Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project
... preserving the past to protect the future ...

A n   I n v e s t i g a t i v e   S t u d y
Stumbling over the sickening trail of Eric Saul ...

...to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all...  
  E l i e   W i e s e l   
    

Solly Ganor
The Solly Ganor Case of Credibility and Deceit:
Solly Ganor, the Lithuanian Holocaust Survivor,
Seeking Fame and Glory out of the Ashes of the Holocaust
With a Little Help From His American Found Friend and Coach, Eric Saul

by
K. K. Brattman
Managing Editor

Dated: March 11, 2004

  • I.  Opening Statement
  • II. Who Is Solly Ganor? 
  • III. Open Questions on Solly Ganor
  • IV. Questioning Mr. Ganor's Grandiose Praises
    Purportedly his "Light One Candle" Book Had Received  

  • V.  On Solly Ganor's Plug
    on Eric Saul's "Visas for Life" Exhibit in Jerusalem 
     
  • VI.  Concluding Remarks

P a r t   V I   o f   V I

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Let's Do Not Forget Them:
They are looking at us ...
Photo by Margaret Bourke-White
Prisoners at Buchenwald
 (1945)

Source: masters-of-photography.com/B/bourke-white/b-w_buchenwald.html 

 

VI. CONCLUDING REMARKS
(with two
Postscripts)

If we are to take Mr. Ganor at his word, then concocting acts of "heroism and high tragedy" was part of Mr. Ganor's "trait" going back all the way to when he "was about nine years old." In the Prologue (p. xi) of his alleged autobiographical book "Light One Candle," Mr. Ganor states:

"When I was about nine years old, around 1937, my friends and I were thrilled to stumble upon the skeleton of a Russian officer. He was in a cave in the woods surrounding Kalautuvas, a little resort town a few miles downriver from Kaunas. Around the earthly remains of this lonely soul, who died so far from home, we concocted a whole history full of dash and heroism and high tragedy." [Emphasis supplied.]

Thus, from this admission, it appears that Mr. Ganor and Mr. Saul were made for each other and this respectfully may indeed hold a clue of their lasting bond. When we have asked Mr. Ganor if he is not troubled by Mr. Saul's apparent lack of academic credentials and of his bogus "Visas For Life" exhibits, Mr. Ganor in his email to us of February 22, 2004, (Exhibit 8, ¶¶2,3, hereto) stated:

"Allow me to tell you that I am on the board of the directors of the Dachau Association and on the Foundation of Yad Vashem. Before you chose to attack me, don't you think that you should have checked up on me who I really am?

Concerning Eric Saul, whom you call an impostor with no academic credentials, I have known Eric Saul since he was curator at the prestigious War Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco. I don't think that they would have accepted him without the proper credentials." [Emphasis supplied]

My goodness, can you believe even for one second that Yad Vashem's standards are so low that it has as one of its directors a person that would accept without any verification one's credentials and rely solely on a blind trust and on the assumption that "proper credential" must exist if that person was associated with another museum. Respectfully for us, such a scenario is outside of our comprehension and, as such, we refuse to believe it. Yes, we refuse to believe that Yad Vashem has on its board people like Solly Ganor. Sorry, but for us the alternative that such a scenario could be true is inconceivable.

Protecting further his precious friend Eric Saul that had transformed him into a celeb Holocaust survivor, Mr. Ganor, in the same stated email [Exhibit 8], noted this in ¶4 and ¶5, respectively:

"As far as his bogus "educational" Holocaust project [is] concerned, hundreds of thousands of people in more than hundred and fifty towns around the world have seen the 'Visas For Life' exhibitions." And,

"More people have been made aware of the Holocaust through Eric Saul's Visas For Life than your website would in a thousand years."

Yes, we share Mr. Ganor's representation that Mr. Saul's 'Visas For Life' exhibitions have traveled extensively polluting the grounds of the Holocaust as perhaps no other person. It is because of all this that we think that the time is long overdue for Mr. Saul to face its deeds and be held accountable for it.

Liberated inmates behind a barbed wire fence at Auschwitz.
Photo courtesy: US National Archives

Take a good look at the picture above. Take another look and look straight into that woman's eyes behind the barbed wire. Do not move. Stay still. Her penetrating eyes are going to reach your soul. And when that happens, you undoubtedly would be able to see the source of our tremendous anger that we have for the Ganor-Saul pair...

