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February 27, 2004
Horror through eyes of a child
Rare photos and moving words mark Shoah exhibit at Holocaust centre.
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Solly Ganor was 10 years old in 1941, when his four-year trauma
at the hands of the Nazis began. His miraculous survival in Lithuania's
Kovno ghetto, concentration camps and, finally, a death march from
which he very nearly didn't survive, is told in a monumental exhibit
now on display at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
Light One Candle: A Child's Diary of the Holocaust uses the frank
and moving testimony of Ganor's diary, combining his narrative with
some of the rarest and most important surviving photographs of the
ghetto where most of Ganor's fellow Kovno Jews perished. The exhibit
holds special significance for Canadian observers and tells of the
remarkable role played by Japanese and Japanese-Americans in Ganor's
life story.
The exhibit is intended as an introduction to Holocaust learning
for younger audiences, but the content has resonance for people
of all ages. Through Ganor's words, the Holocaust experiences of
millions of Jewish children are parallelled.
Life in the Kovno ghetto was photographed by George Kadish, himself
a resident of the Lithuanian town, in hundreds of stills that may
be the most significant photographic collection taken by a victim
during the Holocaust, according to Holocaust centre officials. The
collection, which now belongs to the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of
Tolerance, includes representations of Ganor as a child.
Other photographic collections are also represented in the current
exhibit, including six rare photos of the April 1945 death march,
which Ganor survived, as well as photos of Dachau's liberation by
Japanese-American soldiers.
The Japanese connection is a notable closing of a circle in the
Holocaust story of Ganor. Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese consul
to Lithuania, a man with no experience of the Jewish culture or
history, but whose horror at the emerging fate of European Jewry
led him to save innumerable Jews by issuing thousands of illicit
visas that permitted some Lithuanian Jews to escape in advance of
the Nazi extermination. Though Ganor's family was lucky to receive
a Sugihara visa, they were unable to escape in time to evade the
Nazis. Ganor (born Zalke Genkind) and his father were among the
only two of their extended family to survive. After the war, Ganor's
father met and married a Canadian woman and, although Ganor moved
to Israel to fight in the War of Independence and remains there,
he also holds Canadian citizenship.
Ganor was one of the Dachau inmates who were liberated by the American
522nd Field Artillery Battalion, an all-Japanese-American battalion.
In a comment accompanying a photo of Ganor's liberator, Clarence
Matsumura, Ganor notes "It was Clarence who picked me up out
of the snow [where he had fallen during the death march] and saved
my life on the morning of May 2, 1945. This was the first act of
kindness from a person in uniform that I had seen in more than five
years."
In 1992, the two men met again, in Jerusalem, and it was the first
time since liberation that Ganor cried.
In 1955, Ganor published his memoir, titled Light One Candle:
A Survivor's Tale, which tells of the depths to which humankind
descended during that period, but also sheds light on the kindness
and humanity of individuals like Sugihara and Matsumura.
Hundreds of Vancouver school children will have the opportunity
to meet Ganor and hear his story at this spring's annual high school
symposium, arranged by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
A public reception will take place May 6, 7:30 p.m., at the centre.
The current exhibit, Light One Candle, opened Sunday and continues
until May 28. In addition to Ganor's story and the rare Kadish photos,
which are a testament to the murder of all but 3,000 of Kovno's
45,000 Jews, the exhibit includes photos from the Landsberg-Kaufering
slave labor camps, part of the Dachau complex, where many Lithuanian
Jewish men died, and photos from the Sugihara family archives. The
exhibit is a travelling production that premièred in 2001,
during Ganor's belated bar mitzvah, and later was shown at New York's
YIVO Institute.
Pat Johnson is a native Vancouverite, a journalist and
commentator.
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