elly and his wife knew it was time to leave. Nothing good could come from being surrounded by so much hate, and as a recent immigrant Elly was powerless to stop it. In search of a better life for their children, he and his wife moved their family to Toronto, Canada.
They arrived in Toronto in 1964, where they bought a bungalow in the suburbs. Elly joined his brothers-in-law in operating a plastics factory in the industrial heart of the city. Canada was different from the other places he had lived, and the
