TORONTO — Memory – its slipperiness, its accuracy, its toxicity – is the unusual theme of the opening program of this year’s Holocaust Education Week.

Entitled “The Void: In Search of Memory Lost,” the Nov. 1 evening will explore what the program calls “a terrifying empty space.”

But in the hands of Stephen Smith, the memories of Pinchas Gutter, while the stuff of nightmares, glow with warmth and humanity.

The evening will feature more or less a conversation between Gutter, a local Holocaust survivor, and Smith, director of the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Institute, founded by director Stephen Spielberg.

Between Gutter’s tortured memories of death camps and the Warsaw Ghetto, and Smith’s sometimes laborious but ultimately rewarding attempts to extract them, the two men, despite being a generation apart – and one Jewish, the other Christian – have formed a deep bond.

“We are going to be exploring Pinchas’ journey as a Holocaust survivor,” Smith told The CJN in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “The underlying message is that memory is a very deep and traumatic experience with many layers to it and that we haven’t even begun yet to really hear what survivors have to tell us about what it means to survive. We’ve heard many thousands of testimonies, but behind the life histories is also a life.”

The two first met about a decade ago in Cape Town, South Africa, where Smith was taking survivors’ testimony for the local Holocaust centre. The Christian son of an English Methodist minister, Smith recalled that “something quite profound leapt out at me.”

He was struck by the way Gutter described his pre-war boyhood home in Lodz, Poland. Gutter had come from the Gerer chassidic community, and “the way in which he spoke about the community was deeper and it wasn’t as stereotyped [as other testimonies]. He talked about the characters and way in which they went about their lives and the kind of life they lived and values that they had.

“It brought the whole community to life. I realized he was back there when he was talking. And he took me into that community in a way that I’d never really experienced before when listening to a Holocaust survivor. Because he was there, I was back there, too. I felt part of the story.

“I could also see he thought very profoundly about what it meant to be a Holocaust survivor. And I thought to myself, ‘I’d really like to talk this man again.’”

For the next five years, the two talked, with Smith collecting 40 hours of Gutter’s testimony in Toronto, Cape Town and London. They even travelled to Poland together.

“We spent five years journeying back into his memory and to some degree, recovering that memory,” said Smith, the founding director of the UK Holocaust Centre in London, Britain’s first dedicated Holocaust memorial and education institution.

Gutter was seven years old when the Second World War began. Having fled Lodz, he and his family were incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto for 3-1/2 years until April 1943, the time of the famous uprising.

The family was deported to the Majdanek death camp, where his father, mother and twin sister were murdered. Gutter endured other Nazi camps, including Terezin, and a death march. Liberated by the Soviet Red Army in May 1945, he was taken to Britain and South Africa before coming to Canada.

One part of that tale has gripped Smith.

“He came to visit me in England and told me a very moving story in which he described how he and his sister were going into a selection at Majdanek. He went one way, she went the other, and as she went around the corner, there was her long golden braid, and it disappeared. And only half an hour later did he realize what had happened.

“He looked at me and said, ‘She was my twin sister and I have no recollection of her except for long golden braid going around the corner. I can’t remember her at all. I want you to help me find my sister.’

“What became clear,” Smith says, “is that the past haunts him. Many things came out [about how] deeply traumatized he is, even to this very day.”

Through that haze of raw emotions, the two also spoke about religion, forgiveness, love and Poland, and they “try and make some sense of it in a way that is open,” Smith says.

“Pinchas is willing to unmask himself, and show how notwithstanding all that confusion and emotion and disarray, somehow this man got his life back together and continues.

“He struggles on so many levels with his identity and spirituality. It was amazing to have observed all that, and for him to allow me in.”

But because memory is fallible, “I don’t look for factuality. I look for the person that’s telling me their story. With all [their] pitfalls – and there are many – when survivors’ testimonies are taken together, there is a lot we can learn from them, because they do corroborate each other and there is an amazing amount of unusual detailed fact in them.”

The two are friends now. “We know more about each other than any person in our lives probably,” Smith says. He and Gutter are now collaborating on a book on their experience.

Says Smith: “I dared to step into some unknown and difficult territory with him. It’s been a really tough journey. And it brought us very close.”

The talk will be held at Adath Israel Congregation, 37 Southbourne Ave., at 7.30 p.m.