Ganor, Solly, A Candle in the Darkness: Survival in the Kovno Ghetto and in the Darkness, 2022hau — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

"From almost every point in the ghetto, one could see the winding road climbing up the hill toward the Ninth Fort, and the endless procession of the condemned slowly making their way along it. I couldn’t stop trembling. […] The ghetto residents who survived ran about like a frantic crowd, searching for relatives and friends, trying to block their ears from the dreadful sounds of the machine guns that came from the Ninth Fort. The shooting was sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, but it went on without pause, hour after hour, day and night. We tried to shut out the terrible noise, but in vain".

Solly Ganor was born in Lithuania on May 18, under the name Solly Ganchikind, the third child of a well-established Jewish family. World War II abruptly cut short his happy childhood. He and his family were imprisoned in the Kovno Ghetto. The boy experienced the horrors of the ghetto firsthand and heard from an eyewitness about the mass murder at the Ninth Fort.

Solly and his family showed great ingenuity in smuggling food into the ghetto, and he and his friends even managed to hide books, read, and study amid hunger, forced labor, brutal Aktionen, and massacres. After the liquidation of the ghetto, he was sent to forced labor in the Stutthof camp and then to Lager 10, a subcamp of Dachau. To survive, Solly had to summon all his resourcefulness and courage.

Solly’s father, Chaim Ganchikind, became known in Lager 10 as one of the most talented storytellers. These storytellers went from barrack to barrack after lights-out, and in exchange for their stories, received a modest extra portion of food. Eventually, the boy and his father were forced on a death march, which they survived only barely.

For nearly fifty years, Solly kept his memories buried deep within him. Only after a moving encounter with his liberators—Japanese American soldiers—almost half a century after the end of the war, did he finally allow himself to look back, to recall the unbearable experiences, and to weep like a child.

This book is the fruit that grew out of that emotional breakthrough. Without doubt, Solly inherited his father’s gift for storytelling, and the story he tells here—with great vividness and intertwined with harrowing descriptions—is one that the reader follows with bated breath and a broken heart.