Appendix 2
Dachau Survivor's Reputation Wanders Turbulent Terrain
of the Internet
BY Jonathan Tilove
c.2006 Newhouse News Service
Solly Ganor survived the death camp at Dachau. But at 79, he
doesn't know if he will survive what an odd Holocaust Web site, run by a
Jewish refugee in Massachusetts, has done to his reputation.
Ganor, who lives in Israel, wrote a well-received memoir in 1995 --
"Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale." He began lecturing about his
experience in schools in the United States, Israel, Europe and Japan.
But for the last couple of years, if you run a Google search on "Solly
Ganor," one of the top results is a page from ISurvived.org operated by
Kalman K. Brattman in the Boston suburb of Malden. "Solly Ganor Case of
Credibility and Deceit," it reads, "questioning his claims and
representation of the Holocaust and his alleged autobiographical book."
At Ganor's appearances, students began asking whether he was, as a Google
search suggested, a fraud.
"I feel like the character in Kafka's `The Trial,"' Ganor says --
hounded and helpless.
With the Internet, the world entered a new information age of thrilling
speed, breadth and openness, but also, sometimes, of Kafkaesque menace. It
once was nearly impossible to ruin another person's reputation in every
corner of the globe without spending an awful lot of money. Not anymore.
Ganor's story is a cautionary tale of this changing geography. Here is the
enhanced capacity of a single savvy individual to spread insinuation in ways
that gain authority with a mass audience inclined to believe that where
Google shows smoke, there must be fire. Here, too, is the tremendous
imbalance of power between those for whom the Internet is home and those for
whom it is a strange and scary place.
"The Internet is like the Wild West," Ganor says. "It seems
like there are not any rules at all."
Googling "Solly Ganor" returns some
10,000 results in an instant. But what really matters is what comes up on the
first page. A shadow of doubt is cast, and the damage is done.
A click on the link to ISurvived plunges you into a
tome by the site's "managing editor," there identified as K.K.
Brattman. It is a scattershot assault intended to tatter Ganor's credibility.
Why did Ganor change his name? (Many Jewish emigres to Israel did.) What's his real age? (He learned belatedly that he is a year
older than the year used in his book.) How could he know so many languages?
(He spoke Lithuanian, Russian, German, Yiddish and some English.) How could
he have kept a diary in the Kovno, Lithuania, ghetto? (Ganor says he disposed
of it when he arrived in the first of two concentration camps; he
reconstructed it after the war.)
Plunked in the middle of the diatribe, next to a huge exclamation mark, is a
stunning disclaimer: "Let us begin by noting that we have no direct
evidence of any sort on Solly Ganor." What you are reading, Brattman
writes, "is but our opinion for what it's worth."
Ganor considered suing, but was told it could prove expensive and futile. He
complained to the major Internet search engines. If ISurvived didn't rank so high in their results, the fulminations it contains would be
distant cries in the cyber-wilderness.
Google advised Ganor to file a "spam report" if he thought Brattman
was gaming their algorithms, which calculate rankings based on a Web page's
links to other pages pertinent to a given search. But he should be specific:
Did he suspect Brattman of using deceptive redirects, doorway pages, hidden
texts, or misleading or repeated words?
Google software engineer Matt Cutts looked at ISurvived and saw no evidence of any deceptive practice
intended to fool the company's Web crawler. If Google, with its motto
"Don't be evil," doesn't screen out character assassins, what then?
"The wonderful thing about the Web," Cutts responds, "is that anybody can put their own message out there. The answer
to bad speech is more speech."
Who is Kalman Brattman?
Born May 1, 1944, he escaped Romania in 1969 after graduating first in his
class from the University of Bucharest, where he studied astronomy.
And while Brattman hasn't had to confront Solly Ganor in court, he has
experience with the American legal system.
In 1979, acting as his own counsel, he was convicted of assaulting a college
student with intent to rape. Court records show Brattman pulled a stranger
into his Harvard Square apartment and began attacking her until, frantic, she
told him she didn't believe in premarital sex. He let her go.
Again representing himself, Brattman overturned the verdict on appeal,
because the judge had misdefined "rape." Brattman was subsequently
retried, and in 1982 found guilty of assault. He was given a six-month
suspended sentence.
Now in Malden, he is president of NatureQuest, a
foundation that publishes ISurvived and other Web
sites and which, according to year after year of filings with the IRS, has no
money coming in or going out.