We have come to the end of our study, but before we shall leave it, let us respond in brief to Mr. Ganor's last paragraph of his referenced email [Exhibit 8] where it is stated:

"Naturally, I don't think it would be beneficial to any of us if such a suit is made public: A Holocaust survivor suing a Holocaust Survivors' Network. Still I would go ahead and do it no matter how much it will cost me, unless you can come up with some plausible answers to my questions." [Emphasis supplied]

For us, as stated in our Part IV, the issues surrounding the accuracy of Holocaust information that is being disseminated in the world is of

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A Dachau Survivor
on the Liberation Day
[US National Archives]
extreme importance particularly when its credibility is being questioned and challenged with direct evidence, and when it is capable of passing with relative ease as genuine Holocaust material. When bogus Holocaust material is being passed by an alleged eyewitness of the Holocaust, this represents a new and rather unprecedented dimension of deceit because of its rarity and its sickness involved. It is because of all this that when such rare situations are being encountered, they must be made public. We owe such public exposure to the Memory of the Holocaust and to its true recorded History.

Only time will tell whether Mr. Ganor's alleged Holocaust experiences would not in fact parrallel to the ones of other discredited Holocaust survivors. One such an example is the recent exposure of Deli Strummer. As Art Abramson, Executive Director of the Baltimore Jewish Council who initiated an investigation into Strummer's past, put it,

"Get history right. Respect the living. Honor the dead."

Another example resembling perhaps more closely to Mr. Ganor's case is the discredited celeb Holocaust Survivor Jerzy Kosinski, who after being exposed committed suicide. And for those not familiar with that case see this biography, and this summary from The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed.:
Kosinski, Jerzy , 1933-91, American writer, b. Lódz, Poland. He taught at the Univ. of Lódz before emigrating to the United States in 1957. In his best-known novel, The Painted Bird (1965), the horrors of war and the violation of a human being are rendered in language of remarkable beauty. The novel depicts the nightmarish wanderings of a young boy among brutal peasants in a nameless country during World War II. Kosinski's other novels include Steps (1968, National Book Award), Being There (1971), The Devil Tree (1973), Cockpit (1975), Passion Play (1978), and The Hermit of 69th Street (1988).

For several decades the wittily urbane author was a literary, social, and media celebrity. However, during the 1980s Kosinski was shaken by scandal as critics charged that other authors had helped him to write his books and that his supposed roman à clef, The Painted Bird, which had made his personal and literary reputation, was not remotely autobiographical. This discrediting may have been a factor in his suicide. Kosinski also wrote under the name Joseph Novak.

Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0828145.html                

As far as we are concerned, we shall remain focus, as a laser beam, to the issues raised herein on Mr. Ganor's case of credibility and deceit as the preservation of an accurate and honest Holocaust record is to us of utmost importance. And because of this importance, a vigorous scrutiny is essential in this pursuit. We owe this attent and diligent scrutiny because we are the very last generation that can undertake such a task. As the Holocaust survivor Zvi Gill put it before Yad Vashem,

"The Age of the Survivors is drawing to a close. 
Before long no one will be left to say, 'I was there, I saw, I remember what happened'. 
All that will be left will be books of literature and research, pictures and films, and multitudinous testimony." 

Thus, before those grand open "books" of History will be closed forever, we need to make every effort in seeing that the Holocaust information included in there is accurate and honest as much as it can be determined. We cannot do otherwise as we are being continuously watched by the penetrating "eyes" of History... Photographs as the ones posted in here (including the remarkable photograph of Margaret Bourke-White --that true American master of photography, published first in the May 7, 1945 issue of Life magazine, and posted on top of the page) speak volumes indeed...

For us makes absolutely no difference if the public exposure of our findings will end up in the courts or in open presentations that we can hold on our website. This is not a duel, a fight, or a contest between us and Mr. Ganor with winners and loosers, but it is rather a quest for truth and nothing else.

