Solly Ganor holding bowl, Kovno Ghetto. Photo: George Kadish.
Light One Candle: A Child’s Diary of the Holocaust
Solly Ganor was born on May 18, 1928 in Heydekrug, a small town near the East Prussian border, where most of the inhabitants spoke German. He was the youngest of three children of the Genkind family. His father Chaim Genkind was from Minsk, white Russia, and his mother Rebecca Genkind-Shtrom, came from a family that traces its origin in Lithuania to 1756. His sister Fanny was fourteen years older than he, and his brother Herman seven.
In 1933, when Hitler came to power, the Genkinds moved back to Kovno (Kaunas), where they had a very large family. The family soon established itself in a new business, and Solly had to adjust from his native German tongue to Yiddish, Lithuanian and Hebrew, that most Jews in Kovno spoke.
In the introduction of his book, Solly described his youth:
“Kovno, Lithuania, is a little-known spot on the map for most Americans. It looms large in my memory, however. It is where I spent the greater part of my childhood, and where a large part of the story that follows takes place.
Kovno was a lovely city of nearly 120,000 people. More than thirty thousand Jews lived and prospered in the town, my family among them. For many years, Kovno was one of the few places in Europe where the Jews were able to live nearly autonomously, and they built a strong community. Its Yeshivas [Jewish religious schools] attracted students from all over Europe. Its professionals and scholars and merchants played an important role in the town’s economy. Its cultural life was diverse and sophisticated. There were four Hebrew high schools and one in Yiddish in Kovno. Several Yiddish newspapers and a Yiddish theater, was part of the Jewish culture. Most of the Jews of Kovno were Zionist. I remember my childhood as a very happy one.”
On Hanukah 1939, Solly met by chance, the Japanese consul to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara. The Genkinds were among the first to receive a life saving visa from Chiune Sugihara, but when the Soviets entered Lithuania their Lithuanian passports became invalid. They were caught by the Nazi invasion and spent three years in the Kovno ghetto, where most of the Jewish inhabitants were killed in various Actions and deportations. Having survived all the actions, they were deported to German concentration camps in the spring of 1944, on the eve of the Soviet army reoccupying Kovno. Solly’s mother and sister were sent to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig, while he and his father were sent to a satellite camp of Dachau, known as Lager X [Camp 10], near the German town of Utting.
Solly’s mother died in Stutthof of typhoid fever, while his sister Fanny survived and was among the Jewish women who were shipped out by the Nazis on boats to the Baltic Sea where they were going to be drowned. Solly and his father worked in Lager X under the most appalling conditions.
Hard labor, starvation and beatings were their daily rations. Many died and at the end of the war, the rest were sent on a death march from Dachau to Tyrol.
Thus the remnants of the once glorious Lithuanian Jewry, died from starvation, exhaustion and freezing weather and their bodies lay strewn about where they fell and were shot. This tragedy took place at the end of April 1945 on the picturesque roads of Bavaria.
Solly Ganor survived the death march, and was liberated by a unit of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion of the US Army. The unit consisted of Japanese American soldiers. Ironically, many of these soldiers volunteered for military service from American relocation camps. The person who saved him was Private Clarence Matsumura, who in 1992 was reunited with Solly in Jerusalem.
After his liberation Solly spent some time with the American army where he worked as an interpreter for a US Army intelligence unit that was identifying and prosecuting Nazi collaborators hiding among the Displaced persons.
Solly’s father who survived the Death March, married a Canadian woman, who was in charge of United Nations Relief Agency (UNNRA) in the Munich area. Solly was supposed to have joined them in Canada.
On May 15, 1948, when the State of Israel was declared, Solly decided instead of going to Canada, to join the Israeli Defense Forces and fought in the war of Independence.
After the war, in 1949, he joined the fledgling Israeli merchant marine, where he eventually reached the rank of captain.
In 1960, he was accepted by the London University, where he studied English Literature and languages. In 1963, he returned to Israel where he married his present wife Pola. They have two children, Daniel and Leora, and three grand children. After returning from England Solly was offered a job to manage a textile factory belonging to Pola’s family and in 1977, they moved to La Jolla California.
By 1984, their daughter Leora became 18 and went back to Israel to serve her two years in the army. The Ganor’s returned to Israel the same year. Solly spends most of his time lecturing as a witness to the Holocaust throughout the US, Germany, Japan and Israel.
The book Light One Candle has been translated into German and Japanese. In Germany and Japan, Solly’s book has been widely circulated, and is now recommended reading for high schools. In Japan, some high schools even produced a play based on his book.
