(What follows is a review of the above book by S Fuller, who is a volunteer at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. The review was published in issue No. 1, January 2004, of Zachor “Remember,” the centre’s newsletter)
Left for dead by SS guards on a snow bank, Solly Ganor was helped to safety by a Japanese-American soldier of the 522 Field Artillery Battalion, the unit that rescued survivors of the Death March in May 1945.
This same man, Clarence Matsumura, would again liberate Solly Ganor when they met again in Jerusalem in 1992 — this time it was from emotional death. In Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem, Ganor says that while he had survived the Death March with his body intact, his spirit had been left crippled. He saw himself “as the trunk of a tree that had survived a forest fire. Black and charred beyond recognition, with all my branches gone ...” It was in the presence of Clarence and his fellow veterans of the 522 Field Artillery 37 years later that he was to feel that he had sprouted “new emotional branches ... perhaps reviving old ones that weren’t really dead, only dormant.” It was also the first time since his liberation from the Death March that he had been able to cry.
As few people knew of the important role the “Nisei”, as Japanese Americans were known, had played in the liberation of camps, Ganor’s says that following his reunion with Clarence Matsumura many reporters were eager for interviews with the group in the remaining eight days they were in Israel.
Ganor chronicles his life as a boy in Kaunas, Lithuania before the rise of the Nazis, his unimaginable suffering in the ghetto, the concentration camps of Dachau and then on the Death March, his time fighting in the War of Independence and his subsequent life in Israel, where he still lives when not living in the United States, his other country of residence. In his story two people, both of Japanese ancestry, feature as important to his survival and he names them in his dedication, describing the one as his guide, and one as his rescuer. Clarence Matsumura and the men of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion are his rescuers and Chiune Sugihara is his guide, and both are included in his dedication, along with his mother and brother who died and his father and sister who survived, as well as his wife, Pola, and his two children. In a story, which tells of the monstrous things of which human beings are capable, this story tells too of those who acted differently, and their courage and moral fortitude stands out in Ganor’s account.
Sugihara was the Japanese consul in Kaunas, the town in which Ganor lived and a town he describes as “a bit like some small Eastern European version of Beirut or Casablanca” which had for decades been a favoured asylum for all sorts of refugees and where nearly one third of its some one hundred thousand residents were Jewish. Ganor was to first meet the man he thanks in his book for helping restore his faith in humanity at his aunt’s store — a store in which she sold imported and gourmet foods. Ganor was only 11 years old, but he immediately recognised Sugihara’s goodness and kindness, something that was to remain with him and features prominently in his life.
At the meeting at his aunt’s shop he was given Chanuka money and invited by the Japanese consul to consider him as an uncle. Ganor, then reciprocated this kindness by inviting Sugihara to their family Chanukah party. It was the first time Sugihara had visited a Jewish home. Thus began Ganor’s relationship with the man whose “shining moral example guided me through the darkest years of the Holocaust.”
Following on this meeting in the winter of 1939, conditions worsened as Germans took control of more of Europe and with this increasing numbers of Jews urgently sought transit visas. Sugihara, against orders of the Japanese Government, nevertheless, decided that it was his humanitarian duty to issue visas to those whose lives were in danger. He issued thousands of visas to families seeking asylum from the Nazi before moving to represent Japan in Berlin.
Disgraced for defying the Japanese government’s orders for this courageous act, Sugihara was later recognized for it, first in 1985 as “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem and then posthumously when he was awarded the Nagasaki Peace Prize.
Ganor will be the keynote speaker at this year’s symposium and the exhibition Light One Candle begins in February.
© S Fuller 2011