As long as the issues brought by this study are going to be made public, we have no preference for the type of public forum that is going to be used. Thus, it is for Mr. Ganor and Mr. Saul to decide what forum, if any, is most convenient for them. They have our 45-day open invitation to participate herein and submit their presentation, of the issues that have been raised, as they see fit. We shall not interfere with their presentations, if any, as we intend to post their reply, in full, without any further rebuttal from our side.

We have had our say and now, if they so desire, they can have theirs.

Thank you very much for your attention to all this.

Respectfully submitted,

K. K. Brattman
Managing Editor

Dated: March 11, 2004

 

PS-1. On March 7, 2005, Yad Vashem --concurring with our stand-- rejected Eric Saul's petition for the late Vice-Consul Hiram Bingham IV to be awarded with the "Righteous Among the Nations" title. To see that final rendering from Yad Vashem, please click in here.

PS-2. On May 5, 2005, Holocaust Remembrance Day, PBS-TV aired in the United States a 1998 documentary on the late Japanese Consul Chiune "Sempo" Sugihara, recipient of Yad Vashem's prestigious "Righteous Among the Nations" medal. That documentary unfortunately was tainted with misleading information provided by Mr. Ganor and masterminded by no other than the great Holocaust research impostor Eric Saul. To see our rebuttal of the "facts" introduced by Mr. Ganor in that documentary, please click in here.

PS-3. On January 7, 2008 a correction page on Solly Ganor with respect to his imprisonment at Dachau was made and is posted in here.

 

 

 
E n d   o f   S t u d y


Editor's Notice of Closure

Our open invitation for a response to the issues reported in here have been ignored by Messrs. Solly Ganor and Eric Saul and as such, this matter is being closed herein without the benefit of their responses.

Mr. Ganor's "response" to our concerns and issues brought herein was based exclusively on the old adage: if you cannot discredit the message, attempt to discredit the messenger! It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that Mr. Ganor has chosen that pitiful path.

May God have mercy on his troubled soul.

Dated: May 12, 2004



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Postscript 1: Notable reaction
Dated: March 20, 2004

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From the feedback received, important additional points have been made questioning the veracity of Mr. Ganor's claim that he was a prisoner of Dachau. Because of our pledge of confidentiality for the requested anonymity, we will not divulge the source of our information. Of course, the importance of the points made is what counts and this is why they are being posted herein, without reservation, in the desired anonymity.

A Dachau
Watch Tower

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"I read about Solly Ganor at this web site which contains a chapter from his book: http://www.rongreene.com/sollyloc.html

In his description of Dachau, he says that he arrived at the camp and went through the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate. Then he says that all the prisoners were taken to the "opposite end" of the camp for a shower. At first, they were apprehensive, thinking they might be going to the gas chamber. Then his father noticed an open window and said they were going to have a shower after all.

The shower room at Dachau was in the U-shaped building near the gate. I've never read about any shower room at the opposite end of the camp. The gas chamber at Dachau is in a building at the opposite end from the gate, but it was outside the enclosure of the camp, so one could not get to it after walking through the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate. There is now a gate into the area where the gas chamber is located, but that gate wasn't there in April 1945. The gas chamber looks like a shower room but it has no windows. So he couldn't have been describing the gas chamber. That means that there was supposedly another shower room at the far end of the camp. I've never heard about this shower room or read about it. There was a disinfection chamber where the clothing was deloused; this building was at the opposite end of the camp, but I've never read anything about a shower room in this building. But I could be wrong about this.

All incoming prisoners were taken immediately through the "Arbeit Frei Gate" and then to the West Wing of the U-shaped building. There they undressed and took a shower. Their clothes and all their possessions were taken from them. They were given different clothes afterwards. It would have been hard for him to keep his Diary with him because all possessions had to be handed over."

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"In the chapter of Light One Candle that I read, Solly Ganor decribed being sent from Lager 10 (camp 10) which was one of the 11 camps at Kaufering. He was transfered from this sub-camp of Dachau to the main camp at Dachau on April 24, 1945.

I didn't read enough of his book to determine when he was sent to Kaufering Camp Number 10, but it was in 1943 and 1944 that Jews were sent from Auschwitz to build underground factories at the 11 Kaufering camps. During this same period of time, Jews were sent to Stutthof from Latvia, Lithuania and other places including Auschwitz. It is theoretically possible that Solly was first sent to Stutthof and later transferred to Kaufering, but all the survivor stories that I've read mentioned being sent from some other camp to Kaufering, not from Stutthof. Apparently factories were also being built at Stutthof, so Jewish prisoners were sent to Kaufering OR Stutthof. However, the SS did move prisoners around from camp to camp, so it is possible that he was transferred from Stutthof to Kaufering.