Recently Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel recommended Solly’s book Light One Candle as educational reading on the Holocaust. This endorsement by Elie Wiesel, whom the survivors consider as their spokesman, is very gratifying for Solly.
Recently, Solly reflected, “I feel I have finally fulfilled my promise to my perished friends and family to tell their stories. I have finally lit ‘One Candle’ for them.”
Solly Ganor’s Story
A special event changed my silence. It completely changed my life and it remained so to this day.
In April 1992, a man by the name of Eric Saul telephoned me from Jerusalem. It was a fateful call. What happened next was what I consider ‘my second liberation’.
Eric Saul, a historian from San Francisco, came to Jerusalem with a group of Japanese American army veterans of the famed 100th/442nd and 522nd Field Artillery Battalion. Among them was a man who, at the end of World War II, saved my life. This man was Clarence Matsumura.
He was the young soldier who found me at the end of World War Two lying in the snow, barely alive.
It was May 2, 1945. I was with a group of Jewish prisoners on a death march from Dachau to the Tyrol Mountains. With the American Army very near, the Nazi guards led us to a forest clearing where we were to be shot. But when they heard the American Army approaching, the guards ran away leaving us to our fate. It snowed heavily that night and the snow covered the half-dead marchers completely. It was there that Clarence Matsumura with his three Japanese American friends found me. He saved my life by simply getting me hot broth.
Our miraculous reunion after almost fifty years brought about a catharsis in me. Our reunion in Jerusalem had almost a miraculous effect on me. When we met face to face, I broke down. I cried for a very long time, with Clarence and Eric Saul trying to comfort me.
I hadn’t cried since the day of my liberation in 1945.
The catharsis of meeting my liberator was like a second liberation. It changed my life in more than one way. I began to lecture on the subject of the Holocaust, in many countries, but most importantly, I finally published my wartime diary and it has been translated into many languages.
I hope that my account of the Jews of Kovno will fulfill my promise to my family and friends to tell what happened to us.
I was born in Heydekrug, Lithuania, on May 18, 1928, the youngest of three children. My sister Fanny was fourteen years old when I was born, and my brother Herman was seven.
For my eleventh birthday, my brother Herman brought me a present. It was a diary. It was a handsome book embossed in gold and the cover simply said, “Diary.”
“You are the writer in this family. Write down the events to come. Some day it may be an important document.” He smiled when he said it, but his eyes were very serious. It was September 1, 1939, the beginning of World War II.
His words were prophetic, yet it took me more than fifty years to bring myself to publish my diary. It is called Light One Candle, and it was published in 1995.
During the dark hours of World War II, in the ghetto, in the concentration camps, before our liberation, we prisoners often talked about the remote chances of our survival. We made a pact among ourselves that those who would survive the war would tell the truth about what happened. We knew that the world had to be informed. When I survived the war, I knew I was obligated to speak on behalf of the millions of people murdered, and especially the million and a half Jewish children whose voices were silenced.
There are those who can’t understand why I waited so long; fifty years is, after all, a very long time.
The answer lies, as with most Holocaust survivors, the fear, or rather the abhorrence, to expose to the public the terrible things that were done to us, by the Nazis and their European collaborators.
There were those who couldn’t understand our silence, and thought that it implied shame.
Behind our backs they called it: ‘the silence of the sheep that went to the slaughter.’
It never occurred to them that what we went through was so terrible, so utterly horrifying, that it made it psychologically impossible to deal with. We simply went into denial. I was among those survivors who wanted to get on with their lives.
When I enlisted in the Israeli army in 1948 to fight in its War of Independence, I adopted a new identity. Since I came with a group of Canadian volunteers, I registered as a Canadian.
My Hero, Chiune Sugihara
It was Chiune Sugihara who was among the few who risked his career to save Jewish refugees, lining up at his door. The greatness of this man was the fact that against the orders of his superiors he granted visas and he didn’t turn away a single person who came to him for help.
Thousands of Jewish people besieged every day the foreign embassies trying to obtain visas. They went to the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians and more, but the overwhelming majority was turned away empty handed. No one wanted to save the Jews from Hitler. Irony would have it that an ally of the Nazis would risk his career to save Jews, whereas the West refused to help them.
In July 1939, the Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara with his family arrived to my hometown of Kovno, Lithuania. They took up residence in a house not far from where we lived. It became the Japans consulate, an event that received hardly any attention. One of my uncles actually expressed concern, as it was well known that the Japanese were allies of the Nazis.
