On September 5, 2013, Eric Saul wrote:
Dear Friends,
I wanted to take out a few moments and send you some material that I thought might be of interest to you.
I just received a letter from Mr. Solly Ganor, who lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. He is a child survivor of the Holocaust from Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania. He survived one of the most brutal Nazi occupations in Europe. He was a survivor of the Kovno Ghetto and several camps of the infamous Dachau Concentration Camp. His mother and brother were murdered by the Nazis during the war. More than 92% of the Jews of Lithuania were murdered by the Nazi occupiers.
In 1992, I started actively researching the role of the Niseis in the liberation of the sub-camps of Dachau. At the time, I was working with a number of the 522nd veterans. I was also working with the researchers at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
At that time, we had only a very sketchy understanding of what the Niseis did as part of their witnessing of the Holocaust in southern Germany in late April and early May 1945.
As part of my research, I sought out Jewish survivors who had the experience of being liberated by the Nisei soldiers at the end of the war. My parents were living in Jerusalem at the time, and I had them place a news article in the English-speaking newspaper, the Jerusalem Post. The article asked for Jewish survivors of Dachau to relate their experiences being liberated by Niseis. I had several survivors contact me and relate their powerful experiences of being freed.
One of them was Solly Ganor, who was living in Herzliya, outside of Tel Aviv. At the beginning of the war, Solly was just 11 years old. When the Nazis occupied Lithuania in 1941, he was 13 years old. At the time, his father was a prosperous, middle class merchant living in Kovno, Lithuania.
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