He mentions that when he entered the main Dachau camp on April 25th that the camp was relatively clean and orderly. Then overnight more prisoners arrived and it was overcrowded. The next day on April 26, he and his father left on the death march. This sounds about right because there were Jews and Russian POWs marched out of the main Dachau camp on April 26th. However, the part that doesn't sound right is that the main Dachau camp became overcrowded overnight. They had started the evacuation from the sub-camps back in March 1945. From March 1945 until the main Dachau camp was liberated, there was complete chaos and the camp was totally overcrowded. However, Solly Ganor makes it sound like his group was treated very well when they arrived at Dachau. The way I heard it, the water main was broken at Dachau and they had to dig latrines because the flush toilets weren't working. The camp had been bombed on April 9, 1945 and I'm not sure the showers were even working. They were bringing water in with trucks. The Dachau camp had a separate water system from the town of Dachau. They had run out of coal at Dachau and the electric stoves in the kitchen weren't working. They were cooking over wood burning stoves at the very end. Conditions didn't just get worse overnight after prisoners arrived on April 25, 1945.

I know that there have been several fake survivor stories. One of them was the guy who wrote the book "Fragments." One of the mistakes that he made was in describing the gate into Majdanek the way it looks now, instead of the way the gate originally looked. That was one of the things that alerted people that his story might have been made up. Solly Ganor's description of the shower room being at the opposite end of the camp and his account of being able to keep his Diary alerted me that maybe his story is fake. However, he was only at the Dachau main camp for one day, and maybe he forgot where the shower room was located."
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Dachau
"I wrote in my original e-mail to you that I was not sure if the showers at Dachau were working in the last days just before the camp was liberated. I have since looked this up in the book
"Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell" by Marcus J. Smith. Smith wrote that there was no running water in the Dachau camp and that the showers were not functioning when the American liberators arrived. This was because the water main had been broken when the camp was bombed on April 9, 1945. Of course this doesn't prove that Solly Ganor's story is false.

It is hard to remember every detail of what happened 60 years ago so it is understandable that he could have been mistaken about taking a shower at Dachau in April 1945."
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***Editor's Note on Additional Useful Reading:

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Postscript 2: Mr. Ganor's refutal posted in his website.

After the closing of this case, Mr. Ganor has posted on his website "irrefutable evidence" that --according to him-- is able to prove unequivocally the fallacy of our critical study on him. Recognizing in time perhaps that practically no dent of any sort can be seen from his posted proof, he began searching for people who could show some sympathy for him and persuade us to drop this matter from the public view. We responded, in private, to all such requests received recognizing, of course, that Mr. Ganor will be made aware of them.

Mr. Ganor began recognizing further in time that this approach of his will lead nowhere. He then began looking for a reporter that could revive his case and be sympathetic to the situation that he found himself to be in. Well, Mr. Ganor found such a reporter. His name is Jonathan Tilove and he is a reporter for Newhouse Newspapers.

Mr. Tilove armed with Mr. Ganor's "irrefutable evidence" and with a plethora of mudslinging ammunition supplied also by Mr. Ganor opened fire on us on July 20, 2006 with his web posting of his article. Since silence for us is never an option when publicly attacked, we subsequently posted herein our response to Tilove's article under the title Jonathan Tilove's "Kafkaesque Dilemma." Here, Mr. Ganor's "irrefutable evidence" became refutable ...

 

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End of Postscripts
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S p e c i a l   L i n k s :

1. Solly Ganor's Blatant Deceit in the PBS Documentary on Sugihara

2. Deli Strummer, a Discredited Holocaust Survivor

" I've never encountered anything like this before. Ever.
I'm not talking about lapse of memory. I'm talking about invented reality. "
-
- Lawrence L. Langer, an expert in Holocaust testimony
and one of two historians who interviewed Strummer since questions arose
about the validity of her recollections.

3. Reflections
on a Holocaust Impostor:
Fragments
and Its Tortured History

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