“Nothing good can be expected from the Japanese,” he said to my father. How wrong he was.
To go back in time and visit the world I knew as a child is easy. All I have to do is close my eyes and I can see it clearly. Please, join me and I will take you the world I knew as a child and only lives in the memory of the few survivors still alive.
There are times when we should speak not only of our enemies who wish to destroy us, but also of those who risked their lives and careers to save our people.
I want to tell you of a hero, the hero of my childhood; he was the Japanese consul to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara.
In the summer of 1940, he issued visas to thousands of Jewish refugees against the express orders of his government. He is not only my hero, but is the hero of forty thousand Jewish souls who are alive today because of his selfless act to save them from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. I was a living witness to that rescue event and I wish to share it with you.
Several years ago I was invited to celebrate the reunion of Jewish survivors with the their rescuer’s wife, Yukiko Sugihara. The reunion took place in New York’s Town Hall. That day the biggest storm of the year hit New York and the rain came down in buckets, but the Town Hall was packed full with Sugihara survivors. The storm was not going to keep them away from meeting Yukiko Sugihara, who came all the way from Japan to meet us. There were many emotional speeches that evening, including the one by Yukiko herself, but the one that really touched us all was the short speech of a thirteen year old boy.
He came to the stage with a bunch of flowers in his hand, kissed Yukiko on both cheeks and said: “Mrs. Sugihara, Your husband saved my grandfather and grandmother, and because of that I am here today and so are forty thousand descendants of the people to whom your husband issued visas. Thank you, Mrs. Yukiko Sugihara for granting us all our lives.”
The fifteen hundred people who attended the event stood up and gave the boy a standing ovation.
Recently, I received an invitation to come to Hawaii where I would be reunited with Mrs. Yukiko Sugihara. I can safely say that her husband is my hero since I was as an eleven-year-old boy, when I first met him and he declared himself to be my ‘uncle.’ Chiune, Sempo Sugihara was among the first to be recognized by Yad Vashem, as a Righteous Gentile (Ish Hassid Umot) for saving thousands of Jewish people from the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Kovno, Hanukah 1939
“How do you do, Sir” I said politely.
He solemnly shook my hand, returning my open scrutiny, and then smiled. There was humor and kindness in those strange eyes, and I immediately warmed to him. As my aunt Anushka went to the cash register, Mr. Sugihara took a shiny coin from his pocket. “Since this is Hanukah consider me your uncle.” He said extending the coin. I hesitated for a minute. “You should come to our Hanukkah party on Saturday.” I blurted out as I plucked the coin from his hand. “The whole family will be there. Seeing as you are my uncle.” I added. That Saturday, Chiune Sugihara and his wife Yukiko came to our home to attend our party. It was at the party that Mr. Rosenblatt, the refugee who lived at our house, out of desperation approached Mr. Sugihara and asked him whether he would grant him a visa.
Mr. Sugihara was puzzled by this request. Why would a Jewish person wish to go Japan, knowing that the Japanese were allied with the Nazis.
At this party, the Sugiharas met many of my uncles and aunts and through them other Jewish families. When Mr. Sugihara heard that I was collecting stamps, he invited me to come to the consulate.
I would go to the Japanese consulate quite often, to collect stamps and get some tea and Japanese cookies from his wife, Yukiko. I would play with their older son, Hiroki, even though he was much younger than I.
It was only six months later that we found out what a true humanitarian we had for a friend, when he began giving out visas to anyone who came to his consulate. We were among the first to receive the visas, but unfortunately we couldn’t use it, because we were Lithuanian Citizens, and when the Soviets occupied Lithuania, our passports became invalid.
Thus, we were caught in Hitler’s killing machine and most of my family perished. But I always remembered my ‘uncle’ Chiune Sugihara. He was like a lighthouse in the sea of darkness that surrounded us during those days in Lithuania.
I know and love every nook and cranny of this town. Slowly its familiar details emerge in my mind. The golden cupola of the Chor Shoul, our loveliest synagogue, takes shape in the distance. Then Niemuno and Vilnius Streets, and Rotushes Square, lined with its massive stone houses which had probably seen Napoleon on his march to Moscow.
December 1939. It is Hanukah again, the Festival of Lights. I am eleven years old. I collected quite a sum of money from my family as Hanukah gelt. We have some refugees in our house, Mr. Rosenblatt and his daughter Lea. I had to give up my room for them, and sleep with my brother Hermann, an idea I wasn’t crazy about. My mother saw my resentment and made me feel guilty. That was my undoing, because the same day several ladies showed up asking for donations to help the refugees. On impulse, I gave them all my gelt.