ISurvived is mostly a compendium of Holocaust
information built through links to hundreds of reputable Holocaust archives
and Jewish education sites -- links that may help account for its strong
ranking on search engines. The one section bearing Brattman's personal
imprint is the "Holocaust Controversy Page," on which "we
present `sensitive' and controversial issues with respect to the Holocaust as
we filter certain conventional representations of the Holocaust."
For Brattman, the consuming controversy of recent years was an effort to
honor the late American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV for his role in helping
Jews escape Vichy France. Brattman considers Bingham unworthy, and launched a
campaign to deny him a U.S. postage stamp and recognition at Yad Vashem, the
official Holocaust memorial in Israel.
First he attacked members of Bingham's family, whom he charged were using
"distorted and fabricated evidence" to make their case. Then he
trained his sights on Eric Saul, an established Holocaust curator and
researcher, whose Visas for Life project documents how diplomats from many
nations, Bingham among them, aided Jews fleeing Hitler.
Saul, 56, lives in Morgantown, W.Va. He says he sank his life savings of
$350,000 into Visas for Life.
But Brattman brands him a profiteer: "His motto could have been: there
is no business like the Holocaust business!"
Because of ISurvived, when you Google "Eric
Saul," the top two hits identify him as a "Holocaust research
imposter."
Next came Solly Ganor.
In 1992, Saul had reunited Ganor and other Dachau survivors in Israel with
some of the Japanese-American veterans who had liberated them. It was a
cathartic moment that led Ganor to write his memoir.
When Saul brought his Visas for Life exhibit to Jerusalem in 2004, Ganor
wrote an article of praise which, he was told in an e-mail, incensed
Brattman.
The message was signed "Avi," with no surname, but the title
"assistant managing editor." It described a purported gathering at
which Brattman reacted to the article as though a member of his family had
died: "His sadness was most visible. Then, you could see in his eyes his
raging indignation. He saw this as a betrayal."
The Ganor entry on ISurvived soon followed.
While Brattman won't be interviewed, questions e-mailed to him at ISurvived are answered promptly by the "First Assist
Service Team (FAST)."
Q: Who is Avi? Does Avi have a last name?
A: All of us here have last names (sic!), be it Judith, Avi, Ilan, Eva, Miriam, Otto, Pete, etc., but only our
Managing Editor, Mr. Brattman, and our chief webmaster Steve Grunfeld, are permitted to use their last names.
Q: Who is the "I" in "ISurvived"?
A: Questioning the first letter `I' in the name of our website is as
meaningful as questioning Apple Computer Company of the names placed on their
products such as the iMac or the iPod, etc.
Q: How is it that you are able to ensure that your site comes up among the
first three or four hits on Google and Yahoo! when searching for "Solly
Ganor," or "Eric Saul"?
A: That is something you need to ask Google, take a course or two in computer
sciences, etc. We, for sure, have no intention of giving you free computer
lessons on Google algorithms.
Brattman was asked about his criminal record in a separate e-mail. The reply:
"As you have been advised, we no longer can assist you with your
inquiries. Whatever you are working on is of no interest to us. You are
wasting your time and ours in fishing for additional information. Best
regards, First Assist Service Team (FAST)."
"It is Kafka," Karine Barzilai-Nahon,
a professor at the University of Washington's Information School, says of
Ganor's dilemma.
Barzilai-Nahon believes the search engines can no
longer simply plead neutrality in cases like this. "The time has come to
show more social responsibility," she says. If not, she warns, the state
will step in.
Eddan Katz, executive director of Yale's
Information Society Project, says search engines must perfect their algorithms to provide higher-quality results:
"Google can try to make the world a better place by making dubious
voices less heard than might otherwise be the case."
In May, Hiram Bingham was one of six former American diplomats honored by the
Postal Service with a commemorative stamp. But in Israel, Yad Vashem declined
to grant him "Righteous Among the Nations" status for saving the
lives of Jews, despite what Eric Saul believes is the strength of his case.
Meanwhile, Saul, who used to show his Visas for Life exhibit a half-dozen
times annually, hasn't had an offer in two years.
And Solly Ganor tries to fathom how it all came to this.
Brattman, Ganor says, "tells me I'm a Holocaust imposter. He defames the
memory of my mother, who died in a concentration camp, of my brother, who was
shot by the SS.
"There are so few survivors that are still around to tell the story and
he's undermining the credibility of what we're saying.
"He's playing into the hands of the Holocaust deniers."
July 20, 2006
(Jonathan Tilove can be contacted at jonathan.tilove@newhouse.com.)