Customer Reviews

Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In LIGHT ONE CANDLE, Solly Ganor takes the reader into that nightmare world of the Holocaust--I could practically feel the harsh elements, the constant danger of the camps. This book isn't anther rote recitation of death counts. There's so much heart and compassion for all those sweptup in these horrors. The insights into camp life include the primal nature of life stripped to itsbasics--such as the "storyteller" who keeps the outside world and traditions alive. Particularly poignant is Cooky, Ganor's childhood friend whose account of the slaughter at the Ninth Fort is more compelling than Dante's own descent into Hell. Ipersonally feel Ganor's book is deserving of some national/international award. Actually, reading the book I wonder how Ganor got it all done. It must have been so painful to revisit these terrible, incomprehensible, sublime, poignant memories. To me it's the best book on the Holocaust, personal or otherwise--certainly it should be a companion to any serious study of this subject. To me it hits at the heart, gets into the soul. It's the humanity of the account,particularly those heart-rending final glimpses of the condemned trying to smile as they wave good-bye.

This book touched a part of my soul and humanity more than any other book I have read in recent memory. The incredible detail in which Mr. Ganor describes the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, and his subsequent confinement in concentration camps is absolutely chilling. I turned each page with horrid fascination with the thought that things couldn't get worse for Mr. Ganor and his family; it always did. Mr. Ganor recounts his story with eloquent but simple prose that draws the reader directly into his world of loss, torture, cruelty, and often times heroic deeds. Even if you consider yourself a fairly good student of history (which I did), this book will most likely destroy any notion that you really "understand" the overwhelming horrors and atrocities committed during this dreadful time in our history. This book is one for the ages, and is proof positive that we should never forget.

I just completed Light One Candle and it sits deeply in my heart. I am now doing consulting work in Lithuania and I wanted to read more about this country. This is the reason I picked up the book. As well, though, I am a baby-boomer and so was born after World War II. All I know of the war is what I have seen in movies, TV or read. But this sad, yet courageous book helped me understand the war as I have never understood it. Little did I know how deeply I would be affected. Solly Ganor is a remarkable man and I have enormous respect for his bravery is such wretched times. In addition, though, this book taught me how much I owe to those thousands of American men and women who gave their lives so that Solly and I could live a normal life. I had never understood this before. Thank you, Solly Ganor, for teaching me so many things.

i have read well over two hundred memoirs. This is worth crying over (not that other ones aren't also) and listening to very carefully. without sentimentality - without profession of feelings that may or may not have been felt but remembered...solly ganor brings the reader inside his mind and heart.

Solly Ganor's book is simply not to be missed. This is a great narrative from a good man.

Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale From Lithuania To Jerusalem is the autobiographical story of Solly Ganor, a man who survived the unspeakable holocaust of the Second World War when he was 13 years old through the intervention and rescue of a Japanese American soldier in 1945 (who himself had been releases from a U.S. internment camp for Japanese Americans just a few months earlier. Light One Candle is a powerful and vividly told memoir of struggle, starvation, and the brutal tolls of concentration and extermination camps. Light One Candle is a welcome eye-witness testimony and a very highly recommended addition to personal reading lists as well as academic and community library Holocaust Studies reference collections.

Most accounts of the Holocaust I've read, especially memoirs tend to be by Jewish survivors from Germany, Poland & Hungary. This memoir is by Solly Ganor, a Lithuanian Jew who describes the horrors of the Holocaust as experienced by him, his family, and other Jews...his tale is one of hope, courage & faith in the most horrific times...and is told with amazing clarity. His descriptions of life in the Kaunas ghetto is told with vivid detail, the hunger, suffering, and the ever present threat of 'actions' are all described with a level of intensity that often reduced me to tears. It is an emotional account, and the images evoked will not soon fade from one's memory.

Solly Ganor has told us a powerful story of his life as a child and youth during the Holocaust. His details and honesty reveal a family that loved and cared for each other, worked hard, and took chances to survive. His autobiography with its details helps remove many misconceptions about Jews in the Holocaust that people create from the more common short and simplified accounts of the period. This is not an easy book to read, but it will greatly help you to redefine your understanding and respect for people caught in difficult situations as well as other genocide situations.

Super read, difficult, important and compelling. The more I read, the more the more involved I became. Beautifully written and very, very important. Honest and heartfelt. Great book, important subject.

After the holocaust, many survivors did not tell what they witnessed. It was too painful. Far too many people could not believe that what they heard really happened and it was decades before the full story came to light. Even today, people don't want to believe that there could still be a force of evil in this world that could perpetrate sadistic genocide. So explains the silence of many after the war. When you read this book, you become a witness.

Ganor's story opens when he was invited to a reunion of some survivors of Dachau with some of the Japanese American soldiers who liberated them at the war's end. Ganor saw and remembered the face of Clarence, the Japanese American soldier who lifted him from the ground and cared for him. At that reunion, decades of silence cracked open as tears poured from his heart and eyes; he was surrounded and supported. Now he could tell the full story.

Woven throughout his painful account, Ganor (a name taken after the war which means "garden of light") also tells about the kindnesses of some righteous gentiles who risk their lives along the way. He tells about the loyalties among the Jewish victims who withheld information from the Nazis and were tortured to death without ever giving away their friends. Amongst the telling of the horrors of man's brutality against man, Ganor reveals the hope and humanity that shined even in the darkest of times and places-- and even the moral inner wrestling that took place in the conversations and hearts of Ganor's friends, youths who shine, even in their suffering.

Solly Ganor gives a detailed and frank accounting of his experiences of life and death in the Lithuanian ghetto through his rescue at the end of the war by the Nisei soldiers. To survive that kind of ordeal, then to relive it by transmitting the darkest of details, is a gift to the generations that follow. Why do we need to know? We need to prevent such a thing from happening again. We need to remember what is the best in each of us and call it forth in dark personal or national times. We need to see that we can build even from pain and loss, and that in each of us is that same spark of goodness and meaning, promise and triumph.