The next day, a new Laurel and Hardy movie were playing and I was dying to see it, but my pockets were empty.
I had only one hope left, my aunt Anushka. She ran an elegant shop of imported gourmet foods for her rich clientele and she also catered to foreign embassies.
It was cold when I sat out that afternoon, but I was dressed warmly. The snow felt crisp under my boots and shimmered white in the afternoon sun. It was Hanukah, and all along the streets menorahs shimmered in the windows of the Jewish houses, and Christmas trees glowed in the homes of the Christians. Aunt Anushka’s shop window was decorated with a string of colored bulbs, and a contraption attached to the door played a merry tune when you opened it. It was a gift from some inventor friend of hers. Somewhere in Poland, World War Two had started, but here in Lithuania life continued as if nothing had happened.
When I walked in, she was serving an elegantly dressed gentleman. “Ah, my dear nephew is here for his Hanukah money, I bet.” She said in Russian, smiling at me.
“Come here and meet his Excellency, the consul of Japan, Mr. Sugihara,” she added. I suppose I was staring at him. He had the most interesting slanted eyes. I approached him slowly and extended my hand.
George Kadish: A Hidden Camera in the Kovno Ghetto
In addition to depicting the severe conditions of ghetto life, he had an artistic eye for portraiture, the desolation of deserted streets, and the intimacy of informal, improvised gatherings.
Kadish’s last photographs taken inside the ghetto are those recording the deportation of ghetto prisoners to slave labor camps in Estonia.
In July 1944, after escaping from the ghetto across the river, he photographed the ghetto’s liquidation and burning.
Once the Germans fled, he returned to photograph the ghetto in ruins and the small groups who had survived the final days in hiding.
Kadish recognized early on the danger of losing his precious collection. He enlisted the assistance of Yehuda Zupowitz, a high-ranking officer in the ghetto’s Jewish police, to help hide his negatives and prints. Zupowitz never revealed his knowledge of Kadish’s work or the location of his collection, even during the “Police Action” of March 27, 1944, when Zupowitz was tortured and killed at the Fort IX prison. Kadish retrieved his collection of photographic negatives upon his return to the destroyed ghetto.
After Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, Kadish left Lithuania for Germany with his extraordinary photographs. In the American Occupation Zone, he mounted exhibitions of his photographs for survivors residing in displaced persons camps. Kadish later said that his photographs were his revenge.
The photographs of the Kovno Ghetto that appear in this exhibition were taken by George Kadish. Many of these images were printed directly from Kadish’s original 35mm negatives. Kadish died in 1999 in Florida. His photographs are a tribute to his heroism in telling the story of the Jews of Kovno.
Photographing daily life in the Kovno Ghetto was an extremely risky venture. The Germans strictly prohibited it. George Kadish took every opportunity possible to document life in the ghetto. The result constitutes one of the most significant photographic records of ghetto life during the Holocaust.
George Kadish was born Zvi (Hirsh) Kadushin in Raseiniai, Lithuania, in 1910. After attending the local Hebrew school, he moved with his family to Kovno. At the Aleksotas University, located in one of Kovno’s suburbs he studied engineering in preparation for a teaching career and joined the rightist Zionist movement. Before the war, he taught mathematics, science, and electronics at a local Hebrew high school. His hobby, however, would have the most significant impact on his and others’ lives. He developed an interest in photography and even began building his own cameras. He designed a hidden camera for use on his trouser belt.
Acquiring and developing film secretly outside the ghetto was as perilous as using his hidden cameras inside. Kadish worked as an engineer repairing x-ray machines for the German occupation forces in the city of Kovno. Once in the city, he bartered for film and other photographic supplies. He developed his precious negatives at the German military hospital, using the same chemicals he used to develop x-ray film. He smuggled them out in sets of crutches.
The subjects of Kadish’s photographic portraits were varied, but he seemed especially interested in capturing the reality of the ghetto’s daily life.
In June 1941, witnessing the brutality of the initial Nazi actions, he photographed the Yiddish word Nekoma (“Revenge”) found scrawled in blood on the door of a murdered Jew’s apartment. Camera in hand, or whenever necessary, placed just so to record subjects through a buttonhole of his overcoat, he photographed Jews humiliated and tormented by Lithuanian and German guards in search for smuggled food, Jews dragging their belongings from one place to another on sleds or carts, Jews concentrated in forced work brigades. Kadish also recorded activities at the ghetto’s food gardens and in schools, orphanages, and workshops.