Parallel Barbed Wire: From Heart Mountain to Dachau

 “Parallel Barbed Wire: From Heart Mountain to Dachau,” an exhibit created by the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, features the remarkable stories of Heart Mountain incarceree Clarence Matsumura and Holocaust survivor Solly Ganor. Matsumura, great uncle of speaker Newin, 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 subcamp outside Dachau 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. After the war, Ganor went to serve in the Israeli Army, while Matsumura returned to the United States. They lost track of each other until they were reunited in 1992 by historian Eric Saul.

 This event was made possible, in part, with support from Friends of the Cody Library; the Park County Library Foundation; and Heart Mountain Interpretive Center.