Heart Mountain opens new exhibit on ties between Holocaust and Japanese American soldiers

POWELL (WNE) — The Heart Mountain Interpretive Center on Feb. 18 opened its new exhibit, Parallel Barbed Wire, which features the remarkable stories of Heart Mountain incarceree Clarence Matsumura and Holocaust survivor Solly Ganor.
 
Matsumura grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from UCLA and was working in radio before he was incarcerated at Heart Mountain with the rest of his family. 
Ganor was a child living in Lithuania before the Nazi invasion forced him and his family into a Jewish ghetto and then a forced-labor camp in Bavaria. 
 
The paths of Ganor and Matsumura crossed while Ganor was on a death march from his forced-labor camp outside the Dachau death camp and Matsumura was in a forward observer unit of the all-Japanese American 522nd Field Artillery Battalion. 
 
Matsumura rescued Ganor after he had collapsed in the snow aside the road on which he was marching to the mountains south of Dachau. 
 
After the war, Ganor went to serve in the Israeli Army during its war for independence, while Matsumura returned to the United States. They lost track of each other until they were reunited in 1992 by historian Eric Saul. 
 
Ganor chronicled their relationship in his memoir, “Light One Candle,” which the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation has recently republished. 
 
“This exhibit has been over a year in the making,” said Krist Ishikawa Jessup, who curated the exhibit. “Combing through books, oral histories, primary documents, and with the assistance of Clarence’s and Solly’s families, we were able to piece together this amazing history. Though Clarence and Solly’s stories are a micro study of wider historic events, they expose the patterns and strategies of state-sponsored persecution and remind us that fear, racism, and hatred, when left unchallenged, can wreak destruction in any place and at any time.” 
 
This story was published on Feb.  23, 2023.